The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution.
You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.
>This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
No, that's not common at all, nor how the system works. Use of graders/TAs are on an institution basis.
"Grant money" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes. When grant money is used to hire graduate students, they are research assistants and must work on the research project which the grant money was given for.
TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets. Tuition dollars are much more preferred anyway because they're stable and faculty do not have to work for them, they show up based on enrollment.
The fact you have TAs/graders at all is by institution. Large R1 institutions have grad students and undergraduate population to fill these roles. In these institutions, 1 minimally sized undergrad class = at least 1 TA, with additional TAs and graders after some enrollment threshold.
Tenure has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adjunct faculty get TAs/graders all the same.
Indeed, to support your point, I had a teaching assistantship for my first two years of grad school, meaning that I worked on an as-needed basis for things like supervising labs, proctoring exams, grading papers, etc. It was funded by the department. Where I went to school, the TA workload was pretty light.
Then I got a research assistantship, which was funded by my advisor's grant. I meant that I got paid to do my thesis research, and no longer had to teach. This was a precondition for joining his group.
My group was new, lacking much in the way of research funds. Therefore, we taught for support (Chemistry): lab proctor, recitation leader. Somebody had to wrangle those 1000 people taking 1st-year chemistry. Pre-med, pre-vet, pre-dental, biology and a rare chemistry major or two. In return, the department covered my living expenses. This was in ancient times, but I figure similar mechanisms exist today because the student base seems to be quite similar.
>The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first >place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured >professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them >(I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.
Again, I’m not making a moral statement. But you yourself basically just said grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor. (BTW, I teach at a small school and do all my own grading each semester for between 45-80 students depending on the courses I’m teaching that semester)
So if grading is part of the development process for a graduate student, then go ahead and continue. But that’s not the claim in the article. And if grading doesn’t serve a purpose anymore, then stop doing it. You can pay your assistants to do nothing for 20 hrs/week, or you can find literally anything else for them to do.
I went to a larger university, and was in the math department for most of my coursework. My math homework was graded by fellow undergraduate students who received a rubric and selected 4 problems per homework set, out of about 8ish (most classes. A few tough classes only assigned 2-3 proofs or so a week) but the TAs would grade the exams and the professors wouldn’t grade anything. Homework was at most 15-20% of one’s grade, exams being the rest. But most of my professors didn’t care about the homework as it was a tool for learning the material that was on the exams.
In some fields (maybe not mathematics) the graduate students could spend more time doing original research, assisted by teams of undergrads. That would likely make for a more productive learning experience than traditional homework assignments.
Research tends to be deep but narrow - more like an internship than an undergraduate semester; courses can focus on teaching the fundamentals and background material in a broader and more systematic way.
It’s an economic issue. Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid. In fact, grad students are lucky they aren’t being asked to pay extra to be provided with research topics and lab time to pursue them. Maybe that’s another step in the monetization of higher education.
> grad students are lucky they aren’t being asked to pay extra to be provided with research topics and lab time to pursue them
It depends on the field, but grad student wages in science and engineering are usually much lower than what industry would pay for similar work. Academic research is very cost-effective because most of the work is done by underpaid graduate students.
If the undergrads are still paying tuition then the economics won't change. They'll just be paying for more practical experience instead of graded homework.
> grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor
Isn't there a P != NP element to this? Doing the work is hard. Checking it is not.
If a student honestly attempted a problem and failed, diagnosing the failure may be worth the professor's time, but given the bunchiness of undergrad (and frankly, any junior learning) mistake varieties, chances are the TA can identify the issue as well.
Sort of, but not really. For multiple guess type tests, there is that element. However, other types of tests and particular homework, there's not that as much. We're not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques.
At least this is about math where there is usually a single right answer. For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points? There's should be debate over even what is the right points in any large work. And so if you're convincing in your argument of what is the important points, you can pass homework.
> not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques
A student honestly attempting math problems, if it’s a well-designed problem, shouldn’t be able to get multiple answers right with wrong methods.
> For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points?
I’d say a professor should be grading English essays. But a TA can grade short answers, e.g. did you grasp the theme or understand an extratextual reference.
Checking students' homework is part of what it means to be a TA. Grading is a choice the university makes; it's absence makes one no less of a TA.
> being a TA is not some awful exploitation
It's certainly exploitation. For some TAs, who get overworked and lorded over, and in universities when the pay is low, it's awful exploitation. For most TAs it is 'regular' exploitation of getting a crappy salary for serious highly-skilled work.
As other commenters said, graders are certainly not paid from grant money at US institutions. NSF (which funds most mathematicians in the US) would never allow it, and grants are usually much better spent getting grad students off teaching so they can get research done. Teaching assistant (TA) funding would ultimately come from the university. Sometimes it is optional, i.e, a faculty member can request a TA or grader for certain courses but does not get one automatically. Some courses, like large entry-level calculus, cannot be run without teams of TAs teaching recitations.
I'm on the math faculty at a R1 (public) university, and we've not had a budget for graders for most courses for a very long time, with the exception of e.g., very large courses. For most classes the instructor does all the grading. Grading has been a significant fraction of my time teaching, certainly much more than what I can spend on preparing lectures and other teaching-related work. Moreover, much of the time grading is giving feedback, figuring out partial credit, etc; just checking "correct" or "incorrect" is often relatively quick.
In the last couple years, my personal experience has been that (i) a very small (and possibly vanishing) fraction of students are declining to use AI, or at least use it sparingly, because they want to learn; (ii) a growing percentage are using it as a personal tutor; and (iii) some are outright outsourcing all the work. The last category is small, but if that category grows (anecdotally this seems to be the case -- I've mostly taught grad courses in the last year and don't have first-hand knowledge) then what would be the point of spending all that time grading and giving detailed written feedback?
Incidentally, many students in the second category are the type who in years past would form study groups, come to office hours, etc.; now they seem to prefer AI over humans. Some of them do seem to benefit from it, but not all. How one uses AI matters a lot, and how to help students use the tech to learn is something we have to figure out (regardless of how we feel about AI's impact on research).
> They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
Human Interviewer: Congratulations on making it to the 12th interview!
Candidate: Hey, I'm honored to be talk to another human for once!
Human Interviewer: That's funny. And true! Now, it says here you're a recent college grad student.
Candidate: That's right. Had to increase that sweet, sweet earning potential.
Human Interviewer: Also funny, also true! Honestly, what I learned in Intro to Game Theory alone has probably increased my earning potential by 15, maybe even 20%.
Candidate: Oh man, I remember that class! My professor gave up on grading homework that semester because of ChatGPT, and that weighted the midterm and final so much. I never did so much plugging and chugging in my life!
Human Interviewer: That's great. Well, that's about it. Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you. We'll be in touch.
> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.
Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.
The service being paid for is not homework grading. Homework grading is merely one part of how the service has historically been implemented, but if changing circumstances make grading homework less useful, then not grading homework is the service provider doing their job.
> These students paid (a lot of) money for this service
The schools are providing two services to students, not one. There's one directly and the other indirectly. And those two services are sometimes at odds.
The direct service is to teach them. Skills, knowledge, perspectives, critical thinking, etc.
The indirect service is to act as a proxy for people and organizations in the world to avoid having to do a thorough examination of a person's abilities. A degree is an attestation that a student has cleared all the hurdles and accomplished something of value. The better the reputation of the institution, the more value this service is to a student.
Just because students are paying for the direct service doesn't mean they aren't also paying for the indirect one too, it's just that the reputation has been established by all the students that came before and these students will be affecting the reputation for students coming afterwards.
Regardless, because a huge chunk of the service is that attestation, it's not as simple as the customer pays so the customer should get what they want. The universities need to figure out a way to maintain the value of their attestation in the face of students who try to subvert the evaluation process and a changing world. And if homework is providing little value in that regard, some rethinking might be warranted. They could assign it and optionally grade it on request for students who want their work evaluated but make it clear that it bears no connection to the grade that leads to the degree. They could come up with some other means of evaluating whether students have worked or learned the material. They could rework the material to account for the existence of AI. Just like calculators or the internet changed the work environment to obviate previously valuable skills, today's students will be living their lives in a world where AI exists and certain previously valuable skills will not be valuable going forward. A university's job is to produce the most capable person for the environment in which they will live their life. If the old curriculum isn't doing that, the curriculum needs to be rethought. And homework might take on a different role or be significantly less important in that rethought curriculum.
Is that what the students are really paying for? Even before LLMs, some of my college classes had optional and ungraded homework. Students could show up for discussion sessions to ask questions and get help from the instructor or teaching assistants if needed, but that didn't impact their grades. That seemed to be a reasonable approach, although it might vary by subject.
Doing homework is a time-tested, proven way to learn. That is why schools around the world continually assign homework and then grade it. I don't care that you get the right answer. If my daughter's first grade teacher really wanted to subtract 7 from 9, she would grab a calculator or just do it herself. But my daughter is assigned that work anyway because my daughter needs to do those things to learn.
There is and always will be debate on what's worth learning, but if we decide that something is worth learning, it is worth learning to do it yourself, not have AI do it. Schools all over have a big problem with that because kids are using AI to do things that we believe are learning. Is this something that's important to learn or should we now say, you know what? Everyone has an AI. Let's stop teaching these stupid things that AI does well and start teaching other things. That's a question I'm not going to answer, only time will tell and we'll have other debates in the future along similar lines about something else.
This discussion is about college, not first grade. College students who want to do homework to learn more are still free to do so. No one is stopping them.
People of all ages rarely do hard things that are good for them. Colleges have long assigned homework. My daughter has enough time reserved in class to do the work without taking it home.
Many of the 3rd-tier institutions are going to go bankrupt anyway. Demographic changes had already made that inevitable but AI has accelerated the timeline. If they want to survive at all then they'll need to reinvent themselves as vocational training facilities or senior assisted living or something. This is going to be rough for the faculty, and will make the process of finding a tenure track teaching position even more brutal.
The number of students graduating high school peaked in 2025 and has now started a gradual decline. Colleges are essentially now playing a game of "musical chairs" competing for students and there aren't enough to go around. The elite institutions and cost-effective state schools will probably be fine but less exclusive private colleges without a solid value proposition have no clear path to survival.
We have pretty accurate counts of numbers of babies born each year, and number of child immigrants. So that makes it straightforward to forecast the number of high school graduates. People are having fewer children.
Well since you mentioned it, I posit that most of the financial issues the world is facing today is because the GFC wasn’t allowed to occur, it’s been a slow bleeding out ever since.
All of them will. There's zero value in higher education nowadays. In fact I'd argue there's negative value. An inquisitive 13 year old backed by AI can be more productive and resourceful than a team of 100+ Ivy League educated PhDs. Sad, but true. And this is today. Fast forward twenty years after massive AI augmented improvements of hardware and more advanced models have occured and it's game over.
> hyper inquisitive 13 year old was never the target market of universities anyways. Historically they've always done very well
Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.
A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one. If you've met an exceptionally brilliant small-town mechanic, you see how that applies within countries as well.
> Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.
I have no idea what you mean by this. I'm pretty sure that inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones do as well or better than dimwits in war zones, and I'm absolutely sure it's selected for. I don't know why you think stupidity is an advantage in a dangerous or difficult situation.
Too many resources are invested in children who would do well no matter what situation you put them in; imo as a retroactive justification for withdrawing resources for racist reasons. You'd think if you had an intellectually inferior group (whether genetically or due to environmental reasons), you'd invest most of your resources into them - but instead it's generally used as an excuse to withdraw resources.
The biggest secret when it comes to selective schools and universities, is that you don't have to do anything to a smart kid in order to graduate a smart kid. If the reputation of your institution is based on the achievements of its alumni rather than the improvement of its students, selecting for smart kids is loading the dice. They'd do well without you.
That's basically the model of the modern private university: give full scholarships to really talented kids (who have already proved their superiority in often very adverse circumstances), and charge the sky to the idiot children of the upper middle class, who gain prestige through paying for the credentials that the talented were paid to take.
> A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one.
I have no idea how you've decided this. I don't even know what you think a rich country is. If it's rich with no class mobility and no access to higher education or reasonable subsistence for the poor, he'll do badly. If he's in a peaceful poor country without an overbearing class structure, where he can learn in his leisure and his belly is always full, especially now with communication the way it is, he'll be able to do whatever he wants to do. The problem might be class war zones, not war zones. An bright poor kid is running the risk of getting shot or disappeared for doing his best to improve the lives of the people around him in a way the bosses don't like.
HN’s love for the Platonic autodidact meets HN’s agreement with whatever tech SC is shoving down our throats (mudulo “sad but true” or whatever value judgements which still agree with the investor trajectory).
If the value of higher education is purely book learning, sure. But if the value is signaling and the creation of ingroups that will become future elites, they can be valuable even if you do not learn a thing in class. It's a debate about elite higher education that has been going on for decades, as top institutions refuse to grow their class sizes, even as they could find 4x the students that would fit qualifications.
The "elite overproduction" theory might also factor in here. For society as a whole it's better not to have more students graduating from elite institutions than there are elite jobs for them to fill. The disappointed, underemployed extras tend to cause social unrest. But it sucks for the individuals who get unfairly locked out of those opportunities through no fault of their own.
The AI will be pushed everywhere, but as it's currently not succeeding at driving across the USA without a human around for emergency intervention* despite a trillion or so miles of real world experience, I suspect the initial success of AI in plumbing looks more like "humans being meat robot e.g. by wearing AR headset while physically at customer site" and less like "AI controlling metal robot that is physically at customer site".
That said, the economics of AI… eh. I can see it replacing the $3T/year cost of hiring software developers, but this doesn't mean people will spend $3T/year on AI; I mean, Wikipedia killed demand for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but nobody values Wikipedia at the 16 trillion or so USD you'd get by multiplying the cost of the EB with how many people are online.
* even the CyberCab, which was announced as "no steering wheel or pedals", is geofenced and if it's like their other vehicles has human observers on standby for remote control.
Grading homework is still less degrading then the other shenanigans that professors use students for- as in ghost writting books, having them program apps as unpaid labour or doing similar stuff - including renting them out to other companies on campus as free labour. Academia is just very casty at times..
Academia is just a bunch of egotistical people forcing kids to work on their particular hobbies and if the kids don't enjoy it, the professors have the potential to signal a bad reputation to employers. The system is kind of disgusting.
Students should be given much more free reign in what they study.
Graduate students spend 10-20 hours a week grading homework, it's a very time intensive process. But I agree, HW should only be an experience. The entire grade should be determined by an in class midterm and final.
I don’t know Borcherds, so this isn’t intended to sound mean to him, but he could pay his TAs or RAs to do hula hoops naked in public for 40 hours a week and it wouldn’t affect him. He’s a high profile mathematician and the worst thing is that next year’s grant money is a little less and he can’t pay for as much naked hula hooping spectacle.
Entire math departments at multiple lower profile schools will close their doors before he has any actual concern about his future as an academic.
But your point is correct for other professors, much less secure in their positions, who have similar problems with AI and actually do have to concern themselves about using their TAs and RAs productively.
He doesn't pay TAs. The university does. They work for the university, not for individual professors. If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.
If Borcherds accepts TAs then they work for him. The point was that he can do practically whatever he wants and doesn't have to worry about it harming him.
Thanks for explaining to me how the academic system I work in functions. Just like most managers don't literally pay their employees, the company does. The university pays TAs through funds from their various revenue streams, including endowment, tuition, grants to the university, and through indirect costs collected from research grants to researchers, probably including Borcherds own grants. So really a lot of different things pay the TAs, the university is just the clearing house.
>faculty research overhead pays for department TAs
The majority comes from tuition budgets, which are assigned per credit-unit. This also pays for faculty salaries. Math is heavily dependent on tuition because they get little overhead. Life sciences is buying millions of dollars of equipment, chemicals, animals, lab staff that incur overhead, none in math.
>departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts
In fact the University of California does not get to keep any overhead. It goes right back into the State of California General Fund and the CA Legislature, as part of the budgeting process, decides where it goes (obviously considering where it came from). During a budget squeeze, overhead can be diverted elsewhere.
Because of this, for a number of years, it was unknown whether the research enterprise at the University of California was actually covering its overhead costs or operating at a loss.
How well do scores on such exams correlate with future success in life post college? (Define success however you like.) Like what are we actually trying to measure here?
One of my freshman math teachers gave grades out for 3 tests and none on homework. He also told us that if we didnt take the first 2 tests, it wouldn't count against us and only the grade on our final would count. Along with that he had extensive open office hours.
It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question.
I dont like AI destroying some of our systems but if we return back to the sort of learning that college used to be where it was self directed with guidance from professors, I will count that as a win over the factory worker production system that high school was and universities were starting to ape.
I'm going through a self-paced AI intro course right now that was put up online from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the more interesting things the professor says right up front is that while they provide a validation framework to test your homework against and they hold back some pieces of it so you have a hidden checker... There is no ethics expectation that you won't use AI on the problem and you can submit the results against the checker as often as you want.
