AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
dailycal.org238 points by romanhn 3 days ago
238 points by romanhn 3 days ago
The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution.
You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.
>This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
No, that's not common at all, nor how the system works. Use of graders/TAs are on an institution basis.
"Grant money" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes. When grant money is used to hire graduate students, they are research assistants and must work on the research project which the grant money was given for.
TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets. Tuition dollars are much more preferred anyway because they're stable and faculty do not have to work for them, they show up based on enrollment.
The fact you have TAs/graders at all is by institution. Large R1 institutions have grad students and undergraduate population to fill these roles. In these institutions, 1 minimally sized undergrad class = at least 1 TA, with additional TAs and graders after some enrollment threshold.
Tenure has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adjunct faculty get TAs/graders all the same.
Indeed, to support your point, I had a teaching assistantship for my first two years of grad school, meaning that I worked on an as-needed basis for things like supervising labs, proctoring exams, grading papers, etc. It was funded by the department. Where I went to school, the TA workload was pretty light.
Then I got a research assistantship, which was funded by my advisor's grant. I meant that I got paid to do my thesis research, and no longer had to teach. This was a precondition for joining his group.
My department introduced a rule requiring us to TA a certain number of times. There were too many research fellowships and they were short on TAs.
My group was new, lacking much in the way of research funds. Therefore, we taught for support (Chemistry): lab proctor, recitation leader. Somebody had to wrangle those 1000 people taking 1st-year chemistry. Pre-med, pre-vet, pre-dental, biology and a rare chemistry major or two. In return, the department covered my living expenses. This was in ancient times, but I figure similar mechanisms exist today because the student base seems to be quite similar.
And, for larger undergraduate courses, the graders may be undergrads hired to do this menial work for the TAs, while the TAs focus on things like extra study sections and office hours.
As a CS undergrad, I did that kind of work at UC Berkeley in the 90s, grading courses that I'd taken 2-4 semesters earlier. I even did a semester as a TA, because the professor was having a hard time finding enough grad students who wanted to deal with one of those larger classes.
This is how it's worked since medieval times and the reasoning for the degrees being called bachelors and masters.
>The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first >place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured >professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them >(I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.
Again, I’m not making a moral statement. But you yourself basically just said grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor. (BTW, I teach at a small school and do all my own grading each semester for between 45-80 students depending on the courses I’m teaching that semester)
So if grading is part of the development process for a graduate student, then go ahead and continue. But that’s not the claim in the article. And if grading doesn’t serve a purpose anymore, then stop doing it. You can pay your assistants to do nothing for 20 hrs/week, or you can find literally anything else for them to do.
I went to a larger university, and was in the math department for most of my coursework. My math homework was graded by fellow undergraduate students who received a rubric and selected 4 problems per homework set, out of about 8ish (most classes. A few tough classes only assigned 2-3 proofs or so a week) but the TAs would grade the exams and the professors wouldn’t grade anything. Homework was at most 15-20% of one’s grade, exams being the rest. But most of my professors didn’t care about the homework as it was a tool for learning the material that was on the exams.
Ours was 10% homework/90% final exam or 100% exam if you didn't want to submit homework.
In some fields (maybe not mathematics) the graduate students could spend more time doing original research, assisted by teams of undergrads. That would likely make for a more productive learning experience than traditional homework assignments.
Research tends to be deep but narrow - more like an internship than an undergraduate semester; courses can focus on teaching the fundamentals and background material in a broader and more systematic way.
It’s an economic issue. Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid. In fact, grad students are lucky they aren’t being asked to pay extra to be provided with research topics and lab time to pursue them. Maybe that’s another step in the monetization of higher education.
> grad students are lucky they aren’t being asked to pay extra to be provided with research topics and lab time to pursue them
It depends on the field, but grad student wages in science and engineering are usually much lower than what industry would pay for similar work. Academic research is very cost-effective because most of the work is done by underpaid graduate students.
> Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid
Literally how grants work.
> Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid
It is the _main_ activity which "generates value" for an institution, whose primary goal is conducting research.
If the undergrads are still paying tuition then the economics won't change. They'll just be paying for more practical experience instead of graded homework.
Once you finish your classes research is all you are doing. What else are you paying for?
> What else are you paying for?
- Lab access
- Access to PhD advisor
- Research seminars
- ...
> grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor
Isn't there a P != NP element to this? Doing the work is hard. Checking it is not.
If a student honestly attempted a problem and failed, diagnosing the failure may be worth the professor's time, but given the bunchiness of undergrad (and frankly, any junior learning) mistake varieties, chances are the TA can identify the issue as well.
There is, but AI really turned the tables here. With human students you can gauge their "priors" and grade it fairly easily and like you say the mistakes are bunchy. With AI the priors are so different and their steering and everything ends up in a deep dark forest where no one knows whats going on. And it becomes a whole first-principles effort to grade it. Imagine if everyone in class was that weird genius who solves things in a roundabout way that you end up appreciating 2 days later. In person exams have become a must almost.
Sort of, but not really. For multiple guess type tests, there is that element. However, other types of tests and particular homework, there's not that as much. We're not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques.
At least this is about math where there is usually a single right answer. For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points? There's should be debate over even what is the right points in any large work. And so if you're convincing in your argument of what is the important points, you can pass homework.
Edit, fix autocorrect
For math classes there is not a single correct answer, it's worse in that regard than many other fields.
Answers are proofs, not numbers, and there is a ton of nuance, and it is incredibly hard to grade.
It's not as easy as judging the quality of a computer program written as an assignment.
> multiple gas type test
Multiple choice?
> not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques
A student honestly attempting math problems, if it’s a well-designed problem, shouldn’t be able to get multiple answers right with wrong methods.
> For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points?
I’d say a professor should be grading English essays. But a TA can grade short answers, e.g. did you grasp the theme or understand an extratextual reference.
> Grading is part of what it means to be a TA,
Checking students' homework is part of what it means to be a TA. Grading is a choice the university makes; it's absence makes one no less of a TA.
> being a TA is not some awful exploitation
It's certainly exploitation. For some TAs, who get overworked and lorded over, and in universities when the pay is low, it's awful exploitation. For most TAs it is 'regular' exploitation of getting a crappy salary for serious highly-skilled work.
One of my freshman math teachers gave grades out for 3 tests and none on homework. He also told us that if we didnt take the first 2 tests, it wouldn't count against us and only the grade on our final would count. Along with that he had extensive open office hours.
It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question.
