Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I&#x27;d applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign.<p>I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of stuff. I met a bunch of interesting people and it was a blast.<p>I also fell asleep at my keyboard more than once. It was a beautiful summer, biking to work and working with what I still think is one of, if not the, best language ever.<p>Here&#x27;s why all this is relevant - I came back to real life to study CompSci on these old Sparc machines. And it was like, here&#x27;s the power button. What&#x27;s an object in Java? What&#x27;s a compiler? All reasonable stuff.<p>But: Wolfram Research and Mathematica had, in a sense, ruined my undergraduate life before it started. Why were we using all these bizarre tools? Can&#x27;t we do this a million times faster? Why are we learning all these bizarre integrals?<p>It was similar to being denied graphing calculators in A-Level Mathematics (in the UK, think high school). I get it - we need to learn &#x27;the basics&#x27; and survive without tools to some degree. But, it would have been nice to use them in some contexts and not just deny their existence.<p>There&#x27;s an anecdote I think about Milton Friedman being shown people building a dam with shovels and not digging machines, to keep people employed in some God-forsaken country. He asked, why don&#x27;t you use spoons instead? Then, more people would be employed.<p>Mathematica and Alpha are wonderful tools, and I highly recommend applying for an internship if you&#x27;re of the right age or whatever the requirements are today.

You may cheat all you want on your homework, but if calculus tests are like they were when I was in college, taking your exam with no notes or calculator, if you&#x27;ve only cut and pasted from Wolfram Alpha all semester is going to lead you to getting an F in the course.

It is not cheating. It is leveling the playing field.<p>Some students will inevitably have access to tutors or parents who can give them the full answer. With wolfram|Alpha all students have access to this.<p>What this really show is that homework isn&#x27;t the best tool for gauging student prowess.

In my two semesters of college math, I&#x27;ve gathered that the faculty has something of a phobia to, if not wolfram in particular, students&#x27; access to help outside of the department.<p>Homework problems were oftentimes deliberately difficult, and attending tutoring&#x2F;office hours was almost certainly necessary for most students to master the material.<p>I got my hands on an instructor&#x27;s manual of the textbook, and it was a tremendous boon for my mastery of the topics. By having immediate access to the solutions of difficult problems, I was able to comprehend how to approach problems of that type, and therefore could solve more difficult but similar examples in the future. The cycle of attempt&#x2F;fail&#x2F;check-solution&#x2F;repeat was really effective. Waiting for the instructor&#x27;s office hours or the availability of tutors would have made this process, if not impossible, incredibly inefficient.<p>Do any math educators have any insight to this? Is this math department clinging to an antiquated curriculum in which faculty is something of a gate-keeper to knowledge? Is there a good reason for their distaste for &#x27;going around&#x27; them?

I fail to see the problem here. In a curriculum that takes the joy out of math and attempts to reduce the student&#x27;s mind to a calculation machines, students employed a calculation machine.<p>I understand the arguement that math is important, but the way it&#x27;s taught in America, even at the AP level, is criminal. It boils down to &quot;if you see this pattern, apply these steps&quot; without any effort at going beyond. We teach &quot;how&quot; but not &quot;why&quot;, which I think is a common refrain when talking about the American education system, or any test driven education system. Math is a means, not an end.

Playing the world&#x27;s saddest song on the world&#x27;s smallest violin there Denise Garcia. How about maybe updating your curriculum for the 3rd millennium. Nah, that would be to much work, complaining in wired is much more productive.<p>The best part is that people in the school administration might do something like blacklisting Wolfram Alpha on computers in the school library and feel like they&#x27;ve dealt successfully with the problem.

Wolfram Alpha isn&#x27;t the issue. The issue is that we&#x27;re grading students on an arbitrary and meaningless metric, instead of the end result.<p>As an employer, if I hire you to do a task, let&#x27;s say build a toaster, I couldn&#x27;t care less about how you achieved that - as long as I&#x27;ve got my toaster and it can help me grow my toast-making business I&#x27;m happy. Education should work the same.

&gt; “Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division...”<p>What the heck kind of article is this...? I can’t read it seriously.

Am I the only one here that would program their TI-83 in high school to run equations for me so I didn&#x27;t have to solve them by hand?<p>I wasn&#x27;t even that dev-savvy (and still am not), but it was super easy and was a huge time-saver on timed tests.<p>I obviously had to learn the concept in order to program the equation, but once I did - why should I have to go through everything manually every single time?

I felt extremely fortunate that Wolfram Alpha was available when I took calculus in college during summer &#x27;09. Wolfram Alpha was amazingly convenient and helpful in getting through tricky problem sets when there was a queue at the tutoring center. It didn&#x27;t really allow me to cheat at the problem sets because it didn&#x27;t give the intermediate steps, just the final answer. And of course it&#x27;s useless on exams. At least regarding calculus, it seems to me almost 100% a helpful learning tool and 0% a contributor to cheating problems.

