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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

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, there's no such choice. There are no competing alternative courses that can substitute for each other, the very thought seems rather strange. There is one Linear Algebra course. You have to pass it to get your degree. Typically, it's taught by the same prof for many years, but it might also rotate between different chairs and profs (but only one in each semester and the "design" and requirements of the co…

It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it. You don't have the choice to not take the class, you just have choice with which professor you would like to take it with. And often you would have to get lucky anyway, since that session may be filled so you'd have to take it with the "harder" teacher anyway. For example with the…

> It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it.

Remember, in European countries students are admitted to study a specific subject at university, rather than being admitted to the university as a whole and expected to choose a major later on.

So there are multiple courses going on, with a lot of intersection between the topics covered. There's maths for computer scientists (heavy on the discrete maths), maths for engineers (heavy on the integrals and matrices), maths for social scientists (heavy on the statistics), and so on.

So both American and European universities split their year 1 maths courses so they can get a few thousand first-year undergraduates through the largest 300-500 seat lecture theatres. But in Europe it's a split by subject, rather than by choose-your-instructor.

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

#652
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.

except for a plethora of companies that require GPA disclosure on their submissions.

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

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember taking a math class in college and the professor had a very unique way of dealing with cheating. He let us use our books, notes, and "any calculator capability" from our TI-84's. His rationale is that students will try to use these tricks anyways so just let them and then update the test to be "immune" from these advantages. Before every test he mentioned that we could use all those tools but always said "…

I’ve done this but then you end up with students who are not used to “thinking”. They do bad on the test. Now I’m known as a hard teacher. Now people avoid my classes. Administration hounds me for having s low passing rate. I need a job. I now give easy tests. The real issue as I see it is that no one wants to face the reality that far too many incapable, incurious people are going to college. So I pretend to give re…

People want to be engaged with the work they believe in. Students or adults.

Fundamentally, kids that are just trying to pass a class don't see the value in learning and it seems that the contributions towards the "pointless" school work are parts teacher attitudes, parts curriculum design, parts real-life applicability to the student's interests, parts framing.

We've been using tests and such for far too long as a proxy for competence, rather than developing the competencies in such a way that engages the kids.

I think we need to look at reframing fundamental parts of how education is structured. I don't think there needs to be drastic changes, just some small things that allow the education and curriculum to become more engaging.

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes it is even a form field on Linkedin job openings.

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

#655

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 ov…

>many people suggesting we rely on... proctored exams. What exactly do you think that's solving over a... test where the teacher ensures people aren't on their phones? That's what proctoring is.

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

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without some form of watermarking, I do not believe there is any way to differentiate. How that water marking would look like I have no clue. The pandora's box has been opened with regards to large language models.

I thought words that rose in popularity because of LLMs (like "delve" for exampme) might be an indicator of watermarking, but I am not sure.

It's not a very good "watermark". Ignoring that a slightly clever student can use something like https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler/tree/main to prevent those words, students who have been exposed to AI-written text will naturally use those more often.

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

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41882421 My comment from a few days ago. The origin was a conversation with a girl who said she'd been pulled into a professor's office and told she was going to be reported to whatever her university's equivalent of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity is over using AI - a matter of academic honesty. The professor made it clear in the syllabus that "no AI" was allowed to be use…

In my opinion, it strongly depends on what Grammarly is being used for. For a physics paper, that's not a huge problem. For an English writing assignment, that's cheating. Banning AI tools like Grammarly for both is probably the best solution as your physics paper now becomes an extra training exercise for your English paper. Writing essays isn't just about your ideas. It's also a tool to teach communication skills.…

> For an English writing assignment, that's cheating.

Whoops, with that little comment I suspect you've invalidated most English papers written in the past 2 decades. Certainly all of mine! Thanks spellcheck.

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

#658
post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

A lot of colleges have become zombie colleges. Enrollment is way down. Gotta please the remaining clients.

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

#659

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 the US too, but you frequently have the choice between multiple professors based on time slots. Professors who are known to be strict, boring, bad at teaching, etc end up receiving fewer students as a result.

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

#660
post #330
post #178

It is no longer effective to solely use a written essay to measure how deeply a student comprehends a subject. AI is here to stay; new methods should be used to assess student performance. I remember being told at school, that we weren't allowed to use calculators in exams. The line provided by teachers was that we could never rely on having a calculator when we need it most—obviously there's irony associated with ha…

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…

> Written assay evaluation is not and has never been an effective evaluation.

Could not disagree more. Researching, formulating arguments, can give a student a complete view of the subject that studying for tests misses. But, similarly to tests, it probably depends on the skill of the teacher in creating the right kind of written assignments.

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