It is really about time we thought about what universities are for in the 21st century, since there has been significant scope creep wrt labour markets, particularly roles which do not actually require university education but do require a degree for CV reasons. It is nonsense in the 21st century to require a bachelor's degree for such roles. Not to mention the huge societal pressure that you have mentioned, which no 18 year old can really be expected to see through. With CS students this is one thing. Medical students? Air traffic controllers? That is to say, there is a huge gap in the educational integrity of degrees, and this is probably partly driven by people who do not really want to be at university for educational reasons (and, believe it or not, there are other ways to party in your early twenties) and for whom a degree in XYZ is not rationally connected to 80% of their options after school. And there are many such people. This really needs to be thought through, because education is expensive, and it is an enormous waste of money to pay for a couple of years of university and end up failing out or being sanctioned for AI cheating, or being educated for something you do not really want or need to be taught. That is true whether or not education is paid for privately or by the public.

> If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests. I agree - I would have been toast. I wonder if the teachers/colleges need to change the way they teach and assess. Let the students use the AI tools they like (perhaps guide them how they can use them professionally), but test regularly and early on the skills/knowledge they're meant to be gaining offline and in person. Oh and don't give Fs for cheating - suspend them. I read a few years ago about a teacher (I think highschool) who put his lectures on YouTube for students to view in their own time and then used the in class hours for interaction, questions, tests. EDIT: Claude beat my Googling: This was 2 chemistry high school teachers in 2007 - The Flipped Classroom https://fltmag.com/the-flipped-classroom/

>(perhaps guide them how they can use them professionally) If that's anything like how they guided me to use programming languages professionally... In my workplace I find systems and policies move too slowly to keep up with how rapidly the LLM world is changing. Colleges are even more glacial. They've barely adapted to video conferencing.

How do they keep up? Honestly it’s too risky to make a serious move on such a fast-paced environment. The only thing I can see them doing is removing technology altogether. People did just fine 100 years ago. Want to learn to code? Use a Commodore 64. The company was purchased and rebooted the C64: https://commodore.net/

Yes, meanwhile, Claude Cowork was only released this past January. And that was amazing. But I don't know about anyone else but I've already moved on to just using Codex for just about everything (except some Kagi use). Schools work on timescales of years, AI is advancing on the timescale of weeks and months. Until that situation stabilizes I think the only institution capable of teaching about it is the family -- parents.

Ancient brains, medieval institutions, godlike technology. Tristan Harris had some sort of comment like that on a podcast about the challenges posed by AI.

> Let the students use the AI tools they like […], but test regularly and early on the skills/knowledge they're meant to be gaining offline and in person. I very much doubt there is any agreement on what those skills are. Creating the idea of “what to learn in the new world” is itself IMO an important academic creation, but there’s no reward for doing it and no way to know if you’re on the right track (you just have to wait and see). Employers are also just adapting. Wait until companies are paying unsubsidized “list price” for LLM usage. Then we can have a better idea of the worth of the automation and what skills should stay with humans.

> I read a few years ago about a teacher (I think highschool) who put his lectures on YouTube for students to view in their own time and then used the in class hours for interaction, questions, tests. That seems like a smart approach. It reverses the traditional model of "lecture in class, homework outside of class".

A smart approach that does not solve the AI problem - actually flipped classrooms work worse now due to AI usage. My own experience with flipped classrooms (which seems to be shared by quite a few people who have tried it out): they only work well if all students actually read/watch the materials beforehand. In small, advanced courses, intrinsic motivation may be sufficient - but in most cases you need some extrinsic coercion - such as a mandatory quiz about the materials or hand-written lecture notes that need to be shown at each in-person session. With AI, some people don't watch the lectures but let ChatGPT give them a summary which they submit. Then these people poison your in-person session with their lack of knowledge and motivation.

Research has shown that testing is far and away the most valuable academic tool. Just have a quiz every day. In fact, have _TWO_ quizzes, one at the start of class and one at the end, and take the higher of the two scores. In between the first quiz and the second, work through problems with the students designed to help people that bombed the first test figure out how to pass the second.