There&#x27;s a simple solution to this, which also has the advantage of creating better educational outcomes: have students do the reading at home, and the work in class.<p>Dry lectures aren&#x27;t the best way to learn something: hand-on work is. Listening to a teacher read a powerpoint is a waste of time, because you could just read (or watch a video) on your own.<p>But having an expert on the material standing over your shoulder, helping you through tough spots while you&#x27;re working through it? <i>That&#x27;s</i> valuable.

The problem is that not all math problems are worth doing. For instance, when I took Calculus 2&#x2F;3, some of the homework problems weren&#x27;t usually hard per se, they were just arduously long. And honestly not really worth doing by hand. If I misplaced a single number and didn&#x27;t realize it immediately, I would spend the next 10 minutes solving an integral that had no use, plugging it into Webassign for it to tell me I&#x27;m wrong, backtrack until I find my issue, and solve the corrected integral. I would usually do this at least once per problem (but usually more like two or three times).<p>So by the end of the course, I would just figure out the integral (or rather, the triple integral), plug it into Wolfram, plug the outputted answer into Webassign, and if the answer was wrong I&#x27;d backtrack until eventually the answer that Wolfram outputs is correct. At which point I&#x27;d solve the integral by hand.<p>---<p>There was one time when the homework problem asked me to find the intercept of this obscenely complex trigonometric equation. I tried for a solid half hour and couldn&#x27;t solve it, so I went to the math help room to ask the TAs for help. I ended up stumping three of the TAs. A few days later, I went back to see if they had figured it out. Turns out they hadn&#x27;t. They said we should just use Wolfram to get the answer.

Recalling the first-year university math analysis course, our professor himself told us about Wolfram Alpha. Which followed by a whole year of equations and integrals the site could solve only numerically.<p>The high enough level of the tasks beats any cheating attempts.

Or they could cheat by doing their homework, then checking the results on Wolfram Alpha to make sure they always get 100%.

I find it an awesome tool to advance knowledge. I recently had to take calc again after 10 years, and it helped me get back up to speed super fast. I would do the work, check the answer in the back of the book, and if I got it wrong, I would use Wolfram Alpha to do step by step to see where I got it wrong.<p>I can see some people saying that is cheating, but it is a learning tool to me. The class was 90% tests&#x2F; quizes. HW was a participation grade. Meaning a tool like that gives no one an advantage. Unless they are using it during the test.

Teach and test for understanding <i>why</i> and <i>how</i> the answer comes to be, not <i>what</i> the answer is. Maths education, in my experience, relies too much on testing of the arithmetic rather than the logic. This just results in plug and chug because it&#x27;s lazy testing and students apply lazy solutions.<p>Good examiners will ask students questions that make them think about why and how, not what the answer is. These often don&#x27;t even need algebra or arithmetic because it assumes students know the equations and instead goes a level deeper to test understanding of why those equations are the way they are.<p>I had the gamut in uni. I found that engineering more often successfully tested understanding as I describe above. Some didn&#x27;t; my thermo was a case of &#x27;learn how the equations work, then read the right graphs and go&#x27; but particularly some of my fluid and aerospace courses were great at asking questions that really tested deep understanding of the theories.<p>One good example of this that I came across more recently is some of the edX courses that used to exist featuring Walter Lewin (before his sexual harassment came to light). He was very successfully able to question his students on the why and how, not just the what. This actually proved even more important in the MOOC environment, where you can&#x27;t as tightly control the environment in which students undertake examination.<p>It&#x27;s hard, it requires good lecturers really spending a bit of time devising questions as well as supporting their tutors as they teach the students, but it&#x27;s possible.

My dad said to me that knowledge isn&#x27;t what you remember, it&#x27;s what you can remember or look up relatively quickly.

There&#x27;s a significant point a lot of people are missing. In e.g. physics and chemistry, the math is not the point. Using e.g. Wolfram Alpha is great if it allows students to solve larger and more complex problems, without sitting there solving integrals over and over (for instance).

A few issues:<p>1) applications rest on the shoulders of giants, it isn&#x27;t efficient to learn too much more than you need to. If you only need to &quot;understand&quot; at a high level, you should just use tools that &quot;do it for you&quot; at lower levels - It&#x27;s just a shame there are not better FLOSS competitors to Mathematica.<p>2) It should be clear what the &quot;understanding dependencies&quot; are - i.e. when some knowledge of the foundations can inform the higher levels, and when they don&#x27;t. If I understand what &#x27;sorted&#x27; means, I don&#x27;t need to know the details of any specific sorting implementation to use it.<p>3) The way mathematics is split up into a million small, set-theoretically-abstract lemmas etc makes it so much harder to understand. It makes even familiar concepts hard.