His thinking is quite simple on this... There's absolutely nothing he could do, practically, to prevent you from feeding the questions straight to an AI and having it kick out the answers. But since this is a self-taught, self-selected course... His advice is to not do that until you get well and truly stuck, and only then will you have enough attempts built up to compare to the answer to understand the concept you're missing.
I think it's a decent middle ground for an online published self taught course. But I don't know that such an approach works in terms of, say, a Carnegie Mellon University being able to continue to charge the tuition it does for the courses that aren't self-taught.
Some of my engineering professors had a policy that you couldn't get a lower grade in the class than your grade on the final. You could and they said some students did turn in no work at all and still got an A based on the final.
This motivation is why, when I was in grad school, I never liked handing out grades. I would have rather just marked the problems I found with a HW submission, added notes where appropriate, and that's it. If no grade is given, it is obvious that you have provided the student the service of reading and checking their work, rather than allowed them to increase their 'score' or collect 'points'.
In interviews I sort of bit the bullet and do pair ai coding interviews - you just have to change with the times
My guess based on my experience as a math major is that they just stop giving homework and the in class tests become more rigorous (can’t imagine how much harder they could have made these at my school at least)
My point is that no matter what tool you’re using, at some point you have to stretch your brain and the exams/screenings/etc just haven’t caught up to how to stretch someone’s brain in this new world and I’ve found just embracing the thing to be a better approach than any sort of pearl clutching
> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.
No structure needed, the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people. It’s the actual business model; undergraduate education is break even, the only way money is ever made is alums donating to the school due to the feel-good memories they formed when they attended.
Unfortunately, for schools who thought their purpose was to educate, they will be made obsolete in the near future. Expect a lot of schools to close.
But those places that always understood their purpose was for affluent young adults to mingle and connect with other affluent people, they will be just fine.
> the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people
Post-GI Bill. Before university was universal, there was a strong philosophical angle to the enterprise. (Also meet your generation's rich kids, that's always been a part of it.)
The irony is that homework barely helped even before AI. I feel like we should move more into self grading extra material for students to peruse if they are unsure about their ability in the subject, rather than adding chore to those that are fine and a point of worry for those that need that bit extra.
Maybe in some other subjects. Not in mathematics. When I did my math degree a large amount of the learning came via doing problem sets and this was a very common experience among other students too.
Really? When I'm reading textbooks nowadays for fun, I absolutely do the problems at the end of the chapter. It tells you when you think you learned something but didn't.
As an aside, the professor in question is Richard Borcherds, fields medalist. He is probably most well known for proving the “Monstrous Moonshine” conjecture of Conway and Norton that there is some sort of correspondence between modular functions and representations of the Monster Group. When the conjecture was made in the 1970s, it was purely because someone noticed that a certain number was the same as the cardinality of the monster group. It seemed a crazy coincidence, so John H Conway said (playfully) that it was “Moonshine”. Hence the name “Monstrous Moonshine”.
> As an aside, the professor in question is Richard Borcherds, fields medalist.
I get what you're saying but credentialism of this kind has literally zero meaning today. For instance restating your opening sentence as "As an aside, the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents" sounds far more credible and intimidating at this point.
> the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents
Yet the folks with access to unrestricted Mythos agents tackling mathematics are hiring credentialed mathematicians. Your heuristic, applied to itself, rejects itself.
We’re a long way from that world. Does your company even interview people who don’t fit the requirements of a job position? No, of course not. So what are you filtering on, if not credentials.
This guy doesn’t just have credentials. He has record of proven results.
This is quite sad. Even if students would cheat off each other, someone had to do the homework. And even the collaboration of cheating on homework always served as a forcing function for me or others to think about the material. If not actively, at least in the form of a quasi background radiation. With AI that is completely gone, and without reward loops for incremental work, the truth is there is a large number of people (especially 18-20 year olds) who will not do well on the exams because they need a bit of a stick.
I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.
Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place. We have pushed far too many youths into college as the default option, and that hasn't been good for the students or the institutions.
There are plenty of people who have the innate intelligence and intellectual curiosity to succeed in college, but come out of high school lacking discipline and clueless about what they want to study. They would be better off spending a few years working or serving in the military or something to get their shit together first, and then enroll in college later. Those students tend to have clearer goals and take the educational experience more seriously.
> Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place
Well, that raises an interesting philosophical question. What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Surely you agree that there are a wide variety of teaching styles present among all college professors. If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material? Why is this an issue with the student, and not the professor not being teaching material, or the university not being facilitator-of-education material for failing to match students and professors well?
I agree that people have been pushed into college as a default option due to it being overloaded as both place of learning but also printing salary-granting papers, but it's NOT clear to me that students who need the specific stick mentioned in some cases are broadly unsuited for higher learning.
> What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Any that are self motivated.
> If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material?
Honestly, no. It shows a lack of (a) institutional-navigational skills, e.g. change your professor, (b) flexibility to different learning "styles" (which are increasingly being shown to be a myth) and/or (c) ability to circumvent adversity, e.g. by reading the textbook, finding online videos or hunting down a study group. That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
Modern college students are basically afforded the freedoms and privileges of a classical scholar with a wealthy patron. Their day-to-day needs are taken care of. They have access to massive libraries. They have access to lectures and professors at office hours. And they navigate all of it with a pre-selected cohort of similar students.
(To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.)
> That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
I disagree, because muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life.
> To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.
Again, I disagree.I mean, I agree on its face, in that a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree.
But we're talking about people who aren't motivated and capable. The best path to something resembling success for people who lack the motivation and capability to be successful on their own, is to muddle through the university system and by whatever necessary means get the piece of paper.
College at large is not a waste of time for these people. Until the downstream society stops valuing a degree as it does, time spent getting the degree is not wasted, because it yielded the degree. If the paper is had, the time was well spent, regardless of how that time was actually spent or whether anything was learned.
> muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life
True [1]. I'm not debating the individual incentives. (I wasn't clear about this earlier.) I'm just not convinced a college graduate who muddled through is worth 75% more to an employer or society than a high school grad who muddles.
> a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree
For a binary measure of success, yes. A successful person empowered with a peaceful, rich society and challenging college experience will do better than one without.
In the real world, those on the bottom of the social hierarchy (such as undergrad students) need to adapt to the styles of those on the top (professors). Perhaps that's unfair but it's just the way the world operates. College can be a great environment to learn that essential life skill of adaptability. Find a way to succeed even when you're in a shitty environment surrounded by toxic people.
If we're talking about "the way the world operates", then because of how society values college degrees, any path that gets you the piece of paper is a worthwhile and valuable one. Whether that path involves learning, complaining until given a passing grade, or forcing/convincing your professors to accommodate your preferred style of "learning".
This is something that needs to be fixed downstream, by making the paper less valuable. Making the paper more difficult to get instead is just manufacturing misery because of people too stubborn to pull their heads out of the sand and admit that the function of undergrad is the salary paper, and self-motivated learning has been largely relegated to grad school.
It's about having to be externally motivated for that particular assignment. Or class of assignment, whatever.
There are often a variety of tasks which are graded. Homework, exams, presentations, labs, etc. Every class and professor sets the mix of valuation of these differently, and has different quantities of each. That's teaching style.
If you hate presentations and cannot be roused to make one except by threat of failure, but are great at learning the material and pass the exams with ease, then that's a teaching style incompatibility.
Much of college is a social signaling mechanism. Well over a decade ago one of my family members, with a degree of shame had to explain to a friend why I didn’t finish my BA.
A lot of middle and upper class people use college as a way to filter people. You can argue our top universities also serve as finishing schools.
I did, after reaching six figures anyway, finish my BA. The shame is gone.
Or does it still linger as I went to a middle of the road state school. Not Stanford, Yale or even Berkeley.
Honestly I originally attended community college in part to get grant money/loans which allowed me to get a cheap apartment. As a bonus I meet a lot of cool people, read Howard Zinn.
Sure, there are fundamental questions about what college should really be for. Should the focus be on training competent employees or educating well-rounded citizens or anointing social elites or eliminating injustice or advancing the frontiers of human knowledge? Everyone seems to be coming to the debate with different unstated assumptions about that.
Back when I was a student, 25+ years ago, many professors were a bit lazy. They just re-used problem sets which they had made earlier. No single year would be alike, but the problem sets would still be from a larger collection.
The students would then hand down the big book of problem and solution sets down to the freshman class.
The professors, still being a bit lazy, knew this. But instead of scarping the old problems, they'd just say that cheating only hurts the students doing it - as the homework grades would not influence the final grade. And sure enough, the students that never did their own work, rarely did well (if at all passed) on the finals exam.
When I was at university, a student caught cheating was cause for being expelled.
I am recruiting college kids right now, impeccable pedigrees, elite universities. Our recruitment process involves the kids recording videos where they answer questions as a pre-screening. They are explicitly told not to use AI for the exercise. I have the Claude and ChatGPT answer to those questions on my screen while I review their responses. 40% read it pretty much verbatim. The paradox is I don't even care whether they knew the answer or not, but to me it's an integrity test.
I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.
I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.
I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.
It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.
And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.
Cheating always has been available as an option. AI just makes it faster. At Cal, you always had students who would still pursue doing things on their own even when not cheating led to lower grades. The reality of it all is that cheating catches up to you eventually and the later it does, the worse are the outcomes. If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.
Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?
> If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.
Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.
Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.
I think you’re conflating too many things here. Never claimed that the universe is fair nor do I claim that failing upwards isn’t a thing.
If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.
In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.
I know you chose 50/50 arbitrarily. But I think the real numbers are much worse. A few years ago, I stayed a couple nights at a hostel in a rural spot in Italy. I’m in my 50s, and most of the others there were Americans in their 20s, fairly recent grads. A dozen of us went out to dinner one night, and among the topics discussed was cheating in college. Only myself and one of the younger people said we did not cheat, the others all treated it as an expected part of the college experience. This isn’t exactly “data”, and perhaps there’s some sort of correlation between hostel-goer and cheater, but I was shocked at the numbers. And that was before LLM usage was common.
My read is it's pre- versus post-social media college experiences. There have always been a number of cheaters. But their blast radius of normalization was limited to their roommate or maybe even dorm floor. With social media, a single cheater at a single school can enable and normalize the practice for millions.
When I was young, public universities in Spain only evaluated the final exam. That was not a problem; it helped people become responsible. Nowadays, they have changed it to evaluate continuous homework, and students end up worse prepared.
Unfortunately the single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day? Can you perform under arbitrarily selected stressful conditions? Are your executive functions fine with that plan?
The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.
"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."
I certainly find that now, going back to uni. In a couple of subjects we get the option to prepare a cheat sheet, and I would say I actually look at less than 10% of it. The act of preparing it forces me to revise, and internalise the facts and ideas.
Only if you were planning to scrape by. If you actually know the material (the thing the exam is supposed to determine), you should do fine, and any good or bad luck will tend to average out by the time you graduate. Besides, there really aren't any alternatives left. Completed homework had some weak-ish signal for a while, but now it doesn't.
Your argument seems to imply that the only thing that an exam is possibly allowed to measure is ability to answer a question at some arbitrary point in time. It also separates the people with the wit to understand a bunch of topics in a span of 3 or 5 months, the ability to plan accordingly, enough self control, and some motivation to see the plan through from the ones that don't. That's not a bad thing, as diplomas are often used as a proxy not only for intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs.
The only thing I'm saying is that measuring once maximises the luck component. Sure, measure other things by proxy as well. But to borrow your phrase, understanding and taking into account the variability of real life behaviours, sampling noise and environment biases shows "not only intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs."
No, it doesn't. Repeating it ad infinitum does that.
But therefore it's a good thing grades aren't just pass or fail, but have a range, from 1 to 10, or to 20 or whatever. Too bad there's so much external pressure on the system.
Take a moment to think about it. Why does the confidence interval go smaller with more samples? What does it say about the impact of luck in repeated tests?
>single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day?
If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.
It's clear what pool the content will be from. But it's impossible to check everything. Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.
> barring rare emergencies
It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.
> Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.
In the case of calculus as an example, there should be nothing from the class you didn't have time to practice sufficiently. A full academic year is more than enough time to learn integrals, derivatives, sequences, and series with the small collection of tricks for solving difficult problems (telescoping series, trig sub, etc.) There's a couple dozen rules you learn that are straightforward to apply, and for the times they aren't obvious, there's like a dozen total tricks (trig sub, etc.).
I took these classes. I remember how most people just phoned in the entire thing and complained at the exam review sessions how hard everything was.
Interesting. Honestly I think about this much more in a cohort way. There’s some cohort of students who are extremely self motivated and mature and understand the way you do one thing is kinda the way you do all things. There’s another cohort that is completely checked out or whose priorities are not grades at all. For these cohorts I don’t think it makes a big different.
But it’s hard for me to imagine that for the cohorts in between (who definitely want to be motivated) having some forcing function is just an easier guiding hand to helping them become responsible vs. completely bombing a class and then potentially losing hope or self identifying as lazy/helpless - which I had seen all too often to some of my smartest classmates.
Regardless not saying this to invalidate your experience. Just hasn’t lined up with mine.
Ultimately the goal of education shouldn't just be a filter but it should ensure that as many people as possible learn the material. Homework allows for early intervention by faculty to get people back on track. There really are students who end up succeeding after this intervention.
The solution is not to feed students from spoon all the time. They are adults and should act as such, it is not a school where it is really important to give every child a chance. Grading homework must be opt-in. Those who want it, get the grade as a feedback, can seek for help then and get the help, those who skip should be assumed prepared for final exam and judged by it. There are millions of people in the world who can use education opportunities to their maximum, and the place should not be reserved to those who feel entitled by whatever privilege they have.
We observe that intervention leads to more students learning. I don't believe that "well they are adults they can fail if they want" is an excuse for a university refusing to take steps that they know would improve pedagogy.
I do agree that AI has made this basically useless. Rather than skipping homeworks or doing a bad job the students just cheat and there is no opportunity to notice and intervene. They get all the way to the screen-free final and fail.
I do not think that controlling homework does improve pedagogy at scale. Homework helps engaged and motivated students who are ready to accept the feedback. Maybe in your place they are majority and effects are visible. As soon as grades for homework become the goal, the Goodhart‘s law starts playing the role in the dynamics of relationships between students and teachers. AI has nothing to do with it, cheating with homework did always exist.
Another angle on this is the tope that curriculum is so out of date your AI completed assignment may be ahead of the class subject matter. The real teacher is is having a motivation or need to do something and learning about what you need to learn to get the goal accomplished, AI can be a great companion for that journey, weeding out the sycophantic slop and getting to truth is the new challenge. There are a lot of elements to school that discourage curiosity (asking a stupid question in front of class) or being picked on for being a keener or other anti-intellectual "cool kid" mentalities. In the end we need to make the line between learning and success more obvious for young people, maybe that doesn't work when the definition of success includes fitting into a burocracy and letting the singing key be "4".
With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought.
It is expensive because it confers greatly enhanced earning potential. Students borrow against that future income. Sometimes from the state.
It confers enhanced future income largely because of the inherent vetting process that asures future employers this person is able to focus for extended periods of time on intellectual tasks, is able to follow through and function within a bureaucracy. I don't think it's as much about skills, at least it's way overkill for the skills that are actually needed on the job for most jobs.
I don't see the rise of LLMs as obviating the "functional cog in the Rube Goldberg machine" training.
It is also expensive because the debt is very hard to get erased through bankruptcy, so private companies are now offering more money to people than is actually needed. So universities see this $ and raise prices.
Kinda like how tax breaks on housing initially help people, and then the market adjusts based on the new inflow of $.
> Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State.
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The death of apprenticeships is because you are training your own competition. It worked in the past because you trained your kid for a trade that was arcane and took a couple decades to master, but now you'd be training someone with no loyalty to you in a field that can be speed run in a year or so with YouTube assistance.
You neo-liberals have been wrong about this for 40 years now. You wrought us all with your Reaganomics, and have had the full attention of every government for this entire time (except maybe in Cuba) and the results have been truly disastrous, climate catastrophe and all.
If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. The fact that we haven’t is proof that the promises of neo-liberalism are all lies.
> If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now.
Food. Consumer goods. Telecommunications services. Transportation. Clothes. All things that have gone down in absolute prices and relative amount of family income to be provided.
Education / Housing / Healthcare: all deemed "up to the State" and that takes increasingly more from people at ever diminishing returns.
We can have a long and serious conversation about how hard the Government should be involved in regulating these things, and how we could set up systems that ensure that these become universally available and not just for middle/upper class. We can even have a conversation about things that should be controlled by the Government even if it means a high cost to society. But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness.
The way to solve this is not by giving the monopoly back to the state, but by the state enacting regulations thay allows smaller players to join the grid.
Europe has been doing this for 20 years now. I have yet to see successful results. And realizing each failure of Neo-liberal policy Europe keeps doubling or quadrupling down. I believe they are on their 4th energy package at the moment. I am sure the fate if this 4th attempt will be identical to the other efforts of making capitalism fix the problem, and identical to any other neo-liberal policy. Europe will have more billionaires and peoples energy bills will be higher.