I always absolutely hated when a teacher did a reverse classroom and I had to “learn” at home and then practice in the classroom. I think the solution is more engaging lessons and less outside work. I know why homework exists, but homework is a chore that most people want to get done as fast as possible. If kids got to learn something interesting in school and then have their free time after school, there would be less dependence on AI. If they’re interested in the topic, they’ll put more effort into it. If not, they were never going to retain it anyway

Yeah, I'm trying to imagine how awful it would be to have every class flipped. 6 hours a day of watching lectures at home (assuming it's a complete flip and classes are an hour each, like they were for me). It's unrealistic.

I dunno, I used wolfram alpha a lot during calculus classes. However my uni didn't require any homework assignments to be done and they did not contribute to grades. Only the exam mattered. Maybe the problem is that doing assignments contributes to your grades? The answer from wolfram alpha wasn't so much to get the homework done, but to understand how I would be screwed in the exam.

This is all assuming tests measured anything valuable in the first place. In my experience standardized tests were always flawed and most of my peers knew shit about the subjects they passed in top % a year after. If AI breaks the current education system that's a win in my book.

I've been wondering if there would be a benefit to inverting how we teach subjects now. Previously we would teach from the bottom, and build up. Semi-colon goes here, curly brace goes there, and then build up to architecture, systems, etc. But this doesn't seem to make sense when someone comes to a topic with an LLM in-hand. They need to know high-level techniques, architecture, best practice, etc. As they pursue the topic they start to get down into the details, although probably never learn to do it fully independently. I quite like this view because it paints a somewhat optimistic way forward from where we are now.

I’m not sure. We’ve always had to pick the level of abstraction we start teaching at. Voltages, transistors, registers, assembly, C, etc. This feels like it could just be a progression of that.

I wonder who would be working in these thinking gyms? Nice idea. Extra mural studies for the age of agentic ai.

> Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project? Yes, if they are "responsible" for the code delivered, where responsible means they understand the code, the architecture, the decisions made, etc. In this case, the students had to invent multiple strategies to solve a specific problem. The "successful" groups did a mix of generated and hand-crafted code (don't know percentages), implemented different strategies and knew their plus and minuses, could change the code in a timely manner to accommodate some of my requests, etc. The "unsuccessful" group couldn't do any of that. I'm not anti-AI (and really, what could I do if I were?) since I use it myself, I'm just anti-slop, especially from my students. But in reality I've been slowly transitioning from group projects (for a subset of the grade) to "practical tests", where they must implement a significant subset of a larger project in a 2h class. Still experimenting though.

This is valid, and I would add that these academic hunger games are a result of College Degrees being needed to get what remains of well paying jobs. Maybe we can use AI to create new exams that grade people on professional capability, and then gate entry into other professional degrees? Hmm, Where would the teachers come from, and how good would the education actually be?

> “I’m a strong, strong opponent of what Harvard is doing to say that only a fraction of students can earn A’s,” Garcia said. “I think you should have clear standards for what an A means, and then give tons of opportunity for people … to get to that A bar without lowering the standard. So everybody who’s curving is hiding that effect. It’s completely hiding that effect, and it’s pretending as if nothing’s wrong, and something is definitely wrong.” Grade curves are how you test your curriculum for good challenge - are you challenging people such that an A isn't a too-low threshold. When you force people into a curve, you haven't defined a threshold of mastery, you've defined a sorting function: A means "better than this year's peers". It is absolutely bananas to me that a tech/math oriented school would be doing any sort of curving.

To be honest, there’s approximately zero reasons to teach major-grade math to just about anyone but math majors. None of the applied math disciplines need go that deep, and what they do need depends on the field (physics is all about analysis, CS is about algebra and discrete math, and so on).

Personally, I do believe that math as a discipline has this huge issue of being mostly incomprehensible garbage. Not because the actual truth encoded in it would be this complex, but because the encoding scheme just sucks. I see it as a packaging problem that has so far not been painful enough to trigger any meaningful change. With this LLM-driven collapse, that might finally change. Idk I'm hopeful. Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring only found in small chunks of the population to truly click.

