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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

#761

Post by JellyBeanThief »

lumost wrote: post #611
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…

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 someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.

I can, too. I wanted to learn, but I also wanted to achieve a high GPA. I had a privileged background, so I got to retake classes after earning Cs or Bs until I got an A, without cheating.

The consequences: My degree took a long time to get, cost more money than my peers in the same program, and I now have a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy.

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

#762

Post by withinboredom »

clarebear123 wrote: post #754
withinboredom wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you claim to know C very well and can't knock that out in 5 minutes, and it takes you 45 minutes of prompting, well, you don't know C usefully. I recently had an interview and a "skill test" in C. It was proctored by the interviewer in-person. I had so many questions about the questions. It was like, what is the output of "some code" and while obvious, there were some questions where specific CPU architecture ma…

What architectures would it not be 04 on?

(older) ARM (aka, big-endian) it will be 01

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

#763

Post by Syonyk »

commandlinefan wrote: post #759
Syonyk wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard, and interviewing is better suited to answering "nope, not you!" questions than "yes, you'll be a good fit." Onsite interviews with a range of approaches seem to be the best I've found over the years. As much as it pains me, things like fizzbuzz are still useful, because people still lie about their ability to program in languages. If you claim to know C very well and can't knock that out in 5 minutes, and…

> things like fizzbuzz are still useful I think you're right here but, to play devil's advocate... isn't there some survivorship bias going on here? I assume you've never tested the negative hypothesis and gone ahead and hired somebody who couldn't program fizzbuzz to validate your assumption.

You're right. When interviewing for a team that writes mostly in C and assembly (assembly for various different ISAs), we're not going to hire someone who claims to know C and fumbles through some basic problems and can't reason about hardware in the slightest.

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

#764

Post by SkyBelow »

pdonis wrote: post #540
SkyBelow wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. Isn't it to either do that now, or to lose the signaling value of college degrees as indicating knowledge.

> the signaling value of college degrees as indicating knowledge I'm not sure knowledge is what a college degree signals to prospective employers. The alternative hypothesis, which AFAIK has a fair bit of support, is that it signals a willingness to do whatever it takes to fulfill a set of on paper requirements imposed by an institution, by hook or by crook.

It has signaled different things over the years, and generally more than one thing at a time. I think it will still signal things to employers so that having a college degree isn't going to be become useless, but it will become less sufficient. Things like internships, references, and significant take home projects/complex and long interviews will now be needed to vouch for skills in a way that a degree mostly covered in the past.

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

#765

Post by DowagerDave »

pj_mukh wrote: post #669
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…

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?…

IME: 1. build a co-op/intern program and hire out of that exclusively for junior. It's like an extended, two-way interview or try before you buy for both sides.

2. screen for passion and general technical competency above all else. You're going to make arbitrary decisions & restrictions (ex: we're only hiring from these 3 schools) which is fine, then work within those constraints. Ask about favorite classes (and why), what they've done lately or are excited about, side projects, OS contributions, building/reading/playing. The best intern I've hired lately answered some high-level questions about performance by building a simple PoC to demo some of their ideas, with React - a technology they didn't know but that we use.

3. recognize some things on the hiring side that from the hunting side don't make sense or are really annoying: you're playing a numbers game, hiring is a funnel, it's better to miss a great hire than go with a poor candidate (i.e. very risk averse), most hiring companies are at the mercy of the market; they hire poorer candidates and pay more, then get very picky and pay less. In a tight market you can't do much internally to stand out, and when lots of people are looking you don't have to.

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

#766

Post by FigurativeVoid »

lumost wrote: post #611
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…

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…

> My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy.

I agree with the first part, but I think the second follows from it.

Take a class like organic chemistry. When I was in school, the grade was based on 5 exams, each worth 20% of your grade. Worse still, anything less than an A was seen as a failure for most students dreaming of medical/vet school.

Of course you are going to have people that are going to cheat. You've made the stakes so high that the consequences of getting caught cheating are meaningless.

On top of that, once enough students are cheating, you need to cheat just to keep up.

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

#767

Post by clarebear123 »

withinboredom wrote: post #762
clarebear123 wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What architectures would it not be 04 on?

(older) ARM (aka, big-endian) it will be 01

I just ran it on my M2 mac and got 04. Don't compilers typically take endianness into account for things like this anyway?

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

#768

Post by DowagerDave »

methodical wrote: post #756
pj_mukh wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

I think the best test for a Junior is to ask them to submit some of their OSS or personal fun projects they've worked on. From my perspective, especially with Juniors who aren't expected to be extremely knowledgeable, displaying a sense of curiosity and a willingness to learn is much more important. If, hypothetically, there's two candidates, one who is more knowledgeable but has no personal projects versus someone w…

Most of this isn't even necessary; just look for passion and that gets them excited from a relevant technology area, then probe for legitimacy and learn about their interests. Being a jr. is all about the individual learning and skilling up, you really shouldn't be looking for existing expertise.

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

#769

Post by Syonyk »

clarebear123 wrote: post #754
withinboredom wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you claim to know C very well and can't knock that out in 5 minutes, and it takes you 45 minutes of prompting, well, you don't know C usefully. I recently had an interview and a "skill test" in C. It was proctored by the interviewer in-person. I had so many questions about the questions. It was like, what is the output of "some code" and while obvious, there were some questions where specific CPU architecture ma…

What architectures would it not be 04 on?

Anything big endian.

  unsigned int x = 0x01020304;
  unsigned char *c = (unsigned char*)&x;
Assume x is stored at 0x100. On a little endian architecture (x86, most modern ARM systems, etc), it will be stored in memory as [04][03][02][01], from bytes 0x100 to 0x103. If you assign char c to the address of x (0x100), it will read one byte, which is 0x4.

However, on a big endian system, that same value would be stored in memory as [01][02][03][04] - so, reading a byte at 0x100 would return 0x1.

Older ARM systems were big endian, and there are others that run that way, though it's rarer than it used to be. One of the perks of little endian is that if you want to read a smaller version of a value, you can read from the same address. To read that value as an 8, 16, or 32 bit value, I read at the same address. On a big endian system, I'd have to do more address math to do the same thing. It mostly doesn't matter, but it is nice to be able to have a "read of 8 bits at the address of the variable" do the sane thing and return the low order 8 bits, not the high order bits.

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

#770

Post by commandlinefan »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #713
fallingknife wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They dumbed down college degrees so that everyone can get one. What did you expect? Can't do that without lowering standards.

We are now several generations in on telling people the way to get a good job is to get a college degree. So everybody is there to get the piece of paper, not to actually learn things they are interested in.

Since it costs $50-$200,000 per year, I wouldn't really expect many people to go there just because they were "interested".
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