I dont like AI destroying some of our systems but if we return back to the sort of learning that college used to be where it was self directed with guidance from professors, I will count that as a win over the factory worker production system that high school was and universities were starting to ape.
My university math and even my high school calculus class was pretty much like this.
We had homework assigned and in the high school class the teacher spent part of class time reviewing and taking questions about the previous homework set. In the university classes this was done in a discussion section or in office hours.
In high school the homework was supposed to all be in one notebook which would be reviewed periodically but only to see that some effort was being made, it was not graded. It counted maybe 10% of the grade. In the university classes it wasn't even looked at.
The vast majority of the grade was based on quizes and exams, we were typically allowed to bring one standard-sized page of notes for these, and a calculator.
This was all in the 1980s time frame.
I teach CS at Berkeley, as a lecturer. i.e., I'm contingent and on a contract. And don't really have grant money—though, y'know I actually try to supplement my income so I can live in the Bay Area. I spent years working in EdTech as well.
Others have already say why TA's (and graders) often do the grading. That's also not the same as the prof not paying attention to the work students do.
But I do want folks to think about the time faculty are actually allocated to teach courses. I have a 2 unit course I teach, ~70 students this term, and 2 hours of class. I'm paid for maybe 8 hours per week for all the prep class time, planning. Doesn't actually leave much time at all for grading. There are definitely qualified students who could be TAs who would give the students much more time and feedback than I am able...
For other courses, I have a bit more time allocated, but hundreds of students and still one of me. The only way students get feedback is when TAs grade.
Anyway, that's just the practical bits...
A lot of faculty are moving to 100% proctored assessment, and I think it sucks. For me, reading at least some of the student responses and seeing the data are helpful. Faculty do want to engage with their students and are similarly demoralized when everything is reduced to a transaction. It's hard not to be nihilist about it. Our own jobs, even at a public University are just capitalistic transactions with fewer profits. Students want the degree because it's the only thing they can hold on to as a token of hope for the next few years. Both students and faculty can fall into patterns of really low trust, and it's hard to be the 'outlier' trying to trust students when most of your colleagues say people don't do the work.
I don't actually have great solutions for building intrinsic motivation in students, except talking to them and minimizing the extent to which everything is a transaction. But I'm required to assign grades, still.
Many of the 3rd-tier institutions are going to go bankrupt anyway. Demographic changes had already made that inevitable but AI has accelerated the timeline. If they want to survive at all then they'll need to reinvent themselves as vocational training facilities or senior assisted living or something. This is going to be rough for the faculty, and will make the process of finding a tenure track teaching position even more brutal.
> Many of the 3rd-tier institutions are going to go bankrupt anyway
Source? I have been reading this every year since like the financial crisis.
The number of students graduating high school peaked in 2025 and has now started a gradual decline. Colleges are essentially now playing a game of "musical chairs" competing for students and there aren't enough to go around. The elite institutions and cost-effective state schools will probably be fine but less exclusive private colleges without a solid value proposition have no clear path to survival.
https://www.wiche.edu/resources/report-u-s-high-school-gradu...
> number of students graduating high school peaked in 2025 and has now started a gradual decline
Hasn’t this happened after each boom generation?
Not like this. Someday it will likely turn around, but it's probably going to be after we're long dead.
https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
>62.8% of high school (or equivalent) graduates go on to postsecondary study.
>Enrollment among new high school graduates has declined 10.4% since its peak in 2009 (70.1%).
There are still a lot of kids that could go to those 3rd tier universities, but choose not to. The cost/benefit is not perceived to be there anymore.
How do we know that was a peak? There's only been one more year of data
We have pretty accurate counts of numbers of babies born each year, and number of child immigrants. So that makes it straightforward to forecast the number of high school graduates. People are having fewer children.
Well since you mentioned it, I posit that most of the financial issues the world is facing today is because the GFC wasn’t allowed to occur, it’s been a slow bleeding out ever since.
All of them will. There's zero value in higher education nowadays. In fact I'd argue there's negative value. An inquisitive 13 year old backed by AI can be more productive and resourceful than a team of 100+ Ivy League educated PhDs. Sad, but true. And this is today. Fast forward twenty years after massive AI augmented improvements of hardware and more advanced models have occured and it's game over.
Have you ever… been in an actual lab..? There are more disciplines in the world than computer science, you know
A hyper inquisitive 13 year old was never the target market of universities anyways. Historically they've always done very well.
> hyper inquisitive 13 year old was never the target market of universities anyways. Historically they've always done very well
Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.
A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one. If you've met an exceptionally brilliant small-town mechanic, you see how that applies within countries as well.
> Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.
I have no idea what you mean by this. I'm pretty sure that inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones do as well or better than dimwits in war zones, and I'm absolutely sure it's selected for. I don't know why you think stupidity is an advantage in a dangerous or difficult situation.
Too many resources are invested in children who would do well no matter what situation you put them in; imo as a retroactive justification for withdrawing resources for racist reasons. You'd think if you had an intellectually inferior group (whether genetically or due to environmental reasons), you'd invest most of your resources into them - but instead it's generally used as an excuse to withdraw resources.
The biggest secret when it comes to selective schools and universities, is that you don't have to do anything to a smart kid in order to graduate a smart kid. If the reputation of your institution is based on the achievements of its alumni rather than the improvement of its students, selecting for smart kids is loading the dice. They'd do well without you.
That's basically the model of the modern private university: give full scholarships to really talented kids (who have already proved their superiority in often very adverse circumstances), and charge the sky to the idiot children of the upper middle class, who gain prestige through paying for the credentials that the talented were paid to take.
> A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one.
I have no idea how you've decided this. I don't even know what you think a rich country is. If it's rich with no class mobility and no access to higher education or reasonable subsistence for the poor, he'll do badly. If he's in a peaceful poor country without an overbearing class structure, where he can learn in his leisure and his belly is always full, especially now with communication the way it is, he'll be able to do whatever he wants to do. The problem might be class war zones, not war zones. An bright poor kid is running the risk of getting shot or disappeared for doing his best to improve the lives of the people around him in a way the bosses don't like.
> don't know why you think stupidity is an advantage in a dangerous or difficult situation
Not stupidity. Docileness. Staying low and being scared versus wandering out because something caught your interest.
> you don't have to do anything to a smart kid in order to graduate a smart kid
What are you basing this on? The evidence from gifted programs suggests the opposite–under-stimulated smart kids can become problem kids fast.
> give full scholarships to really talented kids (who have already proved their superiority in often very adverse circumstances), and charge the sky to the idiot children of the upper middle class
What are you basing this on? Most elite schools charge nothing to families making less than the median household wage.
