
Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat - spacelizard
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-is-making-it-extremely-easy-for-students-to-cheat/
======
SteveCoast
When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in
Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book,
so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a
slot, and flew to Champaign.

I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a
polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all
kinds of stuff. I met a bunch of interesting people and it was a blast.

I also fell asleep at my keyboard more than once. It was a beautiful summer,
biking to work and working with what I still think is one of, if not the, best
language ever.

Here's why all this is relevant - I came back to real life to study CompSci on
these old Sparc machines. And it was like, here's the power button. What's an
object in Java? What's a compiler? All reasonable stuff.

But: Wolfram Research and Mathematica had, in a sense, ruined my undergraduate
life before it started. Why were we using all these bizarre tools? Can't we do
this a million times faster? Why are we learning all these bizarre integrals?

It was similar to being denied graphing calculators in A-Level Mathematics (in
the UK, think high school). I get it - we need to learn 'the basics' and
survive without tools to some degree. But, it would have been nice to use them
in some contexts and not just deny their existence.

There's an anecdote I think about Milton Friedman being shown people building
a dam with shovels and not digging machines, to keep people employed in some
God-forsaken country. He asked, why don't you use spoons instead? Then, more
people would be employed.

Mathematica and Alpha are wonderful tools, and I highly recommend applying for
an internship if you're of the right age or whatever the requirements are
today.

~~~
roumenguha
To add another point, my A-Level teacher always said anything the calculator
can do, you can do, and just as fast.

And then she chose a question from the book, had one of us start typing, and
she started at the board solving the same thing.

She finished first. Not by much, and obviously the calculator is the faster
choice more often, but she finished first.

~~~
scarmig
Reminds me of the story of Feynman vs the Abacus. [1]

Though, as a story, the conclusion he draws is pretty self-congratulatory and
bothers me a bit. The substrate on which you implement an algorithm like
arithmetic doesn't really speak to whether you "know numbers." It's like the
high schooler thinking being very good at computing integrals makes you good
at math.

[1]
[http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html](http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html)

~~~
posterboy
Being powerful, ie good in something, is a function of Work over Time, so if
you are good _without much effort_ , that implies some sort of talent I think.

------
res0nat0r
You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like
they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator,
if you've only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead
you to getting an F in the course.

~~~
Chardok
Too right; it may help being able to just provide the answers, but homework
made up a small percentage compared to the actual exams, which of course were
done without any notes and were simple enough not to need a calculator.

It may be difficult trying to teach these kids how to perform the math itself
when they can show the homework, but ultimately they are failing themselves
when it comes down to needing a fundamental understanding on the process
itself.

This reminds me more of teachers scoffing at calculators being a crutch. It
comes down to the students' willingness to learn, not how to thwart cheating
on homework.

~~~
jandrese
My impression is that the article is about highschool students, where homework
tends to be on the order of 75% of your grade simply because you get so much
of it.

If someone were really serious about abusing the service they could pull out a
C in the class even with hard failures of the tests.

~~~
_jal
> where homework tends to be on the order of 75% of your grade

I think I found the problem.

~~~
jandrese
It's hard to balance when you have an hour of homework assigned every day, but
only get tested about once a month. So you have 20 hours of homework vs. a 30
minute test.

The difference in magnitude ends up being too much. Either each homework
assignment is worth almost nothing or they outweigh tests.

------
wodenokoto
It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field.

Some students will inevitably have access to tutors or parents who can give
them the full answer. With wolfram|Alpha all students have access to this.

What this really show is that homework isn't the best tool for gauging student
prowess.

~~~
fullshark
Homework's largely supposed to be about reinforcing the lesson for math
courses. For other courses it's largely about reading which shouldn't be done
in class. Tests/essays are for assessment.

~~~
xenihn
Then why should homework be factored into grades at all?

