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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

#691
post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe the solution is to get rid of degrees and certifications, and just let the students who actually want to learn attend.

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

#692

The LLMs de-value the viability of homework, and assignments consisting of at-home busywork. As an alternative, teachers will have to put more emphasis on proctored exams. I say good riddance, that's exactly how it should be. At-home busywork is a scourge on especially K-12 students. Yet, every teacher has been loading their students up with homework, because that's their idea of what a "good teacher" is supposed to…

One of the math teachers I hated most nevertheless had a very good homework policy: homework is optional, it's entirely for you to learn the material and pass the exams. I did it freestyle, no formatting, just doing the math.(I hated him because he made us memorize mathematical proofs verbatim for a third of our exam scores. A study in contrast, shall we say.)

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

#693

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…

That will be a dystopia. If I were a student still, I would rather go to the university physically, than install spyware on my computer, that only incidentally reports to the university, but its main purpose will be collecting my personal data for some greedy commercial business. No thank you. That, or the uni shall give me a separate machine to write on, only for that purpose.

> I would rather go to the university physically, than install spyware on my computer

Well yes, in-person proctored is the gold standard. For those who can’t or won’t go in person, something invasive is really the only alternative to entirely exam-based scoring.

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

#694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work. Once you get past that level students have already formed bad habits and so still only do what it takes to pass. I don't know how to fix it, I don't know if it CAN be fixed.

This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work. This is 100% incorrect.

Have you ever heard of "weed-out courses" ?

Admittedly, they are about teaching things. For example, teaching Laplace transforms to mechanical engineers. It certainly isn't true to say the "courses are not about teaching anything".

But if 20% of the class should decide to change majors to business? Well, there's been some filtering out of students too.

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

#695
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…

Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions? -> GPA can be gamed, as laid out. -> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use. -> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts -> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot. What should be best practice here?…

> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot

They aren't 'fair' in avoiding every false negative, but they at least tell me that the passing candidates know and can do something.

If I ask someone who claims to know Python or Java whether or not you can have a memory leak in them, and their answer is 'no' or 'Maybe, but I don't know how', I get a pretty good idea of whether or not they know anything about this topic.

If you can't do fizzbuzz, you probably aren't a good fit for a SWE position either, you should be aiming for something more director-level. Given how much people struggle with coding, I sometimes feel like I may as well ditch my regular question, and just ask them to write that.

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

#696

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. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class.

When I was in college, this was every math class. You could cheat all you want on the 20% of your grade that came from homework, but the remaining 80% was from 3-4 in-class, proctored exams.

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

#697
post #611

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…

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…

> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order.

And every non-educational institution after that will see school, degree as a checkbox.

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

#698
post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The central example of this is college admissions statements. Some kids have the advantage both of parents who can afford to give them the experiences that look good on such an essay (educational trips to Africa, lessons in two musical instruments, one-on-one golf coaching, that kind of thing), and who can hire tutors to "support" them in writing the essay. This is an absolute disgrace. And then these are the peopl…

> This is an absolute disgrace. And then these are the people who lecture you on "inclusion". Are they? Is there any evidence of correlation between these two groups of people?

A number of institutions promote both stances.

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

#699
post #465
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.

I don't know what the rest of the world calls "cursive", but here in the US the cursive we get taught is strictly inferior: slower to write, less compact on the page, and harder to read (while also being strictly uglier than true calligraphy). It's a script designed for allowing you to avoid lifting a quill from the page and thereby avoiding ink blots; it's entirely obsolete.

Yeah, the hand they taught us (in the early '90s) was some common one that I gather most places have taught in the US for decades. It never made any sense to me. Ugly, hard to read, and not even notably faster to write, even if you got good at it.

Later I found out it was developed for use with a fountain pen, designed with the idea that a correctly-faced nib would make some strokes bolder and others very faint, and to keep the nib always moving in a kind of flow to avoid spots, and to make it natural to keep the nib faced the correct way(s), plus with even more attention to avoiding raising the pen than most cursives, for similar reasons of avoiding spotting. That made all the downsides make sense—it's far less ugly and easier to read when written with a fountain pen, and may well be faster than many other similarly-clean methods of writing with one.

Why the hell we were still learning that hand decades into the dominance of the ballpoint, remains a question.

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

#700
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost. GPS is great at knowing where you are, but directions are much much harder, and the extra difficulty is why the first version of Apple Maps was widely ridiculed. Even now, I find it's a mistake to just assume Google Maps can direct me around Berlin public transport better than my own local knowledge — sometimes it can, sometimes it can't. (But yes, a single original Pi Zero beats all humans combined at arithm…

When I visit a new city I trust google maps more than I trust myself with a paper map, it even knows all public transport routes and times, and can guide me through connecting different types of public transports (e.g.: bus + train) to get to my destination quicker/cheaper, that would take me and a paper map quite a bit longer to plan.

I trust it in new places for the same reason.

After I moved here and learned the system, I realised it had on my first trip directed me through a series of unnecessary train routes for a 5 minute walk.

Last summer, when trying to find a specific named cafe a friend was at, Google Maps tried to have me walk 5 minutes to the train station behind me to catch the train to the stop in front of me to walk back to… the other side of the street because I hadn't recognised the sign.

It's a great tool, fantastic even, but it still doesn't beat local knowledge. And very occasionally, invisibly unless you hit the edge, the map isn't correctly joined at the nodes and you can spot the mistake even as a first time visitor.

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