The are many things which are difficult to measure directly, and thus people tend to use indirect measurements instead; school-learned math is full of such things. Consider a fairly simple example: &quot;What is the factorial of a number?&quot;<p>Determining whether a student knows this is going to take a bit of work (particularly if they lack a formal way to specify it e.g. Pi notation or even a programming language), but we might approximate it by instead asking &quot;What is the factorial of 5?&quot; Now obviously this is not a perfect measure of what we&#x27;re <i>actually</i> looking for even in the absence of calculators (e.g. someone might memorize 5! = 120), but it&#x27;s easy to evaluate and is probably a <i>decent</i> proxy in the absence of calculators.

They may let you cheat (just like SparkNotes I guess), but these tools also let people like me who haven&#x27;t had advanced calculus survive when we otherwise wouldn&#x27;t. If you pay for the WA service (I don&#x27;t remember what it&#x27;s called), you can type complex math in and it will break down how to solve it out. This was invaluable to me in some CS classes where I knew how to implement the algorithms once the math had been detangled, but the mathematical notation was so opaque to me at the time that I would&#x27;ve had no hope of figuring it out.<p>Obviously, I learned a lot from having it broken down like that so I wouldn&#x27;t be as dependent on the tool now, but at the time, it was a huge learning aid.

Anyone who thinks using wolfram alpha for math is cheating has never tried using it for non-trivial calculations. Yeah, it will save you the time of looking up an integral from a table, but it&#x27;s worthless if the integral isn&#x27;t in a standard table. It will save you time on looking up the equation for the area of a dodecagon, but it won&#x27;t prove that equation. It will save you time figuring out the units of the final answer, but it won&#x27;t tell you if those units are logical. Wolfram alpha only saves people from the tedious busywork of basic arithmetic and algebra, the user still needs to do all the math.

Since when has wolfram alpha an AI? I always thought it was simply calls to Mathematica.<p>Maybe when you ask general questions it uses an AI, but with functions and maths I think it only uses Mathematica.

Using a search engine is not cheating. There is nothing wrong in making use of all available resources in assignments and this is just another resource at their disposal. My $0.02

This isn&#x27;t new... I had a TI-89 in college that could solve for calculus equations. As someone else pointed out... we couldn&#x27;t use it on tests though.

If a computer can easily answer the question, it is not worth asking it to a human (this also applies in the real sense that it won&#x27;t be valued by the marketplace and translate to higher wages).<p>How about challenging students with problems that are difficult even when modern technology is used to its fullest extend? Or teaching students how to build tools that solve their homework?

I work training and cheating professionals. I used to be a project in chief (the guy that hired, fired and evaluated new personal).<p>I encourage to my students to do the, so called, cheat, because its what the people in the real world do, people don&#x27;t need to memorize a lot of topics and people use calculator, computer and excel. Sheesh with the old and rust model of learning.

I am deeply grateful that something like WolframAlpha existed when I was taking calculus classes. It helped me soo much. I could make up integrals, solve them and see if I was right, just like that. It even has a function to show step by step solutions of integrals and series. All extremely useful tools to deepen understanding, not to cheat.

Students cheat because our society values diplomas more than knowledge.<p>It&#x27;s a true problem, but the consequences are not visible yet.

SymPy is in the same ballpark as Wolfram for calculus, and not rate-limited: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sympy.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sympy.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;index.html</a><p>It doesn&#x27;t include the databases of structured information or the NLP-like interface though.

The &quot;problem&quot; is that the students have moved to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerbasedmath.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerbasedmath.org&#x2F;</a> but the curriculum hasn&#x27;t (yet). Just fix the curriculum.

Its not just high school students. I had some classmates in grad school using it to breeze through feedback theory homework. The tool is as powerful as students are lazy.

Today I learned you can cheat on homework. So apparently giving up and having the wrong answers (or no answers at all) is what professors would prefer. Cool :)

I have a Master&#x27;s degree in physics and Wolphram|Alpha would not have been out of place in the acknowledgements section of my theses.

“Difficult to trace”? If it generates the same output for any given input, then you can just compare the students’ submitted papers with it, no?

Sounds like Wolfram Alpha could be very helpful for anyone doing self-study, from math textbooks that don&#x27;t put answers in the back.

&quot;while a few were still using it at their jobs as engineers or quantitative analysts&quot;<p>Er... which is a good thing, surely?

The big issue to me is things that matter take effort.<p>So many things (like math answers) are made so available with no effort.

we need to learn &#x27;the basics&#x27; and survive without tools to some degree.

I found symbolab.com much better at this.. It also has much better user interface.

I think we should learn

So the test is rewarding students with the skills to perform well in real life, instead of only those who have submitted blindly to the outdated traditions taught by those who cannot do.<p>There is of cause a level where you cannot just copy solutions but those tend to be badly covered by &quot;facts centered&quot; written exams anyway so why not build your exams around the reality that modern tools exist and will be used, instead of testing as if the world had not changed since the teachers left school.