Where did you go to school? I think every test I took from kindergarten through college was written with the possibility of a few extra points for class participation.

Not the way it was done in my parent’s time. In European schools most significant tests and examinations were oral. Time to consider that here. Hard to pretend to know something when you actually don’t in front of the examiner. My PhD defense was oral here.

My impression is that we don’t need to use schools as babysitters for high school and college aged students who don’t want to learn anything. Who resort to cheating in order to pass.They could be out working and beginning a life for themselves. It really starts with grade one, when the education policy is to place every child into grade two next year, they have not passed grade one, they have just gotten a year older. And there is no reason for it to be called “grade two” when all it is - is a collection of 7 year olds - just like in the playground.

That would be very time consuming. Some of my college classes had more than 100 students in them.

Yes, and educational. First of all, we don’t need so many incompetent and uninterested students in classes. It is everybody’s waste of time and money.

There seems to be way too many students these days in classes who can’t do the work and of course they resort to cheating to pass (using AI, plagiarizing, stealing exams etc) - they have to. The problem is that they should not be there in the first place. It’s like asking a blind person to become a skeet shooter. So, yes, these students have a lot of mental anxiety, depression, mental health problems - more is expected of them than what they are able to do. The stress must be very high. If they are just lazy and uninterested they should not be there either. Some people’s answer is to dumb down the curriculum until it is meaningless, my answer is only the capable and interested students should be there.

Not everyone is interested in every subject, but most people are good in the thing they're most interested in. I was horrible with mathematics and history. Memorizing numbers has always been difficult for me, and that includes dates. But I wanted to be a journalist; a writer. I was able to squeeze by with my math and history requirements to get into college and excelled at "all things verbal."

You are suggesting that I shouldn't have been allowed to go to college at all because it was a waste of time, I was lazy and uninterested, or that I must of course have been cheating, or that I suffered a mental illness.

None of the above is true. I just suck at math. There's no shame in that. But I was required to take a math class in college if I wanted to get my degree. So I took probability/statistics, since I never took Algebra II, Calculus, or Trigonohowever it's spelled, and learning the odds of a dice game seemed infinitely more interesting than signing and co-signing with numbers instead of your signature (that's a joke, but that's seriously the extent of my knowledge of anything beyond basic algebra).

I also loathed memorizing dates and matching them with events. I'm not good at it. But I was required to take Western Civilization if I wanted my degree. So I took it. I barely passed. It was a huge class with around 300 students at 8 in the morning for 3 hours twice a week. I usually taped it and napped with the tape recorder on my lap, and fast-forwarded to the interesting parts the week before exams. I didn't cheat, because I didn't care enough about the grade. As long as I got a C- or better I was happy.

I aced every single English, writing, grammar, and literature class I've taken ever since 4th grade. That's my forte, and that's what I got my double-major in. With honors. Without AI.

Access Denied

not surprising how AI can be abused and used for manipulation. .

generally i don't use it, unless looking for programming code, as code is pretty standard to check if it works or not. .
everything else,

nah!

Yes, I don’t believe in force feeding students past high school education. However, for example, if you need math, eg. statistics, for psychology and you are really interested in say, becoming a clinical psychologist, as a student you either bite the bullet and learn the math so that you can do the lab analysis required in psych courses, or find a different major to study. If the student is interested enough they will work on all the courses necessary to get their qualification.

I don't know how it is now, but when I went to college in the late 1970's-early 1980's there was a thing called "all-college requirements." If you wanted a 4-year degree in anything at all, you were required to take and pass certain courses. English 101 was a minimum (I had to petition the Dean to be placed in advanced English. The E101 professor was upset that I corrected her correction of my very first paper for the class. She criticized the content instead of the quality, and the assignment was to write about my topic of choice.) I was required to take at least one math class and one civics/sociology class, and I was required to take a history course and Senior Seminar. For civics/sociology I took a class on deciphering state general statutes. Pre-law stuff.

Almost all of the rest of my four years consisted of creative writing, prose and poetry, oration, classic literature, Chaucer and advanced Shakespeare, and a ton of journalism classes including court reporting (fascinating, final paper covered a homicide case). Everything else was electives so I filled them up with things like ASL and psychology.

Another requirement was that I had at least one full year of a foreign language in High School, or that I take at least one semester of it in college. I'd taken a couple years of Spanish in high school so I was exempt from having to take it in college.

I didn't have to do well in any of these "all-college requirement" except English because that was my major. But I did have to pass them all, and not be on academic probation more than one semester out of the four years.

At this time different universities, up to a point, have different requirements towards degrees. Also to get credit at an ivy university you have to get an A or above in an accepted equivalent course at another university. Transfer credits are difficult. I believe there is a plan to re-examine them now. Husband was registrar at an ivy.

This wasn't toward any specific degree. It didn't matter what degree you were persuing. If you wanted that B.S. on your graduation certificate, you had to take a minimum of 1 math, 1 civics/sociology, 1 history, and Senior Seminar, plus the foreign language requirement which could be fulfilled if you'd taken a year or more in high school.

If your degree was in phys ed, you had to take those above minimum courses. If your degree was English Literature, you had to take those above minimum courses. These minimums didn't have to have anything at all to do with your major or minor. You had to take them anyway, and pass them.

