mhoye
The rich, privileged kids have always been able to pay somebody to do their homework.
It's impossible for me to read all these articles about AI in education without believing that the fundamental problem is not that lazy students can and do cheat, but that access to cheating has been democratized; that it is now accessible to the unprivileged.
Education should be non-transactional; a system that _can't_ be bought out or gamed. But that - in cost, and in outcomes - would rebuke that privilege.
mhoye
If you had some certification process where one candidate in, say, twenty turned out to be wildly unqualified, somebody whose dad had bought them their law degree or forklift certification or who cares what without doing the reading or training, without passing the tests, what value would we - or should we - put on that certification?
Relatedly: of the the _30%_ of Harvard freshmen who count as "legacy admissions", what fraction of them do you think wrote their own applications?
mhoye
I don't see a way through this that doesn't involve education doubling down on its ideals and abandoning its present structure: discarding transactional certification in favor of a system that can't, to the absolute best of our capacities as a society, be gamed. Not by stochastic technologies and not by naked privilege. Those two things are, to borrow an infosec term, leveraging the same attack surface, and that is what we need to fix.
Court Cantrell prefers not to
@mhoye If we want an ungamable education system, we're gonna need a helluva lot more teachers -- enough that there's a close enough relationship between every student and their teacher(s) that the teacher can tell from conversation whether or not the student has gained the necessary knowledge. No more tests, exams, homework, or grades. No more automated processes whatsoever. We'd need a reimagining of education from the ground up and across the board.
Chris Siebenmann
@mhoye Education purely for education's sake without a certification/mark at the end is a non-starter for a lot of people. If things went that way I think it'd probably mostly go back to being a sign of idle elite status, instead of something for professionals that people would get hired based on.
Rich Felker
@cks @mhoye You have to envision it alongside UBI or other radical social change.
You also need to be making it universally accessible. The reason education for its own sake is "a non-starter" for lots of people isn't that they don't want education, but that they don't want to spend their scarce money on something that won't have proportional returns.
Chris Siebenmann
@mhoye My suspicion is that the only survivable system is partly a guild/apprenticeship system where someone has to put their reputation on the line to sponsor you to professional status. This has all sorts of bad effects, but approximately everyone wants some simple mark of quality they can use to make decisions and I don't see any other way for the mark to be meaningful in the face of people trying to game it.
(You'd do university before the guild/etc to learn.)
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.