The last point is pretty much exactly what you both seem to be saying. Families making less than median wage with kids who have proven their superiority over those circumstances get charged nothing.
> An inquisitive 13 year old backed by AI can be more productive and resourceful than a team of 100+ Ivy League educated PhDs
This isn't necessarily a good thing. cf The Lisp Curse.
When I reed comments like yours I can't help but wonder if you got rejected by the university you wanted to go to or failed to graduate.
HN’s love for the Platonic autodidact meets HN’s agreement with whatever tech SC is shoving down our throats (mudulo “sad but true” or whatever value judgements which still agree with the investor trajectory).
And yet AI still can't tell me what the default setting for my tractor's carburetor has.
If the value of higher education is purely book learning, sure. But if the value is signaling and the creation of ingroups that will become future elites, they can be valuable even if you do not learn a thing in class. It's a debate about elite higher education that has been going on for decades, as top institutions refuse to grow their class sizes, even as they could find 4x the students that would fit qualifications.
The "elite overproduction" theory might also factor in here. For society as a whole it's better not to have more students graduating from elite institutions than there are elite jobs for them to fill. The disappointed, underemployed extras tend to cause social unrest. But it sucks for the individuals who get unfairly locked out of those opportunities through no fault of their own.
Then AI might also struggle to find a big enough market, no? Or will it move into things like plumbing?
The AI will be pushed everywhere, but as it's currently not succeeding at driving across the USA without a human around for emergency intervention* despite a trillion or so miles of real world experience, I suspect the initial success of AI in plumbing looks more like "humans being meat robot e.g. by wearing AR headset while physically at customer site" and less like "AI controlling metal robot that is physically at customer site".
That said, the economics of AI… eh. I can see it replacing the $3T/year cost of hiring software developers, but this doesn't mean people will spend $3T/year on AI; I mean, Wikipedia killed demand for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but nobody values Wikipedia at the 16 trillion or so USD you'd get by multiplying the cost of the EB with how many people are online.
* even the CyberCab, which was announced as "no steering wheel or pedals", is geofenced and if it's like their other vehicles has human observers on standby for remote control.
> The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade.
Whether he graded it, or his assistants graded it, I’m not really sure how that matters at all to the point.
> They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
Human Interviewer: Congratulations on making it to the 12th interview!
Candidate: Hey, I'm honored to be talk to another human for once!
Human Interviewer: That's funny. And true! Now, it says here you're a recent college grad student.
Candidate: That's right. Had to increase that sweet, sweet earning potential.
Human Interviewer: Also funny, also true! Honestly, what I learned in Intro to Game Theory alone has probably increased my earning potential by 15, maybe even 20%.
Candidate: Oh man, I remember that class! My professor gave up on grading homework that semester because of ChatGPT, and that weighted the midterm and final so much. I never did so much plugging and chugging in my life!
Human Interviewer: That's great. Well, that's about it. Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you. We'll be in touch.
Candidate: ???
The situation in American academia is something long mirrored in colleges in other countries.
You went to college because it was the only way to get a job that paid well.
When other vocations stopped having the ability to ensure people could enjoy social mobility, people focused on the only pathways left.
I'm going through a self-paced AI intro course right now that was put up online from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the more interesting things the professor says right up front is that while they provide a validation framework to test your homework against and they hold back some pieces of it so you have a hidden checker... There is no ethics expectation that you won't use AI on the problem and you can submit the results against the checker as often as you want.
His thinking is quite simple on this... There's absolutely nothing he could do, practically, to prevent you from feeding the questions straight to an AI and having it kick out the answers. But since this is a self-taught, self-selected course... His advice is to not do that until you get well and truly stuck, and only then will you have enough attempts built up to compare to the answer to understand the concept you're missing.
I think it's a decent middle ground for an online published self taught course. But I don't know that such an approach works in terms of, say, a Carnegie Mellon University being able to continue to charge the tuition it does for the courses that aren't self-taught.
This motivation is why, when I was in grad school, I never liked handing out grades. I would have rather just marked the problems I found with a HW submission, added notes where appropriate, and that's it. If no grade is given, it is obvious that you have provided the student the service of reading and checking their work, rather than allowed them to increase their 'score' or collect 'points'.
That's what I am doing for my classes, just provide useful feedback and mark the homework as submitted. The university wants points, but for me any submission is 100% points, even if there are errors and omissions.
However, now there are students that just copy the output of LLMs without even caring to understand terminology and notation. Should that count as a completed assignment? In some egregious and too obvious cases I ask them simple questions about what they wrote and don't give them marks/points if they have no clue.
Using LLMs as assistants for homework is one thing, and there's no way to prevent it. But students who just copy characters from the screen without caring to understand what is going on are on another level. Above all, they are wasting their time.
Regarding giving or not giving scores, that's a complicated issue. Scores provide a "negative incentive" for learning. A positive incentive would be some pat on the back for doing the assignments. However, our brains are not wired by the evolution to do things only for positive incentives when there are no grades/deadlines/etc.
In my experience, being lenient works great with graduate students, and undergrads won't do and won't understand anything in the course if there are no grades. I learned that the hard way.
> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.
Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.
The service being paid for is not homework grading. Homework grading is merely one part of how the service has historically been implemented, but if changing circumstances make grading homework less useful, then not grading homework is the service provider doing their job.
Is that what the students are really paying for? Even before LLMs, some of my college classes had optional and ungraded homework. Students could show up for discussion sessions to ask questions and get help from the instructor or teaching assistants if needed, but that didn't impact their grades. That seemed to be a reasonable approach, although it might vary by subject.
Doing homework is a time-tested, proven way to learn. That is why schools around the world continually assign homework and then grade it. I don't care that you get the right answer. If my daughter's first grade teacher really wanted to subtract 7 from 9, she would grab a calculator or just do it herself. But my daughter is assigned that work anyway because my daughter needs to do those things to learn.
There is and always will be debate on what's worth learning, but if we decide that something is worth learning, it is worth learning to do it yourself, not have AI do it. Schools all over have a big problem with that because kids are using AI to do things that we believe are learning. Is this something that's important to learn or should we now say, you know what? Everyone has an AI. Let's stop teaching these stupid things that AI does well and start teaching other things. That's a question I'm not going to answer, only time will tell and we'll have other debates in the future along similar lines about something else.
This discussion is about college, not first grade. College students who want to do homework to learn more are still free to do so. No one is stopping them.
