College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT::The growing number of students using the AI program ChatGPT as a shortcut in their coursework has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.

  • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    That’s just what we tell kids so they’ll learn to do basic math on their own. Otherwise you’ll end up with people who can’t even do 13+24 without having to use a calculator.

    • Overzeetop@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      11 months ago

      people who can’t even do 13+24 without having to use a calculator

      More importantly, you end up with people who don’t recognize that 13+24=87 is incorrect. Math->calculator is not about knowing the math, per se, but knowing enough to recognize when it’s wrong.

      I don’t envy professors/teachers who are hacing to figure out novel ways of determining the level of mastery of a class of 30, 40, or 100 students in the era of online assistance. Because, really, we still need people who can turn out top level, accurate, well researched documentation. If we lose them, who will we train the next gen LLM on? ;-)

      • end up with people who don’t recognize that 13+24=87 is incorrect

        I had a telecom teacher who would either allow you to use a calculator, but you had to get everything right.
        Or go without and you could get away with rougher estimates.

        Doing stuff like decibels by hand isn’t too bad if you can get away with a ballpark and it’s a much more useful skill to develop than just punching numbers in a calculator.

    • Arthur_Leywin@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      11 months ago

      When will people need to do basic algebra in their head? The difficulty between 13+24 and 169+ 742 rises dramatically. Yeah it makes your life convenient if you can add simple numbers, but is it necessary when everyone has a calculator?

      • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        11 months ago

        Like someone said. It’s not just about knowing what something is, but having the ability to recognize what something isn’t.

        The ability to look at a result and be skeptical if it doesn’t look reasonable.

        169+742. Just by looking I can tell it has to be pretty close to 900 because 160+740 is 900. That gives me a good estimate to go by. So when I arrive at 911. I can look at it and say. Yeah. That’s probably correct, it looks reasonable.

      • Mtrad@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        That sounds like ot could be a focused lesson. Why try to skirt around what the desired goal is?

        That also could be placed into detecting if something is wrong with AI too. Teach people things to just help spot these errors.

        In my experience, it’s so much more effective to learn how to find the answers and spot the issues than to memorize how to do everything. There’s too much now to know it all yourself.