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Education AI

Teachers Are Embracing ChatGPT-Powered Grading 121

Schools are widely adopting a new tool called Writable that uses ChatGPT to help grade student writing assignments. Axios reports: Writable, which is billed as a time-saving tool for teachers, was purchased last month by education giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, whose materials are used in 90% of K-12 schools. Teachers use it to run students' essays through ChatGPT, then evaluate the AI-generated feedback and return it to the students.

A teacher gives the class a writing assignment -- say, "What I did over my summer vacation" -- and the students send in their work electronically. The teacher submits the essays to Writable, which in turn runs them through ChatGPT. ChatGPT offers comments and observations to the teacher, who is supposed to review and tweak them before sending the feedback to the students. Writable "tokenizes" students' information so that no personally identifying details are submitted to the AI program.
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Teachers Are Embracing ChatGPT-Powered Grading

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  • by mick232 ( 1610795 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @06:09AM (#64296728)
    Pupils use ChatGPT to write the essay, then the teacher uses ChatGPT to grade it.
    • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @06:47AM (#64296756)

      (Consultant) “So, then you grade the papers?”

      (Teacher) ”Well, no. ChatGPT does that now.”

      (Consultant) ”I see. So, what *exactly* would you say, you do here again?”

      (Teacher) ”I’d shut the fuck up, Bob. ChatGPT does consulting too.”

      • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @07:58AM (#64296822)
        Exactly this.

        The question is, why do we ask students to write? The only person who's ever likely to read an academic essay is a teacher, TA, or examiner. So what's the point? The point is so that students & their teachers can see how much of the subject matter they can remember & how well they can understand it. It's provides valuable feedback that can then feed forward into future study in terms of what to study & how to study it (if their teacher knows how to give effective feedback). Frequent writing by students helps to strengthen their memories & develop their understandings too. In other words, it's all kinds of good but only if humans are doing it.

        For teachers, analysing & grading students' writing is a way to gain valuable feedback about what students can remember & how well they understand it, & gain insights into gaps in students' knowledge, their assumptions, & common misunderstandings about concepts & principles. Those insights can & should feed forward into future teaching & learning resource design in order to optimise instruction. This is why well-trained, experienced, & conscientious teachers can get much better results than less experienced & less-conscientious ones, i.e. it's years of building & developing specific knowledge about how students tend to learn specific concepts & principles & the best ways to help them. This phenomenon even has a name: Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) (Lee Schulman, ~1980s).

        If anyone believes an LLM can do this, they're delusional.

        BTW, if you want to see what automated feedback looks like, this example, for English as a foreign/second language learning, actually works better than LLMs (I've systematically compared performance according to rubrics of effective & ineffective feedback) because it's strategically designed on specific learning objectives with a lot of input from proficient teachers (with lots of PCK). But even then, it's not that great: https://virtualwritingtutor.co... [virtualwritingtutor.com] Cambridge University also has one but which isn't as good: https://writeandimprove.com/ [writeandimprove.com] Note that both are free & come with disclaimers.
        • The question is, why do we ask students to write? The only person who's ever likely to read an academic essay is a teacher, TA, or examiner. So what's the point? The point is so that students and their teachers can see how much of the subject matter they can remember..

          I hate to point this out, but the point of teaching in American public schools is sadly more about funding.

          Students are “taught” to pass a standardized test for 75% of the school year. That standardized test is (ab)used to determine a “grade” for the school itself, which directly drives funding for that school.

          In other words, teaching has become about money. Go figure.

          You can try and cram the rest of your teaching dream in between the 25% left of the school year, and the average a

          • by quenda ( 644621 )

            Students are “taught” to pass a standardized test for 75% of the school year. That standardized test is (ab)used to determine a “grade” for the school itself, which directly drives funding for that school.

            Wow! In my country, Australia, funding for public schools is higher when the standardised test scores are lower.
            On the basis that lower performing schools (less intelligent and motivated kids) need more teaching assistants, and individual programs.
            The standardised test (NAPLAN) is every two years, and while the younger kids did a couple of practise tests beforehand, that was more to be familiar with the format. There is little incentive for schools to "teach to the test".
            Of course standardis

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              Students are “taught” to pass a standardized test for 75% of the school year. That standardized test is (ab)used to determine a “grade” for the school itself, which directly drives funding for that school.