People of all ages rarely do hard things that are good for them. Colleges have long assigned homework. My daughter has enough time reserved in class to do the work without taking it home.
> Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is “not a very good system,” but at the moment, he has no alternative
He still assigns homework. He's not grading it. The students that want to try, they're free to do it. If they have questions, there are office hours.
The only thing being removed is the grading, not their homework. If they want to learn, they can.
> These students paid (a lot of) money for this service
The schools are providing two services to students, not one. There's one directly and the other indirectly. And those two services are sometimes at odds.
The direct service is to teach them. Skills, knowledge, perspectives, critical thinking, etc.
The indirect service is to act as a proxy for people and organizations in the world to avoid having to do a thorough examination of a person's abilities. A degree is an attestation that a student has cleared all the hurdles and accomplished something of value. The better the reputation of the institution, the more value this service is to a student.
Just because students are paying for the direct service doesn't mean they aren't also paying for the indirect one too, it's just that the reputation has been established by all the students that came before and these students will be affecting the reputation for students coming afterwards.
Regardless, because a huge chunk of the service is that attestation, it's not as simple as the customer pays so the customer should get what they want. The universities need to figure out a way to maintain the value of their attestation in the face of students who try to subvert the evaluation process and a changing world. And if homework is providing little value in that regard, some rethinking might be warranted. They could assign it and optionally grade it on request for students who want their work evaluated but make it clear that it bears no connection to the grade that leads to the degree. They could come up with some other means of evaluating whether students have worked or learned the material. They could rework the material to account for the existence of AI. Just like calculators or the internet changed the work environment to obviate previously valuable skills, today's students will be living their lives in a world where AI exists and certain previously valuable skills will not be valuable going forward. A university's job is to produce the most capable person for the environment in which they will live their life. If the old curriculum isn't doing that, the curriculum needs to be rethought. And homework might take on a different role or be significantly less important in that rethought curriculum.
I'm doing law school through an unconventional program called LPAB. You have to complete 20 subjects, each with a 20% assessment and an 80% exam, with only a 3 hr lecture every week and that's it. You don't really get a chance to ask questions and there's no tutorials or handholding.
While the assessment can be gamed, you must overcome the exam which are written and reviewed outside of the university, so the lecturer doesn't know what is on the exam, and the questions and exam papers are never returned.
Doing this I remember my undergrad and masters felt like I was coddled as there was a bunch of fluff grades in doing assignments and just turning up to class. The grade inflation was a farce as well.
As other commenters said, graders are certainly not paid from grant money at US institutions. NSF (which funds most mathematicians in the US) would never allow it, and grants are usually much better spent getting grad students off teaching so they can get research done. Teaching assistant (TA) funding would ultimately come from the university. Sometimes it is optional, i.e, a faculty member can request a TA or grader for certain courses but does not get one automatically. Some courses, like large entry-level calculus, cannot be run without teams of TAs teaching recitations.
I'm on the math faculty at a R1 (public) university, and we've not had a budget for graders for most courses for a very long time, with the exception of e.g., very large courses. For most classes the instructor does all the grading. Grading has been a significant fraction of my time teaching, certainly much more than what I can spend on preparing lectures and other teaching-related work. Moreover, much of the time grading is giving feedback, figuring out partial credit, etc; just checking "correct" or "incorrect" is often relatively quick.
In the last couple years, my personal experience has been that (i) a very small (and possibly vanishing) fraction of students are declining to use AI, or at least use it sparingly, because they want to learn; (ii) a growing percentage are using it as a personal tutor; and (iii) some are outright outsourcing all the work. The last category is small, but if that category grows (anecdotally this seems to be the case -- I've mostly taught grad courses in the last year and don't have first-hand knowledge) then what would be the point of spending all that time grading and giving detailed written feedback?
Incidentally, many students in the second category are the type who in years past would form study groups, come to office hours, etc.; now they seem to prefer AI over humans. Some of them do seem to benefit from it, but not all. How one uses AI matters a lot, and how to help students use the tech to learn is something we have to figure out (regardless of how we feel about AI's impact on research).
There is no “earning potential” to be gained in a world where you simply ask machine to do X and it does it for you.
We might not quite be there but we’re trucking towards that point at full speed.
I mean, we used to have a world like that once upon a time...
It took me a bit, but I eventually got what you meant. For those of you puzzling over it, fakedang is referring to chattel slavery.
> They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it
If we accept the narrative that LLMs can defeat the incentive structure of course work as a concept, it raises the question of if college will continue to raise earning potential for much longer.
Grading homework is still less degrading then the other shenanigans that professors use students for- as in ghost writting books, having them program apps as unpaid labour or doing similar stuff - including renting them out to other companies on campus as free labour. Academia is just very casty at times..
> as in ghost writting books, having them program apps as unpaid labour or doing similar stuff.
Presumably at this point anyone tasked with such will offload it to an LLM?
Academia is just a bunch of egotistical people forcing kids to work on their particular hobbies and if the kids don't enjoy it, the professors have the potential to signal a bad reputation to employers. The system is kind of disgusting. Students should be given much more free reign in what they study.
While there are professors who use students to ghostwrite books or force them to submit papers in co-autorship, that's definitely not common, and practically impossible outside of graduate school. Your average professor/TA is underpaid and struggles to teach basic stuff to the undergrads, that is totally unrelated to their scientific interests and "hobbies".
Some of my engineering professors had a policy that you couldn't get a lower grade in the class than your grade on the final. You could and they said some students did turn in no work at all and still got an A based on the final.
Graduate students spend 10-20 hours a week grading homework, it's a very time intensive process. But I agree, HW should only be an experience. The entire grade should be determined by an in class midterm and final.
I don’t know Borcherds, so this isn’t intended to sound mean to him, but he could pay his TAs or RAs to do hula hoops naked in public for 40 hours a week and it wouldn’t affect him. He’s a high profile mathematician and the worst thing is that next year’s grant money is a little less and he can’t pay for as much naked hula hooping spectacle.
Entire math departments at multiple lower profile schools will close their doors before he has any actual concern about his future as an academic.
But your point is correct for other professors, much less secure in their positions, who have similar problems with AI and actually do have to concern themselves about using their TAs and RAs productively.
He doesn't pay TAs. The university does. They work for the university, not for individual professors. If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.
If Borcherds accepts TAs then they work for him. The point was that he can do practically whatever he wants and doesn't have to worry about it harming him.
