The same thing happened when calculators came out, when the Internet mainstreamed, mobile phones came out, and now AI...
It's the education system that needs to adapt, not the students. Change is hard, but eras of computing drive societal change and professors and colleges need to adapt to stay relevant and not the other way around.
Start emphasizing problem solving and applications and creative thinking over rote regurgitation of data.
My favorite engineering professor was all over this decades in advance. You could bring any reference material you wanted to take one of his tests.
We couldn't find the solutions to his test problems in a search engine. If you can nowadays, maybe student and professor both need to reconsider your career path because you may not have one for very long.
There are rote concepts that underpin stuff like that. There is a certain amount of rote you need in order to be creative. Calculators are great, but knowing how to multiply has more value than just knowing that 3 times 4 is 12. This same idea applies to so many disciplines and I'm wondering if we're going to go back to a more tedious kind of learning where long periods of supervision are necessary to keep sure you know the foundations necessary for the higher level more conceptual classes.
Everbody on the planet has a smartphone and access to a world of information and data at their fingertips.
Unless you are a contestant on Jeopardy, being able to recall lots of little pieces of data no longer has a lot of inherent value.
What does still have significant value is understanding what the data represents and how it can used and manipulated and combined and applied in creative ways in order to make good decisions and solve problems.
If you can't figure out how to describe your question, for example, because you haven't memorized enough vocabulary to express it, it becomes problematic.
Similarly if you aren't familiar enough with the topic to verify that the output of any such tool is reasonable, and you end up posting "rm -rf /" as an answer to a question of "how do I free space on my hard drive" because it's a common shitpost answer to the question.
And a lot of people have gotten through the education system, in my experience, by rote regurgitation from memorization without deeper understanding, so I think the changes around this are going to make much clearer to some a gaping divide between how well people learn right now versus how well people think others are learning.
I quite stormy disagree with you here: in order to reason about complex things it's absolutely necessary to have ready knowledge so that you can combine those bits and draw conclusions, see bigger pictures etc, you just can't do that by googling some facts.
Good luck with that. Llama2 can run on a gaming rig. You can train it on your own writing and it will write exactly like you (but better or worse as you choose). There’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
The only way forward is performative knowledge verification in person and a controlled environment.
the running joke at university doing engineering was "here I have got two hours to get four problems half right, in the real world I am going to have as long as it takes to not make a mistake"
so, assess by continual assessment, make submissions by github, students have to push a commit at least every 20% of progress so the lecturer can see the incremental development/thinking and progressto wards the final result.
consequently, the correction of the approach and process to the problem can be much better tailored and it will also be much harder to use chatGPT, or any other cheating method for that matter.
Are exams all written online now? Were they okay with students googling answers and sharing them with each other, but getting customized answers from a robot is where they draw the line?
Most interesting thing about this I remember reading is when a history professor assigned a chatgpt essay to his students and asked them to find flaws in it.
It's the education system that needs to adapt, not the students. Change is hard, but eras of computing drive societal change and professors and colleges need to adapt to stay relevant and not the other way around.