              Wow! In my country, Australia, funding for public schools is higher when the standardised test scores are lower. On the basis that lower performing schools (less intelligent and motivated kids) need more teaching assistants, and individual programs. The standardised test (NAPLAN) is every two years, and while the younger kids did a couple of practise tests beforehand, that was more to be familiar with the format. There is little incentive for schools to "teach to the test". Of course standardised subject tests at the end of high school for university entrance is a different matter. Those are high stakes.

              In America, everything is about profit and punishment. If you don't adhere to the edicts of profit driven everything? You should be punished. Poor performing schools create poor workers for the owner class, and should be punished by having funding lowered until they shape up. Our entire society runs that way over here. If you lower your value to the owner class, like, for example, by being stupid enough to get cancer, or have an accident, you will be punished by having wealth extracted from you and your fam

              • by quenda ( 644621 )

                Everything? Almost all schools in the US are public. And from here they seem good, no? The worst parts appear to be the school lunches. And the school shooting drills.
                Healthcare and tertiary education are where the money gets crazy.

                • Everything? Almost all schools in the US are public. And from here they seem good, no? The worst parts appear to be the school lunches. And the school shooting drills. Healthcare and tertiary education are where the money gets crazy.

                  Public schools have been shit in the states for forty years or more, and our politicians argue over how to best pull funding from them all the time. "No Child Left Behind" was an acceleration of the already existing trend, where instead of giving more support to teachers we instead lowered the bar so no student can excel, and everybody is only as educated as the worst student in the class is capable of achieving with borderline staffing. Hiring people to oversee public education that literally believe publi

              • In the US public schools are funded from local and state tax dollars, with a frosting of federal money so that particular school districts do not fall to far behind. If the teachers and administrators want more, they only have to call on the retires and blame them for making the current workforce in the zip code a poor economic foundation. Parents are to blame, they to were products of the failing schools 20 years ago.

                Parents have one choice on their students time horizon, if they feel their loca
                • In the US public schools are funded from local and state tax dollars, with a frosting of federal money so that particular school districts do not fall to far behind. If the teachers and administrators want more, they only have to call on the retires and blame them for making the current workforce in the zip code a poor economic foundation. Parents are to blame, they to were products of the failing schools 20 years ago. Parents have one choice on their students time horizon, if they feel their local education system sucks....move or hire outside help at an additional cost. Outside help is 30% cheaper in the long run, as it has little administrative overhead. I have made the choice to live rural where the schools suck and educate my kids to my standards. I did not sit in 40 credit hours of undergrad math classes taught by true masters to let the public sector schools teach the language of physics in their dull form. My kids will be prepared to ace any undergrad math class while enjoying dorm life, and I send them to writing centers with not quite masters to write like undergrads as high school freshmen. Even if they float with gentlemen's and gentlelady's Bs as undergrad, they can walk into any corporate setting and provide for themselves. As a site for nerds and geeks, we know one size does not fit all, but we certainly complain when the off the rack spandex super suit provided by goverment overlords looks like a hot mess. My kids build their own futures with a utility belt full of skills I can hand to them. Public school is the baseline for suckers, spending time on it, just brings our kids competition to a higher level. Love my neighbor, but I love my kids more.

                  I don't have kids myself, but when I was in school I ended up doing a lot of information seeking on my own terms simply because I knew what we were being taught in school felt hollow, empty, and meaningless. Rote memorization, and all of history painted with the victor always being perfect and pure as the driven snow. Most don't have that drive themselves, and the concept of public education being shit is something I think we should all fight against for the simple fact that an entire society can fall if on

            • Wow! In my country, Australia, funding for public schools is higher when the standardised test scores are lower.

              Incentivized failure. What could possibly go wrong?

          • by Ksevio ( 865461 )

            That standardized test is (ab)used to determine a “grade” for the school itself, which directly drives funding for that school.

            ???
            Where is that the case in the US? It's certainly not common. Usually schools are given testing requirements but they don't get more money if scores are higher. I suppose it's included in a teacher's performance review so in the sense that the teacher wants to remain employed it's about money, but basically that's just policy.

        • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @09:07AM (#64296916)

          The point is so that students & their teachers can see how much of the subject matter they can remember

          You're forgetting that writing also helps with organization and conceptualization. You might remember the pilgrims and Puritans were two different groups, but being able to explain who landed first and why one was really the remnants of a terrorist group shows you not only memorized the subject matter, but understand the differences. Even something as simple as writing what you did over the summer forces you to think in what order you did things as well as explain what you did.

