This is now reality -- fighting to change the students is a losing battle. Besides in terms of normalizing grade distributions this is not that complicated to solve.
Target the cheaters with pop quizzes. Prof can randomly choose 3 questions from assignments. If students cant get enough marks on 2/3 of them they are dealt a huge penalty. Students that actually work through the problems will have no problems with scoring enough marks on 2/3 of the questions. Students that lean irresponsibly on LLMs will lose their marks.
That's exactly how scientific courses were in my experience at a university in the US. Curriculum was centered around a textbook. You were expected to do all end of chapter problems and ask questions if you had difficulty. It wasn't graded. No one checked. You just failed the exam if you didn't.
My high school English teacher's book reports were like this. One by one, you come up, hand over your book, and the teacher randomly picks a couple of passages and reads them aloud and asks what had just happened prior and what happens after. Then a couple opinion questions and boom, pass or fail. Fantastic to not write a paper on it; paper writing was a more dedicated topic.
That's also how it's done in almost all French engineering schools. You get open book tests with a small amount of relatively difficult questions and you have 3-4 hours to complete.
In some of the CS tests, coding by hand sucks a bit but to be honest, they're ok with pseudo code as long as you show you understand the concepts.
There is no European mind when it comes to education, hell, there is barely a national mind for those countries with federated education systems (e.g. Germany).
Well take home exams are not very useful nowadays with AI. And yeah, other commenters are right when he says there's no European mind when it comes to education, each country does its own thing.
in France I got a bunch of equivalent take-home tests, between high school and graduate level, mostly in math and science. The teacher would give us exercice equivalent to what we'd get in our exams and we'd have one week to complete it (sometimes in pairs) and it'd be graded as part of that semester
Certainly with maths you’re marked almost totally on written exams, but even if that weren’t true you’re also required to go over example sheets (hard homework questions that don’t form part of the final mark) with a tutor in two-student sessions so it’d be completely obvious if you were relying on AI.
I really like oral exams on top of regular exams. The teacher can ask questions and dive into specific areas - it'll be obvious who is just using LLMs to answer the questions vs those who use LLMs to tutor them.
Of course, the reasons they do quizes is to optimize the process (need less tutors/examiners), and to remove bias (any tutor holds biases one way or the other).
The tutorial system is just for teaching, not grading. It does keep students honest with themselves about their progress when they’re personally put on the spot once a week in front of one or two of their peers.
The biggest contrast for me between Oxbridge and another red brick was the Oxbridge tutors aren't shy of saying "You've not done the homework, go away and stop wasting my time", whereas the red brick approach was to pick you up and carry you over the finishing line (at least until the hour was up).
At the end of the day you can't force people to learn if they don't want to.
As a society we need to be okay with failing people who deserve to fail and not drag people across the finish line at the expense of diluting the degrees of everyone else who actually put in effort.
I'm not sure why we care about the degree. Employers care about the degree, but they aren't paying for my education.
The students who want to learn, will learn. For the students who just want the paper so they can apply for jobs, we ought to give them their diploma on the first day of class, so they can stop wasting everybody's time.
Employers want the degree because it's supposed to verify that you have a certain set of knowledge and/or skills, or at the very least, you're capable of thought to the extent required to get that degree. That's the only reason they want it.
Student being unable to unwilling to learn that knowledge or acquire those skills should mean they don't get that degree, they don't get those jobs, and they go work in fast food or a warehouse.
"Just give them the degree" is quite literally the worst possible solution to the problem.
I only partially agree with "you can't force people". I think that all people are just like children, but bigger. You can force a kid to not eat to much sugar, even when they want to.
Same with education, for example you can financially force people to learn, say, computer science instead of liberal arts. Even when they don't like it. It's harder, less efficient, but possible.
Because students wouldn't do the homework and would fail the quizzes. Students need to be pressured into learning and grades for doing the practice are a way. Don't pretend many students are self-motivated enough to follow the lecturer's instructions when there's no grade in it and insisting that "trust me, you won't learn if you don't do it".
