Yes, we can find creative in-class test methods immune to cheaters and GPTs. But if the skill you are testing has been commodified, the deeper problem is to justify learning it at all. Once you have the calculator, learning long division hardly matters. Most adults have forgotten the algorithm.
We're making the skill of writing, and much else, into a calculator.
But we don't know yet what the implications will be... the skill is writing is bound up with thinking and culture in ways long division is not.
In learning and practicing division, you gain an intuition about how numbers are composed. This is an intuition that is useful when you’re trying to figure out if you should pay for that 50 dollar item, or if 6 payments of 10 dollars is a reasonable deal. While you could always bring out your calculator every time you make a decision, most people don’t and rely primarily on quick intuition instead.
This is more important than ever in the world of chat GPT. When you’re dealing with something that can quickly generate something that sounds convincing regardless of truth value, you need that quick intuition to keep up. So the question is, if you’re a chemistry major, how do you gain that intuition? It’s possible that generating lots of data from GPT and just checking it for truth value more painstakingly before handing it in is sufficient to eventually learn. But it’s also possible that you do need to personally learn the fundamentals by working through problems if you want to eventually gain the intuitions a chemistry major needs to have. While a deeper problem exists in the commodification…it’s hard to say how much that deeper problem affects the ideal way to teach people to be skilled in a subject.
Yes, we can find creative in-class test methods immune to cheaters and GPTs. But if the skill you are testing has been commodified, the deeper problem is to justify learning it at all. Once you have the calculator, learning long division hardly matters. Most adults have forgotten the algorithm.
We're making the skill of writing, and much else, into a calculator.
But we don't know yet what the implications will be... the skill is writing is bound up with thinking and culture in ways long division is not.