Michael Rowe

Trying to get better at getting better

Using LLMs to raise our expectations

Instead of spending so much of our time thinking about whether students 1) should use LLMs, 2) how much they use it, and 3) what they use it for, let’s just say that they should use it, a lot (IMO, the more, the better), and look more closely at what they use it for, and whether they use it effectively.

“You have access to sophisticated expertise across a wide range of domains and you…asked it to write an essay?” Yawn.

Or, did you use it to solve a real-world problem?

Did you:

  • Recognise a local need and start a business?
  • Build an app for marginalised users?
  • Launch a website?
  • Create a marketing campaign?
  • Build a product that consumers want?

If we insist on keeping our assessments the same (i.e. asking what students know), we’re going to focus on the wrong question.

The wrong question is, “Where is the line differentiating between your knowledge and skills, and the LLMs?”

A better question is, “What problem did you and the LLM solve together?”


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Comments

2 responses to “Using LLMs to raise our expectations”

  1. Michael Rowe avatar
    Michael Rowe

    Hi Lambert. Thanks for the comment. I agree that distributed cognition is a more helpful framing of the problem, but I worry that the incentives in higher education are too misaligned to support this position: “As long as universities hold onto the belief that AI can, and must, be separated from the student, we’ll be stuck in a paradigm where universities try positioning themselves as the gatekeepers to information and expertise. But this ignores the reality that students and AI form a collective intelligence where the originator of ideas is impossible to isolate.”

  2. Lambert schwirth avatar
    Lambert schwirth

    Absolutely agree Michael. The concept of distributed cognition between human and technology is more helpful. We don’t ask our students to do long multiplications with pen and paper or do ANOVAs by hand (instead of with R or SPSS), so why not include LLMs? I like you me posts, they make a lot of sense to me.