          BR

          Aside from the outliers such as Nora Roberts and John Grisham, most people have a difficult time writing for any extended period of time. It takes a lot of energy and mental gymnastics to put concepts into a coherent written form. Starting kids early can help alleviate some of this issue.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          If anyone believes an LLM can do this, they're delusional.

          To be fair, there are a lot of delusional people. May have something to do with bad teaching.

          Excellence breeds excellence, mediocrity breeds abysmality. Or something like this. (Yes, I know "abysmality" is not a proper word. It should be because we need it.)

        • Why do we ask students to write? "Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Dick Guindon Writing forces clearer thinking.
      • I take the paper from the student to ChatGPT and I take the grade from ChatGPT to the student.

        I'm a people person DAMNIT!

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The loop closes and a while later everything burns down....

    • Pupils use ChatGPT to write the essay, then the teacher uses ChatGPT to grade it.

      This is an actual problem, and recognizing LLM output is a real-life Turing Test: A human can do it relatively easily, but an LLM can't.

      This is an active area of research for two reasons: First, LLMs that recognize LLM output can be used in applications such as the grading system described in TFA. Second, LLMs can avoid reinforcement training on their own output, which could potentially cause feedback loops that magnify errors, similar to citogenesis [xkcd.com].

    • by indytx ( 825419 )

      Pupils use ChatGPT to write the essay, then the teacher uses ChatGPT to grade it.

      You got here first. Your comment was upvoted as funny, but this is the new reality. It was way easier for my partner to grade online work when they could just copy suspicious passages and search for them with Google. Now the suspicious passages turn up nothing.

      • Perhaps the solution is to accept only handwritten submissions.

        In my day they were called 3 hour exams. No computers, no mobile phones - just pen and paper.

        NB: You can still grade them with computers using handwriting recognition.

        • My sister teaches high school English in the Bay area and she told me that they actually just did exactly this. They made every student at the school, at the same time and while being watched by their teacher, do a written assignment. It of course generated some 1,100 papers to be graded but the students didn't have access to any technology for the assignment.

  • by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @06:14AM (#64296730)
    Hear me out. Previously, you have a page for an essay to read as a teacher. You read it and you mark it. Now you have an essay from the student, and an essay-length comments/observations from ChatGPT. Now you have to read both if you're dilligent at all, because ChatGPT might be inaccurate and you want to know how it came to write the comments. So you have to do twice the work. Of course, if you don't care much, you can quickly eyeball ChatGPT's output, say "looks legit" (and AI output is perfect for making up things that look legit), and move on. So dilligent teachers will appear to be inefficient and slackers. Great.
    • Ok diligent needs one "l", argh I wish I could edit posts
    • by waspleg ( 316038 )

      Most of them won't do that. They will just be like "the computer says it's good/bad" and grade accordingly without reading so much as a summary. School districts, who are like churches in that they generally have money and refuse to pay for anything if they can get it for "free", will use this to justify increasing class sizes and worse teacher:student ratios. No one will learn shit.

      Like 8 years ago there were kids using cellphones with apps that would solve math problems from a picture (I work K12 and h

      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @06:58AM (#64296772)

        They will just be like "the computer says it's good/bad" and grade accordingly

        For many teachers, that's an improvement. Some just mark essays as "turned in" or "not turned in."

        It is also common for teachers to avoid assigning essays since grading them is so time-consuming.

        I've watched TAs grading college essays from a list of keywords and phrases. If you mention those words, you get the points. If you don't, you don't. Things like grammar and logic are ignored. Nobody has time for that in a class of 200 freshmen.

        • by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @08:16AM (#64296844)

          I've watched TAs grading college essays from a list of keywords and phrases. If you mention those words, you get the points. If you don't, you don't.

          Sounds like HR and CVs, I guess that's a whole new level of preparing students for the workforce

        • by flink ( 18449 )

          I was never in a class of 200 that requires essays. Physics 101 lecture, sure. But lit or sociology or philosophy were always 20-30.

          • This!

            Maybe schools that work that way need not be rated so high...

            • Maybe schools that work that way need not be rated so high...

              Ratings are based on self-perpetuating selectivity and have little to do with the quality of teaching.

              For instance, Harvard is primarily a research institution and secondarily a graduate school. Undergraduate education is the lowest priority, and the quality of instruction sux.