Thanks for explaining to me how the academic system I work in functions. Just like most managers don't literally pay their employees, the company does. The university pays TAs through funds from their various revenue streams, including endowment, tuition, grants to the university, and through indirect costs collected from research grants to researchers, probably including Borcherds own grants. So really a lot of different things pay the TAs, the university is just the clearing house.
> He doesn't pay TAs. The university does. They work for the university, not for individual professors.
faculty research overhead pays for department TAs. that's why departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts.
> If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.
define:irony
>faculty research overhead pays for department TAs
The majority comes from tuition budgets, which are assigned per credit-unit. This also pays for faculty salaries. Math is heavily dependent on tuition because they get little overhead. Life sciences is buying millions of dollars of equipment, chemicals, animals, lab staff that incur overhead, none in math.
>departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts
In fact the University of California does not get to keep any overhead. It goes right back into the State of California General Fund and the CA Legislature, as part of the budgeting process, decides where it goes (obviously considering where it came from). During a budget squeeze, overhead can be diverted elsewhere.
Because of this, for a number of years, it was unknown whether the research enterprise at the University of California was actually covering its overhead costs or operating at a loss.
How well do scores on such exams correlate with future success in life post college? (Define success however you like.) Like what are we actually trying to measure here?
> Graduate students spend 10-20 hours a week grading homework
They do not, lol.
100% of the grade being from exams is really bad for some types of students.
For one thing, you will always have some courses in the courseload which have assignments that count toward the grade. So of course, you prioritize getting those assignments done, at the cost of procrastinating the ones that don't contribute to the grade, which will tend not to get done. If you don't do those, you will tend to bomb on the exams.
I would instigate a system in which your assignments count toward their grade, but the assignment's marks are derived from the marks that you hit in the exam, not from the content of the assignment.
Like say that we make assignments 20% of the course grade. For the sake of simplicity, let's suppose we use the final exam grade to determine the assignment contribution.
If you do all the assignments and get 80% in the final, your assignments then contribute 16% to your course grade (out of the maximum 20%). If you've done half the assignments then you get 8% from them, and so on.
I would not impose a minimum bar of what constitutes an assignment being done. If the assignment is, say, programming assignment to make a tokenizer for a programming language, and someone hands in a tiny file containing a "hello world" function, then that will still count as the assignment being done. That student will self-punish when they bomb the final exam due to not having learned, and that exam's percentage then determines the value of their disingenuous assignment effort.
I guess that a form of this system has already existed in the past: namely when certain professors made attendance made attendance part of the grade. So just by warming a seat in the lecture you could get 5% whether you are absorbing anything or tuning out.
Grades being based purely on exams is a bad thing; it encourages "examsmanship" rather than scholarship. It's hard to see what else you can do in the face of AI. Work done in uncontrolled conditions can easily be faked. If you embrace AI, then you have to raise the bar for the size and complexity of homework problems. But then the homework measures the student's ability to take on a complex problem with AI, and not the specifics of the subject matter in the course. You can take on arbitrary complexity without understanding a specific subject matter. If we raise the complexity to the point that you fail, it's not from the subject matter, but the complexity. In no way can we arrange "AI allowed" homework such that the student learns a specific topic; the harder we make it, he more effectively the student learns to use AI, while avoiding the actual topic.
What’s happening to the signal?
That’s the goose that’s laying the golden egg.
Are the people that do well on the proctored assignments firewalled off from AI going to be the best employees?
In interviews I sort of bit the bullet and do pair ai coding interviews - you just have to change with the times
My guess based on my experience as a math major is that they just stop giving homework and the in class tests become more rigorous (can’t imagine how much harder they could have made these at my school at least)
My point is that no matter what tool you’re using, at some point you have to stretch your brain and the exams/screenings/etc just haven’t caught up to how to stretch someone’s brain in this new world and I’ve found just embracing the thing to be a better approach than any sort of pearl clutching
> probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while
Honestly he should just tell student to grade their homework with chatGPT themselves.
The irony is that homework barely helped even before AI. I feel like we should move more into self grading extra material for students to peruse if they are unsure about their ability in the subject, rather than adding chore to those that are fine and a point of worry for those that need that bit extra.
Maybe in some other subjects. Not in mathematics. When I did my math degree a large amount of the learning came via doing problem sets and this was a very common experience among other students too.
> homework barely helped even before AI
Really? When I'm reading textbooks nowadays for fun, I absolutely do the problems at the end of the chapter. It tells you when you think you learned something but didn't.
The good thing about AI is that it never tells you when you actually didn't learn anything. So you're left feeling like a genius, with good feelings!
> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.
No structure needed, the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people. It’s the actual business model; undergraduate education is break even, the only way money is ever made is alums donating to the school due to the feel-good memories they formed when they attended.
Unfortunately, for schools who thought their purpose was to educate, they will be made obsolete in the near future. Expect a lot of schools to close.
But those places that always understood their purpose was for affluent young adults to mingle and connect with other affluent people, they will be just fine.
> the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people
Post-GI Bill. Before university was universal, there was a strong philosophical angle to the enterprise. (Also meet your generation's rich kids, that's always been a part of it.)
As an aside, the professor in question is Richard Borcherds, fields medalist. He is probably most well known for proving the “Monstrous Moonshine” conjecture of Conway and Norton that there is some sort of correspondence between modular functions and representations of the Monster Group. When the conjecture was made in the 1970s, it was purely because someone noticed that a certain number was the same as the cardinality of the monster group. It seemed a crazy coincidence, so John H Conway said (playfully) that it was “Moonshine”. Hence the name “Monstrous Moonshine”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine
He has a youtube channel with lectures in number theory, category theory and other things.
> He has a youtube channel with lectures in number theory, category theory and other things.
The channel: https://www.youtube.com/@richarde.borcherds7998
Thanks for mentioning this. I just realized that the Monster Group has approximately as many elements as the Earth has atoms (|MG| ~ 8*10^53)
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> the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents
Yet the folks with access to unrestricted Mythos agents tackling mathematics are hiring credentialed mathematicians. Your heuristic, applied to itself, rejects itself.
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> They _were_. OpenAI/Anthropic are fully RSI
Source?
EDIT: It’s news to my friend who’s high up at one of them!
We’re a long way from that world. Does your company even interview people who don’t fit the requirements of a job position? No, of course not. So what are you filtering on, if not credentials.
This guy doesn’t just have credentials. He has record of proven results.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. Access to AI doesn’t make you more credible. At best, it makes you more productive.
The better LLMs get at math the better the people using them need to be to be able to ask them the right questions and understand their output.
lol yes, a monkey with no mathematical training but an army of agents is a better mathematician than a literal fields medallist.
