My Trig teacher, which was the class where I got my cherished TI-83+, had the exact same opinion of my little TI-Basic programs which worked the same way as yours.

I got an A in that class both semesters, which was better than the B I often got in Math (and a C- once in AlgII) because I hated doing homework. But starting on the program as soon as I grasped the concept and usually blasting through the homework with it by the end of the period meant an A was easily in my grasp.

That teacher was the best damn math teacher ever. He would work hard to help every last student get it, he'd gladly spend his whole lunch helping a kid if they needed it.

PS. I did share some of my programs, mostly with one girl, but she's a successful nurse today so I guess I didn't ruin her future :D

One of the people I went to school with (several years ahead, his assembly class was on VAX rather than MIPS) had to write a program that solved a polynomial.

As he was going through the tome that represented the CISC instruction set of a VAX system (long before easy search engines), he found POLY ( https://www.ece.lsu.edu/ee4720/doc/vax.pdf page 9-118).

So, his program, instead of doing all the calculations was setting up a few registers, a large comment block that explained it, a call to POLY, and reading out the registers.

He claimed to have gotten full credit and within a handful of semesters later the course was switched from CISC architectures to RISC.

The adult educator figures in 1958's _Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine_ had a pretty similar conclusion regarding automation as a demonstration of domain knowledge. The interesting thing is that this view is pretty rare when it comes to business domains.

1998 was just on the cusp of the Nerd Liberation era

thats the sign of a good teacher right there

You both are my people, haha. Did anyone build the connection cable?

Was this before or after you chose that username? :D

>> if I knew the material so well that I could write a program that didn't just solve it, but showed the work, then clearly I knew the material so well that I'd ace the test even without the program

Lol. So naïve. Half the point of programing and testing the software is so that you can then forget how to do the task yourself. I'd say that 90+% of the task-specific code I've written was for that I no longer remember how to do myself. Once upon a time I wrote a thing to calculate some of the specifics re water hammer effects in pipes. I still have the code but, for the life of me, I have totally forgotten the actual math.

I absolutely did this as well, though for the most part you could hardly call them "solvers", just tools to help me more effectively check a stack of educated guesses. IIRC a lot of the problems could be bounded well enough to brute force on my TI-83+.

absolute legend. I love that you just rewrote the programs during the test!

Kolmogorov, turing, and church would be proud of you, as with anyone that did similar :')

It's difficult to teach ingenuity for a variety of reasons.

To give you an idea of what I mean: I used to maintain the content filter for a school. Students being students, they found all sorts of ways to get around it. I never took much issue with the students who found ways around it. They were exploring and learning. The issue was with the other students. The ones who just followed someone's instructions, never exploring and never learning.

I would imagine that calculators are much the same. Programming them to answer questions is a great way to reinforce concepts. Copying the program off of someone else and finding ways to hide thee program is just plain cheating (of the system and themselves).

Good schools/teachers absolutely do, though. Mine did!

Not exaggerating when I say your math teacher is one of the most enlightened I ever heard of. Fantastic story.

There was also "group", I think it was called? You could select multiple things, including programs, to copy into archive memory - that way the original would still be there so they could see they deleted something, then you ungroup it later to restore it.

I think this is essentially the same reasoning that Sussman et al give for using a computer to explain classical mechanics in their famous textbook (see [0]). By insisting that the student compute with the concepts, they assert that they will get a deeper understanding than if they just read a bunch of formulas. Hard to argue with that, to my mind, although the choice of Scheme as the language is a bit of a mind bender for newbies.

[0] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...)

I'd love to get a look at your implementation, this sounds brilliant. What do you feel for you through the challenges? More porting, or navigating the core?

Why does the following obvious solution not work: - Homework is just voluntary. You have to force yourself to study anyways. Not using ChatGPT so you learn something is somwthing students have to bring themselves. - Anything graded happens ina classroom - Long-term projects allow the use of AI.

