Last week, high school students took a written matriculation exam in mathematics. I recommend everyone to try to make it too. You can easily find the assignment (and subsequently the correct solution) on the website. Don’t worry, there are 25 examples that are not difficult and can be solved much earlier than the allotted two and a quarter hours.
For a few of them, you may lack formulas (for example, to calculate the surface area of a cone of rotation) or specific terms (what is a geometric sequence?), but with most examples, even decades after leaving school, you will be able to cope with just pencil, paper and a calculator .
Undoubtedly enough to at least pass the matriculation exam, i.e. get at least 17 points out of 50. Some examples seem indecently easy for 19-year-old students, for example when you have to calculate how much a passenger plane measures when you know the length of the model and its scale. But who has to keep coming up with those examples, right?
Pupils could use a book of tables and formulas, drawing supplies and a calculator “without graphics mode, solving equations and modifying algebraic expressions”. As the director of the Smíchovské secondary technical school and gymnasium wrote on the X network on graduation day https://twitter.com/RadkoSablik/status/1785911775235367198:
“What are students allowed to use? Specific tables from 1989, a calculator that is not programmable. I better look at today’s date to see if I’m in a dream, it’s actually 5/2/2024!! It wasn’t a dream!! Someone should really wake up!!”
Principal Sáblík caught this from some of the discussants on the social network, mostly from people “armed” with the opinion that it is all right and that there is no reason for pupils to have any other amenities. Exactly according to the popular thought pattern: “We had it the same, and it didn’t hurt us either!”
But that’s the problem. Some things are generally valid, but not technology. These have changed fundamentally in recent decades. I would like to remind you that I was also allowed to use the same aids when preparing for the oral exam (we didn’t do written exams at the time). But I composed it 38 years ago!
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I am from a relatively lucky generation that got the opportunity to use the “achievements” of modern technology at least twice during my schooling. And even in the normalizing Czechoslovakia. I remember that in elementary school in the 1970s, the mathematician told us that we were extremely lucky, because a few years ago we would still have to know how to use a logarithmic ruler, the so-called logaro.
We were already allowed to have electronic computers, however it was a slightly suspect capitalist invention. And ten years later, when I joined CTU in 1986, we were the first or second year who learned to program not on big computers (using punched cards), but we had a classroom with 20 IBM PCs. Little boy.
However, today is the year 2024. The world has changed tremendously since I graduated. And the most fundamental change is happening right now. This year’s graduation is already the second one where generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, could be used to solve examples. But this year it’s really a commonly used tool, not a special curiosity and a toy, as it was for many last year.
I tried to “deploy” ChatGPT (the paid version with the GPT-4 Turbo model) for graduation. The result was 38 points out of 50. The calculation itself took less than ten minutes (the biggest work was taking “screenshots” of entering examples and uploading them to ChatGPT), checking the results took half an hour. I would say that a person of average intelligence would need about 30 to 40 minutes to pass the exam with a score of 45 or higher.
What does it mean? Better put, what do I mean? First: That I understand exactly the frustration of director Radko Sáblík, who under these circumstances finds the arrangement of this test frustrating. Yes, education has always lived somewhat in the past. What is sometimes said about the army applies to him. That he prepares students more for the battles of the past than the future.
But secondly: I also understand when someone says that we should look at mathematics as a method to learn to think, and not as a practical tool. Word problems are not extrapolations of real problems, but really just word problems. And that’s why it makes sense to ban some aids when solving them. After all, in athletics, the marathon is still run, even though we know that it can be completed significantly faster on a bike.
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At the same time, it is true that no new technology has been as disruptive as AI. Calculators were great, especially the so-called scientific or programmable ones, but most people didn’t learn how to use them properly anyway. Everyone will learn how to use generative AI. I can’t rule out that for a year or two we will be bothering the graduates with a similarly designed exam as this year. But then it becomes unsustainable.
But it does not only apply to high school graduates and certainly not only to mathematics. The basic question is: What, how and why will we learn? Not our children at school, but “us” as humanity. It turns out that AI can do a lot of things for us today, almost as well or better than average people do today.
At random: write, read, understand the text, solve problems or – see matriculation in mathematics – calculate examples.
We get into a situation where we don’t have to do many of these activities, although at the same time we feel that it would be good for us if we knew how to do them. Which quite logically will lead to the fact that only a part of us will do them, maybe only a very small one.
Psychologist and coach Radvan Bahbouh told me a good comparison in an interview. That is, mental work will eventually be similar to physical work. If you told someone in the 19th century that most of it would disappear and that one day there would be such a thing as fitness centers, they would not believe it. Today, people come to physically “suffer” voluntarily and pay for it. Perhaps something similar awaits mental effort.
On the floor plan of the better two, which ChatGPT would receive for solving this year’s graduation, we can see the main risk of AI. Not in taking control and power over us. But in that it takes away our need to learn, create and think. That it frees us from the need to do difficult and complicated things. Among other things, for example, the written matriculation exam, which – dare I say – has no hope of surviving in its current form.
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