I'm not sure what to say about this.
I came to math very late, due to poor school/environment perhaps, but later I took to it like a fish to water. At a jr college I stuffed my schedule with math classes, took everything available, and rarely missed a question on an exam. I really did enjoy working problems and became a math tutor and also graded exams for a favorite professor. Grading was quite a lot of time consuming, meticulous work, which I wouldn't claim to enjoy. I would comb over students' homework and exams and point out errors, docking points for each problem (I really wasn't paid enough for the hours I put in, but I had standards for my work..)
All I can think of, is if you really like math like I did, you could really excel in the environment today..
Also, it is important to know when you made a mistake, but that is enough. You'd learn more figuring out where you went wrong on your own. Which is why I believe you can teach yourself mathematics given a clear introduction to the concepts, a runway of problems to work, and a way to self check your answers.
Setting the curve was its own reward.
This is quite sad. Even if students would cheat off each other, someone had to do the homework. And even the collaboration of cheating on homework always served as a forcing function for me or others to think about the material. If not actively, at least in the form of a quasi background radiation. With AI that is completely gone, and without reward loops for incremental work, the truth is there is a large number of people (especially 18-20 year olds) who will not do well on the exams because they need a bit of a stick.
I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.
Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place. We have pushed far too many youths into college as the default option, and that hasn't been good for the students or the institutions.
There are plenty of people who have the innate intelligence and intellectual curiosity to succeed in college, but come out of high school lacking discipline and clueless about what they want to study. They would be better off spending a few years working or serving in the military or something to get their shit together first, and then enroll in college later. Those students tend to have clearer goals and take the educational experience more seriously.
> Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place
Well, that raises an interesting philosophical question. What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Surely you agree that there are a wide variety of teaching styles present among all college professors. If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material? Why is this an issue with the student, and not the professor not being teaching material, or the university not being facilitator-of-education material for failing to match students and professors well?
I agree that people have been pushed into college as a default option due to it being overloaded as both place of learning but also printing salary-granting papers, but it's NOT clear to me that students who need the specific stick mentioned in some cases are broadly unsuited for higher learning.
> What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Any that are self motivated.
> If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material?
Honestly, no. It shows a lack of (a) institutional-navigational skills, e.g. change your professor, (b) flexibility to different learning "styles" (which are increasingly being shown to be a myth) and/or (c) ability to circumvent adversity, e.g. by reading the textbook, finding online videos or hunting down a study group. That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
Modern college students are basically afforded the freedoms and privileges of a classical scholar with a wealthy patron. Their day-to-day needs are taken care of. They have access to massive libraries. They have access to lectures and professors at office hours. And they navigate all of it with a pre-selected cohort of similar students.
(To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.)
> That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
I disagree, because muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life.
> To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.
Again, I disagree.I mean, I agree on its face, in that a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree.
But we're talking about people who aren't motivated and capable. The best path to something resembling success for people who lack the motivation and capability to be successful on their own, is to muddle through the university system and by whatever necessary means get the piece of paper.
College at large is not a waste of time for these people. Until the downstream society stops valuing a degree as it does, time spent getting the degree is not wasted, because it yielded the degree. If the paper is had, the time was well spent, regardless of how that time was actually spent or whether anything was learned.
> muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life
True [1]. I'm not debating the individual incentives. (I wasn't clear about this earlier.) I'm just not convinced a college graduate who muddled through is worth 75% more to an employer or society than a high school grad who muddles.
> a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree
For a binary measure of success, yes. A successful person empowered with a peaceful, rich society and challenging college experience will do better than one without.
[1] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-happened-to...
In the real world, those on the bottom of the social hierarchy (such as undergrad students) need to adapt to the styles of those on the top (professors). Perhaps that's unfair but it's just the way the world operates. College can be a great environment to learn that essential life skill of adaptability. Find a way to succeed even when you're in a shitty environment surrounded by toxic people.
If we're talking about "the way the world operates", then because of how society values college degrees, any path that gets you the piece of paper is a worthwhile and valuable one. Whether that path involves learning, complaining until given a passing grade, or forcing/convincing your professors to accommodate your preferred style of "learning".
This is something that needs to be fixed downstream, by making the paper less valuable. Making the paper more difficult to get instead is just manufacturing misery because of people too stubborn to pull their heads out of the sand and admit that the function of undergrad is the salary paper, and self-motivated learning has been largely relegated to grad school.
It's not about "teaching style". It's about having intrinsic motivation vs having to be motivated with a stick and threat of failure.
It's about having to be externally motivated for that particular assignment. Or class of assignment, whatever.
There are often a variety of tasks which are graded. Homework, exams, presentations, labs, etc. Every class and professor sets the mix of valuation of these differently, and has different quantities of each. That's teaching style.
If you hate presentations and cannot be roused to make one except by threat of failure, but are great at learning the material and pass the exams with ease, then that's a teaching style incompatibility.
It depends on what college is really for.
Much of college is a social signaling mechanism. Well over a decade ago one of my family members, with a degree of shame had to explain to a friend why I didn’t finish my BA.
A lot of middle and upper class people use college as a way to filter people. You can argue our top universities also serve as finishing schools.
I did, after reaching six figures anyway, finish my BA. The shame is gone.
Or does it still linger as I went to a middle of the road state school. Not Stanford, Yale or even Berkeley.
Honestly I originally attended community college in part to get grant money/loans which allowed me to get a cheap apartment. As a bonus I meet a lot of cool people, read Howard Zinn.
Sure, there are fundamental questions about what college should really be for. Should the focus be on training competent employees or educating well-rounded citizens or anointing social elites or eliminating injustice or advancing the frontiers of human knowledge? Everyone seems to be coming to the debate with different unstated assumptions about that.
Yeah I disagree with this entirely.
I did very poorly in school growing up. I think I failed at least 4-6 classes in middle/high school.
In college I did well and I'm now getting my masters in CS while working as a software engineer.
So, the 'stick' can certainly be useful. Doing poorly in high school is not necessarily an indicator of how you will do in college -- particularly if your life at home was turbulent as it was for me.
You missed the point. Some level of "stick" is appropriate and often necessary for children in middle/high school. But this article is about adults in college. If you get to college and still need the stick then it's probably not the right place for you.
I didn't miss the point. The "stick" was essential to me in college, but I didn't express that very well in my previous comment
You guys are acting like you can only live at one of two extremes: purely self-motivated, or purely grade driven.
For most students it’s a mix of the two.