~~~
treehau5
Incentive to do it.

~~~
an27
And propping up the grades of compliant students.

------
captain_clam
In my two semesters of college math, I've gathered that the faculty has
something of a phobia to, if not wolfram in particular, students' access to
help outside of the department.

Homework problems were oftentimes deliberately difficult, and attending
tutoring/office hours was almost certainly necessary for most students to
master the material.

I got my hands on an instructor's manual of the textbook, and it was a
tremendous boon for my mastery of the topics. By having immediate access to
the solutions of difficult problems, I was able to comprehend how to approach
problems of that type, and therefore could solve more difficult but similar
examples in the future. The cycle of attempt/fail/check-solution/repeat was
really effective. Waiting for the instructor's office hours or the
availability of tutors would have made this process, if not impossible,
incredibly inefficient.

Do any math educators have any insight to this? Is this math department
clinging to an antiquated curriculum in which faculty is something of a gate-
keeper to knowledge? Is there a good reason for their distaste for 'going
around' them?

~~~
impendia
> the faculty has something of a phobia to ... students' access to help
> outside of the department.

Math professor here. I am most certainly happy if my students get help outside
the department, and I think my attitude is quite typical.

We can be a little bit wary of some kinds of help. Too much math teaching
consists of "If you see a problem that looks exactly like X, here are the
steps you should memorize to solve it."

But we don't care _per se_ if you can solve problems of the shape X, Y, or Z.
We want you to develop your skills to the point that all of these lie
naturally within your skill set, that you could do them even if you've never
seen one exactly like that before. As such, some kinds of tutoring can be
counterproductive.

But most aren't. In my opinion your professors' attitude was quite foolish.
Kudos to you for seizing the initiative and figuring out for yourself how to
best learn the material.

~~~
gregmac
> Too much math teaching consists of "If you see a problem that looks exactly
> like X, here are the steps you should memorize to solve it."

A significant amount of math testing is basically checking if you've memorized
some theorem (and then can solve it), so is that surprising?

~~~
impendia
> is that surprising?

No. It's a difficult problem to mitigate.

There are always going to be some students who want to learn the minimum
possible to pass the exam, and who will never work with the material again.
Although I do my best to be respectful of such students (indeed, in some
circumstances this can be a perfectly rational point of view), my pedagogy is
aimed at the student who sees my class as something more than a meaningless
hoop.

------
hguant
I fail to see the problem here. In a curriculum that takes the joy out of math
and attempts to reduce the student's mind to a calculation machines, students
employed a calculation machine.

I understand the arguement that math is important, but the way it's taught in
America, even at the AP level, is criminal. It boils down to "if you see this
pattern, apply these steps" without any effort at going beyond. We teach "how"
but not "why", which I think is a common refrain when talking about the
American education system, or any test driven education system. Math is a
means, not an end.

~~~
aesthetics1
This drives me crazy in my mathematics courses. Sometimes I just do not
recognize the pattern, and tools like Mathway or Wolfram Alpha can say "right
here dummy" and give me the first step. It is not always about cheating, but
seeing the steps for solving the problem logically outlined. I often back
myself into a corner working out a difficult problem and need a lifeline.

------
adamnemecek
Playing the world's saddest song on the world's smallest violin there Denise
Garcia. How about maybe updating your curriculum for the 3rd millennium. Nah,
that would be to much work, complaining in wired is much more productive.

The best part is that people in the school administration might do something
like blacklisting Wolfram Alpha on computers in the school library and feel
like they've dealt successfully with the problem.

~~~
yequalsx
Have you tried teaching calculus where everyone gets to use Wolfram Alpha
and/or Mathematica? I did for three years.

I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more
importantly don't want to. They just want to mimic problem types. They don't
want to understand the why. Plug and chug is their true desire.

Using the computer exposes right away if a student understands the concepts.
You can't get started on a problem if you don't know what to tell the computer
to do or why. I went back to the old paradigm. A few students got it but most
never understood.

~~~
adamnemecek
> I discovered that the students really don't understand the concepts and more
> importantly don't want to.

The problem is that you are forcing people who don't care about it to learn
it. Ofc they'll take shortcuts.

> Plug and chug is their true desire.

I mean, most tests are very plug and chug so it's no surprise.

Also note that it might be unreasonable to expect students who never used
these tools to use them for the right purpose. Mathematica is a complex tool
but I can't imagine that much class time is dedicated to the tool itself.