              Yet Harvard only admits 3% of applicants, so it is rated as a top school, and every Asian tiger mom wants her baby to go there.

          • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

            I was never in a class of 200 that requires essays. Physics 101 lecture, sure. But lit or sociology or philosophy were always 20-30.

            Yeah, but your class might have 3-4 sections and only one TA.

      • by Bongo ( 13261 )

        Yes, I agree, I think it is making society worse. It's the classic sci-fi story where a technology is invented that's so powerful we actually end up destroying ourselves because it amplifies our worst natures, i.e. forbidden planet. Human nature hasn't changed that much in thousands of years. However, at the same time, the technology does seem to work in positive ways that are unexpected. Kind of like how the internet is increasing transparency and starting to deconstruct all the propaganda that we've been

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Enshittification at work by completely perverted incentives.

    • Hear me out. Previously, you have a page for an essay to read as a teacher. You read it and you mark it. Now you have an essay from the student, and an essay-length comments/observations from ChatGPT. Now you have to read both if you're dilligent at all, because ChatGPT might be inaccurate and you want to know how it came to write the comments. So you have to do twice the work. Of course, if you don't care much, you can quickly eyeball ChatGPT's output, say "looks legit" (and AI output is perfect for making up things that look legit), and move on. So dilligent teachers will appear to be inefficient and slackers. Great.

      Seems the point of a big chunk of technology in the classroom is reducing teacher workload at the expense of student learning.

      What will really suck is when students start talking like ChatGPT to get better grades then we'll have entire generations of Vivek Ramaswamys.

      • Don't worry they'll never start talking like ChatGPT because they wouldn't even read its output! Nobody's got time for that anyway, as every answer is decorated with an incredible amount of waffling that makes your eyes glaze. So they just generate-copy-paste. Actual spoken conversations on the topic would be more like "Uuuhhhhh"
      • Hear me out. Previously, you have a page for an essay to read as a teacher. You read it and you mark it. Now you have an essay from the student, and an essay-length comments/observations from ChatGPT. Now you have to read both if you're dilligent at all, because ChatGPT might be inaccurate and you want to know how it came to write the comments. So you have to do twice the work. Of course, if you don't care much, you can quickly eyeball ChatGPT's output, say "looks legit" (and AI output is perfect for making up things that look legit), and move on. So dilligent teachers will appear to be inefficient and slackers. Great.

        Seems the point of a big chunk of technology in the classroom is reducing teacher workload at the expense of student learning.

        Yeah, we've somehow become so profit-first obsessed that we don't realize paying teachers barely living wages, then giving them more and more students in pursuit of cost-cutting is leading to sub-optimal results. Our solution now is to automate teaching jobs, rather than increase funding for schools across the board and alleviate teacher stress.

        What will really suck is when students start talking like ChatGPT to get better grades then we'll have entire generations of Vivek Ramaswamys.

        So I'm not the only one who noticed that guy talks just like a current-gen AI. It's like he aggregates internet opinions and randomly spouts them out in whatever ord

    • Gut feeling of AI models is very high for the ignorant, it must be correct, this is the rocket pack future. Unless it it AI programing questions and responses the initial testers are not field experts in context. This why finance is jumping on the bandwagon, gut feeling is what drives markets at the profitable edge and context can be ignored. Some of the best traders throw away context daily, the field is called technical trading.
  • by classiclantern ( 2737961 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @06:30AM (#64296746)
    The human species is doomed. If people are too stupid to see the danger in embracing meritocracy then we are doomed.
  • To ChatGPT my ChatGPT! Artificial Idiocy strikes again!
  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @06:47AM (#64296758)

    In anything that is interaction with the students, that is. And grading papers is. You need to invest that time to find out what each student can do and what they struggle with and what you should maybe go over again or change in the next instance of the course.

    All this tool does is advance the enshittification of teaching. Not a good idea unless you want a dumb and incapable population. Obviously, there are teachers that do not care about the quality of their work and these will embrace such a tool enthusiastically,

    • I'm not advocating this, and I agree with your point.

      All this tool does is advance the enshittification of teaching

      Teaching has already been enshittified. The vast quantity of paperwork and mandatory testing means that teachers are basically cranking the handle of a shitton of pointless drudge work, along with incredibly rigid curriculum with rigid timelines, so they barely have time for that personalised interaction anyway.

