I used AI to help in my degree — now I wonder what it's worth
Proposing that students should not run their homework through an LLM or even have the chatbot do it for them because, well, you just shouldn’t, is a dissociation from reality. File picture
In 2018, as I was in transition year of secondary school, I found myself fortunate enough to be going to a local financial advisor’s office every Monday for a few months for work experience.
The work I experienced was largely drinking tea, stapling folders and waiting for the chance to text my mother to come and collect me, but the largest takeaway from this time was that the proprietor of this advisory shop took time every day I was in to talk to me and answer any questions I might have about finance, economics or life in general.
Having someone older and with a genuinely put-together worldview take their time to talk to you and fully engage with questions you have about the world is a beyond-valuable experience to a young person.
Once a year, after the Budget was announced, the proprietor would write a piece for the local newspaper regarding that year’s State budget. He would explain its content and implications and break it down for the lay person.
Having something meaningful to say that others would actually like to read... what could be more valuable than that? It is in part what inspired me to begin writing this today.
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AI initially appeared in my first year of university in the lead-up to Christmas. Our Christmas assignment for a computer science class was some form of a prime number sieve in Python.
When the day arrived, there was chatter amongst students of an AI bot to code for you… well, happy days, how could this go wrong? That computer science module came and went, and along with it came the swift introduction of ChatGPT into daily student life. Explain this, derive that.
What used to be a long time of staring at a bowl of symbol soup, line by line understanding the algebraic meaning and the reasoning behind every move to get to the desired form or solutions was gone, to be replaced with an immediate answer to the next step.
Classes were full of students split from the actual insights of the work they were producing, with the goal of maximising the grade at the end of the day.
Was I any different? No. I played the game to maximise my own outcomes, knowingly prioritising grades over understanding. This tool that could have been the ultimate teacher was now being used to game the system it operated within.
It cut out almost all assignment work and replaced it with in-class tests to go along with end-of-semester exams.
Without assignments to be done at home, gone were the weeks spent in the library digesting and engaging with the materials at hand and the opportunity to learn and understand the subject. Why bother asking why, when all that’s needed is a regurgitation of what you’ve memorised to answer one of a broad range of repeatable questions that you know can come up?
A consequence of this strategy is the case of the humble Fourier series. Using a Fourier series we can break a wave signal down into its component parts.
Ask any of the students who walked out of the exam assessing their understanding of this and see for yourself how many of them could tell you something about using integrals over an L range and establishing ans and bns, but would they actually understand why they were doing any of this?
The aforementioned financial advisor understood his subject to its bedrock before he would take on the responsibility of handling real people’s hard-earned cash or writing for the community.
What does this system actually assess when done multiple times per week for weeks at a time? Nothing valuable.
I had been elected class representative at the beginning of final year, largely motivated by a feeling of being completely over-examined and overlooked.
I approached the department’s review meetings with my thoughts in order and ready to offer some semblance of a solution. The reaction was that of nods and agreement, but also what I felt was no real meaningful desire for improvement or change.
In response to my unrest, a senior professor told me that moral responsibility sits with the student and the student alone. With respect to said professor, academic integrity is a legitimate position but in my experience this is not how the world really works.
People are infinitely complex, and these are all larger contributing factors to why a student is or is not spending her evening considering the Banach fixed point theorem.
Proposing that students should not run their homework through an LLM or even have the chatbot do it for them because, well, you just shouldn’t, is a dissociation from reality.
One of the suggested alternatives to how we were being assessed that I came up with was a piece of work (whether a problem sheet, project or research) followed by an oral exam with a professor or tutor who has a complete or strong understanding of the specific area.
Students can use an LLM to tick off the correct answers, but being pushed and challenged by a scrutinising inquisitor looking to find where understanding fails can reveal the true extent of a student’s learning.
This to me seemed like a positive step towards improving assessment, but it is not without problems, as the faculty was quick to remind me.
On their concerns about students' anxiety in the face of pressure, I felt that a once-off in-depth conversation on a prepared piece compared to the current perpetual cycle of yes-no right-wrong would be a major improvement.
As for the idea that this would be too resource-heavy for a university to do, this I do not accept. A university is not a charity. For each student sitting a four-year STEM subject without placement it takes in a total of €7,418 per year.
The cited difficulty with lecturers being objective in an oral context is potentially an issue, but it's managed fine in the context of the Leaving Certificate and at universities across Europe.
With concrete safeguards and a relevant framework it is a system that has been and is currently practised successfully across many domains.
Having an expert take you seriously and give you their full attention is a deliberate confirmation of a student’s worth, far more so than any number written in red pen at the bottom of an exam script.
The meeting concluded with handshakes and acknowledgement that change was needed and due, but in the time from this meeting to the conclusion of my studies I did not see it.
To give credit to the university, at the end of the academic year it allocated a fund for an internship over the summer to review the course and its contents and provide a report of a framework to improve the department’s offerings.
However, the role was offered a minimal stipend, less than minimum wage. To my knowledge no one ever took up the offer and the project was left undone.
Having come out the other end of this system, I am left questioning the value of my First Class Honours degree.
Providing young people with a document of their results at the end of June each year and a degree at the end of four years is worth something.
But more valuable still would be knowing that someone had taken the time to listen and fully engage with what they've learned, and what they have to say.
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