The Old Education System is fundamentally broken. It looks like this:
Teacher convey information to students
Students regurgitate information in the form of assignments
Learning is measured via grades and standardized tests
Schools compete for reputation using those measurements
This system has lasted for a good 400 years but is teetering on collapse at the moment. Here’s why:
Reputation Economics
The current education system has a reputation virtuous cycle:
Increased Reputation → Better Students → Higher Grades → More Funding → Increased Reputation → and so on.
Unfortunately, ChatGPT can top 10% ALL standardized tests already. This breaks how the system evaluates and sorts students into schools. So it’s unsurprising that the first instinct of schools is to ban the use of ChatGPT.
Banning ChatGPT is an attempt at keeping the system from falling apart. But what needs to happen is a new system of reputation economics not centered around grades and standardized testing.
Reputation has a marketing side (brand name and reach) and a provability side (how to show you are top tier) to it. While there are innovations to be had on the marketing side, provability is where most of the change needs to happen.
Importantly, provability has a cost/quality ratio. Standardized testing recognizes this, and gives the cheapest provability to quality ratio. Basically, it’s cheap to use (you ingest one number, like a GPA of 3.9 or SAT of 1510) but that number will prove something about the quality of student (even if it is very small). You can get better provability with other information, but those things cost orders of magnitude more to interpret.
(Speaking of which, college essays now have near zero provability value. That’s a huge problem in the short term that colleges will be massively under-prepared for.)
Assessment
Assessment evaluates learning on 3 progressive levels:
Level 1: Did you understand the topic?
Level 2: Can you solve problems in the topic space?
Level 3: Can you apply your learnings generally and effectively?
Most assessment focuses on Level 1 & 2. The first 2 levels are required for Level 3 assessment, and typically it costs so much to evaluate Level 1 & 2 that Level 3 is an afterthought. Also, level 3 is just hard in general. Even many professionals can’t do it well.
ChatGPT makes assessing Level 1 & 2 useless because it can achieve those levels. Anyone can already fake those levels for pretty much every topic imaginable, and this is just ChatGPT 4 in 2023.
Assessments on Level 1 & 2 are trivialized from this point onward. Or to illustrate, it was once a requirement to be able to show accurate multiplication of large numbers by hand. The calculator did not obsolete that knowledge, it trivialized it.
This is an incredible opportunity for innovation. Learning should measure the ability to apply knowledge effectively, and this has always been bottlenecked by the cost of assessment, specifically of the first two levels. If the first two levels were free, the potential of what education and schooling can do becomes extremely advanced compared to today. In fact, terrifyingly so.
The Role of Teachers
Teachers ensure learning happens.
How this looks like in a post ChatGPT world is beyond imagination. But for sure, if teachers are still focused on Level 1 and 2 assessment, it is wasted effort.
The key insight is that for each level of assessment, teachers need to perform certain actions to ensure students showcase learning.
Level 1: Did you understand the topic? Teachers give students information, ensuring that the students are listening.
Level 2: Can you solve problems in the topic space? Teachers walk through examples step by step, ensuring that students are following along.
Level 3: Can you apply your learnings generally and effectively?
Teachers who are focused on Level 3 assessment will do a lot less teaching, lecturing, or walking through examples, relying on technologies to do that for them.
Instead, they will focus on outlining and putting together key topics that allows students to effectively accomplish things.
Indeed, if you really consider what effective, applied learning looks like, the output and assessment of it begins to look a bit like working results in the real world.
The Quality of Teachers
How does a teacher evaluate a student’s work, once augmented by ChatGPT?
The more you think about this question, the more you’ll realize that education is completely broken. The answer is you just can’t.
ChatGPT answers Level 1 and Level 2 assessments at top percentiles already. So to keep the current education system working, you have to ban ChatGPT.
The real solution is that teachers need to assess at Level 3. What does this look like?
It looks like a bunch of retraining to me.
Second, and more important question: if teachers can assess and teach level 3, what is stopping them from going to higher paid professions? The answer: nothing.
So we’ll need a new business model for teachers as well, one that is as lucrative as the jobs they could get in the real world.
The endowment and donation ecosystem for colleges seem a massive part of the university business model. Maybe it can work in a decentralized way for teachers as well?
Conclusion
Just like the fall of Rome wasn’t in one day, the current education system is probably not going anywhere in the next 5 years or so.
We still to educate 700 million children a year, and the institutions that run our education system are so big that they will find a way to survive.
But its clear that a new market is open in a post ChatGPT world.
In this market, you can imagine technology doing the babysitting of actual learning - students using ChatGPT like a calculator to self learn the topics they need in order to accomplish whatever they need to accomplish.
Teachers ensure the students are picking the right topics to learn and making progress on their challenges, and students are at the sweet spot of challenge and competence.
Add in some innovation with assessments and recognition, maybe by marrying the two together, so the assessments make a splash in the real world…
…and you have an entirely new way to educate and empower the next generation.