I've mostly had non-graded homework in my studies because cheating was always easy. In highschool they might have told your parents if you don't do homework. In university you do what you want. It's never been an issue overall.
Well, from what I understand, the answer is kinda "no".
Depends on the country and educational system I suppose, but I do believe professors in many places get in trouble for failing too many students. It's right there in the phrasing.
If most students pass and some fail, that's fine. Revenue comes in, graduates are produced, the university is happy.
If most students fail, revenue goes down, less students might sign up, less graduate, the university is unhappy.
It's a tragedy of the commons situation, because some professors will be happy to pass the majority of students regardless of merit. Then the professors that don't become the problem, there's something wrong with them.
Likewise, if most universities are easy and some are really hard, they might not attract students. The US has this whole prestige thing going on, that I haven't seen all that much in other countries.
So if the students overall get dumber because they grow up over relying on tools, the correction mechanism is not that they have to work harder once the exam approaches. It's that the exam gets easier.
For the most part degrees from roughly comparable schools in the same subject are fungible. However, graduating cheaters who should have flunked out of school their freshman year is a one-way ticket to having a reputation that your degree is worthless. You're now comparable to a lower tier of schools and suddenly Y's degree is worth a lot more than yours. The best way (not to only way) to combat this is to actively cull the bottom of your classes. Most schools already do this by kicking out people with low enough GPAs, academic probation, etc. My undergrad would expel you if you had a GPA below 1.8 after your first semester, and you were on academic probation if your GPA was > 1.8 and <=2.5.
This assumes, of course, an institution is actively trying to raise the academic bar of its student population. Most schools are emphatically not trying to do this and are focused more on just increasing enrollment, getting more tax dollars, and hiring more administrators.
Many mathematics professors don't require homework to be turned in for grading. For example, the calculus courses at many US universities. Grades are solely determined by quizzes in the discussion section and by exams. Failure rates are above 30%, but that's accepted.
This model won't work for subjects that rely on students writing reports. But yes, universities frequently accept that failure rates for some courses will be high, especially for engineering and the sciences.
When I was a student, I spent my first 2 years in a so-called prépa intégré of a French engineering school. 20% of students failed and were shown the door during those two years (some failed, some figured that it just wasn't for them). That's fine, that means you keep the ones who actually do the work.
At a certain point, you have to start treating students like adult, either they succeed or they don't but it's their personal responsibility.
My favorite math professor said "your homework is as many of the odd-numbered problems as you feel like you need to do to understand the material" and set a five minute quiz at the start of each lecture which counted as the homework grade. I can't speak for the other students, but I did more homework in his classes than any of the other math classes I took.
That's how it is in Italy. And that's why Italy is behind every other country in education. Because it hasn't yet made graduating as easy as it is in other places.
Well graduation rate is a pretty terrible way to grade education, especially country to country. You could have 100% graduation rate today by just passing everyone - that's basically what we have in primary education and there was an article here just last week about how most college students are functionally illiterate.
In sweden until high school it's literally impossible to fail. There's no grades and no way of failing anyone.
Then they suddenly become kinda stricter in high school, where your results decide if you can go to university and which.
But I've been to one of the top technical universities and compared to Italy it was very easy. It was obvious the goal was to try and have everyone pass. Still people managed to fail or drop out anyway, although not in the dramatic numbers I saw in Italy for math exams.
Nobody has faith in the governments ability to put that money to good use. The US gov uses significant amounts of its budget to fund weapon development, promote weapon sales, change unfriendly foreign governments, support friendly foreign governments, and genocide troublesome foreign populations. Who will support raising more taxes to maintain and expand such efforts?
Offhand, I'm unaware of where to even look to get an easy to digest version of 'where tax dollars go'. Would the GAO make such a report? Something for Congress otherwise? Would there be a classified and an public version?
Even better would be a tool that, E.G. with your IRS filing number, shows how much 'you' paid in, breaks down where that went, and shows how 'you' compare to other areas.
Such tools and reports would cost money, but making them is practically an audit anyway which is a good use of resources in a bureaucracy (part of the self-calibration system).