As the saying in Europe goes: Neo-liberalism will continue until the economy improves.
Do we have 20 years already since people are allowed to set up a solar panel in their backyard and sell excess capacity to the grid?
Do we have 20 years where farmers can grow their own biodiesel to (at least) power their own machinery, or does the state giving them subsidies to let them keep growing vegetables, wine and beef without having to compete in the global market?
We have had 20 years of energy distribution and infrastructure going from government ownership and into private hands, where different private distributors are allowed to compete for customers on the same grid. These were energy packages 1-2 (if I remember correctly). The results have been higher energy prices for European households.
Energy package 3 was supposed to fix this with some additional regulation and standardization. It did not. Energy package 4 is supposed to fix this with more standardization and regulations (including distributed generation; which I am in favor of btw.) however, it will not.
The problem is the privatizations of the 2000s, not in the regulations surrounding small scale solar. The problem is neo-liberalism. Get rid of corporations rent-seeking on our infrastructure. Our energy bills will not become lower until then.
I am guessing Germany or Europe more broadly. Germany is in a pretty bad neo-liberal wave right now, and have been getting worse for the past 10-15 years. And given Germany‘s influence in the EU the effects of this neo-liberal wave are felt across Europe, even in non-EU countries like Iceland (which is currently being fined by the EU for not privatizing garbage disposal fast enough).
However, if you look at the popular movements on the streets of Europe at the moment, you can see that the people are in fact not happy about this. There are very few political means of getting rid of neo-liberalism (see e.g. Spain for a clear example of what I mean) so people are turning to the streets as the only viable alternative.
>If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now
There's a wealth of clear evidence for this in the economic data in Eastern vs Western Europe, East Germany vs West Germany when Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule. The countries under Soviet rule were significantly poorer and to this day most still haven't caught up with their Western European counterparts.
Eastern Europe underwent shock therapy and are today in many ways more extreme in neo-liberal policies then the western part of the same continent.
Western Europe didn’t start neo-liberal policies until after the cold war ended, and it went into full gear around the year 2000.
In either case. Is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s? Are trains running cheaper? Is power transmission cheaper now that energy generation, and delivery have been split apart and sold to private investors on the public stock market?
No, the answer to all these questions are no. Because efficiencies in a system don‘t care about the ownership model, and neo-liberalism is a religious like creed that operates out of idealism for a world that does not exist.
> is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s?
Is it?
> Are trains running cheaper?
They're up about 6% in real terms (or about 0.23% a year) since 2000 [1]. That said, I don't think most European rail is privatized, so this is a strange example.
Yes and no. Garbage disposal is more efficient now then it was in the mid-90s, but that has everything to do with the infrastructure and nothing to do with the ownership model. More on that later.
The ownership of infrastructure and the operation are split where private operators are allowed to compete with national operators on the same infrastructure. This is true for trains and electricity, and in some cases garbage disposal. Many of the national operators are publicly traded with the national government being the majority shareholder.
Some countries in Europe have gone much further in privatizing the rail network then others. The UK being the canonical example of privatization, and Norway being an example of a country privatizing more slowly.
If the promises of neo-liberalism were true, we should see the efficiencies gained in the UK compared to Norway. Yet, no such evidence exists. And that is because efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators.
> efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators
I mostly agree. Infrastructure quality (including institutional quality) dominates. Ideology is usually cover for a lack of evidence.
But ownership modes do create different incentive structures. Full private ownership is famously terrible in natural monopolies. It’s a well-known market failure and folks who proselytize fully privatized utilities are stupid or venal. For many other things, however, private ownership works. A good example is package delivery. (Train operation is a weird case. The UK fumbled. Italy did not. On the other end of the spectrum, DB is a trash fire.)
I've heard this argument over decades and to this day it doesn't make any sense to me. You know what happens when you do that ivory tower thing? Those professions die.
I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.
To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.
Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.
You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.
The software projects you work on as coursework just give you the shallowest possible mechanical introduction on how to put together working code, and their point is almost always to demostrate some underlying theory like networking or distributed systems or graphics or whatever has been understood. It's not to pretend to produce anything viable in a commercial sense or please any imagined customer or market.
Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.
And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.
> I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.
They aren't the ones saying it. Parents, government officials and high school guidance counselors are telling everyone they need college to get a good job.
Colleges don't have to say anything thing about it but they raise their tuition abd accept the grant money while expanding their campuses to accommodate the rise in demand. That's exactly how a business would react to a growing market with rising demand and an influx of government money.
People pass through colleges on their way to getting a job and colleges oblige.
What op thinks colleges should be doing is accepting people who they think, with education, could contribute to the college's research fields. Think about the college tracks that lead to PhDs where the student stays with the university for some or all of their career. That's what OP is suggesting colleges become (or revert to, if that's what they ever were).
Maybe AI will be yet another disincentivized for higher education. When I was considering law school a decade ago, the overwhelming advices from existing attorneys was “unless you’re in the top 10% of the top 10% of universities, you’re wasting your time getting a law degree”. Seems very similar to university today (at least in the USA)
> With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought.
They'll probably just shut it all down.
With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway.
On research: If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.
> With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway
The generation of Americans that went to the moon had only 5-8% of people go to college. Whether someone is smart or dumb has little to do with formal higher education.
The idea is AI is cheap enough and worth it for a company to invest in younger talent that will learn the specifics of the industry much faster. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, maybe university is reduced by 2 years or something.
> If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.
The OpenAI math dump showed that it’s not worth paying hundreds of PhD-years if a tech bro can do it with an agent.
What is the point of grading homework for college students anyway? The objective of exams is to determine mastery of the subject. It makes sense to have a grade act as a certificate of mastery.
Grading homework is a measure of conscientiousness and perhaps a pedagogical tool to force learning but by college perhaps we should have moved out of the need for the latter.
One can simply measure conscientiousness through attendance grade and mastery through exam grade and then we have two grades the universities can certify students for that are no longer dimension reduced into a single number.
We did not have homework per se in what we studied but we did have reading that was relevant for the purposes of tutorials and being prepared for lectures. We also had deliverables (assignments, presentations, practicals) that had grading, and proctored exams.
I found having deliverables helpful in knowing how one is tracking with progress and understanding of the subjects and largely reflective of the final exam result.
I've also had studies done that exams were either 80 or 100% of the grading and that was a lot more stressful without any significant added benefit. In fact given that there were fewer or no deliverables, perhaps even worse mastery / retention after exam completion.
Homework grades are supposed to provide feedback and some incentive to do the work.
However, counting homework grades toward course credit also creates an incentive to cheat. It probably makes sense to remove (or at least drastically reduce) that incentive.
> Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework.
In high school (2006) my physics teacher gave credit for handing in the homework (he checked it and handed it back, but no grade was assigned). Didn't hand in homework, you got a zero.
He knew then that if you assign grades to hw, people will cheat.
If I'm paying for Berkeley, the professor have office hours for me to ask questions.
Cambridge engineering had something similar called "standard credit" for minor assignments. You'd get the full mark by default, only losing marks if missing or egregiously bad. The exam at the end of each year carried almost all of the grade. It meant you had to engage with the work, but didn't turn it into an exhausting competition for the best coursework grades.
Yes I also had this in Uni at some point. Just going through the homework can be a huge effort. If the course is small enough, you probably don't want to hand in obvious junk/slop, especially if you're asked to present "your" solution.
In high school math ,we usually had a stanupin the beginning of every lesson. Basically th entire class on their feet answering rapid fire questions from the teacher , usually some stuff that had been taught in the previous lesson. No calculator/notes just doing math in your head to get to sit down and start the class.
Gnereally sucked when we were going through it , looking back though made digesting the material easier as you had to know, not just cram or hope for a calc or scrap paper to caluclate with.
So basically a oral pop quiz for math. i think could work well to complement homeworks by making sure the material as taught is actually inside the students heads.
The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences (EDIT: that is, doing poorly on the exam) are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
Then they lash out at the instructor, even if it’s really their fault.
Maybe it's changed, but when I went to Berkeley, it was really common that the homework counted for next to nothing and it was on you to do it since the majority of your grade (if not all) was on mid-terms and finals. No one really complained back then...maybe it's changed a lot, but if so, I'd say they should go back to their roots ;)
>> In-class exams, either written or oral. If you don't do homework, it is only on you. And with paper and pen, the next semester, yes.
> The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
For me at least, in most of my classes, the homework was a tiny part of the grade. Just enough to maybe get over what you're talking about, but not enough to really matter.
True. It was true when I was doing my classes and I have to imagine it did not get much better. And with math, there is very easy way to tell if you are anywhere close to understanding it.
That is not the point of the article, though. He posits AI will just do better than humans soon, and he no longer knows whether people should even study math (from the article). So the point is that pursuing those studies is no longer useful; how or whether you grade is irrelevant at that point. (To be clear, I am not defending the statement, just explaining what I understood.)
When I studied, in Norway, we never got any marks or points for our homework. Our final grade was based 100% on our final exam (or mix of final exam + projects for the classes which had those), which was always a pen and paper type of exam. We did have mandatory homework we had to complete, in order take the final exam, but we never got any grades on those.
Later on, when I became a TA, there were obvious signs of cheating in the homework, i.e. people handing in the same homework with the same step-by-step solution, with the exact same errors.
In any case, cheating on homework wouldn't help their grade.
I have been an adjunct CS prof on and off for decades. I stopped in 2020 because teaching over Zoom sucked.
If were to teach a course today: I’d assign homework as usual, and have it be worth zero toward a student’s grade. The point is to learn, do it or not, that’s your choice. I would base the grade on in-person exams and maybe an interview. That’s it. No room for AI to boost grades.
We are still going to be interested in teaching people to think. We are still going to be intrinsically interested in mathematics. Many (most?) of us here have gotten immense pleasure and growth out of solving a problem, or understanding something well enough to explain. Even though the answer was known or someone else could explain it better. AI doesn't change that, really. So we have to find new ways to assess students. It doesn't mean anything fundamental about education. I don't even think it's such a fundamental challenge to math. Most of these things we are trying to prove are, to an engineer, either irrelevant or known empirically already. People want and need to try to understand. They will continue to.
At the lower undergrad level, there was already no point in grading homework a decade ago because Wolfram Alpha existed.
At the graduate level maybe this problem is solved by doing Moore-style classes where the students present (on the chalkboard, not slides) and the professor critiques. Students could still have AI generate proofs and print them out or hand copy them, but maybe that's fine.
Upper undergrad level is tricky, because students are expected to prove things, but maybe don't have the maturity for full-on Moore-style.
Homework is useful as a form of revision, if idiots think they can cheat to a better score the university just needs to take away that incentive: 0 marks for homework, all marks on the exam and a viva.
He should perhaps ask students if they want it marked and if they do still provide feedback, but be clear it won’t count for grades as cheating is too easy.
Lazy students will do no work all year then fail. Clever motivated students will continue to do well.
More people will fail till they realise they need to do the work, but that’s just the way it is, it’s the only way to be sure (along with vivas) that students know the subject.
I was an adjunct math professor at a University for a few years and I completely agree with this. There is this propaganda circulating in (and out of) education that testing is not a good measure of mastery, but it 100% is. It's a hard sell for public schools because, as you said, people will fail more.
Math is an even tougher sell because it's largely a service department. It's hard to justify holding non-majors up because they can't pass calc 2. For upper division math though tests are the way.
Many professors there didn't use homework as part of your grades when I attended. I think the reasoning at the time was students would just copy each other's work anyway or look up solutions online etc
But if you didn't do the homework / learn the material you'd be screwed on the mid-terms / final which was 100% of your grade.
On the flip side, AI's can now grade pure math problems with the accuracy and rigor of a postdoc. And unlike PhD tutors, they're universally accessible to all.
It's the start of a golden age for those of us who are curious autodidacts. If you're working through the exercises of a math textbook, you can now instantly submit your (attempted) theorem-proof to the nearest robot, and see all your misconceptions and shortfalls of rigor laid bare.
> On the flip side, AI's can now grade pure math problems with the accuracy and rigor of a postdoc.
Wait, I'm curious about this bit - I did my math undergrad ~16 years ago and all my homework was handwritten.
Are now AIs capable of ingesting my mess of poor handwriting with arrows indicating the flow of a proof (e.g. from the bottom of the page to the top of a hand-drawn column half-way up the page to cram in the rest of the proof)?
Yeah this is what confuses me and gives me hope. I would have loved to have had AI in college. I probably would have had the confidence to take more and harder classes and generally been much less stressed.
10 years ago it felt like most students would take any easy chance to cheat, especially on nightly homework freshman year. I wouldn’t do it because for some sick reason I was actually motivated by learning more than the grade.
I’ve loved using AI to learn. I made SQL and Python classes of my own to finally get beyond a basic understanding of them. I made an Anki deck to learn a foreign language with very poor existing online resources.
I never graded homework or anything else except the final exam.
In the lab I assist students with implementing and understanding code. Since they know they are not graded, there is no incentive for them to use AI. Sometimes we do try AI for the lulz but it makes as much sense as looking at the solutions (which I do provide already). As I frequently tell them, "AI can replace me teaching you, it cannot replace you understanding the material".
I've been enrolled in an online CS program provided by a respectable university for a while. I get a lot of joy from continuous learning and being in a university program helps me stay focused, plus I'll get credentials to prove it eventually.
Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade. The materials I'm provided are a rambling stream of consciousness that are difficult to make sense of. Only truly elite universities that educate students efficiently deserve to survive.
> Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade.
Sometimes I wonder what it must feel like to be able to so arrogantly make predictions about the future as if one had already lived in it. How can you be so confident about something you don't know for sure?
You could have said the same thing 20 years ago about wikipedia and the internet in general. A kid in a poor school on the other side of the world has access to the same wealth of knowledge than a student in a Ivy League university. But that hasn't made universities useless, and very few of those kids in poor schools (that wouldn't have gone to a elite university) picked up the opportunity.
If anything, AI in education I think will lead to a divergence. Mediocre students will be even more mediocre as they will use it as a substitute for learning, with AI doing their homework. Good students will leverage it to learn and understand things even faster.
I'm willing to give him (or anyone else going through this) a lot of grace here as I think almost everyone who will be impacted by AI will go through 3 major stages, at different rates with each step taking a while to both really be true, and then a bit longer to accept and solidify into reality. And our egos act as blinders on accepting that each next step after 1 is likely.
1) AI is useless.
2) AI helps me.
3) AI replaced me (unless I am a generationally gifted top performer in my field).
While he is, in fact, a generationally gifted top performer in his field, he knows that statistically speaking most of his students will not be which I think makes his apparent angst now understandable.
Yes, there is no point in grading homework or essays. This has been largely true in India and China anyway, and the US will have to move to similar model of standardized tests and in person exams. Universities are anyway proxies for IQ filtering. It is perhaps impolite to say so explicitly in the west, but people will have to confront that.
Maybe for "soft" subjects like History and Philosophy, where almost nobody who does those courses actually becomes a historian or a philosopher... But there are plenty of subjects where you actually do learn things that are useful beyond university. Engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, etc.
Then don't grade the homework! I have in-person quizzes in my class, and the students are motivated to do the homework anyways because it prepares them for the quiz.
When I was in College (as a Chem major) homework was not graded. It was there for you to do to prepare for exams. I'm assuming that this is different for pure math majors though.
I see this as nothing else but an opportunity. Just start asking students about their homework. Not being able to answer about the homework should be punished with seize of the studying...
If they don't mark the homework, it might be useful to redistribute that time to a viva about the home work.
It would give a more accurate impression of the kids understanding, incentive understanding it, be more pleasant interaction for all involved and build the kid up to Vivas and interviews.
Why would you grade math homework? I taught "intro math"[1] through algebra and calculus to linear algebra at UF and ASU over four years as a paid graduate TA. This was the middle '80s. I assigned homework from the text every class. At the beginning of every class we (the students and me) worked through any particular problem any student wanted. That was 15min, max. Then I lectured and assigned more homework. I graded my own 3 in-class closed-book exams and final exam.
Based on the classes the Math Department gave me (very satisfying) and the student evaluations this seemed to work more or less fine. I was a brutal grader though, some of those entry level classes had bimodal distributions with 'F' being the low mode.
I also showed up for office hours and did my best to help people learn by digging through their questions.
I don't see why this methodology wouldn't work fine today. I wouldn't care now how a student learned. Show competency on the human only test and we're good.
I had one student who achieved a solid 'F' come by office hours after the course to tell me how much he enjoyed my teaching. Whatever!
Anyway, teaching that way, with the positive interactions with students interested in learning, was one of the greatest experiences of my life.
[1] An absolute pedagogical shitshow that wasted everyone's time for zero gain.
I have a solution, but I don't think people will appreciate it, because:
1) it is very analog
2) requires work from both student and teacher
3) there is no AI in it
4) there is not money to made on it
5) all of the above
In short, do what my MBA class did. At home you study the examples, the how behind it and possible solutions. In class, you may be called in front of the class to show that you know what you are doing.