None of that would seem like a problem to me if the costs for going to US colleges and universities weren't so ridiculous and the penalties for student loan debt weren't so one sided.
ah yes, instead of giving students homework, have them serve in the military for a few years until they’re ready for college
Sure, why not? That's not the best option for everyone but worked out well for several people I know.
It didn't work so well for elementary school students in Iran.
Oh come on, how is that related at all?
You don't think overfunding a gigantic army has any connection with said army committing war crimes all over the world?
When I was at university, a student caught cheating was cause for being expelled.
I am recruiting college kids right now, impeccable pedigrees, elite universities. Our recruitment process involves the kids recording videos where they answer questions as a pre-screening. They are explicitly told not to use AI for the exercise. I have the Claude and ChatGPT answer to those questions on my screen while I review their responses. 40% read it pretty much verbatim. The paradox is I don't even care whether they knew the answer or not, but to me it's an integrity test.
When I was young, public universities in Spain only evaluated the final exam. That was not a problem; it helped people become responsible. Nowadays, they have changed it to evaluate continuous homework, and students end up worse prepared.
Unfortunately the single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day? Can you perform under arbitrarily selected stressful conditions? Are your executive functions fine with that plan?
The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.
I liked my prof's approach to exams:
"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."
And he was right.
I certainly find that now, going back to uni. In a couple of subjects we get the option to prepare a cheat sheet, and I would say I actually look at less than 10% of it. The act of preparing it forces me to revise, and internalise the facts and ideas.
Your argument seems to imply that the only thing that an exam is possibly allowed to measure is ability to answer a question at some arbitrary point in time. It also separates the people with the wit to understand a bunch of topics in a span of 3 or 5 months, the ability to plan accordingly, enough self control, and some motivation to see the plan through from the ones that don't. That's not a bad thing, as diplomas are often used as a proxy not only for intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs.
The only thing I'm saying is that measuring once maximises the luck component. Sure, measure other things by proxy as well. But to borrow your phrase, understanding and taking into account the variability of real life behaviours, sampling noise and environment biases shows "not only intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs."
> maximises the luck component
No, it doesn't. Repeating it ad infinitum does that.
But therefore it's a good thing grades aren't just pass or fail, but have a range, from 1 to 10, or to 20 or whatever. Too bad there's so much external pressure on the system.
> Repeating it ad infinitum does that.
Take a moment to think about it. Why does the confidence interval go smaller with more samples? What does it say about the impact of luck in repeated tests?
In tests, reseats allow you to take the maximum, not the average. The maximum goes asymptotically up.
>single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day?
If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.
It's clear what pool the content will be from. But it's impossible to check everything. Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.
> barring rare emergencies
It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.
> Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.
In the case of calculus as an example, there should be nothing from the class you didn't have time to practice sufficiently. A full academic year is more than enough time to learn integrals, derivatives, sequences, and series with the small collection of tricks for solving difficult problems (telescoping series, trig sub, etc.) There's a couple dozen rules you learn that are straightforward to apply, and for the times they aren't obvious, there's like a dozen total tricks (trig sub, etc.).
I took these classes. I remember how most people just phoned in the entire thing and complained at the exam review sessions how hard everything was.
It's the simplest of memorization.
Only if you were planning to scrape by. If you actually know the material (the thing the exam is supposed to determine), you should do fine, and any good or bad luck will tend to average out by the time you graduate. Besides, there really aren't any alternatives left. Completed homework had some weak-ish signal for a while, but now it doesn't.
As someone who tasted both education models, the US model of babysitting students for the first few years after high school is superior. Students coming in with relatively weak preparation are able to catch up to their better prepared peers within a couple years. At the junior (3rd year) level you can hardly tell the difference between the graduates of elite high schools and run of the mill public schools. I think the entry bar is much higher, and in many cases insurmountable, in Europe. It persists through the years so someone perfectly capable of developing the required discipline and chops has no chance if they didn't come from the right high school or high school track.
Ultimately the goal of education shouldn't just be a filter but it should ensure that as many people as possible learn the material. Homework allows for early intervention by faculty to get people back on track. There really are students who end up succeeding after this intervention.
The solution is not to feed students from spoon all the time. They are adults and should act as such, it is not a school where it is really important to give every child a chance. Grading homework must be opt-in. Those who want it, get the grade as a feedback, can seek for help then and get the help, those who skip should be assumed prepared for final exam and judged by it. There are millions of people in the world who can use education opportunities to their maximum, and the place should not be reserved to those who feel entitled by whatever privilege they have.
We observe that intervention leads to more students learning. I don't believe that "well they are adults they can fail if they want" is an excuse for a university refusing to take steps that they know would improve pedagogy.
I do agree that AI has made this basically useless. Rather than skipping homeworks or doing a bad job the students just cheat and there is no opportunity to notice and intervene. They get all the way to the screen-free final and fail.
I do not think that controlling homework does improve pedagogy at scale. Homework helps engaged and motivated students who are ready to accept the feedback. Maybe in your place they are majority and effects are visible. As soon as grades for homework become the goal, the Goodhart‘s law starts playing the role in the dynamics of relationships between students and teachers. AI has nothing to do with it, cheating with homework did always exist.
> I do not think that controlling homework does improve pedagogy at scale.
You are welcome to believe this. You are also wrong.
I am curious if you have ever taught at a university.
Interesting. Honestly I think about this much more in a cohort way. There’s some cohort of students who are extremely self motivated and mature and understand the way you do one thing is kinda the way you do all things. There’s another cohort that is completely checked out or whose priorities are not grades at all. For these cohorts I don’t think it makes a big different.
But it’s hard for me to imagine that for the cohorts in between (who definitely want to be motivated) having some forcing function is just an easier guiding hand to helping them become responsible vs. completely bombing a class and then potentially losing hope or self identifying as lazy/helpless - which I had seen all too often to some of my smartest classmates.
Regardless not saying this to invalidate your experience. Just hasn’t lined up with mine.
Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.
I think this is hard to understate.
I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.
I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.
I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.
It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.
And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.
That is all gone now. What a shame.
>Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.
You mean to plagiarize their work. Now finally the nerds also have the option to have somebody else do their work for them.
Back when I was a student, 25+ years ago, many professors were a bit lazy. They just re-used problem sets which they had made earlier. No single year would be alike, but the problem sets would still be from a larger collection.
The students would then hand down the big book of problem and solution sets down to the freshman class.
The professors, still being a bit lazy, knew this. But instead of scarping the old problems, they'd just say that cheating only hurts the students doing it - as the homework grades would not influence the final grade. And sure enough, the students that never did their own work, rarely did well (if at all passed) on the finals exam.
