Ask HN: Should exams allow a level of AI help inversely proportional to your IQ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should exams allow a level of AI help inversely proportional to your IQ?

1 pointamichail11 comments

This system could even allow schools to teach more advanced material to all students.

This leads to a terrible future outcome. Person A and B both graduated with high marks. Person A is truly brilliant and will be a real asset to your company. Person B figured out how to use AI to get the answers the school wanted but doesn’t understand anything and will be a hindrance to the company. Unfortunately, you don’t get to know which one is which, just that they came out of school with similar marks. Best of luck.

Also supposing in this situation that AI can’t really perform the job duties. If it can, don’t bother hiring either person.

It's that dystopia where everyone is given artificial handicaps to achieve total equality in all things.

In this case, you're handicapping the smarter student by depriving them of the AI the dumber student gets.

If the whole point of exams is to test competence, the test becomes totally useless.

AI help can be giving hints instead of completely solving a problem for you.

Back when I was a T.A. in physics I'd be rich if I had a nickel for every time somebody told me "I understand the concepts but I just can't do the problem" and then, when I worked with them to debug their answer, found that they really got the concepts backwards.

One big theme I see is that people want something emotionally out of physics that it just can't give and if you are misaligned on these you are going to accomplish nothing even if you can do the math:

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Causes-beyond-Physics-Streater/d...

Even to the extent of giving hints, you create an unhealthy learning environment. “You have the potential of being smarter (higher IQ), so no help for you. Go figure it out yourself because we’re fairly sure you can.” vs “Oh you poor dumb fool. You’re obviously never going to be capable of supporting yourself so we’ll make sure to carry you there with these extra handicaps. Don’t worry about trying to work harder, we don’t think you can.”

Over dramatized but you get the point. One group is mad about the support the other gets. And that other group loses incentive to really try for things since the solutions, or at least the paths to them, are always sitting there waiting.

If the level of AI help is inversely proportional to your current GPA (instead of IQ), then perhaps this issue will be addressed?

If you want your GPA to have a lower AI help associated with it, then you will try harder.

I'd note that, for political reasons, IQ is disused in pedagogy.

This extends to standardized tests in general. It is often framed around class and race, but I think the real enemy of standardized tests is the "legacy admission" who can't test his or her way out of a paper bag. Ever other element in society is corruptible, people can use their social capital to influence teachers and school administers. Certainly test prep can give people familiarity with the test which helps up to a point but for a certain kind of student the only way to get a good test score is to hire a ringer to take the test for you.

When objective tests are used to assign kids to gifted programs the usual result is an increase in minority and low-income participation because groups that have high social capital are better equipped to manipulate subjective decisions.

Instead of IQ, you can make the level of AI help inversely proportional to your current GPA.

Wouldn't doing that eliminate the entire purpose of exams? The point of them is to test your knowledge, not that of an AI.

Yes. Anyone over zero gets no AI help.

What's the point of exams then?

The better way to think about this is as having a TA available 24/7, except during testing. This artificial TA should help guide students to gain understanding, rather then simple hints or answer/mistake guiding

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