ChatGPTization of Engineering Education

This post is in response to an article in The Hindu (Education Plus) carrying the title, “Engineering a change?” with the strap line, “What kind of impact will Artificial Intelligence and technological innovations have on education in this domain?” I thought it could be interesting and started reading it in a serious mood. Then, reality hit me.

The article I have cited above is of the Premium category and is open only to Subscribers of the The Hindu Group (THG) space on the internet. Hence, this post is likely to be longer than what I feel my readers will be comfortable with (I will be quoting extensively from the newspaper article).

Just to show how I respond to, with undisguised contempt for, ChatGPT, I am giving a link to an earlier blog post of mine here. You would be primed now for my ChatGPT colored bile problem.

The third sentence in the impugned article starts off, “As an academician in India, how will these new developments affect learning in our students?” The way the author goes on about LLMs, I am entitled to assume that he would have run his article through ChatGPT which failed to mark/remark that there is no subject in the sentence. If he did not take it to ChatGPT, the question is, “Why did he not...?” No confidence in it? That is irony.

The above is elementary. Not the next extract: “Such AI tools ...brought libraries and expert contents to a student’s fingertips.” The writer forgot the maxim, paraphrasing, “Easy to get, easy to forget.” No effort, no obligation to remember, for the simple reason you can get it any time. Learning without memory? Is this learning at all?

Lugging books to and between and from hostels or home or library was part of learning. Go back to the so-called days of “Gurukul”: “Sishyas” (students) bent their backs and knees to complete the tasks in the forest hermitage; the “learning” did not come cheap, labor-wise. Whatever they learnt had a cost. But, with AI, you do not value learning on this score. Devalue LLM, please.

“AI tools and search engines will come up with a good answer mostly sans blemish.” (Italics not in the original). I am all for this; if, a teacher is able to accommodate that “mostly sans blemish,” in grading a test/examination paper That is, blemish or not, full credit to be given, mostly. Yuck ...

This point is made in my earlier post (link given), with disgust, in the original!

“[E]ngineering courses are high on theory and low on practice.” Just as the author has “[E]xperiences of several years doing the rounds of several engineering campuses and witnessing first-hand the teaching-learning at work...”, I have had one decade of truly experiencing, “the learning-teaching experience” in engineering education in a private institution in the central region of Tamil Nadu.

My experience, thus, carries more premium, in my not-so-humble opinion. I can defend my strong condemnation of such an evaluation of the engineering courses as stated by the author. It is not the courses, their contents, by themselves, which have this skew. It is in the interest of the edupreneurs’ penchant for getting higher and higher RoI. Stuff a class with the maximum number allowed (and a few more, like 62 v. 60) and create as many sections as she wants.

In this recurring scenario, no single teacher would venture into a class and endeavour to show practical situations where the theory would apply, and how the analysis should be fine tuned by altering or discarding the assumptions one makes in the beginning of the theory. This is from my personal experience.

Most teachers would shy away lest they be caught with their pants down or saree blown away.

It is always about the needs of the industries; never about students gaining insights beyond what is taught in class, beyond what is practiced at work. Graduates are indentured labourers. We are going back to the middle ages, if not backwards beyond that.

“What is the difference between data and information?”, the author asks final year students from the CSE/IT streams. He expects that the response to this question by itself will expose the level of curiosity of the interviewee! Nonsense. She would merely regurgitate what she had crammed into her brain the day of the interview.

I would stop here, though I have many more bones to pick, I can feel readers are beginning to yawn.

Raghuram Ekambaram

 

 

https://nonexpert.blogspot.com/2024/07/how-bad-is-chatgpt-i-am-not-sure-but-i.html