Blame the game, not the player. Grading is about securing status in a primate social dominance hierarchy. Fuck it - math should transcend that as much as our bodies allow.
Part of the purpose of rigorous education is to make sure that students are competent for the academic labor force, but that's only half of the story. The other purpose is to preserve existing knowledge and prevent its loss to the force of entropy eating away at texts, files and neurons. If there's no preservation of knowledge in the academic form anymore we have no choice but to rely on AI, which has a massive downside:
In the event that the cascading metal mining yield declines aren't solved by new tech and we do lose AI, we are now in the state that we will probably also lose calculus, liberalism and the ability to design a steam engine.
There was constant change in the palaeolithic, change of the form "which tribe controls which valley" and no further. The range of possible changes is gonna shrink back to that small range without a stable climate and/or a solid tech foundation.
I heartily disagree, grading hand-written homework serves as an early warning signal to students who don’t understand a concept* but want to. It’s also useful to keeners who like being told "you’re doing a good job, keep it up!" As well a warning to students who are so far behind that they can save time money and their GPA by dropping the class early.
And as a TA, I liked the income, and there’s a knock-on benefit that you’re learning to read with a critical eye which will help as a reviewer in the future.
* or in mine own obsolescent field, a measure of accuracy that indicates a student need think** longer before writing in the future
I recently attended a "flipped classroom" for an anatomy course. Lectures were recorded and done prior to class as (not-for-credit) homework, and the traditional homework was ungraded, done in groups in place of lecture. Labs were essentially just mini practicals with multiple stations.
I had never taken an anatomy course prior, and thought that the flipped classroom worked very well for the younger students. People who hadn't quite developed the knack for studying were now forced into preparing before class, and active recall was embedded into the lab practicals so that the cumulative exam wasn't testing things they'd memorized and forgotten.
For me personally, as a student, homework has only ever been for grade-padding.
Sure, so mark it up, just don't grade it or count its completion in a way such that it counts toward final rankings vs other students. Offer your TA's services to those who want to use it to improve, not to evaluate their AI's output.
I never had a good math teacher in college that graded homework. The good ones told you which problems to do, and they told you that you'd be doomed on the exams if you didn't do them. They also only assigned the problems that had answers in the book.
Making homework a part of your grade is like making attendance a part of your grade. It's something that teachers who aren't capable of teaching do, so they can give students who haven't learned a thing reasonable looking grades. Students have always cheated when homework was graded, it's just that AI makes it so flagrant that it can't be conveniently ignored.
I'm overestimating people, though. There are clearly teachers who are still pretending like students don't cheat when it's like five clicks now. It was much, much harder when tons were still cheating half a century ago. You had to actually meet each other. Admitting that you're collecting a check for nothing is tough, especially because now you're going to have to work.
Who am I kidding? Teachers will just start talking about how grading is bad or racist or something, or saying that using AI is actually better preparation for the future. Hell, they should have done that half a century ago: in real life, being able to cheat well is the best skill.
It's already here. For instance I could walk into this guys math class, not even read the questions or material being taught and _guarantee_ that I'm going to be the highest performer as long as I have access to Astra/Fable. Like, it's not even close.
Maybe forcing them to turn in the homework hand written would help. They’d probably at least learn something by osmosis if they had to write down what the LLM spit out.
You guys were having homework graded in university? I was taking classes where the prof would just be like "pages X thru Y odd/even" at the end of a lecture with a very "do it or don't do it, I don't give a shit" type of mentality. Your final mark was two tests, a midterm and final.
This was always the case. The university system (ignoring research and other functions, since that's mostly decoupled from the type of class in TFA) serves a dual purpose as a teaching system and a credentialing system. How does grading homework (different from correcting homework -- I'll bend over backward to help students understand the material better, and learning from your struggles and mistakes is one of the best ways to make that happen) benefit either?
- There's the paternalistic argument that the adults we send to college aren't real adults and need carrots and sticks to learn properly. Making homework part of the grade helps them help themselves. This is a value judgement on what's more important (squeezing knowledge into people at any cost vs giving people agency and accountability), but I have suggestions as to exactly where people can stuff that argument. IMO, letting fully fledged adults limp through the system without the motivation or wherewithal to do a little hard work in their own self interest isn't doing them any favours.
- On the credentialing side of things, ongoing grading from something like homework helps smooth over the effects of a bad day of sleep or test anxiety. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I think there are tools which are more accurate and less work for the students and the teachers. Start the semester with an ungraded (corrected if students want to take advantage of it, but not affecting their final grade) take-home test of the background knowledge expected for the course. This lets students decide if they're ready or should take an earlier course instead, do some selected reading on weak points during an otherwise relatively light workload in the semester, and learn the teacher's testing and grading style so that there's less anxiety leading up to a real test. Your grade in the course reflects your best demonstrated mastery on the final, which is arguably closer to what people expect from the credentialing aspect of things; nobody cares how well you executed epsilon-delta proofs during the week you studied them, they care whether you're ready for the next course or ultimate job using that skill. Allow a makeup/retake exam (new questions), maybe two, and take the maximum score. To the extent that your test has any noise, this inflates the overall score, but it mitigates the effect of a single bad day, anxiety, etc, and gives you an easy framework for handling legitimate life events. Still assign homework. Still correct it for students who want feedback. Don't let it influence the grade.
> university system (ignoring research and other functions, since that's mostly decoupled from the type of class in TFA)
The primary purposes of research universities is research. You can't ignore the primary purpose of the institution. To the extent teaching has fallen by the wayside it's because universities are research institutions first and teach and credential on the side.
this is what comes for education, the same way as agents can solve home work, they can grade, curate what you learn, what you work on etc.
professors needs to be life coaches and motivators, less of a oral/written book reproducer. That part will be automated. Evals also will be in a locked room, do you home work, bi-weekly do the check, correct with agent what needs to be repeated. Measure if you on course/off course doing better/worse. If you are not doing good, escalate to your coach(professor).
I mean, sure, charisma can engage people into several classes, but also, lets be honest what % of professors really got charisma? If it helps lectures are great, the active work should be done with agents, individually and in the team. of human, and other peoples agents. That's the future of work.
I don't see a point, either. Twenty years ago, the only grades we ever had in law school were finals.
Give homework, have TAs go over it with students, have a final, which is the only thing graded.
Classes are for bringing you toward mastery, isn't it? You should pass based on mastery, not effort. I don't give a shit if my pilot tries really hard to fly. I care if he successfully flies.
I don't see the point of universities at all anymore. They were originally places you went because you couldn't learn a thing anywhere else. Now you can learn anything, anywhere.
Example: If you want to learn to do something with your hands, it normally needs to be taught in person, so you can try to do it, fail, the teacher tells you what you did wrong, shows you how, you do it again and it works. But this can now almost entirely be done with AI. A YouTube video shows you how. You practice it on camera. An AI watches the video, tells you where you went wrong, and shows you specific clips to improve. You do it again until you get it right.
The piece of paper you get from a University doesn't need to come from "A University". Any organization that can give you a test in person can see whether you do the thing right or not and give you a certification if you do.
So really all we need now is an AI Khan Academy and independent testing/certification.
The machine can't do your work. It can automate some of it, but the work isn't done until a human has verified it, and may need to fix it, modify it, etc. That's why we still teach. And we must verify people learned, through tests, practice, etc.
Don't believe the crazy lies that AI can replace your job. AI can't replace anyone's job, because it lies, cheats, hallucinates, can't learn from its mistakes, and can't be held liable.
I had two classes like this, zero grades over the semester, they were among my favorite. Though we didn't really ponder what we were doing there and the means for final grades, for the admins, were both interesting (final test too long and hard, you already know what your grade is)
I had a class like this, Discrete Mathematics, with no grades or assigned homework and just a graded midterm and final. It was easily my least favorite class; I didn't know where to spend my time and spent most of the semester wandering aimlessly through the material. The final was very difficult but open book (to help make up for the lack of structure in the course?) and ended up having a ridiculous curve.
These things are definitely down to the professor. Both of my cases were great teachers. My Calc 3 class was probably the worst, the prof always showed up 20m late, but he pulled the most funding in the department, so he did whatever he wanted.
Grades are a way for teacher and student to check their learning, but teaching still needs to happen regardless of checkpoints. Some subjects require practice, like pre-proof writing in math and many other introductory to intermediate level courses. This is where homework comes in handy.
For my set theory class, the professor still assigned problems, he just never collected or graded them. For my Data Sci 2 seminar, it was only seven of us and we did several presentations and a papers.
I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue.
Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to
The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis
You're not wrong about grading being largely a numerical ranking system for resource allocation - with minimal effort from the allocator.
Even in the age of AI, I think I still prefer a portfolio system where you accumulate a body of work that you can present and defend in an interview for a job or graduate school position. Unfortunately diligent portfolio assessment can be a lot of work when there are hundreds of applicants for a single slot, so the first stage is usually reviewing a summary or list of work rather than the work itself, and that system can be gamed.
In any case, personalized feedback for student work is still very useful, and it may be more beneficial if it is focused on helping students individually rather than ranking them or sorting them into bins.
Without some sort of pre- and post-assessment, it can be hard to determine whether students actually learned anything in a course. The question is: how do you use that information? I think it should primarily be used as feedback to the students and the instructors, with the aim of improving learning.
So, the guy who does brain surgery on you... you want him to have taken some electives he was interested in, passed for having a pulse, then sent off to work in the operating room? Or, should he be required to have gotten at least 80% of questions right on a test of his surgical knowledge?
I'm a bit mixed on this. A lot of graded work is busywork, but a benchmark is needed to see whether concepts are landing or not before midterms or finals, and the easiest way for that is some kind of grading.
Break down the learning objectives to measurable experiment replication then:
Show one, do one, teach one
If you can’t do one or teach one you dont move to the next step.
It’s literally just how apprenticeship works and there’s no reason you can’t do that for calculus or intro to economics and especially applicable to EE, ME, CE
Teaching in academic settings is absurdly inefficient and counterproductive in my experience
Apprenticeship is a good model. The tutorial system also seems to work at some universities.
Personally I have found well-organized, clearly presented university courses to be great ways to learn the material. The combination of readings, textbooks, lectures, tutorial sessions, writing, labs, problem sets, course projects, etc. has been effective for me. Good textbooks and online resources have also been very helpful. Obviously it only works if you actually do the work yourself.
Brian Harvey, who taught CS 61A at Berkeley for decades (and wrote Berkeley Logo and Simply Scheme and Snap! and The Beauty and Joy of Computing), was making this argument long before AI. From "Using Computers for Educational Freedom":
Brian> Students learn best through intrinsic motivation, not through force. What you learn under pressure doesn't last past the exam. Everyone says these things, and yet almost all teachers continue to give grades. Why? "It's required"; "The colleges need grades"; "The parents wouldn't stand for it"; "It's the way things are." In short, the reasons for grades are political.
At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School he built a computer course of self-paced units with no grades, and about 50 kids had keys to the computer center and used it evenings and weekends without adult supervision. In his Snap!Con 2025 talk for the ACM Karlstrom award he said why the no-grades part mattered:
Jens> Okay. I've I've got one more question, Brian. Um, when you showed that picture of Sbury High of the Computer Lab users, computer center user Society Society, you very carefully and conscientiously mentioned every name with the title my friend, Jonathan, my friend. And that struck me as something uh that there might be a deeper message from you behind that.
Brian> Yeah. Yeah. Um, everything conspires to make teachers the enemies of kids. Not because any teacher wants that, but because institutions have a lot of weight. And when you're giving somebody grades, you can't be their friend. It just doesn't work like that. You're not their friend, you're a hurdle they have to overcome.
Brian> So yeah, it was really important to me that they let me not give grades and I think that made the whole thing possible and I couldn't have done it otherwise.
Brian> Mostly, people who talk about AI in education see it as a threat: kids will use it to cheat; or maybe AI will replace teachers so we won't have jobs anymore. Or sort of the best of these views is we don't know yet what skills kids are really going to need in an AI dominated world. Supposing that we have one. I'm pretty confident that AI won't replace teachers for rich kids -- and computers already replace teachers for poor kids, long before AI. The poor kids sit in front of computers that give them arithmetic problems. So it's not as if uh we're opening up a can of worms that's brand new.
AI didn't create the problem with graded homework. It just made it impossible to keep pretending the grade measures the learning.
The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution.
You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.
>This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
No, that's not common at all, nor how the system works. Use of graders/TAs are on an institution basis.
"Grant money" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes. When grant money is used to hire graduate students, they are research assistants and must work on the research project which the grant money was given for.
TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets. Tuition dollars are much more preferred anyway because they're stable and faculty do not have to work for them, they show up based on enrollment.
The fact you have TAs/graders at all is by institution. Large R1 institutions have grad students and undergraduate population to fill these roles. In these institutions, 1 minimally sized undergrad class = at least 1 TA, with additional TAs and graders after some enrollment threshold.
Tenure has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adjunct faculty get TAs/graders all the same.
Indeed, to support your point, I had a teaching assistantship for my first two years of grad school, meaning that I worked on an as-needed basis for things like supervising labs, proctoring exams, grading papers, etc. It was funded by the department. Where I went to school, the TA workload was pretty light.
Then I got a research assistantship, which was funded by my advisor's grant. I meant that I got paid to do my thesis research, and no longer had to teach. This was a precondition for joining his group.
My group was new, lacking much in the way of research funds. Therefore, we taught for support (Chemistry): lab proctor, recitation leader. Somebody had to wrangle those 1000 people taking 1st-year chemistry. Pre-med, pre-vet, pre-dental, biology and a rare chemistry major or two. In return, the department covered my living expenses. This was in ancient times, but I figure similar mechanisms exist today because the student base seems to be quite similar.
>The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first >place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured >professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them >(I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.
Again, I’m not making a moral statement. But you yourself basically just said grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor. (BTW, I teach at a small school and do all my own grading each semester for between 45-80 students depending on the courses I’m teaching that semester)
So if grading is part of the development process for a graduate student, then go ahead and continue. But that’s not the claim in the article. And if grading doesn’t serve a purpose anymore, then stop doing it. You can pay your assistants to do nothing for 20 hrs/week, or you can find literally anything else for them to do.
I went to a larger university, and was in the math department for most of my coursework. My math homework was graded by fellow undergraduate students who received a rubric and selected 4 problems per homework set, out of about 8ish (most classes. A few tough classes only assigned 2-3 proofs or so a week) but the TAs would grade the exams and the professors wouldn’t grade anything. Homework was at most 15-20% of one’s grade, exams being the rest. But most of my professors didn’t care about the homework as it was a tool for learning the material that was on the exams.
In some fields (maybe not mathematics) the graduate students could spend more time doing original research, assisted by teams of undergrads. That would likely make for a more productive learning experience than traditional homework assignments.
Research tends to be deep but narrow - more like an internship than an undergraduate semester; courses can focus on teaching the fundamentals and background material in a broader and more systematic way.
It’s an economic issue. Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid. In fact, grad students are lucky they aren’t being asked to pay extra to be provided with research topics and lab time to pursue them. Maybe that’s another step in the monetization of higher education.
> grad students are lucky they aren’t being asked to pay extra to be provided with research topics and lab time to pursue them
It depends on the field, but grad student wages in science and engineering are usually much lower than what industry would pay for similar work. Academic research is very cost-effective because most of the work is done by underpaid graduate students.
> Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid
Literally how grants work.
If the undergrads are still paying tuition then the economics won't change. They'll just be paying for more practical experience instead of graded homework.
> Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid
It is the _main_ activity which "generates value" for an institution, whose primary goal is conducting research.
> grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor
Isn't there a P != NP element to this? Doing the work is hard. Checking it is not.
If a student honestly attempted a problem and failed, diagnosing the failure may be worth the professor's time, but given the bunchiness of undergrad (and frankly, any junior learning) mistake varieties, chances are the TA can identify the issue as well.
Sort of, but not really. For multiple guess type tests, there is that element. However, other types of tests and particular homework, there's not that as much. We're not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques.
At least this is about math where there is usually a single right answer. For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points? There's should be debate over even what is the right points in any large work. And so if you're convincing in your argument of what is the important points, you can pass homework.
Edit, fix autocorrect
> multiple gas type test
Multiple choice?
> not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques
A student honestly attempting math problems, if it’s a well-designed problem, shouldn’t be able to get multiple answers right with wrong methods.
> For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points?
I’d say a professor should be grading English essays. But a TA can grade short answers, e.g. did you grasp the theme or understand an extratextual reference.
> Grading is part of what it means to be a TA,
Checking students' homework is part of what it means to be a TA. Grading is a choice the university makes; it's absence makes one no less of a TA.
> being a TA is not some awful exploitation
It's certainly exploitation. For some TAs, who get overworked and lorded over, and in universities when the pay is low, it's awful exploitation. For most TAs it is 'regular' exploitation of getting a crappy salary for serious highly-skilled work.
The 90s is 30 years ago. You are out of touch with how things work now.
