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  a57721
  I am teaching some math courses, and I see how LLMs disrupted all standard approaches, and I don't know what to do.I rely on written exams that are open book, but forbid any use of computers and smartphones in class.The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.I just had an experience where all students were given "sample problems" to try at home and prepare for the written test. Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.It seems like the university also has many people pushing for AI use for everything, but I teach basic stuff where the goal is to make students think on their own and digest some fundamental ideas, LLMs can produce perfect solutions, but relying on them is pointless.
• mtrx
  I was at EduLearn (a major edtech conference) this year and talked to many professors exactly about this. A lot of them are pulling work back into the classroom, but keep running into the same problems:- some skills only develop through the actual writing (similar to how you can't learn to code just by watching YouTube videos)- in-class assignments are not always scalable (and students end up using AI anyway)- students aren't motivated enough to participate activelyI think looking at the writing process is a more realistic approach, so I built Turingo (https://www.turingo.net). It replays how a Google Doc was written, highlights unusual edits (large pastes) and tracks how that text changed afterwards. Surprisingly, several professors reported that students often underestimate how much LLM-generated text is left in their final drafts, so just seeing the replay changes the conversation.It's not meant to be a verdict machine like the existing AI detectors (another big problem in education), more of a starting point for the kind of conversations the author's TAs are having. In fact, we're also beta testing a feature that suggests a few questions for the professor to ask based on the replay.And yes, it's not perfect and autotypers do exist, but they're dumber than you'd expect and nowhere close to mimicking a real human (I hope to address that soon).
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  gblargg
  Seems the core problem is that many/most students aren't there to learn the material, just to get grades. The class is a complex mechanism to force them to learn material against their will in a validation arms race. The teacher's job becomes something like a military commander. Seems depressing.
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  Propelloni
  Maybe the Germans were right? One in-person test, preferably an interview, at the end of the semester should be enough to motivate the smarter part of the bunch to make sure they understand the issues at hand. The rest is chaff anyway. Don't optimize for chaff.
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  nfrankel
  I have a fairly long experience of both teaching and grading, even though I stopped a couple of years ago. After a couple of years of trial-and-error, I think I found the "right" way:* Alternate between theory and practice in the course of a single 2-hours slot. Theory is necessary, but the attention span of people is very limited. * Grade either a homework assignment in the form of a real project with specifications. You give the assignment half-semester, so that students who start early can ask questions. Otherwise, grade a in-session exam, with every resource available, including the course and the whole Internet. However, you don't assess the knowledge, but if the student is able to apply their knowledge to the different tasks at hand.These approaches are now completely moot in the age of AI.I was surprised the first time a colleague asked me to do an oral exam. I thought it was a burden on people with poor social interaction skills. It went surprisingly well: you could see in a couple of minutes if the student had integrated the concepts of the course, even if they were shy. Now I wonder if it's the way to go. There's one caveat, though: it doesn't scale.
• charlieyu1
  20 years ago my department head was saying homework was pretty pointless because everyone was copying each other. They assigned a token percentage for homework so at least the students were submitting homework.
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  helsinkiandrew
  > I now shifted to in-person interactions with a TA. After every assignment, each student needs to schedule a 15-minute meeting with a TA to answer a couple of questions in a live conversationIsn't the answer the 'flipped classroom' - students are assigned reading/studying to do before a class and the class becomes more interactive, answering questions/discussing topics/solving problems etc depending on subject. Of course, this is more expensive than a hall with 400 people listening to a lecture with a couple of tests/essays.https://fltmag.com/the-flipped-classroom/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
• smugglerFlynn
  I cannot shake the feeling that we are chasing the wrong goose.The end goal of education is to help you understand how things work, with problem-solving being a means of developing and applying that understanding. LLMs shortcut the former and turn the latter into a pointless arms race that we cannot win.I loved the example of increasing the complexity of learning projects, but I still feel like one question is missing: are people really trying to learn the same thing we were trying to teach them in the first place?
• Aeolun
  I dunno, if I had to teach students now I think I’d just force them to stay in the lecture hall without internet for the hour I need them to work on their assignments that week. I just can’t see any other reasonable way to do this. Everyone leaves their phones at the door in some designated locker or something.
• thow88737363667
  I teach mostly smaller courses but my approach to grading has been the same for years: A combination of a semester-long group project (ending in a paper, a prototype and a group presentation) with individual oral exams about aspects of the project and of the lecture. The lecture is flanked by optional TA sessions as well as access to labs which, for most hours of the day, have some experienced/teaching people being around (this results in a lot of ad-hoc learning situations and a general diffusion of knowledge and practices).This gives me/us a lot of angles to understand what progress has been made throughout the semester as well as to consider and react to individual differences between students. In my book, it’s also resistant to faking it convincingly throughout all modalities. However, scaling that approach to big entry level courses would require more money for teaching than any research group in Europe I’ve ever seen has available.
• N_Lens
  Thanks for sharing. Interesting to see how teachers are adapting to LLMs. I agree that trying to ban AI use is futile.
• sambapa
  Why teach someone who doesn't want to learn?
• Honali
  The most interesting part here is that AI isn't replacing the learning goals, it's replacing the evidence instructors used to measure them
• nurettin
  We still have developers because we can't outsource responsibility to AI. If shit breaks, we still need someone to fix it. Maybe you think that can also be automated. I have a counter-example. AI will rarely use the existing state when solving a bug. It will tack on it's own event queue, it will make up it's own messaging system, it is a cancerous growth. And this observation is based on both opus5.5 and gpt5.6-astra. The results are way past magical at this point, but you still have to weigh in pretty heavily for orderly code growth where solutions are succint, focused and preserve the existing structure. They are still noobs at fixing/adding stuff.
• jan_m_savage
  very simple. All exams to be paper and pen.
• BrenBarn
  In my experience a significant proportion of "evidence-based best pedagogy practices" is hogwash. I'm pretty anti-AI, but going against education-school dogma isn't a reason to avoid AI.
• flimflamm
  Thinking too small. The interactive testing needs to be done by AI. Then the transcript is reviewed by the teacher.
• jdw64
  This makes me think of exams — I always did well on open-book exams, but I didn't do well on exams where I couldn't look at the book. Whether it's because of ADHD or just a lack of memorization ability.Similarly, I did well in interviews where I could use the internet, but I didn't do well in interviews where I couldn't use the internet.Everyone has a testing format they're good at. I'm curious about how this kind of thing is evaluated, and whether there are any papers related to this.
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  bitwize
  School homework is one of those things which, like the OnlyFans economy, I hope AI utterly destroys, despite my general detestation for the corrosive effects of AI on society.
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  otabdeveloper4
  Just grade the process, not the result. It's literally that simple.AI can talk the talk, but it can't walk the walk.A simple "explain why this is the best solution" will make it shit the bed 10 out 10 times.
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  vjk800
  It's funny how people talk about "teaching" getting more difficult with LLMs.Clearly teaching got a lot better, since we now have a new teaching tool at our use, the LLMs. It's evaluating that got harder, because students can use the same tool to cheat in traditional forms of evaluation.If "teaching the students" means the same as "evaluating the students" to you, maybe you shouldn't teach in the first place.