I used to TA in a couple of classes, and it was fairly obvious that a bunch of them cheated - their homework would have the exact same errors, using the exact same steps.

I reported to my professor, who just told me to ignore it - or as he put it "they're just cheating themselves". Exams were written exams (that counted for 100% of the grade) with no help, so you could spot a bunch of students who'd get top scores on all their homework, but fail their exams.

Scores have skyrocketed

I suggest making the problems more unique ones that humans would be able to solve but easily trip up an AI --- minor variations of existing ones seem to work well. There's some fun with that sort of idea here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38766512

> I teach CS, and oh we know but I don't know what to do about it.

You could give students larger projects and have them present their homework.

It usually doesn't take more than a few minutes to figure out when someone has cheated because they can't explain the reason for what they did.

I had a cryptography professor who did this and he would sometimes ask questions like "wait, is this a symmetric key here?" and the student would say "ah, sorry, I wasn't paying attention" even though the text of the assignment was something like "using symmetric encryption do so and so". Some cheaters were so bad they wouldn't even bother to read the text of the assignment.

Also, people who cheat tend to equivocate when asked questions. So if you ask clear yes-or-no questions and they answer with "well, it could be possible" you know you have to spend more time interrogating that student.

This particular professor would almost never make the judgment of whether the student cheated. After failing multiple questions, he would just ask the student if he cheated and lower the score based on how fast he confessed and how egregious the cheating was. Most cheaters would fold quite quick, but some took longer.

I think your idea has already worked for some companies to filter out AI applications, why not try? Especially in a font color identical to the background. You can also scaffold your way to generate questions that get the worst LLM performance, while still being very clear to understand, one side validating the clarity and theoretical tractability for the age, and one side actually solving it. Actor and two critics maybe. I have a container somewhere to create and use this kind of chain visually, could put it on GitHub but I'm sure there are dozens already

We hire interns and I've interviewed quite a few since Chat GPT. It's interesting they almost always ask what I (and the company) think about AI. Never had this question in the past. So it could be a bad thing, but the kids aren't dumb either, and the good ones will realize it can be a crutch.

Part of our interview process is a take home programming exercise. We allow use of AI, but ask that you tell us if you used it or not. That could be a good option for teachers as well.

This is just part of our capabilities now. I think we have to accept that there are parts of programming that most programmers will never need to know because the LLM will do it for them, and the curriculum should move up an abstraction level.

Students are absolutely copy pasting questions into ChatGPT. Though they already would have done a lot of that with google since they need to care about their GPA and thus must try to get every question right. I knew some people paying for chegg just before ChatGPT came out.

I think its still important to assign the homework but yeah its rough.

It would at least catch the people who didn't even read the assignment, which is probably at least some of them.

Why not just increase the scope and explicitly allow LLMs?

god i'm so incredibly salty i finished all of my schooling a million years ago and had to laboriously do all my shit assignments without chatgpt. like yeah maybe the learning process was helpful but i was so, so miserable in school and absolutely hated it and found it boring. kids these days dont know how easy they have it oh my god i'm old

> the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree

> figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating.

And this mindset is why cheating has proliferated. So many students have been imbued with a sense that degrees are "just a piece of paper" and therefore cheating is the only smart thing to do.

> Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.

I'm actually finding it's going the other way. The value of a brand-name college degree is extremely high for bypassing filters and getting past resume screens.

Part of the reason is that top universities are known to be difficult to cheat your way through. Not impossible, but it's not easy either.

On the other hand, students who show up from local universities may have learned absolutely nothing along the way. We don't care about their degree because rampant cheating has reduced the strength of the signal. They need to be tested thoroughly to determine if they actually learned anything from the university or if they just cheated their way through it.

> Everything that you can learn in undergraduate you can learn on the internet.

In principle yes. But it's extremely rare that 18-23 year olds will voluntarily grind through even the tough bits of that curriculum. Autodidacts often have gaping holes of knowledge in the non-fun stuff. Some hypermotivated people will chew their way through it through sheer self-motivation but the vast majority doesn't have the iron will to do that without external pressure. Even top athletes go to training camps and have trainers who push them.

