A Predicament of Higher Education: Anti-Self-Study Designs

1# An observation of complaints

In universities, undergraduates acquire knowledge from media like textbooks. And admittedly, making notes helps make complicated, abundant expertise organized. To validate the extent that the knowledge is grasped, students is tested with questions, quizzes or examinations. During the process above, there is a crucial feedback to better the quality of the tactics of implementing what is learnt. This feedback is called “solutions”, which is in the form of responses from the instructors, or step-by-step resolution of questions on a textbook, etc.

In many of the textbooks of undergraduates’ compulsory curricula, questions are given but answers are missing. These are called “anti-self-study designs”, aiming at improving interactions in class and preventing students from acquiring knowledge without help of others. This is not a big deal if the students could get help from others nearby, the solutions existing in the communications even if not in written words. But many students in universities start to complain because the feedback is gone. The current circumstances of higher education are:

1. Students are required to gain enough credits to graduate.
2. Instructors are forced to push the research projects ahead (so that they could save their posts in universities), instead of the undergraduate curricula.
3. Teaching assistants are randomly hired from the postgraduates of the corresponding instructors.
4. Examinations/quizzes are held before all the practice assignments are given enough guides or supervisions (some teachers love to directly give a mark on the assignments and explain nothing).
5. Before the tests, students self-learn all the knowledge harshly without appropriate explanations or resolution.
6. The quality of undergraduate education overall (and the students’ expertise) is slowly lowered.

The dilemma above could be solved as follows:

1. More active responses of the assistants or the instructors ensure the problems are handled appropriately. (This is discussed in section 1#.)
2. Abundant solutions to the (practice/examination) questions are open and accessible to students. (This is discussed in section 2#.)
3. Students help students by “imparting and inheriting” solutions (even commercially). (This is discussed in section 3#.)
4. Students have access to artificial intelligence freely so that they can ask the machines for help. (This is discussed in section 4#.)
5. Students have unlimited memory. (This is discussed in section 5#.)

For the first possible solution (more active responses), it becomes apparently impossible because it requires much more experts in every dedicated speciality to ensure no possible inaccuracy is made during conversation. The minority of those who can well explain the knowledge has little interest in helping students with ardor, for they have to pursue the priority of survival or hobby.

Let’s discuss more possible solutions below.

2# The defence from authors

Since the questions in the textbooks or lectures are from their authors, or the instructors, it is possible that students ask them for the solutions. However, today the authors would say no. They have the explanations to the refusal:

1. The authors have the solutions to the questions given in the books. But the copyright of the text that shows the solutions is reserved. There is no commercial way to pay the view right of the protected contents.
2. The solutions can only be paid or retrieved by instructors due to the restrictions from the authors. It is based on the consensus that: (a) the identity of instructor is qualified and real; (b) the instructors have enough responsibility that they utilize the solutions and fully explain to the students; © the instructors do not resell the solutions.
3. The instructors are exactly the authors, and they do not compile the solutions when making questions. Sometimes they are willing to answer the questions raised by students, while for all reasons they just want the students to solve the questions by themselves. And in some cases, the instructors are afraid of making mistakes because of a shortage of the knowledge details to some extent.

Considering the reasons above, students have to find the solutions bypassing the possibility from the teachers.

3# Inferior commerces

As students bypass the limited help from the teachers, they should help each other by sharing knowledge materials. These materials are often less accurate at explanations, but often monopolized because the origins are precious. By chatting via the social networking services, current mode of operations is summarized as:

1. A minority of the students has fetched materials about the solutions from the teachers. Or in some cases, a few students are competitive with the questions, and therefore they compile the solutions by themselves.
2. The students with solutions share them on the campus. There are also some online platforms that share the solutions so that the students can exchange the materials freely.
3. The precious materials are sometimes commercially sold. These transactions are not quite legal, for they may go against the copyright of the textbook authors. But this is maybe the only way a student could get the solutions, so there are rarely reported accusations.
4. Many students are complaining that the paid materials are not worthwhile because the materials come with no warranty. The materials are not complete or are not accurate.

Are there any ideas to alleviate the problems above? Nowadays, people love more powerful, more intelligent, more customizable tools.

4# If the students fail to be acquainted

Neither teachers nor students can always perform the best at passing on the knowledge. If there are some ways to utilize machines to help students improve learning process, the assistance quality is guaranteed, for the machines never feel tired. Currently, large language models (LLMs) have the greatest potential to become students’ study assistants. To study efficiently with the help of LLMs, there are basically steps below:

1. The student subscribe to an LLM service, often a paid plan.
2. The student feed the LLM with abundant base ideas, such as textbooks, documents and notes.
3. The student asks the LLM to find the solutions of some questions based on the given materials and backbone abilities provided by the LLM makers.
4. The LLM outputs the result with much more details and explanations. The student can continue chatting with the LLM to better comprehend the key points.
5. The student organize the chat messages into written notes.

There are shortcomings of the LLMs, of course. They are not completely supervised, so they may make factual mistakes with a so-called professional, guaranteed tone. Sometimes it is easy to find the errors but the students cannot have full confidence that they are capable enough to catch the mistakes. This way is still not perfect. What a pity!

5# Memory is the last shortage

There is always an assumption that what the life could be if people can completely take over brain memory, just like disk drives inside computers. If people never forget the knowledge and always erase the trash memories, will the complaints and dilemma diminish? That is, memory is the last shortage, and people must focus on something and give up others.

Will it be better if there are no anti-self-designs? The answer is uncertain. It leads to two ways: people who study consciously learn more efficiently, while people who study unconsciously become more decadent. It had not even been a bad thing, after all, because there would be a higher possibility of fostering smarter generations.