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Title: In Copilot In Excel Demo, AI Told Teacher a 27% Exam Score Is of No
Concern

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/12/0328228/i...

A demo of educational AI-powered tools by a Microsoft product manager (in
March of 2024) showed "how AI has the possibility to transform various job
sectors and the education system," according to one report. But that demo
"includes a segment on Copilot in Excel that is likely to resonate with AI-
wary software developers," writes long-time Slashdot theodp: The Copilot in
Excel segment purports to show how even teachers who were too "afraid of" or
"intimidated" to use Excel in the past can now just use natural language
prompts to conduct Excel analysis. But Copilot advises the teacher there are
no 'outliers' in the exam scores for their 17 students, whose test scores
range from 27%-100%. (This is apparently due to Copilot's choice of an
inappropriate outlier detection method for this size population and score
range). Fittingly, the student whose 27% score is confidently-but-incorrectly
deemed to be of no concern by Copilot is named after Michael Scott, the
largely incompetent and unprofessional boss of The Office. (Microsoft also
named the other exam takers after characters from The Office). The additional
Copilot student score "analysis" touted by Microsoft in the demo is also less
than impressive. It includes: 1. A vertical bar chart that fails to convey
the test score distribution that a histogram would have (a rookie chart
choice mistake), 2. A horizontal bar chart of student scores that only
displays every other student's name and shows no score values (a rookie
formatting error)... So, will teachers - like programmers - be spending a
significant amount of time in the future reviewing, editing, and refining the
outputs of their AI agent helpers? "Not only does it illustrate how the
realities of AI assistants sometimes fall maddeningly short of the promises,"
argues the original submission. "The demo also shows how AI vendors and
customers alike sometimes forget to review promotional AI content closely in
all the AI excitement!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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