~~~
yequalsx
Actually it's not a complicated tool with the free form input, integration
with Wolfam Alpha, and templates for the commands used. Also during every test
I would correct any command that didn't execute properly.

Your point originally was that it requires too much work on the part of
teachers/administration to update the curriculum for 21st century. I'm
pointing out that this view while true in some cases may not be true in the
present situation. It's easy to ascribe to laziness why things are done in
education the way they are to someone not involved in teaching.

------
Rjevski
Wolfram Alpha isn't the issue. The issue is that we're grading students on an
arbitrary and meaningless metric, instead of the end result.

As an employer, if I hire you to do a task, let's say build a toaster, I
couldn't care less about how you achieved that - as long as I've got my
toaster and it can help me grow my toast-making business I'm happy. Education
should work the same.

~~~
vlasev
Plug and chug with Wolfram Alpha is very similar to plug and chug Stack
Exchange answers in your code base.

~~~
Rjevski
Math and programming are a bit different though - to my knowledge in math
you're not dealing with malicious users trying to give you incorrect input in
hopes of exploiting bugs in your algorithm.

Edit: but to be honest if you needed to give the result Z for a set of inputs
X and Y _without_ worrying about invalid/malicious input, then a Stack
Exchange copy/paste is totally fine by me.

~~~
JadeNB
> Math and programming are a bit different though - to my knowledge in math
> you're not dealing with malicious users trying to give you incorrect input
> in hopes of exploiting bugs in your algorithm.

But in fact you _are_! Actually it's even worse; in programming, you are just
up against the ingenuity of actual human (or at least humanly programmed)
users, whereas, in mathematics, you are up against the whole of 'reality' (in
a Platonic sense). A whole tower of consequences will be built upon one
mathematician's work, and, even if no human can spot the flaw in that work, if
it is there then 'reality' will find it, and somewhere in the chain of
consequences there will be an error that will bring the whole thing crashing
down.

~~~
Rjevski
The thing is, if no humans can spot the flaw, then what difference does it
make if they cheated in school? Either way they'll do flawed calculations if
we assume your logic.

However, I wasn't really talking about people wanting to become actual
mathematicians - those probably wouldn't use Wolfram just because they
actually love crunching those numbers manually. The people who we're talking
about here just see math as a roadblock they need to get through to do
whatever they really want to do (programming, etc), and in this case this
"cheating" is totally fine by me.

~~~
JadeNB
> The thing is, if no humans can spot the flaw, then what difference does it
> make if they cheated in school? Either way they'll do flawed calculations if
> we assume your logic.

I don't think that my logic allows us to conclude that. The idea of
mathematics is that it is possible for humans to create and apply a system
whose correct application makes the genesis of errors, howsoever subtle or
undetectable, impossible.

Given this, and the likelihood that a mathematical error (of the conceptual
type "any convergent sequences of continuous functions converges to a
continuous function", rather than of the computational type "1 + 1 = 1") will
_not_ be found, it is especially important that practitioners of mathematics
know how to apply their tools correctly, which they probably will not have
learned by cheating in school; and, if they are able to apply those tools
correctly, then they will not create errors.

(I grant that the weasel word 'correct' and its derivatives risks making this
argument circular. I grant that human mathematicians collectively make an
awful lot of errors, although I hope that we make fewer professional errors
than many other professionals.)

> However, I wasn't really talking about people wanting to become actual
> mathematicians - those probably wouldn't use Wolfram just because they
> actually love crunching those numbers manually.

This comment seems to suggest to me the source of our disagreement in the
first paragraph. As a mathematician, I don't crunch numbers professionally,
and, when I have to do so outside of my profession, don't love crunching them
manually. I suspect most mathematicians are in the same boat.

