| ▲ | benbreen 4 days ago | |
Exactly, this is the reason why I struggle with this sort of solution to the problems we are all facing in education currently. On the surface it seems to make sense, but the blue book exam is entirely artificial and has basically no relationship to real world skills (subconsciously, even the quality of student handwriting handwriting could influence how graders assess blue books). Even leaving AI aside, anyone writing anything nowadays is using Google and Wikipedia and word processors, so why constrain those? Oxford and Cambridge have a "tutorial" system that is a lot closer to what I would choose in an ideal world. You write an essay at home, over the course of a week, but then you have to read it to your professor, one on one, and they interrupt you as you go, asking clarifying questions, giving suggestions, etc. (This at least is how it worked for history tutorials when I was a visiting student at an Oxford college back in 2004-5 - not sure if it's still like that). It was by far the best education I ever had because you could get realtime expert feedback on your writing in an iterative process. And it is basically AI proof, because the moment they start getting quizzed on their thinking behind a sentence or claim in an essay, anyone who used ChatGPT to write it for them will be outed. | ||
| ▲ | SoftTalker 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | |
It really boils down to: are universities trying to teach abstract knowledge, or are they trade schools? If they are trade schools, yes teach React and Node using LLMs (or whatever the enabling tools of the day are) and get on with it. | ||
| ▲ | jbreckmckye 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |
Not sure how it is these days, but at Cambridge, supervisions (what Oxford calls tutorials) did not contribute to our examination / tripos scores. They were just a learning aid. | ||
| ▲ | nxobject 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |
> Even leaving AI aside, anyone writing anything nowadays is using Google and Wikipedia and word processors, so why constrain those? And the library, and inter-library loan (in my case), and talking to a professor with a draft... | ||
| ▲ | lokar 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |
As a CS student I rather enjoyed the blue book essay exams in my classics courses. And it did teach and evaluate skills I’ve used me entire career. | ||