      Note: I'm not saying that ChatGPT should be automating pointless drudge work. I am o

      • The problem is, we only teach pointless drudge work in our schools. Because our teachers are unable to teach anything else.

        What we teach is facts. Cram them into your brain, barf them onto the test, clean out your brain so you can cram the next load of bullshit in. Teachers now just have to check whether you remembered those facts correctly, best case they have some multiple-choice test that they just have to put into one of these pre-cut masks where they can easily see what answers are correct so they don'

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Facts are useless.

          Not quite. You need to remember some facts or you cannot think about things. But that is a select, small subset and it grows automatically when you need things more often. What is useless is memorizing facts that you do not actually need pretty often or in pretty important roles.

          Hence modify to, say, "Memorizing facts is useless for 99% of them" and I agree.

          As to fact-checking and plausibility-checking, yes, that is hard. It is why I have a disproportionally large amount of surprising facts and surprising f

          • Me too but I am not satisfied with such poor results; even though 100% is hopeless. I'd rather fail half and not have as many incompetent people certified as capable; which is one reason job interviews have become so horrible! I've seen some truly shocking graduates out there...especially high school graduates.

            If we make it more elite, then some effort will be put in and the % goes up. The ones who return to make another attempt put in more effort. It's not that people are as stupid as they act, it's that

          • Ok. Rote memorization of facts without any connection to their meaning is utterly useless.

            I distinctly remember trying to cram the distance between certain stations of the Trans-Sibirian railway into my brain. I still know that the distance from Taishet to Ust-Kut is 639 kilometers and I can honestly say I neither know where either of these towns are nor do I give a fuck about either of them. That was not part of the exercise. What we needed to learn was the distances between some godforsaken towns somewher

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Rote memorization of facts without any connection to their meaning is utterly useless.

              That one works nicely. Agreed.

              And ITSEC isn't hard. Hey, I can do it, so how hard can it be? :)

              Familiarity breeds contempt. Do not underestimate your skills. IT Security requires you to turn on your mind and actually use it and that makes it already too hard for most people.

              • *sigh* No don't worry, I don't underestimate my skills. I see it every day, we're currently trying to hire some new talent. We've arrived at the point where we're close to just signing up anyone who at least knows that TCP ain't the Chinese secret service.

                Is it just us or is it currently virtually impossible to find any decent pentesters?

                • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                  Is it just us or is it currently virtually impossible to find any decent pentesters?

                  Possibly. All my IT Security students already have jobs a year before finishing and last time I asked around, no one was a pentester. I think you will have to look for smart people and then educate them yourself. I also know the rates some domestic pentesters currently ask here and they are pretty much on the same level what an IT security consultant with an on-topic PhD or an IT and IT Security auditor costs. That indicates a very skewed market and a general lack of pentesters.

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        This gets to Campbell's Law, which states that any quantitative measure used to control a social process will tend to corrupt that process. If reaching p < 0.05 determines whether your paper is worth citing, then writing scientific papers inevitably becomes about clearing that bar and you get p-hacking. If your school's funding and reputation and everyone's job security is about your school's rankings in standardized tests, then maximizing student scores on those tests tends to become the focus of ever

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Interesting. While "Campbell's Law" is kind of obvious, I had not heard the term before. I do know "Goodhart's law" though. Looks like some pretty good Science is being ignored systematically here. Well, Dunning & Kruger can nicely explain why that is...

    • But of course you can save time in teaching. Remember the eternal wisdom of John Ruskin:

      "There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."

      Why should the laws of commerce not apply to teaching?

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        True. I nearly quoted this as well. Although quite often this is now "a lot worse and a little cheaper" with MBAs that understand nothing except numbers and try squeeze the last pennies out of everything.

        Teaching, with its amplification effect is one of the best possible approach to enshittify a whole society, though. One bad teacher can screw up hundreds of students! So in order to drive society to "peak crap", which obviously many people desire, teach cheapest-possible and worst-possible. This tool certai

        • It is always a lot worse and a little cheaper. Because the rest of the "lot cheaper" is turned into profit.

          Those million bonuses don't grow on trees, you know? And by now we have squeezed everything from the workforce AND the customers so how else would you suggest should we keep the perpetual growth myth alive?

      • But of course you can save time in teaching. Remember the eternal wisdom of John Ruskin:

        "There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."

        Why should the laws of commerce not apply to teaching?

