Live data from Hacker News

CheatGPT

blog.humphd.org

171–180 of 544 posts

Re: CheatGPT

#171

I teach CS1. A lot of this post resonated with me. In particular, I don't think that beginners are well-served by relying on AI to complete their assignments. Later on, once they've developed some computational thinking abilities, sure. Starting out, no. There's a real dearth of good options available to computer science educators today for teaching introductory material effectively in the face of all the new and exi…

“Oral exams also don't scale and raise obvious equity issues.” Not to be intentionally obtuse, but what are the obvious equity issues?

Probably people who are mute or deaf.

That being said, the ultra dense morons who think "oral" can't be extended in a special case to simply mean "without extra time to think" (which is what is is, mostly) are typically not experienced with these exams.

The parent teaches CS1 and is not likely to have been given a formal oral examination in their likely short career (these are usually reserved for PhD qualifying and special MScs).

Re: CheatGPT

#172

I teach CS1. A lot of this post resonated with me. In particular, I don't think that beginners are well-served by relying on AI to complete their assignments. Later on, once they've developed some computational thinking abilities, sure. Starting out, no. There's a real dearth of good options available to computer science educators today for teaching introductory material effectively in the face of all the new and exi…

“Oral exams also don't scale and raise obvious equity issues.” Not to be intentionally obtuse, but what are the obvious equity issues?

Exams can be anonymized when graded to reduce teacher bias. You can't do that with oral exams. In addition, you can't get a second opinion for an oral exam if you suspect you've been graded unfairly.

Re: CheatGPT

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agreed! We ask a variant of this question (we call it "an analysis sample"); from the materials we ask candidates to submit[0]: "A significant challenge of engineering is dealing with a system when it doesn't, in fact, work correctly. When systems misbehave, engineers must flip their disposition: instead of a creator of their own heaven and earth, they must become a scientist, attempting to reason about a foreig…

To be honest, this sounds extremely difficult and not in a good way. That sounds like many many hours of writing work, to describe a problem that might be many years in the past, that might have been solved by extremely intricate methods that are easy to forget, using technologies that are now not commonly in use, etc. A good question to ask about each interview question might be: would a good liar have an easier tim…

Having read many, many, many answers to this question, I don't think that a good liar has a particularly easy time answering this question -- or certainly not in a way that gets them further consideration!

And yes, it's many hours of work -- but the work itself that we are doing is quite hard, and if someone washes out in the application process because it feels unduly arduous, we are likely not a fit for one another.

Re: CheatGPT

#174
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bit like forcing students to use an abacus while calculators are around. I said allow students to use ChatGPT. Just make it clear that pasting answers from it verbatim, just like doing so from SO, is called plagiarism and does not benefit the academic community or themselves. There will always be cheats. Agree about shifting evaluation methods.

What about when it gives the 'best' word choice? Should a student change it arbitrarily?

Just put it into Quillbot.

Re: CheatGPT

#175
I teach to first year students. We have graded programming assignments they can do by themselves, where they can cheat in all sorts of ways, but I honestly don't care, it's their responsibility to learn. Then we have theoretical exams, where there are also questions about programming (but we don't check if the code has perfect syntax). In one course the exams are oral: excellent tool for assessing students, but very time consuming, in another it's written: more efficient, but more shallow.

I like the idea about teaching how to use AI, but it has to be a tool among others.

Re: CheatGPT

#176

"Cheating" is good. School teachers and professors should not be the arbiters of how much money you earn later in life, but they are based on their subjective assessment of you (via grades). Many do not realize the intensely adversarial relationship one is in with a teacher. You are not there to learn. You are there to get an A. In the case of social sciences, you support the ideas your professor espouses. In the cas…

The people you're cheating are not your professors but your peers. For better or for worse, grades are used to rank people and mete out further opportunities and benefits. The professors already have jobs.

Let's unbox that a bit. In what sense are one's peers cheated when an individual cheats?

If the course were going to have 20% A-level students and now has 50% A-level students, what has been taken from the initial 20%? They were still going to be able to put on their résumé "4.0 GPA from Suchandsuch University."

Re: CheatGPT

#177

I teach CS1. A lot of this post resonated with me. In particular, I don't think that beginners are well-served by relying on AI to complete their assignments. Later on, once they've developed some computational thinking abilities, sure. Starting out, no. There's a real dearth of good options available to computer science educators today for teaching introductory material effectively in the face of all the new and exi…

“Oral exams also don't scale and raise obvious equity issues.” Not to be intentionally obtuse, but what are the obvious equity issues?

Not everyone has the same primary language. Especially at universities.

Re: CheatGPT

#178
post #147
post #117

I see a ton of people trying to justify their use of Copilot/ChatGPT (or rushing a startup to cash in on LLMs). Maybe that conflict of interest is why there's very little talk of it being based on plagiarizing and license violation of open source code on which the model was trained. We just suffered through a couple decades of almost every company in our field selling out users' privacy, one way or another. And years…

Right, any humans that reads open source code ever should also be forced to submit any code they write to ensure they've not mentally performed copyright violations. I don't give two shits if whatever current expensive GPT is dumping out code 'very similar' to open source code today. And you'd be chopping off your own nose if you did too. Thinking these models will remain as expensive to run in the future means that…

That’s why we have clean room development.

For patents it is to avoid triggering triple damages.

For copyright it is to help avoid allegations of plagiarism.

> Burn copyright to the ground.

Burn patents to the ground! Copyright has some use, but the Disney changes have somewhat ruined its purpose.

Re: CheatGPT

#179
post #72

Cheating in academia isn't a problem, because the only people students are cheating is themselves. I've seen plenty of cheaters, they were the worst students, and despite cheating couldn't graduate or couldn't find a job after graduating. If some moron is stupid enough to cheat when he's paying 50K a year, let them.

The problem with widespread cheating even if you don't cheat yourself is it essentially reduces the credit rating of your $50k program and has knock on effects elsewhere, like worse interview loops. And if the 'cheater's workload' becomes the norm, you the non-cheater can be literally failed out of programs and scholarships because you didn't keep up.

At what point does "not keeping up with the cheaters" become "There is a more efficient way to do the task and this student's grade reflects they are choosing the inefficient approach?"

I'm reminded of the stories of employees getting busted because they were assigned a job so trivially automatable they either did automate it or they used some find-labor service to delegate it for a fraction of the cost out of their own pockets, who are then accused by the company of "not working."

Re: CheatGPT

#180

If I were a teacher, I'd give written exams for coding, as we used to have back in the 80's when we didn't have enough dedicated computers for everyone in the class, and most of kids didn't have a home computer to work with. So instead, we'd implement simple algorithms on paper for in-class quiz/tests/homeworks. I remember in high school, we had an exam, and one of the question was to write a for loop counting from 1…

> If I were a teacher... You'd be wondering how the heck you get out of a profession where pay is stagnant, the backlog of problems has been growing for a long time, and the minimization of resources to deal with has been in the wrong direction for a long time. You'd join the league of "you can never go wrong hiring another administrator" or exit for some related parlayable field in industry and throw your hands in t…

CS programs seem like a different beast. At my alma mater they are always growing the cs faculty pool. At certain schools you can really work with some giants in cs departments. People who developed the algorithms you are using today with a piece of chalk. A lot of the new hire faculty seem to come from industry too, secured their bag already, and are jaded from working in industry. Sometimes they come from those industry "skunkworks" R&D type of teams where you'd asume everything should have been just peachy for them, but clearly not if they are looking for academic positions with their stacked resume.
Post reply on HN