Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"

For most of us--myself included--once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired". This is far less than most curriculums ask you to know, and every year, "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar. With LLMs, it's practically on the floor for 90% of full-time jobs.

That is why I propose exactly the opposite regimen from this course, although I admire the writer's free thinking. Return to tradition, with a twist. Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset", where the turning-in of the assignment feels more real than understanding the assignment. Publish problem sets thousands of problems large with worked-out-solutions to remove the incentive to cheat.

"Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity" -- paraphrase of an HN comment about a fondly remembered physics professor who made the students memorize every equation in the class. In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.

Something often left out is the dependence on LLM’s. Students today assume LLM’s will always be available, at a price they (or their companies) can afford.

What happens if LLM’s suddenly change their cost to be 1000 USD per user per month? What if it is 1000 USD per request? Will new students and new professionals still be able to complete their jobs?

> once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired"

I thought the point was to continue in the same vein and contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge. I suppose this is why people criticize colleges as having lost their core principles and simply responded to market forces to produce the types of graduates that corporate America currently wants.

> "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar.

Usually people get fired for their actions and not their knowledge or lack thereof. It may be that David Graebers core thesis was correct. Most jobs are actually "bullshit jobs," and in the era of the Internet, they don't actually require any formal education to perform.

> Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination

You are describing how school worked for me (in Italy, but much of Europe is the same I think?) from middle school through university. The idea of graded homework has always struck me as incredibly weird.

> In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.

They do change what is worth learning though? I completely agree that "oh no the grades" is a ridiculous reaction, but adapting curricula is not an insane idea.

The question is no longer "How do we educate people?" but "What are work and competence even for?"

The culture has moved from competence to performance. Where universities used to be a gateway to a middle class life, now they're a source of debt. And social performances of all kind are far more valuable than the ability to work competently.

Competence used to be central, now it's more and more peripheral. AI mirrors and amplifies that.

I had an electrodynamics professor say that there was no reason to memorize the equations, you would never remember them anyways, the goal was to understand how the relationships were formed in the first place. Then you would understand what the relationships are that each equation represents. That I think is the basis for this statement. Memorization of the equations gives you a basis to understand the relationships. So I guess the hope is that is enough. I would argue it isn't enough since physics isn't really about math or equations its about the structure and dynamics of how systems evolve over time. And equations give one representation of the evolution of those systems. But it's not the only representation.

> Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset"

To the horror of anyone struggling with anxiety, ADHD, or any other source of memory-recall issues under examination pressure. This further optimizes everything for students who can memorize and recall information on the spot under artificial pressure, and who don't suffer any from any of the problems I mentioned.

In grade school you could put me on the spot and I would blank on questions about subjects that I understood rather well and that I could answer 5 minutes before the exam and 5 minutes after the exam, but not during the exam. The best way for me to display my understanding and knowledge is through project assignments where that knowledge is put to practical use, or worked "homework" examples that you want to remove.

Do you have any ideas for accommodating people who process information differently and find it easier to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding in different ways?

This is all very well if the goal was to sift the wheat from the chaff - but modern western education is about passing as many fee paying students as possible, preferably with a passably enjoyable experience for the institutional kudos.

But "enough to not get fired" is not an answer to a question "why should I know anything?". To be honest, it's not clear if the rest of your post tries to answer the initial question of why you should know anything or the implied question of how much should I really know.

You didn't answer why the student should memorize anything, except the hand-waving "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity".

Students had very good reason to question the education system when they were asked to memorize things that were safe to forget once they graduated from school. And when most functional adults admitted they forgot what they had learned in school. It was an issue before LLM, and triply so now.

By the way, I now am 100% agree with "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity." However, if you asked me to try to convince the 16-year-old me I would throw my hands up.

> why should I know anything

The obvious answer is "Because it's interesting."

But suppose you think strictly in utilitarian terms: what effort should I invest for what $$$ return. I have two things to say to you:

First: what a meaningless life you're living.

Second: you realize that if you don't learn anything because you have LLMs, and I learn everything because it's interesting, when you and I are competing, I'll have LLMs as well...? We'll be using the same tools, but I'll be able to reason and you won't.

I think the people who struggle with the question "Why should I know anything?" aren't going to learn anything anyway. You need curiosity to learn, or at least to learn a lot and well, and if you have curiosity you're not asking why you should learn anything.

Honestly, I feel like I have to know more and more these days, as the ais have unlocked significantly more domains that I can impact. Everyone is contributing to every part of the stack in the tech world all of a sudden, and "I am not an expert on that piece of the system" no longer is a reasonable position.

This is in tech now, were the first adopters, but soon it will come to other fields.

To your broader question

> Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"

You should know things because these AIs are wrong all the time, because if you want any control in your life you need to be able to make an educated guess at what is true and what isn't.

As to how to teach students. I think we're in an age of experimentation here. I like the idea of letting students use all tools available for the job. But I also agree that if you do give exams and hw, you better make them hand written/oral only.

Overall, I think education needs to focus more on building portfolios for students, and focus less giving them grades.

What I like about the approach in the article is that it confronts the "why should I know this?" question directly. By making students accountable for reasoning (even when tools are available) it exposes the difference between having access to information and having a mental model

This is like the Indian education system and presumably other Asian ones. Homework counts for very little towards your grade. 90% of your grade comes from the midterms and the finals. All hand written, no notes, no calculators.

That’s a terrible indictment of society if true. People are so far from self-realization, so estranged from their natural curiosity, that there is no motivation to learn anything beyond what will get you fed and housed. How can anyone be okay with that? Because even most chronically alienated people have had glimpses of self-actualization, of curiosity, of intrinsic motivation; most have had times when they were inspired to use the intellectual and bodily gifts that nature has endowed them with.

But the response to that will be further beatings until morale improves.

What about technology professionals? From my biased reading of this site alone: both further beatings and pain relievers in the form of even more dulling and pacifying technology. Follow by misanhtropic, thought-terminating cliches: well people are inherently dumb/unmotivated/unworthy so topic is not really worth our genuine attention; furthermore, now with LMMs, we are seeing just how easy it is to mimic these lumps of meat—in fact they can act both better and more pathetic than human meat bags, just have to adjust the prompts...