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Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

bloomberg.com

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Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#551

Post by acdha »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #547

isnt the easiest solution to this just to make homework optional? Put all the weight into in class written exams and just have more of them.

It’s the most obvious but it’s expensive. At the very least, I think it’d mean that we need to hire more teachers since it takes much longer to give exams or grade oral/handwritten ones and you’d need to restructure the academic schedule – for example, if the work of writing a report has to be done in person, you need to find hours during the week where students can do that work under supervision but the schedule is already full of instruction time.

In practice, reconsidering how clsssed are structured is a good idea but this is forcing it to happen all at once without any additional resources.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#552

Post by skhunted »

greentxt wrote: post #542
skhunted wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But people now teaching at higher education institutions need their classes to fill. That means we need to treat our students as if they are our customers. We must please the customer. In years past the attitude was that society at large was our client. Today the student is our client.

The student is the one paying your salary so that would be expected though, right? Where the students get the money from in the first place is the issue imo. Perverted markets do perverse things.

In the old days the money public colleges got to operate overwhelmingly came from the state. Now it comes overwhelmingly from tuition.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#553

Post by lizknope »

lupire wrote: post #448
dambi0 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on the questions. There are also open book exams. A viva is a type of exam so I don’t see they are incompatible with assessing research

Not every class is STEM. Are you writing a 4000 word research paper sitting in class?

A few of my high school teachers in the early 1990's made our final paper into a big project.

It was not just "turn in the paper at the end" but turn in your topic with a paragraph describing it. Then make an outline, then bibliography of the sources we were using. During the process we had to use 3x5 index cards with various points, arguments, facts, and the specific pages in the books listed in our bibliography. We did this because this was later used to make footnotes in our paper.

By structuring the project this way and having each milestone count as 5-10% of the overall grade it made it much harder to cheat and also taught us how to organize a research paper.

I suppose you could ask ChatGPT to do the entire paper and then work backwards picking out facts and making the outline etc.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#554

Post by shepherdjerred »

IMO there's zero correlation between grades and knowledge/ability to apply knowledge. So many peers in college cheated. My boss at my last job (while I was doing OMSCS part-time) suggested that I cheat on a project. In undergrad I saw peers looking up (and successfully finding) answer sheets online _while in class_.

I even knew those who did the work honestly, received high marks, and then couldn't actually write reasonable code. In my capstone project one of my teammates ask me if his code needed to compile or not. Another couldn't implement a function that translates ASCII letters -> numbers without a lookup table.

Anyway, all of this to say, maybe we just shouldn't care about grades as much.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#555

Post by hombre_fatal »

I don't understand most of the comments here.

I couldn't cheat in high school because we couldn't use our phones during class. Not for worksheets nor quizzes and especially not exams whether they be multiple choice, oral, or essays.

Yet the top threads here act like we need a whole refactor of schooling, many people suggesting we rely on viva voce exams and proctored exams. What exactly do you think that's solving over a simple classroom scantron test where the teacher ensures people aren't on their phones?

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#556

Post by simsla »

skhunted wrote: post #491

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating. The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. B…

As a student of the previous generation, I much preferred exams with an oral defence component. Gave an opportunity to clear up any miscommunications, and I always walked away with a much better estimate for how well I did.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#557

Post by jjmarr »

SilverBirch wrote: post #255
greatartiste wrote: post #111

For a human who deals with student work or reads job applications spotting AI generated work quickly becomes trivially easy. Text seems to use the same general framework (although words are swapped around) also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity. It isn't long before you real…

I did engineering at a university, one of the courses that was mandatory was technical communication. The prof understood that the type of person that went into engineering was not necessarily going to appreciate the subtleties of great literature, so they're course work was extremely rote. It was like "Write about a technical subject, doesn't matter what, 1500 words, here's the exact score card". And the score card…

Extremely disciplined students always feed papers into AI detectors before submitting and then revise their work until it passes.

Dodging the detector is done regardless of whether or not one has used AI to write that paper.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#558

Post by iteria »

mikeocool wrote: post #424
junaru wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It even came with handwriting built in as authentication mechanism! AI detectors hate this secret! On a more serious note - US removed cursive from their curriculum almost two decades ago - something i cant wrap my head around as cursive is something the rest of the world(?) uses starting in middle school and onwards through the whole adult life.

21 states still mandate cursive in their curriculum. There are lots of things I spent a lot of time learning school that I rarely use, but see the value in having learnt. Cursive, beyond a very basic level, is not one of those things. Though I’m no education expert, perhaps there is a subliminal value to spending all that time.

I learned cursive in school and never used it. I have written countless essays by hand in grade school and college and never felt the need to do it in cursive because to me my cursive was just way more unreadable than my printing and not particularly faster.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#559

Post by skhunted »

nostrademons wrote: post #541
skhunted wrote: post #491

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating. The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. B…

The solution, clearly, is a world where those who actually learned the math can use it to cheat the people who didn't. ...which is what we have today, where the most lucrative industries for people with good math skills are finance (= cheating dumb people out of their retirement), advertising (= cheating dumb people out of their consumer dollars), and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes)…

….and data-driven propaganda (= cheating dumb people out of their votes).

I like the phrasing you used.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#560

Post by simsla »

dmd wrote: post #438
ninalanyon wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I studied physics at Exeter University they still used the tutorial system and finals. Tutorials were held fortnightly; the tutorial groups were typically three or four students. There was no obligation to turn up to lectures or even tutorials. You just had to pass the end of year exams to be allowed to continue to the final. The class of degree that was awarded depended on the open note final exam and the repor…

What about those of us who can explain our ideas and thinking clearly and in great detail in writing but would struggle to even prove we've heard of the topic orally?

At my uni, you could prepare a written answer. The professor would read your written answer and ask follow-up questions.
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