Posted23 July 2022, 08:58
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ZurichA foundation offers to have its matu work written by a robot
Posted in Zurich gymnasiums, flyers invite “brave” students to have their mature work written by an algorithm. An action criticized by teachers.
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Posters have also been placed in gymnasiums.
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La School Change Foundation (editor’s note: “Foundation for School Change” in French) recently distributed flyers in Zurich gymnasiums inviting you to “invest little or no time in your final year work”. A “brave” person was sought there wishing to have their mature work written by an algorithm. The goal is to make fake maturity work that can “fool the teacher reviewing the maturity work and thereby draw attention to the fact that algorithms are going to shake the foundations of systems that exist today,” says Nils. Landolt, elementary school teacher and founder of the School Change Foundation.
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As for the choice of the student, Nils Landolt specifies: “I have to feel the enthusiasm for the subject and notice that the person is not motivated by classic laziness.” The foundation adds that the entire process will be done anonymously and will then have to be resolved retrospectively.
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The algorithm used is “a linguistic processing model capable of acquiring knowledge autonomously from the Internet and which can create, summarize or translate texts thanks to deep learning”, explains the founder.
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We should not force a student to be dishonest and thus risk that he does not succeed in his maturity.
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Lucius Hartmann, president of the Swiss Society of Gymnasium Teachers, assures that establishments are already fully aware of the possibilities offered by such algorithms. If he finds the project of having a work written by a robot (or bot) quite judicious, he would however choose another framework. “We should not force a student to be dishonest and thus risk that he does not succeed in his maturity.”
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A point of view shared by the president of the Conference of secondary school teachers of the canton of Zurich, Markus Huber, for whom the project is technically obvious and interesting but “ethically reprehensible”. In his eyes, the student who lets himself be carried away in such an attempt misses the learning objective of the mature work, “namely to design and write a work oneself and to defend it at the end during an oral presentation”, he concludes.
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(dk/aze)
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