~~~
Rjevski
I definitely agree that someone using tools should know how to use them right
- however in this case maybe the curriculum should be tweaked to point out
mistakes when using a tool? Ie, instead of assuming that someone would do it
by hand, assume they'd do everything they can to cheat their way out of doing
the work and trick them as much as possible so the tools would only work if
you use them right. Instead of focusing on teaching them how to do it by hand
(which they would never do in the real-world given the time constraints),
teach them which tools to use and how to use them properly.

My point about crunching numbers manually or not was more about the fact that
a lot of people taking those math tests do so because it's required by X
policy and not because they are genuinely interested in math, and IMO that's
fine - not everyone aims for a job that involves mission-critical math. Some
for example might just want to develop games, where a screw-up could at worst
result in a graphical glitch.

~~~
JadeNB
> I definitely agree that someone using tools should know how to use them
> right - however in this case maybe the curriculum should be tweaked to point
> out mistakes when using a tool?

I totally agree! I structure my classes to point out both common classes of
mistakes that everyone makes, and uncommon classes of mistakes that are subtle
and difficult to catch. I even have a special way of presenting it (I switch
to a colour I only use for discussing mistakes).

Students hate it. One of the two comments that I consistently get on my
evaluations is "stop telling us how _not_ to do it." (The other is that my
tests are too hard, precisely because they don't involve just rote
computations.) I've been told by classroom observers that many students
literally ignore it, ceasing to take notes while I discuss mistakes and
resuming only afterwards.

I keep doing it anyway, and I make a point of _why_ I'm doing it, but it can't
all be me; some of the onus has to be on the students to be willing to think
about understanding failure modes as being as important as success.

------
williamstein
> “Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division...”

What the heck kind of article is this...? I can’t read it seriously.

~~~
Rjevski
Even if this was true, what's the problem? He built a successful business that
many people find useful, and that's good enough for me.

~~~
williamstein
I respect the abilities and accomplishments of Wolfram. My problem with the
statement I quoted from the article is that I suspect it is bullshit; I think
Stephen can do long division, and much much more...

~~~
defective
"I never learned long division, and look at me." \-- Stephen Wolfram

[http://www.stephenwolfram.com/media/meet-inventor-who-
makes-...](http://www.stephenwolfram.com/media/meet-inventor-who-makes-
complex-calculus-simple/)

------
joelrunyon
Am I the only one here that would program their TI-83 in high school to run
equations for me so I didn't have to solve them by hand?

I wasn't even that dev-savvy (and still am not), but it was super easy and was
a huge time-saver on timed tests.

I obviously had to learn the concept in order to program the equation, but
once I did - why should I have to go through everything manually every single
time?

~~~
iddqd
We had the calculators force reset before every test.

~~~
qubex
A friend of mine had a graphing CASIO calculator (we sat our exams in 1999)
and he figured out a way of making text files persist across resets. This was
the very epitome of unfair competitive advantage, but I figured that if he put
in the effort to find the work-around, he deserved to benefit from it.

------
gkop
I felt extremely fortunate that Wolfram Alpha was available when I took
calculus in college during summer '09\. Wolfram Alpha was amazingly convenient
and helpful in getting through tricky problem sets when there was a queue at
the tutoring center. It didn't really allow me to cheat at the problem sets
because it didn't give the intermediate steps, just the final answer. And of
course it's useless on exams. At least regarding calculus, it seems to me
almost 100% a helpful learning tool and 0% a contributor to cheating problems.

------
thomascgalvin
There's a simple solution to this, which also has the advantage of creating
better educational outcomes: have students do the reading at home, and the
work in class.

Dry lectures aren't the best way to learn something: hand-on work is.
Listening to a teacher read a powerpoint is a waste of time, because you could
just read (or watch a video) on your own.

But having an expert on the material standing over your shoulder, helping you
through tough spots while you're working through it? _That 's_ valuable.

