One of the biggest complaints I've had about my son's schooling is the lack of homework and at-home projects. For years, I chalked it up to the lost COVID year and lowered expectations. Now I'm starting to worry that homework itself is becoming a relic, and that should alarm every parent in America.
I still remember the work that was expected of me as a kid.
In fifth grade, I wrote a research paper on the Revolutionary War. I had to read several books, take notes, write the paper, and put together a full bibliography. In sixth grade, our class split into groups, two per subject, one arguing the pro side and one the con side. I landed in the pro-capital punishment group, and we did all kinds of research together, including a trip to a local jail, before giving our presentation to make our case. In seventh-grade biology, I had a group project on the endocrine system. We met with our team outside of school over a few weeks, divvied up the work, built our own portions of the project, and presented it in class.
I can say this objectively: kids today aren't expected to do nearly the same amount or level of work I was doing as a kid. And I get the impression this problem reaches well beyond my local school district.
The lack of homework in particular has really bugged me, but I'm starting to see why it's likely to fade away anyway, and the culprit is artificial intelligence.
Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley mathematician who won the Fields Medal in 1998, has stopped grading homework for correctness. He made the change after watching students lean on AI to rack up top scores, and he concluded that take-home assignments have outlived their usefulness because chatbots now solve undergraduate math problems better than many of his students can.
"Student use of AI for homework is now widespread," Borcherds told The California Post. "Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty."
ICYMI: All Hell Breaks Loose at the United Nations: Waltz Spokesman Assaulted
So Borcherds now hands out credit simply for finishing the work, right or wrong. Inc. reported that he admits it's "not a very good system," but he says educators haven't found a better way to deal with the skills gap that AI dependence is opening up. And catching the cheaters has become nearly impossible.
"There is no easy way to tell the difference between human and AI generated work," Borcherds said. "Occasionally one could tell it is AI because AI made a few characteristic errors, but AI has now improved so much that it rarely makes obvious mistakes."
When I was a kid, we didn't have the distractions kids face today. We certainly didn't have AI. The internet was still young and barely the tool it is now. Having so much information at our fingertips is wonderful, but it has brought a whole new set of problems. Technology often drives progress, but AI feels like an exception.
"There have been plenty of technical breakthroughs in the past — hand weaving was put out of business by looms, and horses were put out of business by motor cars, and so on," Borcherds said. "This is the first time anything like this has happened in mathematics, though."
His move follows warnings from other Berkeley faculty that sky-high homework grades are covering up weak fundamentals in math and engineering, weaknesses that surface the moment students sit down for a proctored exam.
If one of the finest mathematicians alive can't tell his students' work from a chatbot's, what chance does a sixth-grade teacher have? And if college students are outsourcing their thinking, imagine the temptation for a 12-year-old with a smartphone in his pocket.
Education will have to adapt.
Maybe homework will ultimately go away, but something will have to take its place. Those projects we all did as kids teach us more than facts about the subjects they cover. They teach us how to dig for answers, work with other people, and see something hard through to the end.
Children learn to think by doing the thinking themselves. Every generation has had its shortcuts. Heck, I’m sure calculators were controversial when they first became a thing in schools. But AI can skip the struggle entirely, and the struggle is where the learning happens.
