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Notes -
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NYMag)
link-archive link
Article describing what was predictably coming to college campuses since GPT3 got released. The narration follows some particularly annoying Korean-American student trying to make quick bucks from LLM-cheating start-ups and a rather dumb girl who can't follow basic reasoning, which makes the read a bit aggravating and amusing but overall the arch is not surprising. Recommended for a quick read. Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.
Some interesting highlights for me:
Honestly, I think the article does itself a disservice by not breaking the problem down into the two major but separate issues, detailed below. Instead it bounces between the two in an effort to provide an engaging article, but it's very important to realize that these two problems are largely separable problems. They both involve AI, but that's the extent of the overlap.
Problem One: Scientific research clearly indicates that the difficulty and engagement with a task is directly proportional to learning. The neuroscience points out that different parts of the brain are activated when asked to perform "recall" instead of mere "recognition." Unfortunately many students are unable to recognize the difference! Recall is something like: "tell me something about this" and you work from scratch, recognition might be a looking at your notes or a nice summary and going "oh yeah that makes sense", or answering a multiple-choice question where you have plenty of cues to work with. Some have even argued that it's possible to create in-class notes that are too good at their purpose, thus "offloading" the work to an external knowledge storage device, in a sense. The key point however is this: not only is recall far more potent than recognition in terms of how likely the information is to make it into long-term memory in the first place, it's also worth stating that the more connections that are made during the learning process, the more likely the brain is to be able to retrieve that information from long-term memory as well.
ChatGPT in its most common use case, entirely "short-circuits" this process, depriving a student from forming connections, and developing a kind of "base knowledge" that could be helpful on less foundational topics later. This does not necessarily have to be the case - a good prompter might use ChatGPT to self-quiz, or ask smart follow-up questions, or give deeper explanations that trigger more connections (ignoring hallucinations for now). I think this kind of advanced usage is a small minority of college users, though. In short, this is the most serious problem for AI in college.
Problem Two: How important are essays, anyways? We can't really escape the classic "calculator problem": remember plaintively asking your math teachers why you needed to learn this if a calculator or graphing software could do it just fine? Obviously that's a complicated question, and this one is too; a certain level of familiarity with numbers and how they work is critical if you go into any kind of later applied math, not knowing your times tables can cripple the ability to engage with algebra, but frankly there were absolutely some questions that were designed to be deliberately difficult rather than to emulate any kind of real-world situation. So, essays. What good is an essay? Honestly I think the evidence has always been a little hand-wavy and weak for essays. Not only did virtually all humanities professors go way overboard on being strict about formatting in a misguided attempt to help students (I've seen some horror stories where well-written essays get absolutely demolished due to stupid rules like "you must exactly rephrase your thesis at the start of the conclusion") but it's hard to see if the act of writing essays noticeably improves vague notions like "thinking critically". Now, I might be behind the times on this particular area of research (if it even meaningfully exists), but it has always seemed to me that essays were more crude attempts at prompting students to do plenty of recall via independent research and synthesis. Thus increasing learning. But this was always an artifact of how difficult the task of assembling an essay from scratch is, something clearly no longer difficult with AI.
Thus, the essay must die. Perhaps professors should ask for a wider variety of writing formats, more applicable to life. Perhaps the standards should shift to the end-result of the writing - is it enjoyable to read and factual and the right length/complexity? Perhaps live or oral assessments should be more prominent. Or maybe professors should focus on teaching smaller and more broadly useful writing tips, about the writing itself, or even consider teaching tips about how to best prompt an AI for assembling a piece of writing. Is there any evidence writing essays actually increases the capacity or ability to wield "critical thought"? I say no, if you want to teach critical thinking, you might as well attempt to do so directly and not default to weak proxies like essays.
When you wanted to explain an idea you had to people you don't know, you sat down and wrote this essay. Maybe that's the joke, but in all seriousness, this is the good of an essay. It's a way of conveying your thoughts in a timeless and self-contained fashion.
They are also a way of helping yourself think. Have you read Paul Graham on essays? https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
Unless you are defining essays very strictly as 'five part theses of twenty pages as written by humanities students'. I am quite prepared to believe that essay writing is taught badly.
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