Sounds like classic liberal education.

Now students complaining about professors using AI.

I read The NY Times article.

The professors said they used A.I. as a tool to provide a better education.

They claimed that chatbots
1. saved time,
2. helped them with overwhelming workloads and
3. served as automated teaching assistants.

I think the first two would also apply to students.

In general, university students are not prohibited from using AI—-just for certain assignments a professor specifies, which is part of the learning process. Universities are places of learning.

Too many people have misinterpreted all of this as universities are preventing students from using AI for anything. They are not.

I am an Adjunct Professor at a local college. I can tell that many of my students use AI.

I have each student write about themselves and what they expect to learn in my classes during the first week of classes.

I teach online, so I never meet them face to face, but I do read their first assignments and I find that they write several levels above their initial writing during assignments.

I can often see that it is not in their voice or with their given vocabulary.

The issue is, how do you prove any of it.

There is a new paradigm being consider with AI. It is not unlike the use of a calculator in a math class when we were younger. Does the calculator act as a cheat or an enhancer.

For non-mathematical and non-science students, there has been argument that calculators provide marginal students a way to navigate mathematical exercises and produce an acceptable result.

I don’t have an opinion, yet, on the use of AI. Is it the modern calculator or is it just a quick cheat? Like I said, I’m still evaluating….

Similar to using book someone wrote on subject, easier and quicker getting off web than going to library finding the book then reading it? then, using words from book? Either way if about memorization.

It was a liberal arts school, yes. Emerson College, founded by Charles W. Emerson as a school of oratory for boys in Back Bay, Boston. Went through a few different incarnations, as a girl's school for a short period, and eventually ended up co-ed. Communications Studies and dramatic and multi-media arts are its main components.

Norman Lear, Jennifer Coolidge, Henry Winkler were all students there. Denis Leary graduated the year before I did and taught one of my creative writing classes for one semester before he headed off to become famous. Mario Cantone (the guy who played Anthony Mariantino in Sex and the City) and I were "wall buddies." We hung out together at "the Wall" between classes. It was literally a 3-foot wall in front of 96-98 Beacon Street, the school's headquarters.

And we all had to learn the same "all-college" requirements if we wanted to graduate. We didn't have AI, there were no TI-83 or TI-84 calculators or any other graphing calculators at the time, they hadn't been invented yet. Neither were laptops, tablets, public internet, or smartphones. If we needed to look something up we'd go to the library and use the dewey decimal system file wall to find a book we thought would help us. Or we'd look for something on the microfiche.

We were taught critical thinking skills. How to ask the right questions, to understand what we were dealing with from one moment to the next. We were taught spacial awareness. You couldn't go to Store24 at 3 in the morning during midterm week by yourself, without having an acute sense of spacial awareness (and a kubotan, and memorizing a Shakespeare sililoquy and not being afraid to recite it LOUDLY to make your assailant think you were insane and leave you alone).

I was at a museum in Europe the other day.

The vast majority of the descriptions of the exhibits were in Spanish. As I was leaving I told the receptionist that the museum was interesting but that it would be much better if the descriptions were also in English. She said that they were working on it but that they didn’t have the staff.

With AI, a person could take a photo of the Spanish description and the exhibit would be instantly translated to English - saving time and money.

Should the museum use AI and save money or should they hire someone to translate manually?

You don't need AI for that. You just need Lens, if you have an android phone, I'm sure there's one for apples. Or, next time you go to a country where Spanish is the primary language spoken, make sure you've learned at least a passing conversational Spanish before you pack your bags for the trip.

Just enroll in online college and do all the AI you want. Who’s going to know and who’s checking? All care about the money. :22yikes:

You had an education in more than one sense then, OBB. I hope you had a good time - it sounds like you enjoyed it. But you could have still cheated if you wanted to. We did. First year engineering at my university was a culling process. There were classes, including labs, from 9:00 to 5:00 every day. One hour for lunch. Then homework assignments in physics, electricity, chemistry, applied math, drafting etc every day, each subject taking a good 2 hours or more to complete. To be taken up the next day. In order to complete them all you either had to be a genius or “cheat”.

Three or four of us would get together after classes and one would do the physics assignment and we’d copy it with slight differences, one would do the drafting, that was harder to copy etc. This was the only way we could possibly complete all the assigned work in time. And the professors had to know it.

Nice article in today’s WSJ:

“AI has exposed a decline in higher education that has been under way for decades. Colleges increasingly focus on job training and credentials rather than intellectual growth for its own sake. Choose-your-own curricula, runaway grade inflation, and the popular notion of the four-year party are symptoms of the same problem. Students have no qualms about cheating, because as far as many of them can tell, college isn’t about learning anyway.

Education is meant to liberate us from bias and ignorance. By hindering the development of students’ critical faculties, AI is setting up future generations for the opposite. Technology has its place in higher education, but not at the expense of learning. Real students deserve a real education.”

Real students would demand a real education.

Do you want someone performing an open-heart surgery on you, if you knew that their degree was courtesy of AI and they really didn't understand anatomy/physiology?

AI robots are performing surgery today.

AI-powered robots can autonomously tie sutures and knots, a task that requires precision and dexterity, according to The American College of Surgeons.