I have mentioned this in a few comments: for my CS classes I have gone from a historical 60-80% projects / 40-20% quizzes grade split, to a 50/50 split, and have moved my quizzes from being online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-written notes

Rather than banning AI, I'm showing students how to use it effectively as a personalized TA. I'm giving them this AGENTS.md file:

https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac

And showing them how to use AI to summarize the slides into a quiz review sheet, generate example questions with answer walk throughs, etc.

Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves: the projects are designed to draw them into the art of programming and give them decent, real-world coding experience that they will need, even if they end up working at a higher level in the future.

AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations (e.g. how twos complement works) that I wouldn't have otherwise. But it is obviously extremely dangerous as well.

"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."

> “Over the years I’ve found that when students read on paper they're more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries,” Shirkhani wrote to the News. “This improves the quality of class time by orders of magnitude.”

This is the key part. I'm doing a part-time graduate degree at a major university right now, and it's fascinating to watch the week-to-week pressure AI is putting on the education establishment. When your job as a student is to read case studies and think about them, but Google Drive says "here's an automatic summary of the key points" before you even open the file, it takes a very determined student to ignore that and actually read the material. And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade.

Schools are struggling to figure out how to let students use AI tools to be more productive while still learning how to think. The students (especially undergrads) are incredibly good at doing as little work as possible. And until you get to the end-of-PhD level, there's basically nothing you encounter in your learning journey that ChatGPT can't perfectly summarize and analyze in 1 second, removing the requirement for you to do anything.

This isn't even about AI being "good" or "bad". We still teach children how to add numbers before we give them calculators because it's a useful skill. But now these AI thinking-calculators are injecting themselves into every text box and screen, making them impossible to avoid. If the answer pops up in the sidebar before you even ask the question, what kind of masochist is going to bother learning how to read and think?

At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.

If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they actually learn in college then what the students are doing is rational.

If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.

Over a decade ago now, I was teaching college English as a grad student, and my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class.

My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem.

It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week.

Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.

>This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence.

I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?

Quote from OA

"TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option."

And later in OA it states that the cost to a student is $0.12 per double sided sheet of printing.

In all of my teaching career here in the UK, the provision of handouts has been a central cost. Latterly I'd send a pdf file with instructions and the resulting 200+ packs of 180 sides would be delivered on a trolley printed, stapled with covers. The cost was rounding error compared to the cost of providing an hour of teaching in a classroom (wage costs, support staff costs, building costs including amortisation &c).

How is this happening?

At 150 eurobucks apiece, printed freshman coursebooks were prohibitively expensive in uni. We just pirated everything as a consequence.

""When you read a book or a printed course packet, you turn real pages instead of scrolling, so you have a different, more direct, and (I think) more focused relationship with the words,” Fadiman wrote."

I concur completely with Fadiman's comment as that has been my experience despite that I have been using computer screens and computers for many decades and that I am totally at ease with them for reading and composing documentation.

Books and printed materials have physical presence and tactility about them that are missing from display screens. It is hard to explain but handling the physical object, pointing to paragraphs on printed pages, underlining text with a pencil and sticking postit notes into page margins adds an ergonomic factor that is more conducive to learning and understanding than when one interacts with screens (including those where one can write directly to the screen with a stylus).

I have no doubt about this, as I've noticed over the years if I write down what I'm thinking with my hand onto paper I am more likely to understand and remember it better than when I'm typing it.

It's as if typing doesn't provide as tighter coupling with my brain as does writing by hand. There is something about handwriting and the motional feedback from my fingers that makes me have a closer and more intimate relationship with the text.

That's not to say I don't use screens—I do but generally to write summaries after I've first worked out ideas on paper (this is especially relevant when mathematics is involved—I'm more cognitively involved when using pencil and paper).

In pretty much any school system, just complain that the printout is not compatible with your text-to-speech engine, and the instructor will be required to provide an electronic version, no questions asked.

Who is behind this over digitization of primary school? My understanding is that in the Us pretty much all homework and tests are done on computers or iPads.

This obv isn’t a push by parents because I can’t imagine parents I know want their kids in front of a screen all day. At best they’re indifferent. My only guess is the teachers unions that don’t want teachers grading and creating lesson plans and all the other work they used to do.

And since this trend kid scores or performance has not gotten better, so what gives?

Can anyone comment if it’s as bad as this and what’s behind it.

Computers have not advanced education — the data shows the opposite. I think we should just go back to physical books (which can be used!), and pen and paper for notes and assignments.

