AI Boosted Homework Scores by 18% – Then Exam Scores Dropped 20%, Study Shows

This article is about the Economist's summary of a journal article so we have a (AI?) summary of a summary. Not very helpful. Here are a couple of better references:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618

https://archive.is/w1eng

Also note the findings are more nuanced than may appear on the surface.

For some of the classes my kids were in, the lessons and homework time were reversed.

Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.

Education sustem is not about the actual knowledge, but about training various aspects of the brain during kids development. So even memorizing literature have benefits, even though it doesn't bring any career use.

If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.

I think we need to accept that AI causes cognitive decline, like Alzheimer's. For an Adult this may be manageable, but in a young brain, this is detrimental.

In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.

We cannot be boosting AI slop like this

abolish homework

Learning in school is so broken.

Homework is boring. I had a tough enough time focusing on it in the 90s when computers and video games were still a drag to get going... Imagine explaining to a child today that they need to sit down and do an hour of math homework every other night?

I just can't see it happening.

It's too boring.

I don't have a solution to this problem.

Yeah, obviously. We also don't know how to use flint and steel to start fires any more. You wouldn't outlift a crane, why would you want to outhomework an AI? And you can't even argue that this toil is going to help in the workplace, because the workplace is now AI-native, and you can offload everything to AI.

Guess what this is probably fine. AI helps people do their work on a daily basis and probably makes them memorize less things. That’s how the world is moving. You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic. And we shouldn’t organize our society around memorizing things for exams.