        While America has excelled at applying the laws of commerce to everything, I would hope any semi-functional adult would see the folly in saying education/teaching should fall under the same laws. There is value in an intelligent population with enough education to understand how to fact-check, how to verify sources, how to keep a critical eye on any new information coming in. Granted, our politicians see a value in exactly the opposite, and use the laws of commerce and the profit above all mentality as a wa

        • You're looking at a for-profit educational system that shoves our youth into unrecoverable and unnecessary debt and you seriously question this?

          Not really, do you?

          • You're looking at a for-profit educational system that shoves our youth into unrecoverable and unnecessary debt and you seriously question this?

            Not really, do you?

            I'm questioning why we've allowed it to come to this, but not questioning that it is this way. I just don't get how we set aside literally every value we have in the name of profit. There is nothing else that matters in America. Money first, people can get fucked.

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              People are important! You can make a lot of money arranging for people to get fucked! (Literally and figuratively...)

              Obviously, respecting people or any such deviations and perversions is out of the question.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          There is value in an intelligent population with enough education to understand how to fact-check, how to verify sources, how to keep a critical eye on any new information coming in. Granted, our politicians see a value in exactly the opposite, and use the laws of commerce and the profit above all mentality as a way to turn us away from viewing actual education as valuable.

          I mean, this is pretty obvious. Who with good education and good insights would vote Trump or any of the other clowns (as a lesser evil than Trump)?

          • There is value in an intelligent population with enough education to understand how to fact-check, how to verify sources, how to keep a critical eye on any new information coming in. Granted, our politicians see a value in exactly the opposite, and use the laws of commerce and the profit above all mentality as a way to turn us away from viewing actual education as valuable.

            I mean, this is pretty obvious. Who with good education and good insights would vote Trump or any of the other clowns (as a lesser evil than Trump)?

            Our entire society has been chanting "MBA! MBA!" so loudly over everything that we've literally let it infect every area of our existence. MORE PROFITS QUARTER OVER QUARTER OR DIE TRYING!

            Apparently we're aiming for the latter choice.

    • Factories and mass-production have made it possible to bring art to the masses - $5 for a flawless vase that would take a human many tens of hours to create. The only problem is that the machine-made vase is soulless junk and so is this AI-powered teaching aide
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, at worst that vase will collect dust. Badly taught kids commence to do bad work or, worse, bad teaching.

    • Powerpoint, smartphones, automated testing have done so much harm already that most people don't know what real education is anymore... other than a few experiences which the student may not even realize were the legitimate education moments of their life.

      What "leaders" want is worker drones only but the problem is as they promote that world they are creating long term problems as the more drone-like the work the more AI can replace it. Not that thinking long term is their concern until the bubble bursts an

  • Soon kids will be too dumb to operate the cell phone. Or even have a clue as to why you would use one. Imagine the rich just having a whole population of human slaves too dumb to know better. I guess they will be teaching grazing to the kids now.

    • As long as they know how to buy stuff in the iStore and how to find out whether the latest model of the cellphone they absolutely MUST buy because it now has some new gimmick nobody wants (until they get told by marketing why they can't live without it anymore), everything should be fine.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I remember a SciFi story from a few decades ago where smarter kids that wanted to know more were chemically dumbed down to keep society working.

    • Soon kids will be too dumb to operate the cell phone. Or even have a clue as to why you would use one. Imagine the rich just having a whole population of human slaves too dumb to know better. I guess they will be teaching grazing to the kids now.

      You're viewing this from the now. The rich don't want a whole population of slaves. They want a world where they own everything, and the rest of humanity can fall away to oblivion as they automate everything away from the rest of us. I mean, why not. It's the oligarch's greatest fantasy. A perfect utopia, empty of homelessness and need, filled with only the richest of the rich, and machines to fill all the other rungs of society. Perfectly obedient machines.

  • So kids can now have ChatGPT write their essays, teachers can grade them using ChatGPT and maybe they now have time to actually teach something worthwhile.

  • So we submit the student's work to ChatGPT. Presumably the student is banned from using AI to help write the essay, but now ChatGPT adds this data to its model. So next time an AI-catching tool is used, it determines that the student used AI because it can be found in an AI model?
  • Just like in Star Trek, Kirk would talk advanced AI to death by giving it a circular logic loop. Now we'll give ChatGPT the loop of writing and evaluating itself until it can't take it anymore and quits.
    • It won't quit but the quality will degrade over time into mush
    • Ideally, it needs external data to assist with self-evaluation.