One can of course argue that the material is irrelevant to actual jobs, and it's an eternal debate whether universities should teach fundamental thinking tools and "theory" or just job skills and web frameworks and git commands.

Getting a degree is about several things:

- It shows you passed admissions (in case that's hard) - It shows you persisted in your studies and managed to pass exams with certain grades - It shows you have acquired certain foundational knowledge

The first two show your ability to learn new things. Even if (and that's just an if) what you learned wasn't directly useful, you show that you can learn, i.e. have some personal qualities like intelligence, conscientiousness, agreeableness. That you're organized enough, don't give up too easily, can work under an authority etc. Many commenters here take these things for granted, but there are many job applicants who are not like you or your friends in these regards and having passed through those filters prepared by colleges is a very meaningful signal to employers.

And the foundational knowledge of math and algorithms is in fact also very useful for any non-code-monkey stuff. You learn a terminology, a vocabulary to talk to colleagues. Yes, you'll learn most things on the job, but it still makes a difference.

And then there's networking as well. Later in life, a recommendation can be very useful for getting a job. Lots of jobs never get publicly advertised because the signal-to-noise ratio is much better if people first search among acquaintances and contacts.

So a college education gives: foundational knowledge, demonstrable evidence of personal qualities, external push and motivation for developing yourself, a personal network.

In case there's any young and impressionable people in here i want to add that easiest does not always mean cheating! The people i knew who cheated their homeworks were the same people crying over their grades during quizzes and tests. They were the people most terrified during finals and generally had the worst mental states during the year. It certainly did not seem to make their lives easier. Sure, you might get away with it but these things can come back to bite you!

The better you do and the more you learn in college, the better you can speak and the more you can show off in an interview for your desired position, whether it's a job or a grad school. Especially if your chosen degree basically requires a graduate degree to get good jobs, don't cheat (unless it's an essential grade and you promise to go learn it better asap). Grad school doesn't mess around, it's hard enough for the studious ones.

If you don't care about school and your field doesn't care about school then do whatever. But don't make a habit of living dishonestly. It wears at the soul

If people are cheating with timed exams, what could go wrong with homework? Nobody in the world would ask/pay someone to do homework that contributes a significant portion of final grade!

Just use supervised testing. It's scalable, battle tested, and pervasive. Even ignoring scalability, orals have problems. KISS!

We need to start scaling this. Pay the money fund teachers to sit with students

How is that cheating? The prof isn't creating the questions to certify their own knowledge.

which is actually my "Dark AI World" prediction for the next 5-10 years:

a boom of AI to such an extent that everything we do in our lives gets more verbose and it's just AI bots chatting to each other, in each step blowing up the signal with more noise on one side, distilling out the signal at the other end. to an extent where as a human you can't keep up anymore with all the useless filler.

can we just leapfrog (or backtrack) to API's talking to each other please?

Homework is an incredibly controversial topic I think, because:

Homework, since you can get a lot or even full credit even if you get it wrong (haven't learned the material well), provides a big boost to the grades of a type of student who "tests poorly" -- whether because they failed to learn the material, or because of anxiety or whatever.

On the other side of the debate you have an alliance of:

• Parents who think "Jeez, my kid comes home from school with 3 hours of homework every night, WTF, let them live life"

• Kids who, to avoid using labels, I'll just say... they learn the material easily AND can prove it easily on a test. They say "WHY TF are you wasting hours of my time doing busywork??

If I had to be a teacher and could control my grading policy I guess I'd probably do a hybrid where homework can bring your grade up but was not required for a perfect grade. So,

GRADE = MAXIMUM(HW_GRADE * .15 + TESTS, 1)

With all due respect to the "can't take a test" crowd, it seems unfair to give homework a weight higher than that though. Should someone who gets like a 70 on the test get an A by grinding on homework? I'm glad I'm not a teacher so I don't have to actually debate anyone on that.

