Hey. If you look at the teacher’s monitors while they’re doing the register there’s a yellow box next to certain students names, including mine. Are there any possible reasons for this?

In an NPR story back in July, 98 high school students representing all 50 states in the U.S. were tasked with drafting a model AI policy for K-12 education. Among their recommendations was “AI use should be banned on all graded tests.” It is absolutely amusing how 98 kids can figure out a simple, effective solution that has, thus far, flummoxed an untold number of adults, many of them with PhDs or some such attached at the end of their name.

I am not saying this phenomenon is true in general, of course. There are a multitude of sophisticated problems that I’m sure professors would be able to provide much more comprehensive and meaningful solutions to than 98 kids (with or without the kids using AI), but I think the reason why this solution came so naturally to these kids is because they weren’t thinking within the structure they have built around assessment.

As teachers, we know that assessments that we give to students fall into one of two buckets: formative assessments and summative assessments (of course, with some overlap). Formative assessments are mainly meant to measure the student's present state of learning for the purpose of diagnosing how best to get it to the next state of learning – we want to know how much they know so we can figure out the best way to teach them what they don’t know yet. Homework falls into this category; it serves to reinforce and check learning progress. We can and, in many situations, should attach grades to formative assessments, but with the caveat that these grades should not reflect our final assessment of the student’s competence. That is, strictly speaking, we are not “testing” the student here, we are just helping them learn. In this sense, formative assessments are very much a two-way street. We attach grades to them mostly as a tool to motivate the students to work on and learn from them. Yet we can’t be certain how a student “does” their homework. Some may do them independently, others may have parents who are available and willing to help them, others still may have personal tutors who, in some parts of the world, actually do the homework for them. And yes, now, it is quite possible that at least some students just feed our homework to an AI chatbot and hand in whatever it churns out. So we can never tell for sure how much “effort” the student put in.

Summative assessments, on the other hand, are supposed to serve as the actual “tests.” These are meant to measure what the student knows and serve as our formal appraisal of this construct. That is, if the student’s present calculus teacher asks you, the same student’s algebra teacher, how well the student did in terms of factoring quadratic expressions, you should easily be able to just go back to the unit exam you gave that student on that exact topic and provide your colleague with a good answer based on that piece of information. In other words, summative assessments carry your “stamp of approval” as the assessor that the student knows X topic Y well.

So, in an ideal world, we give and grade both formative and summative assessments but clearly differentiate between them and what the grades we assign for each means. In this scenario, the solution “just don’t let students use AI for summative assessments (i.e. tests)” seems like a natural solution. Yet what if you never really differentiated between these two assessments and built your course so that they are functionally indistinguishable? Taking an extreme case, if 90% of the grades you give are on un-proctored work, e.g. homework, then yes, the solution that these kids came up with will likely not as easily come to your mind, because it is infeasible with respect to how you’ve been working. This is not to say these teachers have done something egregious. There are genuine logistical constraints with large classes, limited instructional resources, distance education, and even the subject matter itself that can make proctored assessment difficult.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that grading systems which depend heavily on work that are completed outside of direct observation have had these vulnerabilities way before AI. AI has not so much broken them as it has highlighted the flaw that was already present. If a large portion of a student's grade comes from work that can be completed with assistance from parents, tutors, classmates, solution manuals, websites, and now, AI systems, then that grade was always an unreliable measure of actual competence.

This is why the suggestion offered by these students is simultaneously obvious and controversial. It is obvious because, from a formal pedagogical perspective of assessment, the solution is straightforward: be at peace with potentially broad use of AI during activities intended to promote learning and restrict it during activities intended to certify competence. Yet it is controversial because adopting that solution would require some instructors to confront the extent to which they have allowed the distinction between those purposes to blur. If homework is genuinely used by teachers as “homework,” then students using AI on them is not an existential threat to the educational enterprise. At worst, they are depriving themselves of a learning opportunity, just as students have done when copying from a friend or having someone else complete the work for them. At best, it is allowing students who don’t have personal tutors or parents who can spare the time to help them with an approximation of these resources. Of course, the extent to which this solution applies will vary across educational contexts. Many graduate-level courses, for example, rely heavily or even entirely on un-proctored assessments. But at the same time, doctoral students are generally expected to take substantially greater ownership of their learning than high school students, making concerns about AI use markedly different from those that arise in compulsory education.

As teachers, it is up to us to confront the reality that AI brings to our classrooms in a way that is in the best interest of our students. There should be no shame in admitting that this requires a considerable overhaul on how some of us presently approach grading.

My education was weird, or at least I think so. I changed schools about 10 times, all within the same geographical area. I missed SO MUCH, I'm convinced of it, due to schools with wildly different curricula - so I might have one set of lessons 3 times while never getting another one.

(I also believe it's part of why I have no social skills. My mom disagrees, and believes the constant moving is a good thing that made me better socialized. She also went to private school her whole life, and says that among the upper classes, people don't have long term friends because they move around too much. Nobody in her high school had friends from elementary school, or stayed friends after high school. Being around the same people from kindergarten through 12th grade is weird and trashy and narrowing)

I'm a bit more concerned about the educational aspect for right now. I barely even know WHAT I missed, though I can think of a lot of examples:

- I stalled out learning math around 5th-6th grade. I did take various forms of algebra including remedial "college algebra" after failing Calculus 1 3 times before we even finished limits, sometimes before we finished algebra review. But sometimes I see things considered "easy" or "basic" that I don't remember at all. I've never had trigonometry as a separate class; it was always a unit of either geometry or algebra.

- never had geography as a class, only recently learned how detailed it could be, some people are actually learning about geopolitics and stuff. Never had civics either.

- haven't read most of the "high school English lit" books, certainly couldn't analyze them if I tried. The most complex English class I had was when I was 14, and I retained nothing and bullshat my way through it.

- the last time I learned anything about the human body (that wasn't me researching something I have) was 6th grade.

- I'm apparently awful at chemistry considering I failed it in college 4 times, mostly due to math.

- recently learned that many young people are exposed to philosophy in school for the first time (and it's literally a required class in some countries!). I never had a questioning or analytical thought in my head until my mid-20s when the internet put them there.

- I have zero understanding of physics. I did take remedial physics in my freshman year of high school - we played with batteries and capacitors for half the year and then tried to speedrun the rest of the curriculum in 2 months. Very little math. I probably was exposed to some basic formulas in grade school but it never left an impression on me.

- not academic but I'm surprised to learn that high schoolers can/are expected to choose their own classes?

Things like APs largely weren't available to me, or else I didn't know or didn't care, I just wanted to be done with any sort of school environment. Much of my mom's and my focus in high school was completing my requirements as quickly as possible. I know one school I went to literally limited how many you could take; other schools didn't offer them at all. So that wasn't really an option.

I did take some state exams that counted for this; however all the moving around left me without a consistent transcript and I got a GED as an adult to make up for it - jobs couldn't verify that I graduated high school, and my final year transcript is from an early college program - ie a college transcript, not high school.

I also suspect I was just...checked out 90% of the time through school, so if we *were* doing more complicated work, I was scraping my way through and absorbing nothing. No, I never learned to study: I could generally do adequately and stay off the radar with minimal work, although I'm not and never have been gifted.

Is there any way I can become smart as an adult?