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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

#641

Post by blibble »

Ukv wrote: post #347
renegade-otter wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is here to stay Let's not assume a lot right now. OpenAI and other companies are torching through cash like drunken socialist sailors. Will AI be here as a Big Data 2.0 B2B technology? Most likely, but a viable model where students and laypeople have access to it? To be seen. We all mooched off of dumb VC money at one point or another. I acquired a few expensive watches at Fab dot com at 80% off when they were g…

> [...] but a viable model where students and laypeople have access to it? To be seen. You can run GPT-4-equivalent models locally. Even if all software and hardware advancements immediately halt, models at the current level will remain available.

how useful will a 2024 era model be in 2030?

2040? 2050?

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

#642

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

marcelsalathe wrote: post #384
teekert wrote: post #243

FWIW, I'm a consultant for a large University hospital, and Dutch. My PhD thesis, years ago, got the remark: "Should have checked with a native speaker." So, now I use ChatGPT to check my English. I just write what I want to write than ask it to make my text more "More concise, business-like and not so American" (yeah the thing is by default as ultra enthusiastic as an American waiter). And 9 out of 10 times it says…

I completely agree. LLMs are incredibly useful for improving the flow and structure of an argument, not just for non-native speakers, but even for native English speakers. Making texts more accessible through clear language and well-structured arguments is a valuable service to the reader, and I applaud anyone who leverages LLMs to achieve that. I do the same myself.

Yes it's a valuable service but we should also be aware that it puts more and more weight on written language and less weight on spoken language. Being able to write clearly is one thing, but being able to converse verbally with another individual is another entirely, and both have value.

With students, historically we have always assumed that written communication was the more challenging skill and our tests were arranged thusly. But we're in a new place now where the inability to verbally converse is a real hurdle to overcome. Maybe we should rethink how we teach and test.

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

#643

Post by zamadatix »

xnyan wrote: post #39
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the teacher can produce no proof For an assignment completed at home, on a student's device using software of a student's choosing, there can essentially be no proof. If the situation you describe becomes common, it might make sense for a school to invest into a web-based text editor that capture keystrokes and user state and requiring students use that for at-home text-based assignments. That or eliminating take-h…

>For an assignment completed at home, on a student's device using software of a student's choosing, there can essentially be no proof According to an undergraduate student who babysits for our child, some students are literally screen recording the entire writing process, or even recording themselves writing at their computers as a defense against claims of using AI. I don't know how effective that defense is in prac…

I've been going for a comp sci degree for the fun of it lately (never had the chance out of high school) and I've done this for different courses. Typically for big items like course final projects or for assignments it's mentioned are particularly difficult/high stakes.

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

#644

Post by shombaboor »

krick wrote: post #58

That's kinda nuts how adult people learned to trust some random algorithms in a year or two. They don't know how it works, they cannot explain it, they don't care, it just works. It's magic. If it says you cheated, you cheated. You cannot do anything about it. I want to emphasize, that this isn't really about trusting magic, it's about people nonchalantly doing ridiculous stuff nowdays and that they aren't held accou…

the ai companies should have had the foresight to guide educators given the hassle they unleashed on them.

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

#645

Post by HarryHirsch »

borski wrote: post #55
HarryHirsch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law is unevenly enforced. My wife is currently dealing with a disruptive student from a wealthy family background. It's a chemistry class, you can't endanger your fellow students. Ordinarily, one would throw the kid out of the course, but there would be pushback from the family, and so she is cautious, let's deduct a handful of points, maybe she gets it, and thus it continues.

I completely agree that it is unevenly enforced. Still doesn't make universities the law.

You can't divorce the law that's on the books from the organs that enforce it. Any legal theorist will tell you that. Any lawyer will tell you that, and if you were ever involved in serious litigation you know.

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

#646

Post by zahlman »

red_admiral wrote: post #512
VancouverMan wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I got an ID photo taken, I got to wait and watch as the dark-skinned Indian photographer repeatedly struggled to take a suitable passport photo of the light-skinned white woman who was in line directly ahead of me. This was at a long-established mall shop that specialized in photography products and services. The same photographer had taken suitable photos of some other people in line ahead of us rather…

I think this comes down to there being different definitions of racism, that are sometimes flat out contradictory. I don't think anyone is saying that the universities or the software companies have some kind of secret agenda to keep black people out. As far as I can tell there's good evidence they're mostly trying to get more black people in (and in some cases to keep Asians out, but that's another story). I also do…

>What I am claiming is that the universities in question ended up with a proctoring product that was more likely to produce false positives for students with darker skin colors, and did not apply sufficient human review and/or giving people the benefit of the doubt to cancel out those effects.

The issue is that, for most people, the term "racism" connotes a moral failing comparable to the secret agendas, fear and hatred, etc. Specifically, an immoral act motivated by a deliberately applied, irrational prejudice.

Using it to refer to this sort of "disparate impact" is at best needlessly vague, and at worst a deliberate conflation known to be useful to (and used by) the "super-woke Ibram X Kendi" types - equivocating (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy) in order to attach the spectre of moral outrage to a problem not caused by any kind of malice.

If you're interested in whether someone might have a legal case, you should be discussing that in an appropriate forum - not with lay language among laypeople.

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

#647

Post by kurthr »

skhunted wrote: post #573
Akranazon wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany isn't special, (almost) all exams work like that in the US as well. I don't know why he was implying otherwise. Almost all degrees have required courses in the US as well. You point to a true failure in incentives. And yet, the US has the highest density of renowned universities.

For online courses it is no longer the case that exams are proctored in person. Most higher education in the United States is done at community colleges and regional state universities.

Once you have an online class with no proctored exams (or even biometric ID check) you don't know who took the class anyway. Frankly, that makes any "online degree" certification basically worthless without a proctored exit exam. That doesn't mean the education or study aren't valuable, they are to whoever is actually doing it.

I didn't realize that so many community colleges and state universities were basically online diploma mills.

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

#648

Post by visarga »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #493
hombre_fatal wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s trivially defeated with a recording / transcript.

And we could get an AI to review the recording!

It's what OpenAI does. They have a small safety model checking on the big model.

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

#649

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

CBLT wrote: post #639
skhunted wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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].…

In a pass/fail system, what does a student need to do for a teacher to be willing to fail them? What is the minimum bar to pass?

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

#650

Post by polishdude20 »

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…

I think homework is coming back to bite us/them.

K-12 specifically has it bad. Wake up 7am get to school for 8/9 fill your day with classes you don't have much interest in while also figuring out how to be a social human with other kids and all the stress that entails. Then we require them to go home and continue to do more schoolwork.

Of course they're gonna cheat. They're overworked and overstressed as it is.

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