As other commenters said, graders are certainly not paid from grant money at US institutions. NSF (which funds most mathematicians in the US) would never allow it, and grants are usually much better spent getting grad students off teaching so they can get research done. Teaching assistant (TA) funding would ultimately come from the university. Sometimes it is optional, i.e, a faculty member can request a TA or grader for certain courses but does not get one automatically. Some courses, like large entry-level calculus, cannot be run without teams of TAs teaching recitations.
I'm on the math faculty at a R1 (public) university, and we've not had a budget for graders for most courses for a very long time, with the exception of e.g., very large courses. For most classes the instructor does all the grading. Grading has been a significant fraction of my time teaching, certainly much more than what I can spend on preparing lectures and other teaching-related work. Moreover, much of the time grading is giving feedback, figuring out partial credit, etc; just checking "correct" or "incorrect" is often relatively quick.
In the last couple years, my personal experience has been that (i) a very small (and possibly vanishing) fraction of students are declining to use AI, or at least use it sparingly, because they want to learn; (ii) a growing percentage are using it as a personal tutor; and (iii) some are outright outsourcing all the work. The last category is small, but if that category grows (anecdotally this seems to be the case -- I've mostly taught grad courses in the last year and don't have first-hand knowledge) then what would be the point of spending all that time grading and giving detailed written feedback?
Incidentally, many students in the second category are the type who in years past would form study groups, come to office hours, etc.; now they seem to prefer AI over humans. Some of them do seem to benefit from it, but not all. How one uses AI matters a lot, and how to help students use the tech to learn is something we have to figure out (regardless of how we feel about AI's impact on research).
> They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.
Human Interviewer: Congratulations on making it to the 12th interview!
Candidate: Hey, I'm honored to be talk to another human for once!
Human Interviewer: That's funny. And true! Now, it says here you're a recent college grad student.
Candidate: That's right. Had to increase that sweet, sweet earning potential.
Human Interviewer: Also funny, also true! Honestly, what I learned in Intro to Game Theory alone has probably increased my earning potential by 15, maybe even 20%.
Candidate: Oh man, I remember that class! My professor gave up on grading homework that semester because of ChatGPT, and that weighted the midterm and final so much. I never did so much plugging and chugging in my life!
Human Interviewer: That's great. Well, that's about it. Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you. We'll be in touch.
Candidate: ???
> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.
Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.
The service being paid for is not homework grading. Homework grading is merely one part of how the service has historically been implemented, but if changing circumstances make grading homework less useful, then not grading homework is the service provider doing their job.
> These students paid (a lot of) money for this service
The schools are providing two services to students, not one. There's one directly and the other indirectly. And those two services are sometimes at odds.
The direct service is to teach them. Skills, knowledge, perspectives, critical thinking, etc.
The indirect service is to act as a proxy for people and organizations in the world to avoid having to do a thorough examination of a person's abilities. A degree is an attestation that a student has cleared all the hurdles and accomplished something of value. The better the reputation of the institution, the more value this service is to a student.
Just because students are paying for the direct service doesn't mean they aren't also paying for the indirect one too, it's just that the reputation has been established by all the students that came before and these students will be affecting the reputation for students coming afterwards.
Regardless, because a huge chunk of the service is that attestation, it's not as simple as the customer pays so the customer should get what they want. The universities need to figure out a way to maintain the value of their attestation in the face of students who try to subvert the evaluation process and a changing world. And if homework is providing little value in that regard, some rethinking might be warranted. They could assign it and optionally grade it on request for students who want their work evaluated but make it clear that it bears no connection to the grade that leads to the degree. They could come up with some other means of evaluating whether students have worked or learned the material. They could rework the material to account for the existence of AI. Just like calculators or the internet changed the work environment to obviate previously valuable skills, today's students will be living their lives in a world where AI exists and certain previously valuable skills will not be valuable going forward. A university's job is to produce the most capable person for the environment in which they will live their life. If the old curriculum isn't doing that, the curriculum needs to be rethought. And homework might take on a different role or be significantly less important in that rethought curriculum.
Is that what the students are really paying for? Even before LLMs, some of my college classes had optional and ungraded homework. Students could show up for discussion sessions to ask questions and get help from the instructor or teaching assistants if needed, but that didn't impact their grades. That seemed to be a reasonable approach, although it might vary by subject.
Doing homework is a time-tested, proven way to learn. That is why schools around the world continually assign homework and then grade it. I don't care that you get the right answer. If my daughter's first grade teacher really wanted to subtract 7 from 9, she would grab a calculator or just do it herself. But my daughter is assigned that work anyway because my daughter needs to do those things to learn.
There is and always will be debate on what's worth learning, but if we decide that something is worth learning, it is worth learning to do it yourself, not have AI do it. Schools all over have a big problem with that because kids are using AI to do things that we believe are learning. Is this something that's important to learn or should we now say, you know what? Everyone has an AI. Let's stop teaching these stupid things that AI does well and start teaching other things. That's a question I'm not going to answer, only time will tell and we'll have other debates in the future along similar lines about something else.
This discussion is about college, not first grade. College students who want to do homework to learn more are still free to do so. No one is stopping them.
People of all ages rarely do hard things that are good for them. Colleges have long assigned homework. My daughter has enough time reserved in class to do the work without taking it home.
Many of the 3rd-tier institutions are going to go bankrupt anyway. Demographic changes had already made that inevitable but AI has accelerated the timeline. If they want to survive at all then they'll need to reinvent themselves as vocational training facilities or senior assisted living or something. This is going to be rough for the faculty, and will make the process of finding a tenure track teaching position even more brutal.
> Many of the 3rd-tier institutions are going to go bankrupt anyway
Source? I have been reading this every year since like the financial crisis.
The number of students graduating high school peaked in 2025 and has now started a gradual decline. Colleges are essentially now playing a game of "musical chairs" competing for students and there aren't enough to go around. The elite institutions and cost-effective state schools will probably be fine but less exclusive private colleges without a solid value proposition have no clear path to survival.
https://www.wiche.edu/resources/report-u-s-high-school-gradu...
> number of students graduating high school peaked in 2025 and has now started a gradual decline
Hasn’t this happened after each boom generation?
How do we know that was a peak? There's only been one more year of data
We have pretty accurate counts of numbers of babies born each year, and number of child immigrants. So that makes it straightforward to forecast the number of high school graduates. People are having fewer children.
Well since you mentioned it, I posit that most of the financial issues the world is facing today is because the GFC wasn’t allowed to occur, it’s been a slow bleeding out ever since.
All of them will. There's zero value in higher education nowadays. In fact I'd argue there's negative value. An inquisitive 13 year old backed by AI can be more productive and resourceful than a team of 100+ Ivy League educated PhDs. Sad, but true. And this is today. Fast forward twenty years after massive AI augmented improvements of hardware and more advanced models have occured and it's game over.
Have you ever… been in an actual lab..? There are more disciplines in the world than computer science, you know
A hyper inquisitive 13 year old was never the target market of universities anyways. Historically they've always done very well.
> hyper inquisitive 13 year old was never the target market of universities anyways. Historically they've always done very well
Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.
A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one. If you've met an exceptionally brilliant small-town mechanic, you see how that applies within countries as well.
> Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.
I have no idea what you mean by this. I'm pretty sure that inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones do as well or better than dimwits in war zones, and I'm absolutely sure it's selected for. I don't know why you think stupidity is an advantage in a dangerous or difficult situation.
Too many resources are invested in children who would do well no matter what situation you put them in; imo as a retroactive justification for withdrawing resources for racist reasons. You'd think if you had an intellectually inferior group (whether genetically or due to environmental reasons), you'd invest most of your resources into them - but instead it's generally used as an excuse to withdraw resources.
The biggest secret when it comes to selective schools and universities, is that you don't have to do anything to a smart kid in order to graduate a smart kid. If the reputation of your institution is based on the achievements of its alumni rather than the improvement of its students, selecting for smart kids is loading the dice. They'd do well without you.
That's basically the model of the modern private university: give full scholarships to really talented kids (who have already proved their superiority in often very adverse circumstances), and charge the sky to the idiot children of the upper middle class, who gain prestige through paying for the credentials that the talented were paid to take.
> A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one.
I have no idea how you've decided this. I don't even know what you think a rich country is. If it's rich with no class mobility and no access to higher education or reasonable subsistence for the poor, he'll do badly. If he's in a peaceful poor country without an overbearing class structure, where he can learn in his leisure and his belly is always full, especially now with communication the way it is, he'll be able to do whatever he wants to do. The problem might be class war zones, not war zones. An bright poor kid is running the risk of getting shot or disappeared for doing his best to improve the lives of the people around him in a way the bosses don't like.
By what measure of productivity?
> An inquisitive 13 year old backed by AI can be more productive and resourceful than a team of 100+ Ivy League educated PhDs
This isn't necessarily a good thing. cf The Lisp Curse.
HN’s love for the Platonic autodidact meets HN’s agreement with whatever tech SC is shoving down our throats (mudulo “sad but true” or whatever value judgements which still agree with the investor trajectory).
If the value of higher education is purely book learning, sure. But if the value is signaling and the creation of ingroups that will become future elites, they can be valuable even if you do not learn a thing in class. It's a debate about elite higher education that has been going on for decades, as top institutions refuse to grow their class sizes, even as they could find 4x the students that would fit qualifications.
The "elite overproduction" theory might also factor in here. For society as a whole it's better not to have more students graduating from elite institutions than there are elite jobs for them to fill. The disappointed, underemployed extras tend to cause social unrest. But it sucks for the individuals who get unfairly locked out of those opportunities through no fault of their own.
Then AI might also struggle to find a big enough market, no? Or will it move into things like plumbing?
The AI will be pushed everywhere, but as it's currently not succeeding at driving across the USA without a human around for emergency intervention* despite a trillion or so miles of real world experience, I suspect the initial success of AI in plumbing looks more like "humans being meat robot e.g. by wearing AR headset while physically at customer site" and less like "AI controlling metal robot that is physically at customer site".
That said, the economics of AI… eh. I can see it replacing the $3T/year cost of hiring software developers, but this doesn't mean people will spend $3T/year on AI; I mean, Wikipedia killed demand for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but nobody values Wikipedia at the 16 trillion or so USD you'd get by multiplying the cost of the EB with how many people are online.
* even the CyberCab, which was announced as "no steering wheel or pedals", is geofenced and if it's like their other vehicles has human observers on standby for remote control.
When I reed comments like yours I can't help but wonder if you got rejected by the university you wanted to go to or failed to graduate.
Grading homework is still less degrading then the other shenanigans that professors use students for- as in ghost writting books, having them program apps as unpaid labour or doing similar stuff - including renting them out to other companies on campus as free labour. Academia is just very casty at times..
> as in ghost writting books, having them program apps as unpaid labour or doing similar stuff.
Presumably at this point anyone tasked with such will offload it to an LLM?
Academia is just a bunch of egotistical people forcing kids to work on their particular hobbies and if the kids don't enjoy it, the professors have the potential to signal a bad reputation to employers. The system is kind of disgusting. Students should be given much more free reign in what they study.
Graduate students spend 10-20 hours a week grading homework, it's a very time intensive process. But I agree, HW should only be an experience. The entire grade should be determined by an in class midterm and final.
I don’t know Borcherds, so this isn’t intended to sound mean to him, but he could pay his TAs or RAs to do hula hoops naked in public for 40 hours a week and it wouldn’t affect him. He’s a high profile mathematician and the worst thing is that next year’s grant money is a little less and he can’t pay for as much naked hula hooping spectacle.
Entire math departments at multiple lower profile schools will close their doors before he has any actual concern about his future as an academic.
But your point is correct for other professors, much less secure in their positions, who have similar problems with AI and actually do have to concern themselves about using their TAs and RAs productively.
He doesn't pay TAs. The university does. They work for the university, not for individual professors. If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.
If Borcherds accepts TAs then they work for him. The point was that he can do practically whatever he wants and doesn't have to worry about it harming him.
Thanks for explaining to me how the academic system I work in functions. Just like most managers don't literally pay their employees, the company does. The university pays TAs through funds from their various revenue streams, including endowment, tuition, grants to the university, and through indirect costs collected from research grants to researchers, probably including Borcherds own grants. So really a lot of different things pay the TAs, the university is just the clearing house.
> He doesn't pay TAs. The university does. They work for the university, not for individual professors.
faculty research overhead pays for department TAs. that's why departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts.
> If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.
define:irony
>faculty research overhead pays for department TAs
The majority comes from tuition budgets, which are assigned per credit-unit. This also pays for faculty salaries. Math is heavily dependent on tuition because they get little overhead. Life sciences is buying millions of dollars of equipment, chemicals, animals, lab staff that incur overhead, none in math.
>departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts
In fact the University of California does not get to keep any overhead. It goes right back into the State of California General Fund and the CA Legislature, as part of the budgeting process, decides where it goes (obviously considering where it came from). During a budget squeeze, overhead can be diverted elsewhere.
Because of this, for a number of years, it was unknown whether the research enterprise at the University of California was actually covering its overhead costs or operating at a loss.
How well do scores on such exams correlate with future success in life post college? (Define success however you like.) Like what are we actually trying to measure here?
There is no “earning potential” to be gained in a world where you simply ask machine to do X and it does it for you.
We might not quite be there but we’re trucking towards that point at full speed.
I mean, we used to have a world like that once upon a time...
It took me a bit, but I eventually got what you meant. For those of you puzzling over it, fakedang is referring to chattel slavery.
> The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade.
Whether he graded it, or his assistants graded it, I’m not really sure how that matters at all to the point.
One of my freshman math teachers gave grades out for 3 tests and none on homework. He also told us that if we didnt take the first 2 tests, it wouldn't count against us and only the grade on our final would count. Along with that he had extensive open office hours.
It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question.
I dont like AI destroying some of our systems but if we return back to the sort of learning that college used to be where it was self directed with guidance from professors, I will count that as a win over the factory worker production system that high school was and universities were starting to ape.
The situation in American academia is something long mirrored in colleges in other countries.
You went to college because it was the only way to get a job that paid well.
When other vocations stopped having the ability to ensure people could enjoy social mobility, people focused on the only pathways left.
I'm going through a self-paced AI intro course right now that was put up online from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the more interesting things the professor says right up front is that while they provide a validation framework to test your homework against and they hold back some pieces of it so you have a hidden checker... There is no ethics expectation that you won't use AI on the problem and you can submit the results against the checker as often as you want.
His thinking is quite simple on this... There's absolutely nothing he could do, practically, to prevent you from feeding the questions straight to an AI and having it kick out the answers. But since this is a self-taught, self-selected course... His advice is to not do that until you get well and truly stuck, and only then will you have enough attempts built up to compare to the answer to understand the concept you're missing.
I think it's a decent middle ground for an online published self taught course. But I don't know that such an approach works in terms of, say, a Carnegie Mellon University being able to continue to charge the tuition it does for the courses that aren't self-taught.
Some of my engineering professors had a policy that you couldn't get a lower grade in the class than your grade on the final. You could and they said some students did turn in no work at all and still got an A based on the final.
This motivation is why, when I was in grad school, I never liked handing out grades. I would have rather just marked the problems I found with a HW submission, added notes where appropriate, and that's it. If no grade is given, it is obvious that you have provided the student the service of reading and checking their work, rather than allowed them to increase their 'score' or collect 'points'.
In interviews I sort of bit the bullet and do pair ai coding interviews - you just have to change with the times
My guess based on my experience as a math major is that they just stop giving homework and the in class tests become more rigorous (can’t imagine how much harder they could have made these at my school at least)
My point is that no matter what tool you’re using, at some point you have to stretch your brain and the exams/screenings/etc just haven’t caught up to how to stretch someone’s brain in this new world and I’ve found just embracing the thing to be a better approach than any sort of pearl clutching
> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.
No structure needed, the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people. It’s the actual business model; undergraduate education is break even, the only way money is ever made is alums donating to the school due to the feel-good memories they formed when they attended.
Unfortunately, for schools who thought their purpose was to educate, they will be made obsolete in the near future. Expect a lot of schools to close.
But those places that always understood their purpose was for affluent young adults to mingle and connect with other affluent people, they will be just fine.
> the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people
Post-GI Bill. Before university was universal, there was a strong philosophical angle to the enterprise. (Also meet your generation's rich kids, that's always been a part of it.)
The irony is that homework barely helped even before AI. I feel like we should move more into self grading extra material for students to peruse if they are unsure about their ability in the subject, rather than adding chore to those that are fine and a point of worry for those that need that bit extra.
Maybe in some other subjects. Not in mathematics. When I did my math degree a large amount of the learning came via doing problem sets and this was a very common experience among other students too.
> homework barely helped even before AI
Really? When I'm reading textbooks nowadays for fun, I absolutely do the problems at the end of the chapter. It tells you when you think you learned something but didn't.
The good thing about AI is that it never tells you when you actually didn't learn anything. So you're left feeling like a genius, with good feelings!
