What is 120 plus 12?

"What is 120 plus 12?" I asked the student. The student and I were measuring the circumference of a hoop that exceeded the length of the 120 inch tape measure. The student had chosen to measure the circumference and to use inches. The tape measure was 12 inches short of the circumference, the student was holding the tape measure showing that the gap remaining was 12 inches. The student looked up from the measurement in hand and said nothing. I waited. 

Students in a prior term timing the period of a hoop. The period of a hoop is linearly related to the diameter.

"Just add the 12 to the 120, what is 12 more than 120?" The student looked at me blankly. I waited. After twenty seconds, the student asked, "I can use my cell phone calculator?" The student pulled out their cell phone and obtained 132. 

"You couldn't do that calculation in your head?" I asked. The student indicated that they could not. 

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"Plummeting math scores prompted lawmakers to take action and now a new education bill has been signed into law by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine," according to an article published on 18 July 2026 by WJW Fox 8 in Cleveland, Ohio. "Students who are scoring at the lowest level on the state standardized tests must all be remediated," aid Ohio Sen. Andrew Brenner.

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Statistics homework assignment for section 10.3. Students are to answer the 11 questions using the data in the first column. 

[The Gemini interface does not display tabs or carriage returns/line feeds in the echo of the input to the screen. Column A was copied into the prompt directly from Google Sheets. ]

[Gemini has correctly parsed the data that was copied and pasted directly from Google Sheets into the earlier prompt. Gemini has even correctly determined that text in cell A1 is not part of the data set.]

[Here again Gemini is not displaying the carriage returns/line feeds that were present in the original prompt. This is, again, a copy and paste from the spreadsheet. Note that the questions above were in column E and only column E was copied and pasted into the prompt. The population mean, necessary to completing the homework, was in column D.]

[Solutions based on the presumed population of mean of 700 continued. The original questions failed to include the expected population mean.]

[Gemini provided correct answers identical to those seen above in section one of Gemini's response. The corrected material picked up from section two.]

Gemini has scored 100% on the homework assignment. Those are all correct answers and good explanations. This was done using the free version of Gemini.

In my class I ask the students to use spreadsheet functions. I know when I see all of the answers typed in without any functions used, the student has undoubtedly used a large language model such as Gemini to obtain the answers. 

And the function list continues on for every question. Note the function used for the standard deviation. The "dot" notation functions were, as far as I am aware, developed by Microsoft in a bid to make Excel spreadsheets fail in other spreadsheet software. Apparently a function name cannot be protected property. Other spreadsheets quickly implemented the new dot functions. STDEV.S produces the same result as STDEV. The latter is used in all my my course materials. Student assignments have all been coming in with the STDEV.S. Does this prove they are using AI? 

No, STDEV.S is a suggested function in spreadsheets. There is an increased probability that AI is involved, but there is the additional step of asking the AI to supply functions, instead of numeric answers. 

In an online class I cannot have the students use pencil, paper, and statistical tables – even if I wanted to. No one has done statistics using pencil, paper, and tables since the last century. Statistics is done using software, not handware. Sure, one can start to spin visions of lockdown browsers with cameras monitoring the students as they work their homework. That isn't education, that is a dystopian prison and ends with the student unable to get up to go to the bathroom. That is desperately hanging on to a past that is long gone. 

If the point was to get the answer, large language models are just another tool that generates an answer. Either way one is using some form of technology to obtain an answer. One is left looking for a place to plant a marker that says "This technology and no further." Looking over the history of statistical technology that is clearly an untenable position. And in an online class, there really is no functional way to determine which technology a student used to arrive at statistical values. 

The way in which statistical courses have worked up to now has been to work homework assignments that require the use of statistical functions and analysis. This no longer proves that the student has learned statistics. Yet if the point was the solutions, then does it matter how the student obtains those solutions? As AI advances, AI will get better at detecting edge cases where a particular statistic should not be used. Or where a frequentist analysis is simply inappropriate and a Bayesian analysis should be undertaken. Edge cases that a graduate with only an introductory statistics course would not know to consider. 

Left open is the question of how to evolve statistics education so that the material is of benefit to human students. Yet almost any level or meta-level one envisions moving to is also one that modern AI can also handle. 

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This is now a larger issue across mathematics and mathematics education. OpenAI used an internal AI model to disprove a long standing conjecture in discrete geometry.  And the AI did not do this using a brute force, try everything approach. The AI model used existing theorems and proofs to build a counter argument to a long held hypothesis. There is no level of mathematics at which this new calculator cannot operate. 

Math scores are plummeting? On standardized tests? Math scores are probably plummeting on the oral examinations of the era of Pythagoras as well. What are you measuring? Skills that were relevant a century or more ago? Scores are also undoubtedly in the basement for use of an abacus or Chisenbop. 

Richard Hamming is quoted as saying "You get what you measure." Goodhart's Law notes that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." And education has a long history of turning measures into targets. Standardized testing being a prime example. Ohio wants to drive a curriculum that improves scores as measured by standardized testing. The measure becomes the target and everyone loses sight of whatever the original reason for teaching something was. 

What does quantitative literacy look like in the era of AI? What does numeracy mean?