------
kevindong
The problem is that not all math problems are worth doing. For instance, when
I took Calculus 2/3, some of the homework problems weren't usually hard per
se, they were just arduously long. And honestly not really worth doing by
hand. If I misplaced a single number and didn't realize it immediately, I
would spend the next 10 minutes solving an integral that had no use, plugging
it into Webassign for it to tell me I'm wrong, backtrack until I find my
issue, and solve the corrected integral. I would usually do this at least once
per problem (but usually more like two or three times).

So by the end of the course, I would just figure out the integral (or rather,
the triple integral), plug it into Wolfram, plug the outputted answer into
Webassign, and if the answer was wrong I'd backtrack until eventually the
answer that Wolfram outputs is correct. At which point I'd solve the integral
by hand.

\---

There was one time when the homework problem asked me to find the intercept of
this obscenely complex trigonometric equation. I tried for a solid half hour
and couldn't solve it, so I went to the math help room to ask the TAs for
help. I ended up stumping three of the TAs. A few days later, I went back to
see if they had figured it out. Turns out they hadn't. They said we should
just use Wolfram to get the answer.

------
innot
Recalling the first-year university math analysis course, our professor
himself told us about Wolfram Alpha. Which followed by a whole year of
equations and integrals the site could solve only numerically.

The high enough level of the tasks beats any cheating attempts.

------
jandrese
Or they could cheat by doing their homework, then checking the results on
Wolfram Alpha to make sure they always get 100%.

~~~
vivekseth
I think we should encourage that. If students can catch their mistakes early
and learn from them, I think they should.

What we should discourage is students using Wolfram Alpha to just get the
answers without any initial work. That robs students of the chance to learn
and would definitely be cheating.

------
Bedon292
I find it an awesome tool to advance knowledge. I recently had to take calc
again after 10 years, and it helped me get back up to speed super fast. I
would do the work, check the answer in the back of the book, and if I got it
wrong, I would use Wolfram Alpha to do step by step to see where I got it
wrong.

I can see some people saying that is cheating, but it is a learning tool to
me. The class was 90% tests/ quizes. HW was a participation grade. Meaning a
tool like that gives no one an advantage. Unless they are using it during the
test.

------
NamTaf
Teach and test for understanding _why_ and _how_ the answer comes to be, not
_what_ the answer is. Maths education, in my experience, relies too much on
testing of the arithmetic rather than the logic. This just results in plug and
chug because it's lazy testing and students apply lazy solutions.

Good examiners will ask students questions that make them think about why and
how, not what the answer is. These often don't even need algebra or arithmetic
because it assumes students know the equations and instead goes a level deeper
to test understanding of why those equations are the way they are.

I had the gamut in uni. I found that engineering more often successfully
tested understanding as I describe above. Some didn't; my thermo was a case of
'learn how the equations work, then read the right graphs and go' but
particularly some of my fluid and aerospace courses were great at asking
questions that really tested deep understanding of the theories.

One good example of this that I came across more recently is some of the edX
courses that used to exist featuring Walter Lewin (before his sexual
harassment came to light). He was very successfully able to question his