As an aside, the professor in question is Richard Borcherds, fields medalist. He is probably most well known for proving the “Monstrous Moonshine” conjecture of Conway and Norton that there is some sort of correspondence between modular functions and representations of the Monster Group. When the conjecture was made in the 1970s, it was purely because someone noticed that a certain number was the same as the cardinality of the monster group. It seemed a crazy coincidence, so John H Conway said (playfully) that it was “Moonshine”. Hence the name “Monstrous Moonshine”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine
He has a youtube channel with lectures in number theory, category theory and other things.
Thanks for mentioning this. I just realized that the Monster Group has approximately as many elements as the Earth has atoms (|MG| ~ 8*10^53)
> As an aside, the professor in question is Richard Borcherds, fields medalist.
I get what you're saying but credentialism of this kind has literally zero meaning today. For instance restating your opening sentence as "As an aside, the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents" sounds far more credible and intimidating at this point.
> the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents
Yet the folks with access to unrestricted Mythos agents tackling mathematics are hiring credentialed mathematicians. Your heuristic, applied to itself, rejects itself.
They _were_. OpenAI/Anthropic are fully RSI at this point.
> They _were_. OpenAI/Anthropic are fully RSI
Source?
EDIT: It’s news to my friend who’s high up at one of them!
Hahahahaha
We’re a long way from that world. Does your company even interview people who don’t fit the requirements of a job position? No, of course not. So what are you filtering on, if not credentials.
This guy doesn’t just have credentials. He has record of proven results.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. Access to AI doesn’t make you more credible. At best, it makes you more productive.
You are suffering from AI psychosis.
Perhaps you think so, but most people disagree.
lol yes, a monkey with no mathematical training but an army of agents is a better mathematician than a literal fields medallist.
The better LLMs get at math the better the people using them need to be to be able to ask them the right questions and understand their output.
This is quite sad. Even if students would cheat off each other, someone had to do the homework. And even the collaboration of cheating on homework always served as a forcing function for me or others to think about the material. If not actively, at least in the form of a quasi background radiation. With AI that is completely gone, and without reward loops for incremental work, the truth is there is a large number of people (especially 18-20 year olds) who will not do well on the exams because they need a bit of a stick.
I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.
Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place. We have pushed far too many youths into college as the default option, and that hasn't been good for the students or the institutions.
There are plenty of people who have the innate intelligence and intellectual curiosity to succeed in college, but come out of high school lacking discipline and clueless about what they want to study. They would be better off spending a few years working or serving in the military or something to get their shit together first, and then enroll in college later. Those students tend to have clearer goals and take the educational experience more seriously.
> Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place
Well, that raises an interesting philosophical question. What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Surely you agree that there are a wide variety of teaching styles present among all college professors. If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material? Why is this an issue with the student, and not the professor not being teaching material, or the university not being facilitator-of-education material for failing to match students and professors well?
I agree that people have been pushed into college as a default option due to it being overloaded as both place of learning but also printing salary-granting papers, but it's NOT clear to me that students who need the specific stick mentioned in some cases are broadly unsuited for higher learning.
> What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?
Any that are self motivated.
> If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material?
Honestly, no. It shows a lack of (a) institutional-navigational skills, e.g. change your professor, (b) flexibility to different learning "styles" (which are increasingly being shown to be a myth) and/or (c) ability to circumvent adversity, e.g. by reading the textbook, finding online videos or hunting down a study group. That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
Modern college students are basically afforded the freedoms and privileges of a classical scholar with a wealthy patron. Their day-to-day needs are taken care of. They have access to massive libraries. They have access to lectures and professors at office hours. And they navigate all of it with a pre-selected cohort of similar students.
(To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.)
> That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.
I disagree, because muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life.
> To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.
Again, I disagree.I mean, I agree on its face, in that a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree.
But we're talking about people who aren't motivated and capable. The best path to something resembling success for people who lack the motivation and capability to be successful on their own, is to muddle through the university system and by whatever necessary means get the piece of paper.
College at large is not a waste of time for these people. Until the downstream society stops valuing a degree as it does, time spent getting the degree is not wasted, because it yielded the degree. If the paper is had, the time was well spent, regardless of how that time was actually spent or whether anything was learned.
> muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life
True [1]. I'm not debating the individual incentives. (I wasn't clear about this earlier.) I'm just not convinced a college graduate who muddled through is worth 75% more to an employer or society than a high school grad who muddles.
> a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree
For a binary measure of success, yes. A successful person empowered with a peaceful, rich society and challenging college experience will do better than one without.
[1] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-happened-to...
I agree with everything you said here :)
In the real world, those on the bottom of the social hierarchy (such as undergrad students) need to adapt to the styles of those on the top (professors). Perhaps that's unfair but it's just the way the world operates. College can be a great environment to learn that essential life skill of adaptability. Find a way to succeed even when you're in a shitty environment surrounded by toxic people.
If we're talking about "the way the world operates", then because of how society values college degrees, any path that gets you the piece of paper is a worthwhile and valuable one. Whether that path involves learning, complaining until given a passing grade, or forcing/convincing your professors to accommodate your preferred style of "learning".
This is something that needs to be fixed downstream, by making the paper less valuable. Making the paper more difficult to get instead is just manufacturing misery because of people too stubborn to pull their heads out of the sand and admit that the function of undergrad is the salary paper, and self-motivated learning has been largely relegated to grad school.
It's not about "teaching style". It's about having intrinsic motivation vs having to be motivated with a stick and threat of failure.
It's about having to be externally motivated for that particular assignment. Or class of assignment, whatever.
There are often a variety of tasks which are graded. Homework, exams, presentations, labs, etc. Every class and professor sets the mix of valuation of these differently, and has different quantities of each. That's teaching style.
If you hate presentations and cannot be roused to make one except by threat of failure, but are great at learning the material and pass the exams with ease, then that's a teaching style incompatibility.
It depends on what college is really for.
Much of college is a social signaling mechanism. Well over a decade ago one of my family members, with a degree of shame had to explain to a friend why I didn’t finish my BA.
A lot of middle and upper class people use college as a way to filter people. You can argue our top universities also serve as finishing schools.
I did, after reaching six figures anyway, finish my BA. The shame is gone.
Or does it still linger as I went to a middle of the road state school. Not Stanford, Yale or even Berkeley.
Honestly I originally attended community college in part to get grant money/loans which allowed me to get a cheap apartment. As a bonus I meet a lot of cool people, read Howard Zinn.
Sure, there are fundamental questions about what college should really be for. Should the focus be on training competent employees or educating well-rounded citizens or anointing social elites or eliminating injustice or advancing the frontiers of human knowledge? Everyone seems to be coming to the debate with different unstated assumptions about that.
You guys are acting like you can only live at one of two extremes: purely self-motivated, or purely grade driven.
For most students it’s a mix of the two.
ah yes, instead of giving students homework, have them serve in the military for a few years until they’re ready for college
Sure, why not? That's not the best option for everyone but worked out well for several people I know.
It didn't work so well for elementary school students in Iran.
Back when I was a student, 25+ years ago, many professors were a bit lazy. They just re-used problem sets which they had made earlier. No single year would be alike, but the problem sets would still be from a larger collection.
The students would then hand down the big book of problem and solution sets down to the freshman class.
The professors, still being a bit lazy, knew this. But instead of scarping the old problems, they'd just say that cheating only hurts the students doing it - as the homework grades would not influence the final grade. And sure enough, the students that never did their own work, rarely did well (if at all passed) on the finals exam.
When I was at university, a student caught cheating was cause for being expelled.
I am recruiting college kids right now, impeccable pedigrees, elite universities. Our recruitment process involves the kids recording videos where they answer questions as a pre-screening. They are explicitly told not to use AI for the exercise. I have the Claude and ChatGPT answer to those questions on my screen while I review their responses. 40% read it pretty much verbatim. The paradox is I don't even care whether they knew the answer or not, but to me it's an integrity test.
Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.
I think this is hard to understate.
I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.
I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.
I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.
It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.
And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.
That is all gone now. What a shame.
There seems to be increasingly less of that these days
>Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.
You mean to plagiarize their work. Now finally the nerds also have the option to have somebody else do their work for them.
It should be social and other soft pressure to do homework, only the final exam should be graded.
Cheating always has been available as an option. AI just makes it faster. At Cal, you always had students who would still pursue doing things on their own even when not cheating led to lower grades. The reality of it all is that cheating catches up to you eventually and the later it does, the worse are the outcomes. If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.
Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?
> If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.
Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.
Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.
I think you’re conflating too many things here. Never claimed that the universe is fair nor do I claim that failing upwards isn’t a thing.
If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.
In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.
I know you chose 50/50 arbitrarily. But I think the real numbers are much worse. A few years ago, I stayed a couple nights at a hostel in a rural spot in Italy. I’m in my 50s, and most of the others there were Americans in their 20s, fairly recent grads. A dozen of us went out to dinner one night, and among the topics discussed was cheating in college. Only myself and one of the younger people said we did not cheat, the others all treated it as an expected part of the college experience. This isn’t exactly “data”, and perhaps there’s some sort of correlation between hostel-goer and cheater, but I was shocked at the numbers. And that was before LLM usage was common.
My read is it's pre- versus post-social media college experiences. There have always been a number of cheaters. But their blast radius of normalization was limited to their roommate or maybe even dorm floor. With social media, a single cheater at a single school can enable and normalize the practice for millions.
When I was young, public universities in Spain only evaluated the final exam. That was not a problem; it helped people become responsible. Nowadays, they have changed it to evaluate continuous homework, and students end up worse prepared.
Unfortunately the single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day? Can you perform under arbitrarily selected stressful conditions? Are your executive functions fine with that plan?
The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.
I liked my prof's approach to exams:
"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."
And he was right.
I certainly find that now, going back to uni. In a couple of subjects we get the option to prepare a cheat sheet, and I would say I actually look at less than 10% of it. The act of preparing it forces me to revise, and internalise the facts and ideas.
Only if you were planning to scrape by. If you actually know the material (the thing the exam is supposed to determine), you should do fine, and any good or bad luck will tend to average out by the time you graduate. Besides, there really aren't any alternatives left. Completed homework had some weak-ish signal for a while, but now it doesn't.
Your argument seems to imply that the only thing that an exam is possibly allowed to measure is ability to answer a question at some arbitrary point in time. It also separates the people with the wit to understand a bunch of topics in a span of 3 or 5 months, the ability to plan accordingly, enough self control, and some motivation to see the plan through from the ones that don't. That's not a bad thing, as diplomas are often used as a proxy not only for intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs.
The only thing I'm saying is that measuring once maximises the luck component. Sure, measure other things by proxy as well. But to borrow your phrase, understanding and taking into account the variability of real life behaviours, sampling noise and environment biases shows "not only intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs."
> maximises the luck component
No, it doesn't. Repeating it ad infinitum does that.
But therefore it's a good thing grades aren't just pass or fail, but have a range, from 1 to 10, or to 20 or whatever. Too bad there's so much external pressure on the system.
> Repeating it ad infinitum does that.
Take a moment to think about it. Why does the confidence interval go smaller with more samples? What does it say about the impact of luck in repeated tests?
What about frequent in-class proctored quizzes?
>single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day?
If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.
It's clear what pool the content will be from. But it's impossible to check everything. Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.
> barring rare emergencies
It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.
> Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.
In the case of calculus as an example, there should be nothing from the class you didn't have time to practice sufficiently. A full academic year is more than enough time to learn integrals, derivatives, sequences, and series with the small collection of tricks for solving difficult problems (telescoping series, trig sub, etc.) There's a couple dozen rules you learn that are straightforward to apply, and for the times they aren't obvious, there's like a dozen total tricks (trig sub, etc.).
I took these classes. I remember how most people just phoned in the entire thing and complained at the exam review sessions how hard everything was.
It's the simplest of memorization.
Interesting. Honestly I think about this much more in a cohort way. There’s some cohort of students who are extremely self motivated and mature and understand the way you do one thing is kinda the way you do all things. There’s another cohort that is completely checked out or whose priorities are not grades at all. For these cohorts I don’t think it makes a big different.
But it’s hard for me to imagine that for the cohorts in between (who definitely want to be motivated) having some forcing function is just an easier guiding hand to helping them become responsible vs. completely bombing a class and then potentially losing hope or self identifying as lazy/helpless - which I had seen all too often to some of my smartest classmates.
Regardless not saying this to invalidate your experience. Just hasn’t lined up with mine.
Ultimately the goal of education shouldn't just be a filter but it should ensure that as many people as possible learn the material. Homework allows for early intervention by faculty to get people back on track. There really are students who end up succeeding after this intervention.
The solution is not to feed students from spoon all the time. They are adults and should act as such, it is not a school where it is really important to give every child a chance. Grading homework must be opt-in. Those who want it, get the grade as a feedback, can seek for help then and get the help, those who skip should be assumed prepared for final exam and judged by it. There are millions of people in the world who can use education opportunities to their maximum, and the place should not be reserved to those who feel entitled by whatever privilege they have.
We observe that intervention leads to more students learning. I don't believe that "well they are adults they can fail if they want" is an excuse for a university refusing to take steps that they know would improve pedagogy.
I do agree that AI has made this basically useless. Rather than skipping homeworks or doing a bad job the students just cheat and there is no opportunity to notice and intervene. They get all the way to the screen-free final and fail.
I do not think that controlling homework does improve pedagogy at scale. Homework helps engaged and motivated students who are ready to accept the feedback. Maybe in your place they are majority and effects are visible. As soon as grades for homework become the goal, the Goodhart‘s law starts playing the role in the dynamics of relationships between students and teachers. AI has nothing to do with it, cheating with homework did always exist.
> I do not think that controlling homework does improve pedagogy at scale.
You are welcome to believe this. You are also wrong.
I am curious if you have ever taught at a university.
Even as technology has destroyed education as we know it, you and likely many others in education are still thinking about sticks?
The students have made it extremely clear to the teachers
Another angle on this is the tope that curriculum is so out of date your AI completed assignment may be ahead of the class subject matter. The real teacher is is having a motivation or need to do something and learning about what you need to learn to get the goal accomplished, AI can be a great companion for that journey, weeding out the sycophantic slop and getting to truth is the new challenge. There are a lot of elements to school that discourage curiosity (asking a stupid question in front of class) or being picked on for being a keener or other anti-intellectual "cool kid" mentalities. In the end we need to make the line between learning and success more obvious for young people, maybe that doesn't work when the definition of success includes fitting into a burocracy and letting the singing key be "4".
With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought.
No that will not happen as the company has to pay and it shows in their accounts.
Much cheaper not to train anyone and let the state or pupil pay for training.
See lack of apprenticeships for a case of this.
It is the other way around. Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State.
It is expensive because it confers greatly enhanced earning potential. Students borrow against that future income. Sometimes from the state.
It confers enhanced future income largely because of the inherent vetting process that asures future employers this person is able to focus for extended periods of time on intellectual tasks, is able to follow through and function within a bureaucracy. I don't think it's as much about skills, at least it's way overkill for the skills that are actually needed on the job for most jobs.
I don't see the rise of LLMs as obviating the "functional cog in the Rube Goldberg machine" training.
It is also expensive because the debt is very hard to get erased through bankruptcy, so private companies are now offering more money to people than is actually needed. So universities see this $ and raise prices.
Kinda like how tax breaks on housing initially help people, and then the market adjusts based on the new inflow of $.
This is just another way of saying that people go to school to buy access to the network, not for education itself.
> Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State. reply
The death of apprenticeships is because you are training your own competition. It worked in the past because you trained your kid for a trade that was arcane and took a couple decades to master, but now you'd be training someone with no loyalty to you in a field that can be speed run in a year or so with YouTube assistance.
You neo-liberals have been wrong about this for 40 years now. You wrought us all with your Reaganomics, and have had the full attention of every government for this entire time (except maybe in Cuba) and the results have been truly disastrous, climate catastrophe and all.
If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. The fact that we haven’t is proof that the promises of neo-liberalism are all lies.
> If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now.
Food. Consumer goods. Telecommunications services. Transportation. Clothes. All things that have gone down in absolute prices and relative amount of family income to be provided.
Education / Housing / Healthcare: all deemed "up to the State" and that takes increasingly more from people at ever diminishing returns.
We can have a long and serious conversation about how hard the Government should be involved in regulating these things, and how we could set up systems that ensure that these become universally available and not just for middle/upper class. We can even have a conversation about things that should be controlled by the Government even if it means a high cost to society. But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness.
> But to deny that things managed by the State are more expensive overall is a clear sign of ideological blindness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50208837
The way to solve this is not by giving the monopoly back to the state, but by the state enacting regulations thay allows smaller players to join the grid.
Europe has been doing this for 20 years now. I have yet to see successful results. And realizing each failure of Neo-liberal policy Europe keeps doubling or quadrupling down. I believe they are on their 4th energy package at the moment. I am sure the fate if this 4th attempt will be identical to the other efforts of making capitalism fix the problem, and identical to any other neo-liberal policy. Europe will have more billionaires and peoples energy bills will be higher.