It should be social and other soft pressure to do homework, only the final exam should be graded.
Cheating always has been available as an option. AI just makes it faster. At Cal, you always had students who would still pursue doing things on their own even when not cheating led to lower grades. The reality of it all is that cheating catches up to you eventually and the later it does, the worse are the outcomes. If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.
Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?
> If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.
Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.
Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.
I think you’re conflating too many things here. Never claimed that the universe is fair nor do I claim that failing upwards isn’t a thing.
If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.
In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.
I know you chose 50/50 arbitrarily. But I think the real numbers are much worse. A few years ago, I stayed a couple nights at a hostel in a rural spot in Italy. I’m in my 50s, and most of the others there were Americans in their 20s, fairly recent grads. A dozen of us went out to dinner one night, and among the topics discussed was cheating in college. Only myself and one of the younger people said we did not cheat, the others all treated it as an expected part of the college experience. This isn’t exactly “data”, and perhaps there’s some sort of correlation between hostel-goer and cheater, but I was shocked at the numbers. And that was before LLM usage was common.
My read is it's pre- versus post-social media college experiences. There have always been a number of cheaters. But their blast radius of normalization was limited to their roommate or maybe even dorm floor. With social media, a single cheater at a single school can enable and normalize the practice for millions.
Have you been in a work place?
Being friends of the right people can totally give you all the promotions you need, even if all you do has negative value for the company.
The bigger issue here is that even if they don’t cheat and work hard to get all As, there may be no career for them at the end of it.
I use this in class. Basically if you turn in the complete work, your getting an A. But I make sure they know that there's an interviewer with slathering fangs waiting to make sure they have it down.
I'm not the students' competitor; the interviewer is. And the students not only have to impress the interviewer, but they have to impress them more than all their peers do!
The first place I taught gave no grades or unrequested feedback on anything. And no certificate. And those cohorts had the best placement rates. There was nothing in the school for the students to game, so they kept their eye on the real prize.
Even as technology has destroyed education as we know it, you and likely many others in education are still thinking about sticks?
The students have made it extremely clear to the teachers
Another angle on this is the tope that curriculum is so out of date your AI completed assignment may be ahead of the class subject matter. The real teacher is is having a motivation or need to do something and learning about what you need to learn to get the goal accomplished, AI can be a great companion for that journey, weeding out the sycophantic slop and getting to truth is the new challenge. There are a lot of elements to school that discourage curiosity (asking a stupid question in front of class) or being picked on for being a keener or other anti-intellectual "cool kid" mentalities. In the end we need to make the line between learning and success more obvious for young people, maybe that doesn't work when the definition of success includes fitting into a burocracy and letting the singing key be "4".
With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought.
No that will not happen as the company has to pay and it shows in their accounts.
Much cheaper not to train anyone and let the state or pupil pay for training.
See lack of apprenticeships for a case of this.
Even in China companies are already doing this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/china-ai-ta...
It is the other way around. Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State.
It is much cheaper for a company to do NO training.
It does not matter if Education/Training is done by the government or another company all that matters is that the company does not have any training in its accounts. If it has that is an obvious cost to cut.
Long term this is not good for a company but for the next year or two at least it is better and that is all that their shareholders will look at,
> It is much cheaper for a company to do NO training.
Only if someone else is footing the bill.
> If it has that is an obvious cost to cut.
When it costs tens of thousands per year, yes. If training became 10-100 times cheaper, "training" becomes as expensive per employee as the cost of offering cafeteria food or "gym memberships". Training would be on par of offering any other type of employment benefit, and you don't see shareholders asking for big companies to get rid of any of those.
It is expensive because it confers greatly enhanced earning potential. Students borrow against that future income. Sometimes from the state.
It confers enhanced future income largely because of the inherent vetting process that asures future employers this person is able to focus for extended periods of time on intellectual tasks, is able to follow through and function within a bureaucracy. I don't think it's as much about skills, at least it's way overkill for the skills that are actually needed on the job for most jobs.
I don't see the rise of LLMs as obviating the "functional cog in the Rube Goldberg machine" training.
It is also expensive because the debt is very hard to get erased through bankruptcy, so private companies are now offering more money to people than is actually needed. So universities see this $ and raise prices.
Kinda like how tax breaks on housing initially help people, and then the market adjusts based on the new inflow of $.
This is just another way of saying that people go to school to buy access to the network, not for education itself.
> Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State. reply
The death of apprenticeships is because you are training your own competition. It worked in the past because you trained your kid for a trade that was arcane and took a couple decades to master, but now you'd be training someone with no loyalty to you in a field that can be speed run in a year or so with YouTube assistance.
Apprenticeships died long before YouTube. Their decline in the US is linked to the decline of trade unions who sponsor them.
If it was that simple, the cost of education per student would be highest in places like Germany.
You neo-liberals have been wrong about this for 40 years now. You wrought us all with your Reaganomics, and have had the full attention of every government for this entire time (except maybe in Cuba) and the results have been truly disastrous, climate catastrophe and all.
If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. The fact that we haven’t is proof that the promises of neo-liberalism are all lies.
> If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now.
Food. Consumer goods. Telecommunications services. Transportation. Clothes. All things that have gone down in absolute prices and relative amount of family income to be provided.
Education / Housing / Healthcare: all deemed "up to the State" and that takes increasingly more from people at ever diminishing returns.
We can have a long and serious conversation about how hard the Government should be involved in regulating these things, and how we could set up systems that ensure that these become universally available and not just for middle/upper class. We can even have a conversation about things that should be controlled by the Government even if it means a high cost to society. But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness.
> But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness.
The way to solve this is not by giving the monopoly back to the state, but by the state enacting regulations thay allows smaller players to join the grid.
Europe has been doing this for 20 years now. I have yet to see successful results. And realizing each failure of Neo-liberal policy Europe keeps doubling or quadrupling down. I believe they are on their 4th energy package at the moment. I am sure the fate if this 4th attempt will be identical to the other efforts of making capitalism fix the problem, and identical to any other neo-liberal policy. Europe will have more billionaires and peoples energy bills will be higher.
As the saying in Europe goes: Neo-liberalism will continue until the economy improves.
Really?
Do we have 20 years already since people are allowed to set up a solar panel in their backyard and sell excess capacity to the grid?
Do we have 20 years where farmers can grow their own biodiesel to (at least) power their own machinery, or does the state giving them subsidies to let them keep growing vegetables, wine and beef without having to compete in the global market?