elprupneerg

elprupneerg

@elprupneerg

my favorite colors backwards

  • xe/xer, per/per, it/its, they/them

hi! my only other social media is tumblr so my gf says i'll fit in fine here. i'm in my 20s and live in the united states, if you want more info than that then you can read my posts cuz i'm not putting it here (put in some fucking effort to dox me lmao) <3

log inask
elprupneerg
@elprupneerg
wintersouls
@wintersouls
NireBryce
@NireBryce

starting to wonder if the "epidemic" of students submitting papers that teachers think are AI-written, really are just the next wave of systemic public education failures being noticed by professors

more and more I'm running into posts clearly written by humans that read like an AI wrote them but are consistent in tone, posted in like a shopify listing or pseudo-wiki.

looping circular topics, things that could have been caught in an editing pass but people probably aren't given enough time or paid well with to do a good job with the formulas they were taught were the only way by the schools

NireBryce
@NireBryce

I went to a pretty good US public school, and by the late 2000s when I was graduating, a lot of the techniques taught to me were suddenly:

  1. useless compared to giving me an intuition for what problems actually used the thing (compared to knowing how to solve it once presented)
  2. and
NireBryce
@NireBryce

you gotta understand, at least in the US, it seems to me like a reason things are are The Way They Currently Are, is that the parents think the schools will teach the kids the same things the schools think the parents will teach instead.

the schools teach to the standardized tests because their funding hinges on it.

the schools teach to the SATs/ACTs and whatever universities or trade schools are looking for. Because second-order funding for the schools, through the state and the town, depend on people moving there or not going private/charter, and those people are looking at graduation and acceptance rates. The people they're chasing, at least. it's a race to the bottom at every level.

the universities assume the high schools taught you the math you'll need, and the high schools assume the universities will teach it.

the universities think their job is to prepare you to learn quickly on the job and be good at multiple roles. The jobs think universities taught you everything including the institutional knowledge and just fired the guy necessary to bring you up to speed, and hired you in his place.

you see it in every field, but especially things that can't easily be taught, from politics, to government, to diplomacy, to manufacturing, to tech, to engineering, etc.

you saw it during COVID when experts at the top of their field refused to believe 70 years of research and then lied to everyone's faces and then were baffled they lost everyone's trust

and to top it all off, "unemployment"-in-the-not-having-a-reliable-job-for-your-training-exp-etc-even-though-the-industry-signals-it-needs-hires-at-the-same-time sense is high partially because employers think the workforce isn't trying hard enough, instead of the fact that none of them bothered to train or mentor their hires in a way that works, seeing it as additional cost instead of investment.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

muffinlord
@muffinlord

It's the dino nuggets thing again, a shade of the true self reflecting in the false self. If you teach people to write passionless papers about shit they don't care about, then the shit they don't care about is going to be what the machine eats, and then naturally if the machine eats a bunch of bland ass writing, people see what the machine makes from that and think well surely anything like this must be from the machine

The system made itself, i guess, is what I'm getting at, and maybe we should get people to try to write things they give a shit about more than just things to earn twenty points on

login to reply

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

rotsharp
@rotsharp

i have been quietly freaking out about this since not long after i graduated high school and realized that my teachers had adultified me in some cases through my public education at a similarly resourced city as your tale.

i was drafted as an underage ta and given way too much opinion about my peers by my teachers, and it sucked but also it was the least bad option for everybody? my teachers were overworked and didnt have time to deal with my adhd ass, my peers often didnt have other chances to learn, and helping people learn was an early special interest of mine and i was good at it before the world beat the patience out of me. in retrospect, i was on occasion discussing what was essentially covert remedial education for my peers so that the ghouls from the district didnt come in and make things worse, with adults, from when i was 12.

i truly think this is going to be a factor in the next wave of the internet being even more of a collective subconscious perma storm cell as the general ability of the population to both read and write degrades while ability to post (vis smart phone adoption rates) continues to increase. i have basically resolved to do Offline At Any Cost about it. this just isnt a fight i can fight on this ground. making the internet a place instead of a tool was a dangerous choice, and i just gotta change that for myself to keep going

login to reply

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

confusedcharlot
@confusedcharlot

i will say from being proximate to a math heavy science, that remediation is one of the biggest uncompensated burdens facing college teachers.

feynman's famous intro to physics series reflected a huge increase in the mathematical sophistication of incoming college students by the 1960s, and i'm not sure colleges have ever really shifted away from that assumption.

some state schools, especially those that are committed to admitting all applicants, have to face this more head on, but no one really wants to fund it.

login to reply
jcolag
@jcolag

This goes back at least to when I was in school, where the actual education was always supposed to have happened "upstream," with the public schools saying "look, man, we're funded through property taxes, need to march through a minefield where any topic could be an attack on some parent's fake version of Christianity, and most parents just think of us as a gigantic daycare center!"

I went to an engineering college, so the focus on different subjects doesn't match the rest of the world, but I have two data points from...I dunno, a billion years ago?

First, as an engineering school, everyone assumed that no student would have any aptitude for or interest in the humanities. The curriculum had as little of it as the accreditation boards would let them get away with.

But more tellingly, the placement exam involved writing - if I remember correctly - one half-page essay on any one of six topics, with a two-and-a-half-hour time limit. When the professor told me that, I laughed in derision, and they immediately gave me more time, and assumed that I gave up when I walked out of the room in twenty minutes.

Second, by contrast to English, they (of course) did care about math. And in the years that I attended, the math department added three remedial courses, because students kept failing the other remedial courses. I forget what they called them in the catalogs, but internally, they referred to "pre-pre-pre-Calculus." We had students who aspired to designing bridges and jets and stuff, who tried to "when will we ever need to use this in the real world" factoring polynomials, and could/would only do it with a memorizable-and-forgettable system.

In other words, yes, what professors blame on "AI" actually reflects uninspired essay questions and students trained to put forth the least-effort, most-formulaic responses that they can get manage, because that got them through every important class in the past and nobody ever asked them to specify their thesis.

login to reply
NireBryce
@NireBryce

Ehh. Maybe not overall, but in any given field it seems to be the case.

Official Unemployment is a deceptive measure because the Bureau of Labor Statistics only counts unemployment as people who have looked for work in the last 4 weeks, not people out of work who have been applying until they just gave up, dropped out for other reasons, or haven't found jobs willing to hire them. Eventually you fall off the statistics but still don't have a job, not an official job at least.

there's also the opposite end of the spectrum, that also looks for living wages and enough hours, though i don't know anything about the various sources or models there https://www.lisep.org/tru

but even with that going down, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. All I know is there were many more jobs that aren't part time or gig work, and now there are not, and probably 15% of the people I meet dont even have one of those, want to work, but no one is hiring them.

login to reply