Comment by javier_e06 2 days ago
I listened to an segment on the radio where a College Teacher told their class that it was okay to use AI assist you during test provided:
1. Declare in advance that AI is being used.
2. Provided verbatim the questions and answer session.
3. Explain why the answer given by the AI is good answer.
Part of the grade will include grading 1, 2, 3
Fair enough.
This is actually a great way to foster the learning spirit in the age of AI. Even if the student uses AI to arrive at an answer, they will still need to, at the very least, ask the AI to give it an explanation that will teach them how it arrived to the solution.
No this is not the way we want learning to be - just like how students are banned from using calculators until they have mastered the foundational thinking.
That's a fair point, but AI can do much more than just provide you with an answer like a calculator.
AI can explain the underlying process of manual computation and help you learn it. You can ask it questions when you're confused, and it will keep explaining no matter how off the topic you go.
We don't consider tutoring bad for learning - quite the contrary, we tutor slower students to help them catch up, and advanced students to help them fulfill their potential.
If we use AI as if it was an automated, tireless tutor, it may change learning for the better. Not like it was anywhere near great as it was.
There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths. It is certainly not obvious to me that calculators will have a negative effect - I certainly always allowed my kids to use them.
LLMs are trickier and use needs to be restricted to stop cheating, just as my kids had restrictions on what calculators they could use in some exams. That does not mean they are all bad or even net bad if used correctly.
> There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths.
I've seen oodles of research concluding the opposite at the primary level (grades 1- 5, say). If your mentioned research exists, it must be very well hidden :-/
> There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths.
A meta analysis: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-11739-001
That's roughly what we did as well. Use anything you want, but in the end you have to be able to explain the process and the projects are harder than before.
If we can do more now in a shorter time then let's teach people to get proficient at it, not arbitrarily limit them in ways they won't be when doing their job later.
It’s better than nothing but the problem is students will figure out feeding step 2 right back to the AI logged in via another session to get 3.