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AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

bbc.co.uk

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Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#11

Post by ziofill »

quantum_state wrote: post #6

This says more about the exams than the AI or the students…

I agree 100%. This AI wave hopefully if will force universities to rethink the way students are assessed. When I was faculty I had the luxury to teach small classes, and I could always be extremely flexible with assessments so I could assess students as the course progresses, or I could make it project-based, or a 1-on-1 oral exam. But I had colleagues that were teaching a class of 300 students, which meant most of the exams were looked at only by teaching assistants, or they were so heavily automated (e.g. multiple choice) that these days they could totally be fooled by an LLM. Something needs to change and it will (fingers crossed).

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#12

Post by falcor84 »

threecheese wrote: post #10

This is just a way more reactionary way to communicate model benchmarks. “A computer algorithm performed better than humans on a task it was designed for” sounds like the last forty years in a nutshell.

The big question remains - "Is there any benchmark at all on which algorithms can't pass human performance given sufficient resources?". If I were a being man, I would put my money on 'no'

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#13

Post by falcor84 »

meristohm wrote: post #4

Can "educated machines" reproduce on their own yet? How do they fit into the food web, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, etc? Can they make meaning, towards a purpose in life? What role do they serve other than human ingenuity ego-stroking and for a few to further extract money from the many? Can AI love, yet? To what degree are we just avoiding dealing with existential threats by churning through resources to pl…

>Can "educated machines" reproduce on their own yet? How do they fit into the food web, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, etc? Can they make meaning, towards a purpose in life? What role do they serve other than human ingenuity ego-stroking and for a few to further extract money from the many? Can AI love, yet?

I'm sorry to say that to me all these questions sound as semantically meaningful as "can submarines swim?"

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#14

Post by [deleted] »

bee_rider wrote: post #5

Worrying that AI might make exams obsolete is kind of odd, I mean, it is a symptom I guess but only at the very end of a long stupid cascading failure. Students cheat because they want the degree but don’t care to learn the material. Or maybe they want to learn the material, but see employment at the end as requiring better grades than they can get naturally. Either one is the result of bullshit credentialism. (Bulls…

[deleted]

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#15

Post by threatofrain »

bee_rider wrote: post #5

Worrying that AI might make exams obsolete is kind of odd, I mean, it is a symptom I guess but only at the very end of a long stupid cascading failure. Students cheat because they want the degree but don’t care to learn the material. Or maybe they want to learn the material, but see employment at the end as requiring better grades than they can get naturally. Either one is the result of bullshit credentialism. (Bulls…

> Then, they can become something useful for the students, a way to evaluate their progress and get feedback.

That's exactly why it'll become useful to employers. The degree to which student evaluations are frank assessments is the degree to which employers will value them even more. The more honest schools are the higher stakes they become.

If you want to lower the stakes then increase the number of nice seats in the economy.

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#17

Post by RoyalHenOil »

falcor84 wrote: post #12
threecheese wrote: post #10

This is just a way more reactionary way to communicate model benchmarks. “A computer algorithm performed better than humans on a task it was designed for” sounds like the last forty years in a nutshell.

The big question remains - "Is there any benchmark at all on which algorithms can't pass human performance given sufficient resources?". If I were a being man, I would put my money on 'no'

"Given sufficient resources" is the key phrase here.

Humans are ridiculously energy efficient. We are capable of extremely complex thought — as well as a range of physical movement! — while using less energy than most household appliances. I am skeptical that we will ever create non-biological AI that can compete with that.

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#18

Post by daseiner1 »

meristohm wrote: post #4

Can "educated machines" reproduce on their own yet? How do they fit into the food web, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, etc? Can they make meaning, towards a purpose in life? What role do they serve other than human ingenuity ego-stroking and for a few to further extract money from the many? Can AI love, yet? To what degree are we just avoiding dealing with existential threats by churning through resources to pl…

Though I am admittedly an AI pessimist, as regards your penultimate paragraph, I think AI evangelists would argue that the aforementioned technology may offer a pathway to the new paradigm that you allude to.

What consistently goes unremarked upon, however, is the massive political “realignment” (a polite term for revolution) that the proliferation of AI may lead to in the not-so distant future. Disruption and likely violence that may, at best, lead to such a “new vision” for human existence.

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#19

Post by nradov »

bee_rider wrote: post #5

Worrying that AI might make exams obsolete is kind of odd, I mean, it is a symptom I guess but only at the very end of a long stupid cascading failure. Students cheat because they want the degree but don’t care to learn the material. Or maybe they want to learn the material, but see employment at the end as requiring better grades than they can get naturally. Either one is the result of bullshit credentialism. (Bulls…

Credentialism isn't really bullshit. For any decent entry-level job there will be an enormous surplus of applicants (elite overproduction). It isn't practical to evaluate them all in detail, the hiring managers simply don't have time. So they fall back on simple, somewhat arbitrary factors like educational degrees, school rankings, and GPA. It's imperfect but what else can work at scale?

Re: AI can beat real university students in exams, study suggests

#20

Post by tzs »

quantum_state wrote: post #6

This says more about the exams than the AI or the students…

Not really. The point of an exam is to assess whether or not the student has learned the material.

That an LLM can answer all the questions in 2024 is not really all that much different from how it was circa 1980 when probably every integral on my calculus exam was in a table of integrals that I could buy at the college bookstore.

It's just one more thing to add to the list of things that you need to prevent students from using during the exam. In 1980 that included that table of integrals on calculus exam. In 2024 it needs to include LLMs.

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