What you seek is available and has been available for a very long time. Mathing out how your individual tax dollars map to these buckets is a fairly straightforward (IMO) exercise.
https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function (linked on that page but easy to miss) provides a great visualization/interface for the budget that can drill down deep into each category's sub-categories and beyond.
OTOH they might be asking more specifically for a view that controls for how different tax/income sources might be earmarked for specific spending, thus skewing how income tax dollars are distributed compared to the overall budget distribution - though I'm not sure that's going to change one's income tax dollar distribution much. AFAIK even social security is only nominally funded by social security tax, and the deficit means there's debt filling the gaps everywhere anyway.
That page is a good start. It at least shows the breakdown of % by programs, etc.
However as you point out there are different types and methods of tax which go to different bins. The IRS filings are the most likely place to have all that together.
*value for taxation* is also really difficult to discern. The report needs to help break down where someone's tax dollars went...
But it also needs to help collectively show how tax dollars _benefit_ them. That one not just in the taxes they paid but overall based on where they are and what they're doing.
Letting billionaires hoard all the money has gotten us to where we are today. It seems worse than government mismanaging the budget.
Was that concern also there in the 50s and 60s when the wealthy was taxed at a substantial higher rate? I don't believe so.
It all seems to point at the failure of trickled down economics of Reagan.
The us was the only industrialized economy to come out ww2 unscathed. We didn't have to compete for 2 decades. The end results of these policies was the stagnate 70s Reagan was a corrective. However, the policies of Regan only made sense in that context. Republicans became too found of cutting top end taxes when most of what could be gained already was in the 80s. There is no historical period to look at on how to deal with the consequences of integrating China with the rest of the world.
It's the elite wealth pump. Capital is a non-state entity but through corporations was granted person hood by states without a social contract. Trickle down economics was a complete scam and Richard Cantillon has the receipts for it.
Your answer is somewhat typical for Americans: because in my experience, Americans tend to think that all American developments are caused by domestic factors - governance, taxes, billionaires, whatever. Insular thinking, as if the rest of the world did not matter. Left or right, this is a fairly frequent pattern in the US.
But in the meantime, over a billion people elsewhere got out of poverty and built relatively developed economies. The US is no longer an automatic Nr 1 on the world scene by this fact alone. How precisely do you want to keep a massive edge over a billion hardworking East Asians who now have a lot of capital and know-how at their disposal?
Neither Musk nor Lenin can solve this. The US is simply in a relative decline.
>How precisely do you want to keep a massive edge over a billion hardworking East Asians who now have a lot of capital and know-how at their disposal?
Promote the lie down movement in the short term and let the negative birth rate take care of them in the long term. Thats the only way unless the US somehow gets a magical AGI and robots before China.
"let the negative birth rate take care of them in the long term"
There is a presumption hidden in that sentence: namely, that procreation will always be left up to the people and their decisions. That is far from certain. If anyone has the nerve to actually develop and deploy artificial wombs, it is China. And the resulting kids will be simply pushed onto young people to raise - an authoritarian country won't have to ask anyone.
Having kids is one of the last almost-non-industrialized attributes of human lives, most people are still being born in the same way as they used to in the Stone Age. I wonder how long will that situation last.
>If anyone has the nerve to actually develop and deploy artificial wombs, it is China. And the resulting kids will be simply pushed onto young people to raise - an authoritarian country won't have to ask anyone.
We will have to take that info as it comes. I was working off the info we have today. Their birth rate (as well as the birth rate of most of the world) is horrendous. This was a problem they should have started tackling 20-30 years ago.
And I don't know. Why is it taking people so long to wake up? Does he have to bash more at social security until people realize he's not trying to give you more money?
Do you think there are systemic problems in the executive branch of the US government? Wasteful, bloated structures? Agency overreach? Criminal lack of transparency? War-mongering security services? Revolving doors? What do you think about the fact that neither political party ever tries to solve these issues in substantial ways when it is in power? Don’t you find it odd that once someone is in power and is actually trying to do something about it they are attacked from all sides? Could it be that they are imperfect but they are not being attacked for the flaws in their approach/execution but rather because they are threatening structures the ruling class are exploiting?