As the saying in Europe goes: Neo-liberalism will continue until the economy improves.
Really?
Do we have 20 years already since people are allowed to set up a solar panel in their backyard and sell excess capacity to the grid?
Do we have 20 years where farmers can grow their own biodiesel to (at least) power their own machinery, or does the state giving them subsidies to let them keep growing vegetables, wine and beef without having to compete in the global market?
We have had 20 years of energy distribution and infrastructure going from government ownership and into private hands, where different private distributors are allowed to compete for customers on the same grid. These were energy packages 1-2 (if I remember correctly). The results have been higher energy prices for European households.
Energy package 3 was supposed to fix this with some additional regulation and standardization. It did not. Energy package 4 is supposed to fix this with more standardization and regulations (including distributed generation; which I am in favor of btw.) however, it will not.
The problem is the privatizations of the 2000s, not in the regulations surrounding small scale solar. The problem is neo-liberalism. Get rid of corporations rent-seeking on our infrastructure. Our energy bills will not become lower until then.
I'm a bit confused why you have housing and healthcare "up to the state". Are we talking about the United States or somewhere else?
I am guessing Germany or Europe more broadly. Germany is in a pretty bad neo-liberal wave right now, and have been getting worse for the past 10-15 years. And given Germany‘s influence in the EU the effects of this neo-liberal wave are felt across Europe, even in non-EU countries like Iceland (which is currently being fined by the EU for not privatizing garbage disposal fast enough).
However, if you look at the popular movements on the streets of Europe at the moment, you can see that the people are in fact not happy about this. There are very few political means of getting rid of neo-liberalism (see e.g. Spain for a clear example of what I mean) so people are turning to the streets as the only viable alternative.
>If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now
There's a wealth of clear evidence for this in the economic data in Eastern vs Western Europe, East Germany vs West Germany when Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule. The countries under Soviet rule were significantly poorer and to this day most still haven't caught up with their Western European counterparts.
Eastern Europe underwent shock therapy and are today in many ways more extreme in neo-liberal policies then the western part of the same continent.
Western Europe didn’t start neo-liberal policies until after the cold war ended, and it went into full gear around the year 2000.
In either case. Is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s? Are trains running cheaper? Is power transmission cheaper now that energy generation, and delivery have been split apart and sold to private investors on the public stock market?
No, the answer to all these questions are no. Because efficiencies in a system don‘t care about the ownership model, and neo-liberalism is a religious like creed that operates out of idealism for a world that does not exist.
> is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s?
Is it?
> Are trains running cheaper?
They're up about 6% in real terms (or about 0.23% a year) since 2000 [1]. That said, I don't think most European rail is privatized, so this is a strange example.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/product/page/PRC_H... deflated with CP00
> Is it?
Yes and no. Garbage disposal is more efficient now then it was in the mid-90s, but that has everything to do with the infrastructure and nothing to do with the ownership model. More on that later.
The ownership of infrastructure and the operation are split where private operators are allowed to compete with national operators on the same infrastructure. This is true for trains and electricity, and in some cases garbage disposal. Many of the national operators are publicly traded with the national government being the majority shareholder.
Some countries in Europe have gone much further in privatizing the rail network then others. The UK being the canonical example of privatization, and Norway being an example of a country privatizing more slowly.
If the promises of neo-liberalism were true, we should see the efficiencies gained in the UK compared to Norway. Yet, no such evidence exists. And that is because efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators.
> efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators
I mostly agree. Infrastructure quality (including institutional quality) dominates. Ideology is usually cover for a lack of evidence.
But ownership modes do create different incentive structures. Full private ownership is famously terrible in natural monopolies. It’s a well-known market failure and folks who proselytize fully privatized utilities are stupid or venal. For many other things, however, private ownership works. A good example is package delivery. (Train operation is a weird case. The UK fumbled. Italy did not. On the other end of the spectrum, DB is a trash fire.)
> Are trains running cheaper?
You are picking the textbook example of a natural monopoly as a way to argue against how free markets don't work?
Even in China companies are already doing this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/china-ai-ta...
I've heard this argument over decades and to this day it doesn't make any sense to me. You know what happens when you do that ivory tower thing? Those professions die.
I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.
To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.
Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.
You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.
Cs students I've talked to work on real software projects as part of their coursework. It is definitely not all theory.
The software projects you work on as coursework just give you the shallowest possible mechanical introduction on how to put together working code, and their point is almost always to demostrate some underlying theory like networking or distributed systems or graphics or whatever has been understood. It's not to pretend to produce anything viable in a commercial sense or please any imagined customer or market.
Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.
And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.
> I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.
They aren't the ones saying it. Parents, government officials and high school guidance counselors are telling everyone they need college to get a good job.
Colleges don't have to say anything thing about it but they raise their tuition abd accept the grant money while expanding their campuses to accommodate the rise in demand. That's exactly how a business would react to a growing market with rising demand and an influx of government money.
People pass through colleges on their way to getting a job and colleges oblige.
What op thinks colleges should be doing is accepting people who they think, with education, could contribute to the college's research fields. Think about the college tracks that lead to PhDs where the student stays with the university for some or all of their career. That's what OP is suggesting colleges become (or revert to, if that's what they ever were).
Maybe AI will be yet another disincentivized for higher education. When I was considering law school a decade ago, the overwhelming advices from existing attorneys was “unless you’re in the top 10% of the top 10% of universities, you’re wasting your time getting a law degree”. Seems very similar to university today (at least in the USA)
it is too challenging today to capture the value of training your early employees, labor markets too liquid
> With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought.
They'll probably just shut it all down.
With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway.
On research: If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.
> With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway
The generation of Americans that went to the moon had only 5-8% of people go to college. Whether someone is smart or dumb has little to do with formal higher education.
Ironically those on a government payroll are much easier to manipulate and control.
Education is not subsidized only because it's a public good.
The idea is AI is cheap enough and worth it for a company to invest in younger talent that will learn the specifics of the industry much faster. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, maybe university is reduced by 2 years or something.
> If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.
The OpenAI math dump showed that it’s not worth paying hundreds of PhD-years if a tech bro can do it with an agent.
The value of math does not consist in providing yes/no answers to conjectures.
What is the point of grading homework for college students anyway? The objective of exams is to determine mastery of the subject. It makes sense to have a grade act as a certificate of mastery.
Grading homework is a measure of conscientiousness and perhaps a pedagogical tool to force learning but by college perhaps we should have moved out of the need for the latter.
One can simply measure conscientiousness through attendance grade and mastery through exam grade and then we have two grades the universities can certify students for that are no longer dimension reduced into a single number.
To provide feedback on mistakes and help them learn. Unfortunately if you use the grade to contribute to their overall marks, some will cheat.
But that's easily solved - just don't reward cheating on homework.
We did not have homework per se in what we studied but we did have reading that was relevant for the purposes of tutorials and being prepared for lectures. We also had deliverables (assignments, presentations, practicals) that had grading, and proctored exams.
I found having deliverables helpful in knowing how one is tracking with progress and understanding of the subjects and largely reflective of the final exam result.
I've also had studies done that exams were either 80 or 100% of the grading and that was a lot more stressful without any significant added benefit. In fact given that there were fewer or no deliverables, perhaps even worse mastery / retention after exam completion.
Homework grades are supposed to provide feedback and some incentive to do the work.
However, counting homework grades toward course credit also creates an incentive to cheat. It probably makes sense to remove (or at least drastically reduce) that incentive.
> Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework.
In high school (2006) my physics teacher gave credit for handing in the homework (he checked it and handed it back, but no grade was assigned). Didn't hand in homework, you got a zero.
He knew then that if you assign grades to hw, people will cheat.
If I'm paying for Berkeley, the professor have office hours for me to ask questions.
Cambridge engineering had something similar called "standard credit" for minor assignments. You'd get the full mark by default, only losing marks if missing or egregiously bad. The exam at the end of each year carried almost all of the grade. It meant you had to engage with the work, but didn't turn it into an exhausting competition for the best coursework grades.
Yes I also had this in Uni at some point. Just going through the homework can be a huge effort. If the course is small enough, you probably don't want to hand in obvious junk/slop, especially if you're asked to present "your" solution.
In-class exams, either written or oral. If you don't do homework, it is only on you. And with paper and pen, the next semester, yes.
In high school math ,we usually had a stanupin the beginning of every lesson. Basically th entire class on their feet answering rapid fire questions from the teacher , usually some stuff that had been taught in the previous lesson. No calculator/notes just doing math in your head to get to sit down and start the class. Gnereally sucked when we were going through it , looking back though made digesting the material easier as you had to know, not just cram or hope for a calc or scrap paper to caluclate with.
So basically a oral pop quiz for math. i think could work well to complement homeworks by making sure the material as taught is actually inside the students heads.
you can only do things that suck when attendance isn't optional.
.... i'm hearing the solution in the question
> If you don't do homework, it is only on you.
The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences (EDIT: that is, doing poorly on the exam) are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
Then they lash out at the instructor, even if it’s really their fault.
Maybe it's changed, but when I went to Berkeley, it was really common that the homework counted for next to nothing and it was on you to do it since the majority of your grade (if not all) was on mid-terms and finals. No one really complained back then...maybe it's changed a lot, but if so, I'd say they should go back to their roots ;)
This, it’s all exams. Homework is something to help students study, I guess not anymore.
>> In-class exams, either written or oral. If you don't do homework, it is only on you. And with paper and pen, the next semester, yes.
> The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences are still in the future, but less so when they become present.
For me at least, in most of my classes, the homework was a tiny part of the grade. Just enough to maybe get over what you're talking about, but not enough to really matter.
> Then they lash out at the instructor, even if it’s really their fault
I'd put great value, as an employer, in a degree that does nothing but weed out these people.
True. It was true when I was doing my classes and I have to imagine it did not get much better. And with math, there is very easy way to tell if you are anywhere close to understanding it.
Homework assignments ungraded but mandatory.
Then an in-class oral exam on a random subject drawn at exam entry.
Works great in my country.
At the end of the day, the responsibility is on the student to study.
That is not the point of the article, though. He posits AI will just do better than humans soon, and he no longer knows whether people should even study math (from the article). So the point is that pursuing those studies is no longer useful; how or whether you grade is irrelevant at that point. (To be clear, I am not defending the statement, just explaining what I understood.)
this is what I had to do in Italian university and we often had to do both written AND oral exams.
When I studied, in Norway, we never got any marks or points for our homework. Our final grade was based 100% on our final exam (or mix of final exam + projects for the classes which had those), which was always a pen and paper type of exam. We did have mandatory homework we had to complete, in order take the final exam, but we never got any grades on those.
Later on, when I became a TA, there were obvious signs of cheating in the homework, i.e. people handing in the same homework with the same step-by-step solution, with the exact same errors.
In any case, cheating on homework wouldn't help their grade.
The 100% exam weighting certainly makes sense for mathematics, but exam proctoring will have to keep up with technology.
I have been an adjunct CS prof on and off for decades. I stopped in 2020 because teaching over Zoom sucked.
If were to teach a course today: I’d assign homework as usual, and have it be worth zero toward a student’s grade. The point is to learn, do it or not, that’s your choice. I would base the grade on in-person exams and maybe an interview. That’s it. No room for AI to boost grades.
We are still going to be interested in teaching people to think. We are still going to be intrinsically interested in mathematics. Many (most?) of us here have gotten immense pleasure and growth out of solving a problem, or understanding something well enough to explain. Even though the answer was known or someone else could explain it better. AI doesn't change that, really. So we have to find new ways to assess students. It doesn't mean anything fundamental about education. I don't even think it's such a fundamental challenge to math. Most of these things we are trying to prove are, to an engineer, either irrelevant or known empirically already. People want and need to try to understand. They will continue to.
At the lower undergrad level, there was already no point in grading homework a decade ago because Wolfram Alpha existed.
At the graduate level maybe this problem is solved by doing Moore-style classes where the students present (on the chalkboard, not slides) and the professor critiques. Students could still have AI generate proofs and print them out or hand copy them, but maybe that's fine.
Upper undergrad level is tricky, because students are expected to prove things, but maybe don't have the maturity for full-on Moore-style.
Homework is useful as a form of revision, if idiots think they can cheat to a better score the university just needs to take away that incentive: 0 marks for homework, all marks on the exam and a viva.
He should perhaps ask students if they want it marked and if they do still provide feedback, but be clear it won’t count for grades as cheating is too easy.
Lazy students will do no work all year then fail. Clever motivated students will continue to do well.
More people will fail till they realise they need to do the work, but that’s just the way it is, it’s the only way to be sure (along with vivas) that students know the subject.
I was an adjunct math professor at a University for a few years and I completely agree with this. There is this propaganda circulating in (and out of) education that testing is not a good measure of mastery, but it 100% is. It's a hard sell for public schools because, as you said, people will fail more.
Math is an even tougher sell because it's largely a service department. It's hard to justify holding non-majors up because they can't pass calc 2. For upper division math though tests are the way.
Would have been great for me because at the age of fifteen I lost complete interest in school grades. Just interested in learning.
Many professors there didn't use homework as part of your grades when I attended. I think the reasoning at the time was students would just copy each other's work anyway or look up solutions online etc
But if you didn't do the homework / learn the material you'd be screwed on the mid-terms / final which was 100% of your grade.
On the flip side, AI's can now grade pure math problems with the accuracy and rigor of a postdoc. And unlike PhD tutors, they're universally accessible to all.
It's the start of a golden age for those of us who are curious autodidacts. If you're working through the exercises of a math textbook, you can now instantly submit your (attempted) theorem-proof to the nearest robot, and see all your misconceptions and shortfalls of rigor laid bare.
> On the flip side, AI's can now grade pure math problems with the accuracy and rigor of a postdoc.
Wait, I'm curious about this bit - I did my math undergrad ~16 years ago and all my homework was handwritten.
Are now AIs capable of ingesting my mess of poor handwriting with arrows indicating the flow of a proof (e.g. from the bottom of the page to the top of a hand-drawn column half-way up the page to cram in the rest of the proof)?
Yeah this is what confuses me and gives me hope. I would have loved to have had AI in college. I probably would have had the confidence to take more and harder classes and generally been much less stressed. 10 years ago it felt like most students would take any easy chance to cheat, especially on nightly homework freshman year. I wouldn’t do it because for some sick reason I was actually motivated by learning more than the grade.
I’ve loved using AI to learn. I made SQL and Python classes of my own to finally get beyond a basic understanding of them. I made an Anki deck to learn a foreign language with very poor existing online resources.
I never graded homework or anything else except the final exam.
In the lab I assist students with implementing and understanding code. Since they know they are not graded, there is no incentive for them to use AI. Sometimes we do try AI for the lulz but it makes as much sense as looking at the solutions (which I do provide already). As I frequently tell them, "AI can replace me teaching you, it cannot replace you understanding the material".
I've been enrolled in an online CS program provided by a respectable university for a while. I get a lot of joy from continuous learning and being in a university program helps me stay focused, plus I'll get credentials to prove it eventually.
Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade. The materials I'm provided are a rambling stream of consciousness that are difficult to make sense of. Only truly elite universities that educate students efficiently deserve to survive.
> Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade.
Sometimes I wonder what it must feel like to be able to so arrogantly make predictions about the future as if one had already lived in it. How can you be so confident about something you don't know for sure?
You could have said the same thing 20 years ago about wikipedia and the internet in general. A kid in a poor school on the other side of the world has access to the same wealth of knowledge than a student in a Ivy League university. But that hasn't made universities useless, and very few of those kids in poor schools (that wouldn't have gone to a elite university) picked up the opportunity.
If anything, AI in education I think will lead to a divergence. Mediocre students will be even more mediocre as they will use it as a substitute for learning, with AI doing their homework. Good students will leverage it to learn and understand things even faster.
An odd thought keeps running through my mind.
We don't yet know if AI has replaced mathematicians.
But if AI can do homework and exam problems, then it means AI has replaced students.
ChatGPT has been proficient in the English reading and writing department for even longer, and that shows in the quality of students. E.g. https://nypost.com/2026/01/23/us-news/gen-z-students-are-so-...
Borcherds has been working with Epoch AI since at least 2024:
https://epochai.substack.com/p/ai-math-chat-1-thinking-smart...
Now he issues the standard taking points about looms and horses and claims he could not have foreseen it? He is an AI shill, just like Tao.
I'm willing to give him (or anyone else going through this) a lot of grace here as I think almost everyone who will be impacted by AI will go through 3 major stages, at different rates with each step taking a while to both really be true, and then a bit longer to accept and solidify into reality. And our egos act as blinders on accepting that each next step after 1 is likely.
1) AI is useless.
2) AI helps me.
3) AI replaced me (unless I am a generationally gifted top performer in my field).
While he is, in fact, a generationally gifted top performer in his field, he knows that statistically speaking most of his students will not be which I think makes his apparent angst now understandable.
Yes, there is no point in grading homework or essays. This has been largely true in India and China anyway, and the US will have to move to similar model of standardized tests and in person exams. Universities are anyway proxies for IQ filtering. It is perhaps impolite to say so explicitly in the west, but people will have to confront that.
