Educators have to accept an undeniable fact: any assignment that's completed outside of the classroom will in the limit be completed by an LLM and not the student. Even the most diligent and conscientious students will eventually fall to the siren's song of doing literally anything else instead of the assignment.

This is even more inevitable if the student is in any way competing for position with the other students. Such a situation is the platonic ideal of a prisoner's dilemma (opens new window) which are always the underlying mechanism of a race to the bottom (opens new window). Any assignment that is part of that competition, such as being part of their grade, will force students to cheat lest they fall behind.

The only way forward is a tough pill to swallow, but it's become literally impossible to avoid: all evaluative work must happen in environments where accessing LLMs is impossible, which most of the time will be the classroom.

• All graded assignments must be in-class quizzes or exams instead.
• Essays must be written "AP exam" style, in class, on whatever cheating-proof medium is available (which will probably be paper 90% of the time). This means they will be have to be shorter and more targeted, or written over time in multiple class sessions.
• Programming assignments must be either completed in controlled "lab" settings with something like proctors around, or on some platform that records all keystrokes and so can be audited for actual typing.
• Making LLMs inaccessible during schoolwork means schools also have to ban smartphones, but that's a good idea anyway (opens new window).
• Colleges and universities have to rely on the brutal objectivity of the exams and proctored lab-work to force students to actually understand the material, and so avoid leaning on LLMs.

It goes without saying that this isn't fair to educators. They don't deserve to have to clean up the mess created by the LLM companies.

It doesn't matter. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." (opens new window)

Luckily inverted classrooms and mastery-oriented learning (opens new window) present an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and make education better than it used to be. But first let's address all the people who think education should "embrace AI", and reveal that idea as the pernicious marketing lie it really is.

LLMs are too beset by hazards to be useful for education.

If you think a person can meaningfully learn anything or gain any kind of skill when they have access to an LLM, you haven't been paying attention.

• Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they're not good (opens new window)
• Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (opens new window)
• We Need Guidelines for Learning and AI (opens new window)
• Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got "Trendslop" in Return. (opens new window)
• Cognitive ease at a cost: LLMs reduce mental effort but compromise depth in student scientific inquiry (opens new window)
• The End of Reading Is Here (opens new window)

Learning requires effort. It's well established that people only really learn when they have to do something that is difficult. It's really easy to think you understand something (opens new window), but only by actually having to produce it from scratch do you confront the real gaps in your understanding. "Passive review" (opens new window) doesn't work, and LLM use is even worse than just passively reading a textbook.

People can't seem to admit how dire the situation is. The absurd cult of AI mania that's poisoned most executives (opens new window) is so strong that even some of those above critical articles felt the need to include some sop to LLMs, saying that "structured methods could yield benefits". Maybe theoretically, but it's the LLM companies' job to provide that proof, not everyone else's.

No normal educator should spend even a small amount of time figuring out how to use LLMs in the classroom. LLMs, especially in the chatbot form factors delivered by the LLM companies (because they're addictive (opens new window)), have delivered precisely zero benefit to education. Any benefit they seem to provide actually comes from the internet of free open knowledge that underlies them. Welcoming chatbots into the classroom is like welcoming in a lotus-bearing (opens new window) con artist who pretends they wrote the books you already have in your library.

A teacher's job is to teach, not to expose their students to a technology they're already exposed to and whose entire value proposition is that any idiot can just talk to it.

Inverted classrooms and mastery-oriented learning are better anyway.

In examples like Khan Academy (opens new window) we already see how a web app that provides trees of bite-sized concepts with attendant videos and quizzes is enough to basically fully personalize any course material. The remainder of adaptive need is best done by human teachers, and won't be meaningfully improved by hallucinating sycophancy machines. Mastery learning used to be too difficult to be practical, but normal web technologies make building a personalized quiz environment extremely doable.

I hope the people at Khan Academy also learn the lesson sitting in front of them: LLMs are too unpredictable and too easily manipulated to be useful in education (opens new window). There might someday be ways to usefully deploy them, but I'd wager even those uses would be pretty narrow and boring. Khan Academy already has a winning approach, they just have to not get distracted.

Mastery learning is the way forward. We now have the opportunity to move past the assembly-line system that abandons students with widening understanding gaps and pressurizes them under do-or-die tests on rigid schedules. It's well-demonstrated that understanding gaps predict almost all of the variation in learning speed between students (opens new window), so any system that tackles them directly ought to be superior.

And it's more respectful to students as well! I'm guessing every student would much prefer an educational experience where they're guided through rigorous but actually effective work in the constrained time blocks of class-time, and then left to enjoy their lives afterwards. Even if school had to be a bit longer, the clarity and focus of no more homework seems like a good tradeoff to me.

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LLMs have created a genuine crisis, but crises are often the only times real change can happen (opens new window). Take this as an opportunity to genuinely make things better!