| SvennoJ said: Letting AI do algebra for you doesn't teach you what's going on at all. |
If it is used as an educational method it can. I remember using Symbolic AI's in the form of CAS systems (MAPLE, Wolfram Alpha, etc) in my Intro Diff EQ's class slightly more than a decade ago. It was actively taught and encouraged to use these tools because they save a lot of tedious, mistake-prone work and let you actually focus on the bigger picture and concepts. If I wanted to know the specific algorithms and techniques, some of these tools would break down the steps, and worked great as an educational aid.
Testing and assessment was designed to work with the assumption that somebody would be using these tools, as they would in the real-world. The exams were still difficult with them. You still had to think critically.
That isn't to say algorithms and symbolic manipulation techniques shouldn't be taught, but it probably makes sense for these algorithms and symbolic manipulation techniques to be taught with the goal of imparting general principles in dedicated courses. Rotely memorizing a serious of steps is not that.
Where this seems to be a risk in education is that a lot of the assessment process, especially with the movement to online learning, has been largely automated, and these new forms of cheating disrupt those automated assessment pipelines. Teachers and instructors could construct curricula that reduce this cheating, but these would be labor intensive, and their resources are limited. Also teachers would have to be acquainted with the material themselves above the level of rote methods, and in many education systems that is a very difficult gap to bridge.