Maybe for "soft" subjects like History and Philosophy, where almost nobody who does those courses actually becomes a historian or a philosopher... But there are plenty of subjects where you actually do learn things that are useful beyond university. Engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, etc.
Oh no, they might have to reduce class sizes, implement project-based learning, and provide human feedback instead
Then don't grade the homework! I have in-person quizzes in my class, and the students are motivated to do the homework anyways because it prepares them for the quiz.
When I was in College (as a Chem major) homework was not graded. It was there for you to do to prepare for exams. I'm assuming that this is different for pure math majors though.
I see this as nothing else but an opportunity. Just start asking students about their homework. Not being able to answer about the homework should be punished with seize of the studying...
If they don't mark the homework, it might be useful to redistribute that time to a viva about the home work.
It would give a more accurate impression of the kids understanding, incentive understanding it, be more pleasant interaction for all involved and build the kid up to Vivas and interviews.
I dont recall being graded on math homework in college. Its the recommended practice for exams.
Why would you grade math homework? I taught "intro math"[1] through algebra and calculus to linear algebra at UF and ASU over four years as a paid graduate TA. This was the middle '80s. I assigned homework from the text every class. At the beginning of every class we (the students and me) worked through any particular problem any student wanted. That was 15min, max. Then I lectured and assigned more homework. I graded my own 3 in-class closed-book exams and final exam.
Based on the classes the Math Department gave me (very satisfying) and the student evaluations this seemed to work more or less fine. I was a brutal grader though, some of those entry level classes had bimodal distributions with 'F' being the low mode.
I also showed up for office hours and did my best to help people learn by digging through their questions.
I don't see why this methodology wouldn't work fine today. I wouldn't care now how a student learned. Show competency on the human only test and we're good.
I had one student who achieved a solid 'F' come by office hours after the course to tell me how much he enjoyed my teaching. Whatever!
Anyway, teaching that way, with the positive interactions with students interested in learning, was one of the greatest experiences of my life.
[1] An absolute pedagogical shitshow that wasted everyone's time for zero gain.
Can't we install AI on the student's phone, then let them work at home while the AI watches them, and then let the phone grade the student?
"So you thought AI was a gift from heaven? Ha, it's your worst nightmare! Let this be a lesson."
^^;
I have a solution, but I don't think people will appreciate it, because:
1) it is very analog 2) requires work from both student and teacher 3) there is no AI in it 4) there is not money to made on it 5) all of the above
In short, do what my MBA class did. At home you study the examples, the how behind it and possible solutions. In class, you may be called in front of the class to show that you know what you are doing.
Is it hard? Yeah, but it is kinda the point.
Teachers with small classes tend to do this. "Come up and do these problems on the whiteboard," et cetera.
Blame the game, not the player. Grading is about securing status in a primate social dominance hierarchy. Fuck it - math should transcend that as much as our bodies allow.
Part of the purpose of rigorous education is to make sure that students are competent for the academic labor force, but that's only half of the story. The other purpose is to preserve existing knowledge and prevent its loss to the force of entropy eating away at texts, files and neurons. If there's no preservation of knowledge in the academic form anymore we have no choice but to rely on AI, which has a massive downside:
In the event that the cascading metal mining yield declines aren't solved by new tech and we do lose AI, we are now in the state that we will probably also lose calculus, liberalism and the ability to design a steam engine.
I guess then we go back to the basics. The only constant is change.
Gowdy, J., 2020
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632871...
There was constant change in the palaeolithic, change of the form "which tribe controls which valley" and no further. The range of possible changes is gonna shrink back to that small range without a stable climate and/or a solid tech foundation.
Grading homework has never made sense anyway. Only grade work done in class.
In-class exams are anyway a proxy for grading homeworks, because those who don't do them will get lower grades.
I heartily disagree, grading hand-written homework serves as an early warning signal to students who don’t understand a concept* but want to. It’s also useful to keeners who like being told "you’re doing a good job, keep it up!" As well a warning to students who are so far behind that they can save time money and their GPA by dropping the class early.
And as a TA, I liked the income, and there’s a knock-on benefit that you’re learning to read with a critical eye which will help as a reviewer in the future.
* or in mine own obsolescent field, a measure of accuracy that indicates a student need think** longer before writing in the future
** I know, I know
I recently attended a "flipped classroom" for an anatomy course. Lectures were recorded and done prior to class as (not-for-credit) homework, and the traditional homework was ungraded, done in groups in place of lecture. Labs were essentially just mini practicals with multiple stations.
I had never taken an anatomy course prior, and thought that the flipped classroom worked very well for the younger students. People who hadn't quite developed the knack for studying were now forced into preparing before class, and active recall was embedded into the lab practicals so that the cumulative exam wasn't testing things they'd memorized and forgotten.
For me personally, as a student, homework has only ever been for grade-padding.
Sure, so mark it up, just don't grade it or count its completion in a way such that it counts toward final rankings vs other students. Offer your TA's services to those who want to use it to improve, not to evaluate their AI's output.
> Grading homework has never made sense anyway.
This is only true for subjects where there is only one answer to a question.
Plagiarism in other subjects tends to show itself. But AI has made plagiarism more viable in all sorts of fields.
How? Is a teacher unable to read an essay written in class?
I did all my studies in France, and every single grade was ALWAYS for work done in class, regardless of the subject.
We are talking about college/university level work here. The work takes longer than there is lecture time available.
How'd you manage to write a 20 page paper in class?
I never had a good math teacher in college that graded homework. The good ones told you which problems to do, and they told you that you'd be doomed on the exams if you didn't do them. They also only assigned the problems that had answers in the book.
Making homework a part of your grade is like making attendance a part of your grade. It's something that teachers who aren't capable of teaching do, so they can give students who haven't learned a thing reasonable looking grades. Students have always cheated when homework was graded, it's just that AI makes it so flagrant that it can't be conveniently ignored.
I'm overestimating people, though. There are clearly teachers who are still pretending like students don't cheat when it's like five clicks now. It was much, much harder when tons were still cheating half a century ago. You had to actually meet each other. Admitting that you're collecting a check for nothing is tough, especially because now you're going to have to work.
Who am I kidding? Teachers will just start talking about how grading is bad or racist or something, or saying that using AI is actually better preparation for the future. Hell, they should have done that half a century ago: in real life, being able to cheat well is the best skill.
No worries ~10 more years and it won’t make sense to educate people past a certain point anyway
It’ll be like you’re studying under Aristotle while AI is doing cold fusion next to you - incomprehensible on any level.
It's already here. For instance I could walk into this guys math class, not even read the questions or material being taught and _guarantee_ that I'm going to be the highest performer as long as I have access to Astra/Fable. Like, it's not even close.
Yeah but it’ll take some time to collectively decide that higher education no longer makes sense for people.
Just wondering whether it’ll be before money/jobs collapse or after.
Maybe forcing them to turn in the homework hand written would help. They’d probably at least learn something by osmosis if they had to write down what the LLM spit out.
You guys were having homework graded in university? I was taking classes where the prof would just be like "pages X thru Y odd/even" at the end of a lecture with a very "do it or don't do it, I don't give a shit" type of mentality. Your final mark was two tests, a midterm and final.
This was always the case. The university system (ignoring research and other functions, since that's mostly decoupled from the type of class in TFA) serves a dual purpose as a teaching system and a credentialing system. How does grading homework (different from correcting homework -- I'll bend over backward to help students understand the material better, and learning from your struggles and mistakes is one of the best ways to make that happen) benefit either?
- There's the paternalistic argument that the adults we send to college aren't real adults and need carrots and sticks to learn properly. Making homework part of the grade helps them help themselves. This is a value judgement on what's more important (squeezing knowledge into people at any cost vs giving people agency and accountability), but I have suggestions as to exactly where people can stuff that argument. IMO, letting fully fledged adults limp through the system without the motivation or wherewithal to do a little hard work in their own self interest isn't doing them any favours.
- On the credentialing side of things, ongoing grading from something like homework helps smooth over the effects of a bad day of sleep or test anxiety. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I think there are tools which are more accurate and less work for the students and the teachers. Start the semester with an ungraded (corrected if students want to take advantage of it, but not affecting their final grade) take-home test of the background knowledge expected for the course. This lets students decide if they're ready or should take an earlier course instead, do some selected reading on weak points during an otherwise relatively light workload in the semester, and learn the teacher's testing and grading style so that there's less anxiety leading up to a real test. Your grade in the course reflects your best demonstrated mastery on the final, which is arguably closer to what people expect from the credentialing aspect of things; nobody cares how well you executed epsilon-delta proofs during the week you studied them, they care whether you're ready for the next course or ultimate job using that skill. Allow a makeup/retake exam (new questions), maybe two, and take the maximum score. To the extent that your test has any noise, this inflates the overall score, but it mitigates the effect of a single bad day, anxiety, etc, and gives you an easy framework for handling legitimate life events. Still assign homework. Still correct it for students who want feedback. Don't let it influence the grade.
> university system (ignoring research and other functions, since that's mostly decoupled from the type of class in TFA)
The primary purposes of research universities is research. You can't ignore the primary purpose of the institution. To the extent teaching has fallen by the wayside it's because universities are research institutions first and teach and credential on the side.
Ultimately this will impact TAs and adjuncts, who are the ones actually doing the grading.
this is what comes for education, the same way as agents can solve home work, they can grade, curate what you learn, what you work on etc.
professors needs to be life coaches and motivators, less of a oral/written book reproducer. That part will be automated. Evals also will be in a locked room, do you home work, bi-weekly do the check, correct with agent what needs to be repeated. Measure if you on course/off course doing better/worse. If you are not doing good, escalate to your coach(professor).
I mean, sure, charisma can engage people into several classes, but also, lets be honest what % of professors really got charisma? If it helps lectures are great, the active work should be done with agents, individually and in the team. of human, and other peoples agents. That's the future of work.
I never liked grade based education.
Never promoted genuine learning but the ability to get grades.
Where are the successful alternatives?
Live tests based on homework assignments are the only test that works.
I don't see a point, either. Twenty years ago, the only grades we ever had in law school were finals.
Give homework, have TAs go over it with students, have a final, which is the only thing graded.
Classes are for bringing you toward mastery, isn't it? You should pass based on mastery, not effort. I don't give a shit if my pilot tries really hard to fly. I care if he successfully flies.
Profs need to learn how to use AI productively or someone else will.
I don't see the point of universities at all anymore. They were originally places you went because you couldn't learn a thing anywhere else. Now you can learn anything, anywhere.
Example: If you want to learn to do something with your hands, it normally needs to be taught in person, so you can try to do it, fail, the teacher tells you what you did wrong, shows you how, you do it again and it works. But this can now almost entirely be done with AI. A YouTube video shows you how. You practice it on camera. An AI watches the video, tells you where you went wrong, and shows you specific clips to improve. You do it again until you get it right.
The piece of paper you get from a University doesn't need to come from "A University". Any organization that can give you a test in person can see whether you do the thing right or not and give you a certification if you do.
So really all we need now is an AI Khan Academy and independent testing/certification.
but in the end what is the point of learning when you have a machine with all the answers and can do your work?
The machine can't do your work. It can automate some of it, but the work isn't done until a human has verified it, and may need to fix it, modify it, etc. That's why we still teach. And we must verify people learned, through tests, practice, etc.
Don't believe the crazy lies that AI can replace your job. AI can't replace anyone's job, because it lies, cheats, hallucinates, can't learn from its mistakes, and can't be held liable.
This is the wrong approach.
Assume they use AI and grade them based on where they can take it form there.
Cue - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I had two classes like this, zero grades over the semester, they were among my favorite. Though we didn't really ponder what we were doing there and the means for final grades, for the admins, were both interesting (final test too long and hard, you already know what your grade is)
I had a class like this, Discrete Mathematics, with no grades or assigned homework and just a graded midterm and final. It was easily my least favorite class; I didn't know where to spend my time and spent most of the semester wandering aimlessly through the material. The final was very difficult but open book (to help make up for the lack of structure in the course?) and ended up having a ridiculous curve.
Could have also just been a bad professor though.
These things are definitely down to the professor. Both of my cases were great teachers. My Calc 3 class was probably the worst, the prof always showed up 20m late, but he pulled the most funding in the department, so he did whatever he wanted.
Grades are a way for teacher and student to check their learning, but teaching still needs to happen regardless of checkpoints. Some subjects require practice, like pre-proof writing in math and many other introductory to intermediate level courses. This is where homework comes in handy.
For my set theory class, the professor still assigned problems, he just never collected or graded them. For my Data Sci 2 seminar, it was only seven of us and we did several presentations and a papers.
I never saw any point in grading work ever
I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue.
Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to
The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis
Good riddance
You're not wrong about grading being largely a numerical ranking system for resource allocation - with minimal effort from the allocator.
Even in the age of AI, I think I still prefer a portfolio system where you accumulate a body of work that you can present and defend in an interview for a job or graduate school position. Unfortunately diligent portfolio assessment can be a lot of work when there are hundreds of applicants for a single slot, so the first stage is usually reviewing a summary or list of work rather than the work itself, and that system can be gamed.
In any case, personalized feedback for student work is still very useful, and it may be more beneficial if it is focused on helping students individually rather than ranking them or sorting them into bins.
Without some sort of pre- and post-assessment, it can be hard to determine whether students actually learned anything in a course. The question is: how do you use that information? I think it should primarily be used as feedback to the students and the instructors, with the aim of improving learning.
So, the guy who does brain surgery on you... you want him to have taken some electives he was interested in, passed for having a pulse, then sent off to work in the operating room? Or, should he be required to have gotten at least 80% of questions right on a test of his surgical knowledge?
I'm a bit mixed on this. A lot of graded work is busywork, but a benchmark is needed to see whether concepts are landing or not before midterms or finals, and the easiest way for that is some kind of grading.
And why are you being downvoted to oblivion?!?
Again though why have midterms or finals?
Break down the learning objectives to measurable experiment replication then:
Show one, do one, teach one
If you can’t do one or teach one you dont move to the next step.
It’s literally just how apprenticeship works and there’s no reason you can’t do that for calculus or intro to economics and especially applicable to EE, ME, CE
Teaching in academic settings is absurdly inefficient and counterproductive in my experience
Apprenticeship is a good model. The tutorial system also seems to work at some universities.
Personally I have found well-organized, clearly presented university courses to be great ways to learn the material. The combination of readings, textbooks, lectures, tutorial sessions, writing, labs, problem sets, course projects, etc. has been effective for me. Good textbooks and online resources have also been very helpful. Obviously it only works if you actually do the work yourself.
I'm not opposed to that. It would work really well for most applied sciences and engineering curricula.
It's a similar approach the armed services use to train MOSes as well.
Making the class pass-fail would also be more conducive for learning as well.
But still, some sort of benchmark would be needed to at least give students the ability to gauge their proficiency.
Brian Harvey, who taught CS 61A at Berkeley for decades (and wrote Berkeley Logo and Simply Scheme and Snap! and The Beauty and Joy of Computing), was making this argument long before AI. From "Using Computers for Educational Freedom":
Brian> Students learn best through intrinsic motivation, not through force. What you learn under pressure doesn't last past the exam. Everyone says these things, and yet almost all teachers continue to give grades. Why? "It's required"; "The colleges need grades"; "The parents wouldn't stand for it"; "It's the way things are." In short, the reasons for grades are political.
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/freedom.html
At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School he built a computer course of self-paced units with no grades, and about 50 kids had keys to the computer center and used it evenings and weekends without adult supervision. In his Snap!Con 2025 talk for the ACM Karlstrom award he said why the no-grades part mattered:
https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=1917
Jens> Okay. I've I've got one more question, Brian. Um, when you showed that picture of Sbury High of the Computer Lab users, computer center user Society Society, you very carefully and conscientiously mentioned every name with the title my friend, Jonathan, my friend. And that struck me as something uh that there might be a deeper message from you behind that.
Brian> Yeah. Yeah. Um, everything conspires to make teachers the enemies of kids. Not because any teacher wants that, but because institutions have a lot of weight. And when you're giving somebody grades, you can't be their friend. It just doesn't work like that. You're not their friend, you're a hurdle they have to overcome.
Brian> So yeah, it was really important to me that they let me not give grades and I think that made the whole thing possible and I couldn't have done it otherwise.
And on AI in the same talk:
https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=510
Brian> Mostly, people who talk about AI in education see it as a threat: kids will use it to cheat; or maybe AI will replace teachers so we won't have jobs anymore. Or sort of the best of these views is we don't know yet what skills kids are really going to need in an AI dominated world. Supposing that we have one. I'm pretty confident that AI won't replace teachers for rich kids -- and computers already replace teachers for poor kids, long before AI. The poor kids sit in front of computers that give them arithmetic problems. So it's not as if uh we're opening up a can of worms that's brand new.
AI didn't create the problem with graded homework. It just made it impossible to keep pretending the grade measures the learning.