students on the why and how, not just the what. This actually proved even more
important in the MOOC environment, where you can't as tightly control the
environment in which students undertake examination.

It's hard, it requires good lecturers really spending a bit of time devising
questions as well as supporting their tutors as they teach the students, but
it's possible.

------
EGreg
My dad said to me that knowledge isn't what you remember, it's what you can
remember or look up relatively quickly.

------
pletnes
There's a significant point a lot of people are missing. In e.g. physics and
chemistry, the math is not the point. Using e.g. Wolfram Alpha is great if it
allows students to solve larger and more complex problems, without sitting
there solving integrals over and over (for instance).

------
Chris2048
A few issues:

1) applications rest on the shoulders of giants, it isn't efficient to learn
too much more than you need to. If you only need to "understand" at a high
level, you should just use tools that "do it for you" at lower levels - It's
just a shame there are not better FLOSS competitors to Mathematica.

2) It should be clear what the "understanding dependencies" are - i.e. when
some knowledge of the foundations can inform the higher levels, and when they
don't. If I understand what 'sorted' means, I don't need to know the details
of any specific sorting implementation to use it.

3) The way mathematics is split up into a million small, set-theoretically-
abstract lemmas etc makes it so much harder to understand. It makes even
familiar concepts hard.

------
mnarayan01
The are many things which are difficult to measure directly, and thus people
tend to use indirect measurements instead; school-learned math is full of such
things. Consider a fairly simple example: "What is the factorial of a number?"

Determining whether a student knows this is going to take a bit of work
(particularly if they lack a formal way to specify it e.g. Pi notation or even
a programming language), but we might approximate it by instead asking "What
is the factorial of 5?" Now obviously this is not a perfect measure of what
we're _actually_ looking for even in the absence of calculators (e.g. someone
might memorize 5! = 120), but it's easy to evaluate and is probably a _decent_
proxy in the absence of calculators.

------
jeremymcanally
They may let you cheat (just like SparkNotes I guess), but these tools also
let people like me who haven't had advanced calculus survive when we otherwise
wouldn't. If you pay for the WA service (I don't remember what it's called),
you can type complex math in and it will break down how to solve it out. This
was invaluable to me in some CS classes where I knew how to implement the
algorithms once the math had been detangled, but the mathematical notation was
so opaque to me at the time that I would've had no hope of figuring it out.

Obviously, I learned a lot from having it broken down like that so I wouldn't
be as dependent on the tool now, but at the time, it was a huge learning aid.

------
jjk166
Anyone who thinks using wolfram alpha for math is cheating has never tried
using it for non-trivial calculations. Yeah, it will save you the time of
looking up an integral from a table, but it's worthless if the integral isn't
in a standard table. It will save you time on looking up the equation for the
area of a dodecagon, but it won't prove that equation. It will save you time
figuring out the units of the final answer, but it won't tell you if those
units are logical. Wolfram alpha only saves people from the tedious busywork
of basic arithmetic and algebra, the user still needs to do all the math.

------
set92
Since when has wolfram alpha an AI? I always thought it was simply calls to
Mathematica.

Maybe when you ask general questions it uses an AI, but with functions and
maths I think it only uses Mathematica.

