Is breadth of learning always the goal though? Sounds like students are learning to work smarter, not harder.
Now, if they aren’t learning the core competencies in their field of study, that’s a problem. If they just aren’t learning how to write an essay or remember some shortcuts they’ll never need once they graduate, I fail to see a problem.
No, it really isn’t. It’s one method of exercising critical thinking, but someone can go through life never having written an essay and still develop and demonstrate their critical thinking skills.
It’s when we get the vehicle confused with or fused to the concept that we run into trouble in cases like handling LLM use in education.
Should students learn how to craft an essay? Definitely. It teaches all sorts of additional skills that are required to write in that format, assuming you have to generate the entire written work yourself.
Similarly, long division is a useful skill to learn, as are Riemann sums. But so is using a graphing calculator to do your dividing and differentiation for you. LLMs are a tool, not much different from a graphing calculator.
Is breadth of learning always the goal though? Sounds like students are learning to work smarter, not harder.
Now, if they aren’t learning the core competencies in their field of study, that’s a problem. If they just aren’t learning how to write an essay or remember some shortcuts they’ll never need once they graduate, I fail to see a problem.
Writing an essay, aka, presenting your thoughts in written form, is an important process in critical thinking.
No, it really isn’t. It’s one method of exercising critical thinking, but someone can go through life never having written an essay and still develop and demonstrate their critical thinking skills.
It’s when we get the vehicle confused with or fused to the concept that we run into trouble in cases like handling LLM use in education.
Should students learn how to craft an essay? Definitely. It teaches all sorts of additional skills that are required to write in that format, assuming you have to generate the entire written work yourself.
Similarly, long division is a useful skill to learn, as are Riemann sums. But so is using a graphing calculator to do your dividing and differentiation for you. LLMs are a tool, not much different from a graphing calculator.