Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Educators are not known for having their tests being tested. If anything tests tend to have logical errors, misspellings, and "guess what the teacher thought here" kind of questions.

But like anything else this current state is not set in stone. Educators just have not had any feedback and incentives. For subjects and situations where the quality of learning is actually measured, it is the teaching that matters and not the tests. You can have good education and terrible tests and students will come out of that with good education. When the quality is not measured the tests are equally meaningless. (Quality in this context means what the student can do after graduating without failing or creating accidents).

I expect that in the future there won't be a reason for teachers to not give out the answers at the same time when giving out homework. That in turn will force a small change in the process of lessons and studying. Those educators who are already doing this won't need to change much in response to ChatGPT.




> Quality in this context means what the student can do after graduating without failing or creating accidents

That's a problematic quality criterion, since many academic disciplines (including most of the humanities) aren't skill training programs so there is essentially nothing a graduate "can do" that sets them apart from the rest of the population.


What a student should be able to do after finish an academic course is to participate and continue with other academic courses that depend on that course. If there is nothing that requires that course, and nothing that uses anything learned from that course, than the grades of that course has no possible meaning. It noises in the forest that no one hears.

What it also mean is that the measuring of quality of the teaching occur much later in the process. For example, lets say a student study basic math and then apply for an accounting class. We will only know the quality of the basic math education once the student has shown not to fail the accounting class because of poor understanding of basic math. The educator at the accounting class might over time find out that a particular schools or educators allow students to pass without actually being able to do basic math. At that point we know that the quality is low.

We can see similar failure with humanities. A person studying language in order to work as a translator will fail with their job if they don't understand the language which they are translating. It is poor quality when an educator passes students as translators when they can't translate. It can also be very unsafe (translators in hospitals or legal), so high quality in humanities can be just as important as in other disciplines.

We can imagine more difficult topics like philosophy, but from my own experience, those topics are more of experience based education rather than test-based learning. ChatGPT can't do in person group discussions.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: