Does AI actually help students learn? A recent experiment in a high school provides a cautionary tale.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn’t have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning.
A third group of students had access to a revised version of ChatGPT that functioned more like a tutor. This chatbot was programmed to provide hints without directly divulging the answer. The students who used it did spectacularly better on the practice problems, solving 127 percent more of them correctly compared with students who did their practice work without any high-tech aids. But on a test afterwards, these AI-tutored students did no better. Students who just did their practice problems the old fashioned way — on their own — matched their test scores.
Kids who take shortcuts and don’t learn suck at recalling knowledge they never had…
I took German in high school and cheated by inventing my own runic script. I would draw elaborate fantasy/sci-fi drawings on the covers of my notebooks with the German verb declensions and whatnot written all over monoliths or knight’s armor or dueling spaceships, using my own script instead of regular characters, and then have these notebook sitting on my desk while taking the tests. I got 100% on every test and now the only German I can speak is the bullshit I remember Nightcrawler from the X-Men saying. Unglaublich!
Meanwhile the teacher was thinking, “interesting tactic you’ve got there, admiring your art in the middle of a test”
God knows what he would have done to me if he’d caught me. He once threw an eraser at my head for speaking German with a Texas accent. In his defense, he grew up in a post-war Yugoslavian concentration camp.
The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.
Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.
