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Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

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

#631

Post by dragonwriter »

bonoboTP wrote: post #527
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 only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. In Germany, all exams are like this. Homework assignments are either just a prerequisite for taking exam but the grade is solely from the exam, or you may get some small point bonus for assignments/projects. > But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for…

> The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree.

Very strongly depends on the school and major; there are both narrow-path degrees with lots of mandatory courses and wide-path degrees with very few specifically mandatory courses (instead having several n of m requirements) other than lower-division general education requirements.

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

#632

Post by sombragris »

Just thinking: What if a student puts in every term paper some legend similar to: "All rights reserved. Not to be used to train AI or used in so-called plagiarism detection sites or platforms"..?

I know that wouldn't fly but it would be interesting to see something like that.

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

#633

Post by Der_Einzige »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #584
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…

> They are used to doing the necessary work to pass The same for job interviews. I did a lot of technical interviews in the past as interviewer (hundreds) for Software Engineer positions (and still help companies to hire sometimes, as independent interviewer). There is insane amount of cheating. I'd say at least 30% in normal companies are cheaters, and 50% and more in FAANG. I can prove it, in private groups, and fo…

Yup. Blind has people seething about known FAANG interview cheaters getting promoted before them. Everyone who works in big tech knows the cheating grift for getting in.

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

#634

Post by bongodongobob »

samatman wrote: post #620
lumost wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted…

Disagree on the order, unless the next institution is also an educational one, which for undergraduates is mostly not the case. If it's a job, the order will be school, school, major, everything else on the résumé, grades maybe.

Agreed, I didn't know people put their GPA on resumes.

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

#635

Post by kayodelycaon »

jjmarr wrote: post #550
red_admiral wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or of racism. There was a thing during the pandemic where automated proctoring tools couldn't cope with people of darker skin than they were trained on; I imagine the first properly verified and scientifically valid examples of AI-detection racism will be found soon.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5 LLMs already discriminates against African-American English. You could argue a human grader would as well, but all tested models were more consistent in assigning negative adjectives to hypothetical speakers of that dialect.

This is entirely unsurprising to me. As taught to me, written English (in the US) has a much stricter structure and vocabulary. African-American English was used as the primary example of incorrect and unprofessional writing.

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

#636

Post by gs17 »

bearjaws wrote: post #516
fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #395

If AI detection cannot be 100% accurate, I do not believe it is an appropriate solution for judging the futures of millions of students and young people. Time to move on. Either from the tech or from the essay format. In either case, we need to change our standards around mastery of subject matter.

Plagiarism detectors aren't 100% accurate either, and we have to use those as well. Institutions have to enforce rules around these things, if they do not within 10 years their degrees will be pointless. It's what happens when you believe someone to have cheated that matters. If it's not blatant cheating, then you cannot punish them for it. These tools exist to catch only the worst offenders.

Plagiarism detectors usually tell you what you're accused of ripping off. I remember always seeing it come back telling me how I must have copied my references from other essays on the same subject.

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

#637

Post by cmgbhm »

mountainb wrote: post #386
gklitz wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Written assay evaluation is not and has never been an effective evaluation. It was always a cost saving measure because allocating 30min face to face time with each individual student for each class is such a gigantic cost for the institution that they cannot even imagine doing it. Think about that the next time you look at your student debt, it couldn’t even buy you 30min time per class individually with the teacher…

You can still do written essay evaluations. You could just require proctored exams whether or not you use software like Examsoft. If it's a topic that benefits from writing from a store of material, you can permit students to bring either unlimited supplemental printed material or a limited body of printed material into the exam room. For longer essays, you can just build in an oral examination component. This face t…

That’s 8 days of TA time. You’re going to get high variance and most likely having to boil it down to the equivalent of a multiple choice oral exam.

Hiring a n TA to delegate grading that’s hard to verify seems like will cost more than you think.

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

#638

Post by dragonwriter »

skhunted wrote: post #587
schnable wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe. Almost every university in the US takes federal money and relies on federal loan guarantees to keep the high revenues pumping through. In exchange, the schools are subject to requirements by the government and they impose many. I think the bigger issue is the size and scope of higher ed here and if it's actually a good idea to to te…

Around 50% of higher education in the United States is done at community colleges. Tuition accounts for 2/3 of our budget. State subsidy for 1/3. In the past the numbers were reversed. Enrollment in higher education went through a decade long decline. It is now the case that colleges are chasing tuition dollars. Students are the client.

> Around 50% of higher education in the United States is done at community colleges.

Sure, but they don't set the rules; sure, they do much of the education, but much of the demand for them comess from bachelor’s-degree bound students, so the course selection is set by what bachelor’s degree granting institutions accept.

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

#639

Post by CBLT »

skhunted wrote: post #615
lumost wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted…

I think grading is obsolete. Grade inflation increased a lot the past 30 years. Ironically, it has increased the least at the least prestigious colleges. Pass/fail is the way to go. Don’t know if this would mess up things like applying for graduate school or jobs but let’s end the farce that grading has become.

Getting rid of grading sounds crazy, but it's actually happening. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in America, is moving to "equitable grading", which amounts (imo) to pass/fail with extra pageantry. Teachers are being retrained _right now_ to equitable grading.

I know an equitable grading champion at an LAUSD school, I'll see if I can get material to share. EDIT: I just received [0][1][2][3].

[0] (5 page pdf) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB...

[1] (4m30s video) https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0...

[2] (audio interview) https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-g...

[3] (article) https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-gradin...

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