~~~
err4nt
AI gets clicks in 2017: a story about students giving an artificial
intelligence their homework to finish sells better as a story than talking
about students punching formulas into a web-based calculator.

------
kronos29296
Using a search engine is not cheating. There is nothing wrong in making use of
all available resources in assignments and this is just another resource at
their disposal. My $0.02

------
throwaway2016a
This isn't new... I had a TI-89 in college that could solve for calculus
equations. As someone else pointed out... we couldn't use it on tests though.

~~~
2OEH8eoCRo
Had a TI-92+ myself. Best money I ever spent

------
mxschumacher
If a computer can easily answer the question, it is not worth asking it to a
human (this also applies in the real sense that it won't be valued by the
marketplace and translate to higher wages).

How about challenging students with problems that are difficult even when
modern technology is used to its fullest extend? Or teaching students how to
build tools that solve their homework?

~~~
err4nt
> teaching students how to build tools that solve their homework?

This would give them not only a thorough understanding of the problem they are
solving, but teach them a very valuable life skill of finding ways to automate
your work, and finding ways to package your expertise into software that can
be run by a person without your expertise.

This would amazing!

~~~
throwawayjava
Basically, in most college courses the problems are either 1) easy enough that
implementing a program to solve them isn't super insightful, or 2) difficult
enough that complete automation would mean "do research".

I'll limit myself to Math since that's the topic of this article:

Calculus sequence: CS 1 is not a pre-req. And there's not enough time to teach
both CS 1 and Calc 1/2/3 in a single course. "Implement it" works well for
derivatives but not integrals. You're not gonna teach Risch, and implementing
integration tricks isn't particularly insightful IMO. The cost/benefit ratio
explodes in Calc 3, and the physical intuitions become as important as than
the calculations.

Everything past that is proof-based and now you're kind of in "your homework
is an open research problem in combining NLP with theorem proving" territory.
Maybe with the exception of particularly bad Linear Algebra courses and a bit
of the early stuff in Algebra.

From a "pragmatic skills" perspective, this approach is _still_ highly
suspect. E.g. no one's going to invent their way to Risch by implementing
integration tricks.

Point is, _every_ field teaches useful life skills / knowledge, and
programming gets in the way as often or more often than it helps.

------
jorgec
I work training and cheating professionals. I used to be a project in chief
(the guy that hired, fired and evaluated new personal).

I encourage to my students to do the, so called, cheat, because its what the
people in the real world do, people don't need to memorize a lot of topics and
people use calculator, computer and excel. Sheesh with the old and rust model
of learning.

------
Kenji
I am deeply grateful that something like WolframAlpha existed when I was
taking calculus classes. It helped me soo much. I could make up integrals,
solve them and see if I was right, just like that. It even has a function to
show step by step solutions of integrals and series. All extremely useful
tools to deepen understanding, not to cheat.

------
arnaudsm
Students cheat because our society values diplomas more than knowledge.

It's a true problem, but the consequences are not visible yet.

------
Mathnerd314
SymPy is in the same ballpark as Wolfram for calculus, and not rate-limited:
[http://www.sympy.org/en/index.html](http://www.sympy.org/en/index.html)

It doesn't include the databases of structured information or the NLP-like
interface though.

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carry_bit
The "problem" is that the students have moved to
[https://www.computerbasedmath.org/](https://www.computerbasedmath.org/) but
the curriculum hasn't (yet). Just fix the curriculum.

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kiernanmcgowan
Its not just high school students. I had some classmates in grad school using
it to breeze through feedback theory homework. The tool is as powerful as
students are lazy.

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deft
Today I learned you can cheat on homework. So apparently giving up and having
the wrong answers (or no answers at all) is what professors would prefer. Cool
:)

~~~
throwawayjava
_> So apparently giving up and having the wrong answers (or no answers at all)
is what professors would prefer. Cool :)_

It's much easier to correct known unknowns than unknown unknowns.

The best advice I was ever given as a student was "Pretend like you'll get an
automatic A on your report card and treat your grades as a feedback mechanism
for figuring out what you do and do not understand. Just focus on learning."
As a simple corollary, cheating is kinda silly.

~~~
aphextron
>It's much easier to correct known unknowns than unknown unknowns.

This assumes you'll get any kind of personalized feedback and instruction in a
lower division maths course. Good luck with that at a public university.

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ephimetheus
I have a Master's degree in physics and Wolphram|Alpha would not have been out
of place in the acknowledgements section of my theses.

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SimeVidas
“Difficult to trace”? If it generates the same output for any given input,
then you can just compare the students’ submitted papers with it, no?

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DennisP
Sounds like Wolfram Alpha could be very helpful for anyone doing self-study,
from math textbooks that don't put answers in the back.

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vmilner
"while a few were still using it at their jobs as engineers or quantitative
analysts"

Er... which is a good thing, surely?

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losteverything
The big issue to me is things that matter take effort.

So many things (like math answers) are made so available with no effort.

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bikash_ghale
we need to learn 'the basics' and survive without tools to some degree.

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6d6b73
I found symbolab.com much better at this.. It also has much better user
interface.

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bikash_ghale
I think we should learn

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Stranger43
So the test is rewarding students with the skills to perform well in real
life, instead of only those who have submitted blindly to the outdated
traditions taught by those who cannot do.

There is of cause a level where you cannot just copy solutions but those tend
to be badly covered by "facts centered" written exams anyway so why not build
your exams around the reality that modern tools exist and will be used,
instead of testing as if the world had not changed since the teachers left
school.

