Idiocracy
Former professor here!
Students these days are fucked. Professors are fucked too. Two points about AI and one about grade inflation. I’ll keep this brief and give you three quick observations:
- US, Canadian, and UK students are increasingly under pressure to pay more for everything. When you need to choose between working to pay rent and studying, you outsource to AI. Student athletes are, by far, the worst due to the exploitation opportunity athletics programs view them as. Practice more, study less, shop it to AI.
- Student evaluations caused me more pain than anything else. I won a student curated Teacher of the Year award at my university. I’m good at teaching and love it. My student evals were from the ones that got bad grades. Those students spent more time challenging a C or below than actually studying. I know other professors grade inflate just to avoid bad evals and lost time. The eval system needs reform.
- The rapidity in the decline in critical thinking, writing, and problem solving skills is shocking. One moment that sticks with me was when a student insisted Flint, MI didn’t have a water problem but a political leadership problem. OK, fair, explain. They just stared at their laptop blankly. Started typing. Read a chatgpt response. That stuck with me. They probably heard a talking point or used AI for their question and had zero understanding of the situation at all. Its my job to inform them and educate, but it was the blind reliance on AI as their rationalization and knowledge tool that stuck.
The dek gives the game away. The “future of the workforce” is all that matters. Why had we been doing all this gaining of knowledge in college all this time?
The point of an undergraduate degree isn’t knowledge; knowledge is only the first level in Bloom’s Taxonomy, a set of six levels of how people understand different topics.
The problem with the use of AI in college is that students are supposed to get to the application point in undergrad and that college is supposed to provide that practice. Using AI in college is like using a machine to lift weights. Sure, the weights are moved, but it doesn’t benefit the person who needed the exercise.
Ignoring that Bloom’s Taxonomy is outdated and disproven (not that it was ever based on empirical data)…
students are supposed to get to the application point in undergrad and that college is supposed to provide that practice
This hasn’t been true for a long time, ime; colleges have mostly been about laying foundations for years, ever since we moved to a gen-ed system that disfavored any kind of specialized learning at the cost of any usable skills (and since defunding and prison-ifying high schools made even gen-ed baselines not happen in practice). They’ve been having to make up for what kids aren’t getting in high school, but that also means that by the time they leave with an undergrad they have almost no experience of applying their knowledge to real-world-repevant problems.
Yeah, but part of it is because students complained, the current ranking of universities don’t include quality of undergraduate education, and the public didn’t really understand what college was for when providing funding with strings attached.
Is breadth of learning always the goal though? Sounds like students are learning to work smarter, not harder.
Now, if they aren’t learning the core competencies in their field of study, that’s a problem. If they just aren’t learning how to write an essay or remember some shortcuts they’ll never need once they graduate, I fail to see a problem.
Writing an essay, aka, presenting your thoughts in written form, is an important process in critical thinking.
No, it really isn’t. It’s one method of exercising critical thinking, but someone can go through life never having written an essay and still develop and demonstrate their critical thinking skills.
It’s when we get the vehicle confused with or fused to the concept that we run into trouble in cases like handling LLM use in education.
Should students learn how to craft an essay? Definitely. It teaches all sorts of additional skills that are required to write in that format, assuming you have to generate the entire written work yourself.
Similarly, long division is a useful skill to learn, as are Riemann sums. But so is using a graphing calculator to do your dividing and differentiation for you. LLMs are a tool, not much different from a graphing calculator.
