It’s sad because for most people school is about the only time anybody cares enough about your thoughts to actually read an essay and respond to it intelligently.
I’m still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It’s so very easy to claim the kids aren’t all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren’t from people using better prompts? Let’s hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.
Relevant article https://web.archive.org/web/20250314201213/https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a13fc
Admittedly the downward trend began sometime in the 2012s so it predates LLMs.
I agree. It really doesn’t look like AI is the thing that broke. More like the education system, or something about social media.
IMO, kids use ChatGPT because they are aware enough to understand that the degree is what really matters in our society, so putting in the effort to understand the material when they could put in way less effort and still pass is a waste of effort.
We all understand what the goal of school should be, but that learning doesn’t really align with the arbitrary measurements we use to track learning.
I loved writing essays and see the value for a student in knowing how to state a case and back it up with evidence, what counts as evidence, and the importance of clearly communicating the ideas.
That said, I also use AI to write copy daily and the most important thing for anyone’s cognition is critical thinking and reading comprehension, both of which AI is going to teach us whether we want it or not. Critical analysis is the only way we can navigate the future.
Maybe this is another Great Filter for technologically advancing critters?
I hated writing pointless essays about topics I don’t care about, and yet I still like to research and debate.