      Humans go weird without that too. And we also go weird if our only feedback is from a bad source.

      So you can choose a trained-and-static AI, or have one that is continually training and hope the training data is decent.

      Given humans will find it amusing or useful to corrupt the AI, that seems like a bad plan. There aren't any convenient good plans.

  • Writable, which is billed as a time-saving tool for teachers, was purchased last month by education giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, whose materials are used in 90% of K-12 schools. Teachers use it to run students' essays through ChatGPT, then evaluate the AI-generated feedback and return it to the students.

    A teacher gives the class a writing assignment -- say, "What I did over my summer vacation" -- and the students send in their work electronically. The teacher submits the essays to Writable, which in turn runs them through ChatGPT. ChatGPT offers comments and observations to the teacher, who is supposed to review and tweak them before sending the feedback to the students. Writable "tokenizes" students' information so that no personally identifying details are submitted to the AI program.

    Taking into account the clarity, specificity, organization, engagement, and terminology of the text, I would assign it a grade of B.

    The text effectively communicates the purpose of Writable as a time-saving tool for teachers and provides insight into its functionality with ChatGPT. It offers clear examples of how teachers use the tool and briefly mentions the privacy measures taken by Writable. However, there are areas where the text could be improved for clarity and engagement, such as providing more speci

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @08:51AM (#64296894)
    Any teacher doing this should be fired, shortages or no, and any school doing it should lose its accreditation.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. But that would be sane and that would result in better teaching. Both things that are not in high demand today.

  • I have no problem at all with teachers using tools to help cut through the drudgery. But, they had better damned well make sure it isn't saying stupid crap before they return it to the students. That's the actual least they can do.
    • ChatGPT students should be graded by ChatGPT; although, it is redundant if they use some adversarial training.

      Perhaps after this we'll cancel out the ChatGPT and save the energy and just focus on the tiny bits where each tweaks the output of the bot? but how do we do that fully without any understanding because we learned living on the edges of two machines playing chess against each other?

  • by packrat0x ( 798359 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @10:17AM (#64297062)

    Dear non-Americans:

    If you're wondering why Americans do so poorly in school, I
    give you, from TFS, exhibit A:

    "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, whose materials are used in 90% of K-12 schools."

    Its low quality is only matched by its high price!

  • You can be deducted grades for anything. If you can't find something to deduct from, you can resort to the low-hanging fruit like spelling mistakes or sentence structure. That's why I don't give essay-type questions but I know my peers do so they can control students' grades and satisfy the bell curve.
    • Essay-type questions can be somewhat subjective, but I don't understand why it's bad. It's the only way to check if students can make a cogent argument (or simply chain some thoughts together in a coherent manner). It has no place in some classes (e.g., physics or math) but I don't know how one would teach and grade history without essays.

      As for "low hanging fruits" like spelling mistakes.. damn right these should be noted and have an impact on your grade. It's important that kids get subjected to grammar
    • I fucking hated grading music theory composition for the same reason. It's so arbitrary.

      Sure, a perfect musical progression gets 100%, but how do you track the number of errors when one wrong note completely changes the expected progression of subsequent notes? One error leads to the entire thing being essentially impossible to grade, without just giving them 0 points.

  • "The grader-bot gave my GPT-generated paper a B+! Thanks bot! It's an essay on stacked turtles I think, I barely read it."

  • ... teaching humans to write like a robots.

  • by The Cat ( 19816 )

    It's easy to save time when you don't do your job.

    It's also easy for the students to save time by not doing their work.

  • Students need one on one mentorship, support, and understanding for unique experiences and writing styles.
  • Very reminiscent of Real Genius. Comedy becomes reality.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]

  • If I think back to primary and secondary school, the number of teachers in retrospect that I respect:

    1. Ms Brown.
    2. Ms Rosey.
    3. Mr. U.
    4. Mrs. York.
    and 5. Mr. D.

    Now that I have children, the number of their teachers I respect..... none of them. My younger daughter's teacher (Ms L), is Native American, and had all the white kids apologize to her for crimes against her people. My daughter refused and got in trouble, then when we didn't punish her, she blamed us for being bad parents. Other common i
  • That as the teachers are disengaged from their students work, they have no idea as to who produced what. And if the AI screws up, it's even less useful.

Don't panic.

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