Seems like an easy job for cheap e-ink tablets. Even with network access there's not much temptation to stray from reading and potentially scribing.

I might be wrong but I fear this strategy might unfairly punish e-readers which imo offer the best of both worlds

> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.

This made sense a couple of decades ago. Today, it's just bizarre to be spending $150 on a phonebook-sized packet of reading materials. So much paper and toner.

This is what iPads and Kindles are for.

This is a bit off topic, but why are used books so expensive on abebooks, thriftbooks, amazon so expensive compared to booksales, etc? I recall a time when a lot of these online stores were selling them for a few cents (granted, it was a long time ago and it was still called zShops on Amazon).

If textbooks weren't so expensive I'd be more cheering on them.

> TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.

Lol $150 for reading packets? Not even textbooks? Seriously the whole system can fuck off.

If you are flipping through the reading to find a quote, then printed readings are hard to beat, unless you can search for a word with digital search. But speed reading RSVP presentation beats any kind of print reading by a mile, if you are aiming for comprehension. So, it is hard to say where the technology is going. Nobody has put in the work to really make reading on an iPad as smooth and fluid as print, in terms of rapid page flipping. But the potential is there. It is kind of laughable how the salesman will be saying, oh it has a fast processor, and then you open up a PDF and scroll a few pages fast and they start being blank instead of actually having text.

It only struck me recently how geared universities are towards careers and many of the requirements are set by industry, not necessarily by whats good for the student. If you want to enjoy learning for its own sake or enjoy a particular subject I'd suggest ditching uni and going for self learning. Ofc if you need a job you probably need certification, but not if you're learning for fun. Also if you want to make sure you're well rounded, browse uni websites and have a look at the syllabus / reading list and filter out any obvious industry requirements if they don't suit you.

While I fully agree with this, this quote bothers me:

>Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option

Does a student need to print out multiple TYCO Packets ? If so, only the very rich could afford this. I think educations should go back to printed books and submitting you work to the Prof. on paper.

But submitting printed pages back to the Prof. for homework will avoid the school saying "Submit only Word Documents". That way a student can use the method they prefer, avoiding buying expensive software. One can then use just a simple free text editor if they want. Or even a typewriter :)

Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving, much like the stereotypical average vegetable seller.

We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills.

The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates they produce.

The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.

College instructor here. One thing I'm seeing here that's kind of funny is how badly so many of you are misunderstanding the value of "friction."

You see a policy, and your clever brains come up with a way to get around it, "proving" that the new methodology is not perfect and therefore not valuable.

So wrong. Come on people, think about it -- to an extent ALL WE DO is "friction." Any shift towards difficulty can be gained, but also nearly all of the time it provides a valuable differentiator in terms of motivation, etc.

My thesis paper about a course for Freshman Composition Writing to stress fundamentals by way of using quill, pencil, pen, and finally a typewriter, was written 20 YEARS AGO in response to Spell Check and Auto Predict at the time...2006...

This isn't my article nor do I know this Educator but I like her approach and actions taken:

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5631779/ai-schools-teac...

I have been thinking about this and it seems like it's an asset that students want to do as little work as possible to get course credits. They also love playing games of various sorts. So instead of killing trees, printing pages of materials out and having students pay substantial sums to the printing press so we can inject distance between students reading the material and ChatGPT, why not turn it around completely?

1. Instead of putting up all sorts of barriers between students and ChatGPT, have students explicitly use ChatGPT to complete the homework

2. Then compare the diversity in the ChatGPT output

3. If the ChatGPT output is extremely similar, then the game is to critique that ChatGPT output, find out gaps in ChatGPT's work, insights it missed and what it could have done better

4.If the ChatGPT output is diverse, how do we figure out which is better? What caused the diversity? Are all the outputs accurate or are there errors in some?

Similarly, when it comes to coding, instead of worrying that ChatGPT can zero shot quicksort and memcpy perfectly, why not game it:

1. Write some test cases that could make that specific implementation of `quicksort` or `memcpy` fail

2. Could we design the input data such that quicksort hits its worst case runtime?

3. Is there an algorithm that would sort faster than quicksort for that specific input?

4. Could there be architectures where the assumptions that make quicksort "quick", fail to hold true? Instead, something simpler and worse on paper like a "cache aware sort" actually work faster in practice than quicksort?

I have multiple paragraphs more of thought on this topic but will leave it at this for now to calibrate if my thoughts are in the minority

> This semester, she is requiring all students to have printed options.

What could it mean for an "option" to be "required"?