/s noted, how near is "near"?

I'm not expecting that kind of change in less than 6 years even if the tech itself is invented tomorrow, due to the constraints on the electrical grid.

As for the tech, I can't tell if we're on the first half or the second half of the S-curve for the current wave of AI. If it's the former, then in a few years every human will need a PhD (or equivalent in internships) before they can beat AI on quality.

Yeah in a room with a bunch of hackers, makers, DIYers (who actually do the things sometimes), this sort of "so I drew the rest of the owl" wouldn't fly.

Youtube though almost requires it.

I'm not saying they didn't do it, it's just the vibe I get due to the youtubeisms. It doesn't change because someone says they did it, we both just watched the same video ;)

YouTube is huge, there's all sorts of YouTubers out there. There are niche audiences for long-form detailed content too, in the million-viewership range. See Ben Eater for example.

Nearly same here, 2 years behind you. 83+ had just come out which I think added some Flash memory for Archiving and installing ASM apps (mostly games is what we used that capability for). 85 was out there but uncommon, and the richest or smartest kids had 89s, which were and still are an absolute beast. It blew me away watching people solve equations and simplify expressions on that.

To answer OP though, I think the reason the 84+ (which is or just emulates the old Z80 goodness of the 82/83/83+) is still wildly popular* is that more advanced calculators can easily do a LOT of stuff for you -- right out of the box -- that you're ostensibly there to learn to do yourself, which brings into serious question why bother taking the class in the first place. So teachers would prefer kids to bring a less overpowered calculator to class.

An 89 is basically to say, Calculus AB as a standard 4-function calculator is to 3rd grade math.

None of that is a knock on any of those calculators, though. It's incredible what they can do!

* Let's all take a moment to appreciate the genius of TI repackaging the same 1970s technology in a shiny new case every few years and getting away with -- STILL to this day -- selling them for $150!

Those were also full open source until some time ago, then they switched to source-available for the userland with a closed source kernel to prevent modifications allowing cheating on exams. It’s sad they had to take away freedom from the majority of users just to prevent a minority cheating.

And they run python!

https://www.numworks.com/

There's even a smartphone (iOS & Android) app to give it a try, but the magic of a calculator comes with tactile buttons.

It's a shame it doesn't use Giac. RPN CAS forever! ;)

> I can talk about concepts like "atoms" or "bacteria" or "black holes" with anyone, and they'll know what they are - even if their knowledge of those subjects isn't in depth.

I'm not convinced this is an unalloyed good. Knowing that a disease is caused by "bacteria" instead of "demons" isn't really helpful if you don't have a deep understanding of exactly what bacteria is. See, for example, all of the people who want antibiotics whenever they're sick for any reason. We've just replaced one set of weird beliefs in the general populace with another and given it a veneer of science.

The memorization vs reasoning limit may soon be passed with some of these AIs. Really need to do the full controlled testing environment set up to have any chance of avoiding it. No calculators and no home work would be the next step. Maybe we will have a generation of mentats?

>Are K-12 keeping on with remote classes now in the USA?

After COVID many school districts in the US that weren't offering online only school are now. Suddenly they had the capacity to do it as it was forced on them with COVID, so maintain it for students who want it is as easy as anything else.

Calculators and exams are still used after K-12, ~1/20 K-12 students are still taught remotely online in the US in 2023 (it'd be curious to see if that grows or shrinks with time), not all K-12 have instituted bag and equipment checks, the ones that have haven't all done it to the same level, and it may or may not be enough to cover enough of the cases to mitigate impact enough.

I like this idea, however I worry that it would be difficult to do it while being consistent (and unbiased). If the same questions are asked of each student then later students might be unfairly prepped. If different questions are asked then it becomes very difficult to normalize scores across the class. The bias risk is self-explanatory and may be unconscious.

If you could solve this problem well, you could also probably fix the issues with most interview processes.

What if teachers have clear favor/disfavour of students?

Someone still had to pay for them in your case.