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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

#721

Seems like the easy fix here is move all evaluation in-class. Are schools really that reliant on internet/computer based assignments? Actually, this could be a great opportunity to dial back unnecessary and wasteful edu-tech creep.

Moving everything in class seems like a good idea in theory. But in practice, kids need more time than 50 minutes of class time (assuming no lecture) to work on problems. Sometimes you will get stuck on 1 homework question for hours. If a student is actively working on something, yanking them away from their curiosity seems like the wrong thing to do. On the other hand, kids do blindly use the hell out of ChatGPT. It…

  I'm considering making homework worth nothing and having their grade be only 2 in-class exams.
When I did A levels and my first undergraduate degree (in the UK) that's how it worked. The only measurements used to calculate my A level grades and degree class were:

- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of high school)

- Proctored exams at the end of 2 years of study (the last 2 years of university)

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

#723
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?…

Passion. Juniors you want to hire will have a side project. That's all you need to see.

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

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I need a job. I now give easy tests. That seems more of an indictment of your profession than anything to do with the students.

Since the state no longer properly funds higher education there has been a shift in attitude. We are now a business and the client is the student. This has negative long term consequences. One of them is that I pretend to give real tests and real grades. The client must pass. The cost of acquiring new clients is much greater than the cost of keeping existing clients. It's easy to give a passing grade.

Students largely just want to pass. They mostly don't care that they don't know anything.

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

#725
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?…

Most of the big professional sports already have this figured out. New college graduates have to compete for a spot at training camp. Hire them as temp contracts for two weeks to two months and let them play with the starting team.

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

#726
post #5

The challenging thing is, cheating students also say they're being falsely accused. Tough times in academia right now. Cheating became free, simple, and ubiquitous overnight. Cheating services built on top of ChatGPT advertise to college students; Chrome extensions exist that just solve your homework for you.

Is it cheating if the teacher can’t tell

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

#727

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. I completely agree, but the entire higher ed system is moving to on-line instruction. Basically, if the University of follows your suggestion, all of the competing institutions will eat their lunch by offering on-line courses with the "convenience" of on-line assessments" and the…

That's why this has to be mandated by the Higher Learning Commission or the federal Department of Education.

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

#728
post #207

I'm surprised at the number of comments that give up and say that "AI" is here to stay. I'm also surprised that academics rely on snake oil software to deal with the issue. Instead, academics should unite and push for outlawing "AI" or make it difficult to get like cigarettes. Sometimes politicians still listen to academics. It is probably not going to happen though since the level of political apathy among academics…

> Instead, academics should unite and push for outlawing "AI"

Prohibition does not solve the problem of needing to detect violations of the prohibition.

> or make it difficult to get like cigarettes.

Cigarettes aren't, at all, difficult to get, they are just heavily taxed.

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

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conformance.

Amusingly, willingness and capacity to conform to a system you are paying $30k a year for is a pretty good proxy for general intelligence. So maybe it's not that bad?!

It depends on what we think education is for. If the goal is to teach students, it's not so great. If the goal is to signal future employers the intelligence of the student, Maybe that's ok. But maybe the future employers should be paying the tuition instead of the student.

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

#730
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France my essays were written in class, no phones, no book, just your brain, a sheet a paper and a pen. That's still 100% doable today

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.

Classroom time is limited, so if you include cursive writing in your curriculum you have to omit something else. Whatever you dropped to make room for handwriting is almost certainly going to be more useful to the students once they reach adulthood.

At the end of the day cursive writing is a hobby, not a skill. We don't need it anymore. It wastes priceless learning time at a critical juncture in our intellectual development.

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