It seems like now’s the time to rethink how we do education. In my personal post academic life, I’ve found LLMs to be an incredible teacher. Almost like the best professor in the world at my fingertips. I use it to generate quizzes on demand to test for my own knowledge gaps. However, if I use it to speedrun over concepts I should be learning, I may achieve my end goal but I wouldn’t actually learn many of the details. I think it requires an approach where you have to continuously audit your own understanding as you work with the concepts. You must slow down until you’ve confirmed this. Only once you know the concepts deeply and have retained them in your own memory can you then go all in with the LLM.

Maths skills have been slowly falling even before the advent of LLMs. I have a story but this is anecdotical so take it with a grain of salt. I was in my 3rd bachelor's year studying physics (France) and overheard a conversation between two of my teachers. They were discussing how they should modify the 1st year program to now include math, because he had been noticing how more and more students were failing the more math-heavy subjects like body and newtonian mechanics. He said that they should now teach (or re-teach) calculus to 1st year students, which was not taught when I entered college (it was assumed that you learned it in high school and we would only cover linear algebra in 1st year). I can imagine things are only getting worse with students that can now get under the illusion that they know math because they have a tool that can do it for them. Which raises the question: should programs adapt to this, like we adapted to having calculators?

That's a judgemental approach to a pattern that has all the marks of addicting behavior. Of course many people in a competitive environment will click the autosolve button if available. This is a reason to think how to redesign the system so that the approach we want is the reasonable choice, not to look with superiority at those who fall prey to the danger.

> is pushed by powerful and wealthy elite down the throat of society. Adoption has been exponential. We don't need to be AI to be pushed down the throat. People use it because it works and it's useful to them. > The debate that we should have had: Is this tech actually mature enough for pervasive use in society. It's too late for this debate because this tech is already pervasively used, and there's no coming back. It's part of our lives. What we need to do is understand the risks and adapt, probably regulate, educate. So we can get the best of this tech, and mitigate its risks.

The exams need to change. Now that we have LLMs the value a human can bring to a task has changed and it’s that new value that has to be tested. It’s like testing your drawing ability in a photography class. The difference is that now nearly have subject and testing method we have has become obsolete. Drawings courses still exist as will traditional courses, but the main stream has changed and exams and schools need to adapt.

At this point I would support a ban on generative AI by anyone under 18, or even perhaps 21 years of age. A bunch of science fiction stories had "first connection to cyberspace" as a coming of age event, maybe those authors were on to something.

This. It's funny that GP mentioned science fiction as a negative because what immediately springs to mind, for me, is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. We literally have the tools to build his "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" today. We just have to give today's AI a lesson plan to follow and ensure that it never gives the student the answers, and only keeps explaining the concepts in different ways until they click. Wrap that in an iPad app and you've essentially got the exact self-paced learning tool that Stephenson envisioned changing the world.

They are great for self-teaching and great to cheat and not learn anything, depending on how you use them. Main problem is that the technology was very disruptive for education and nobody has figured out yet how to utilize it at scale for schools and universities.

ban has always been the failing option

Average school system has been lacking for a very long time, overhauling it to focus on kids current interests, while sneaking in the other stuff, might now be possible and cheaper to realize with our new tech.

It's critical that we adapt to a strategy where AI supports our learning instead of the having it the other way around.

I really wonder if it's important to learn all that low-level stuff at this point. Most programmers today will never write a binary tree or a hash table. Modern high-performance ones are generic components you get from libraries. Even MIT gave up on teaching from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I got all that stuff. I've wired up a 4-bit adder on a solderless breadboard for an architecture class. I used to have a well-thumbed copy of Knuth handy. I've designed and built a switching power supply. But I'm not up to date on using Claude Code, and should be.

I try to lecture as little as possible. No slides. Quick highlights discussion of the reading, maybe a coding demo, and then students work on coding challenges in class, in groups if they want. I circulate and help out. I'm lucky to have small class sizes at this university. I couldn't pull it off in a class of 300.

A reckoning is coming for school. Learning the rote stuff is no longer essential. Now they need to learn, how to teach "how to think". How to invent, how to be creative. Art++, Woodshop++, Math--

Probably not a bad thing, the coursework is antiquated and meeting students with new advanced tools and the awareness of AI's impact on things in the coming future I imagine there is some apathy and laziness here but idk how unjustified it is "Noooooo you need to manually code on paper in assembly" Alright, well maybe the CS grads need to, but why expect that of everyone else