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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

#911

Post by koliber »

_ea1k wrote: post #624
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…

This really can't be emphasized enough. Universities and the initial hiring process really optimize for a score and not for learning. Those could be, and sometimes are, correlated, but it isn't necessarily the case. Really focusing on stretching yourself necessarily means lower grades. Why is that penalized? TBH, in software engineering a lot of people with lower grades tutor the ones with 4.0 averages. The skillsets…

It is not possible to differentiate someone who stretched themselves and got a lower grade from someone that got a lower grade for more mundane reasons.

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

#913

Post by auggierose »

ckastner wrote: post #850
auggierose wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if an automated decision happens, and the reviewer looks for a second at it, and says, good enough, that will be OK according to GDPR. Don't see what GDPR solves here.

> So if an automated decision happens, and the reviewer looks for a second at it, and says, good enough, that will be OK according to GDPR. Don't see what GDPR solves here. The assumption is that a human review the conditions that led the automated system to make that decision. I think it would be trivial to argue in court that rubberstamping some scalar value that a deep neural net or whatever spit out does not pass…

Why a single score? The AI can generate a whole boilerplate of argumentation of why it made the decision. The reviewer will pretend to read and contemplate it, and then press the "OK" button.

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

#914

Post by withinboredom »

dsv3099i wrote: post #862
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…

You probably did dodge a bullet. The correct answer to every engineering question is "it depends". :)

There were so many other little ones, like bit-shifting signed integers, which is compiler dependent. I lol’d when they told me I didn’t know C well enough. Like bro, I learned on Borland C, then Microsoft (Visual) C, now mostly gcc/clang C. I don’t know C at all.

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

#915

Post by jillesvangurp »

dot5xdev wrote: post #883
jillesvangurp wrote: post #155

I'd expect smart people to be able to use tools to make their work easier. Including AI. The bigger picture here is that the current generation of students are going to be using and relying on AI the rest of their careers anyway. Making them do things the old fashioned way is not a productive way to educate them. The availability of these tools is actually an opportunity to raise the ambition level quite a bit. Unive…

> I would encourage students to use all the tools available to them. Especially AI. I'd set the bar pretty high. How would you set the bar pretty high? How would you avoid just evaluating ChatGPT, instead of the actual student?

Well, zero tolerance on grammar, spelling, etc, being bad obviously. I'd also insist on the thing being coherent and well structured. Both of which were huge problems when I was reviewing student papers. These are all things an LLM can help students with improving.

And of course if all papers are up to standards on that (which IMHO would be a massive improvement already from an educational point of view), you'd be looking for other criteria to judge the papers that maybe showcase things that are actually of value. Like problem solving, critical thinking, originality, etc. I'd be looking for signs of the student having a good grip on the subject matter.

Perhaps I'd do a little verbal exam. I might grill them a bit on the subject they wrote about and make sure they understand what they submitted. Somebody that did the leg work of coming up with something good and that did the research, would be able to answer questions about it and be able to discuss the key points. Ask them some questions about other work they are referencing. Etc.

I just think trying to keep students from using tools that are out there is a lost cause.

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

#916

Post by strogonoff »

injidup wrote: post #909
strogonoff wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paradox is only in your head. Do not confuse the process of learning a skill and practicing it professionally. The line between the two is beyond clear.

The question you refuse to answer is at what point should incompetencey be judged over effort. Little timmy who was always going to be a good teacher has now lost out because you the gave the position for the university place to little Johhny who everyone, despite all his everyone knew he was going to be a terrible teacher. There is no benefit in always being praised for your efforts if you cannot deliver the goods.

I answered that and reiterated it. The outcome can be judged (and it is) when you do it professionally. Everything I said about evaluation on the effort was from the start about the learning process (the topic of this thread) and psychology in the critical formative period of young human’s upbringing.

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

#917

Post by obscurette »

SkyBelow wrote: post #813
Izkata wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common Core was an attempt at teaching this directly. It gets so much ridicule because so few people have good enough number sense to recognize what they're seeing when shown a demonstration. Of course, since they didn't understand it, it then led to bad examples being created and shared, which just made it worse...

It was more than that. It didn't explain the goals well enough to parents, and many teachers didn't have the number sense themselves leading to many of the examples are passed around showing how the whole process is broken. There is also a question of if even works well, as it is somewhat akin to teaching someone the shortcut on how to do something before they have mastered the long way of doing it. Many experts in t…

> There is also a question of if even works well ...

No, it doesn't. And that's one of the main tragedies in modern discussion about education. A lot of people think that we have to teach the way how experts think. But it doesn't work.

Take a look at programming for example. Everything you ever really need to know about programming, can be described in single A4 probably. But it has no any use if you learn. It even makes things worse, because it's a thing you have to pay attention to, but you don't really understand. You have to learn via small babysteps, automate a lot of small things in your brain, practice a lot etc. There is no shortcuts in learning.

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

#918

Post by autumnstwilight »

pessimizer wrote: post #389
JoshTriplett wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity So do humans. Many people have pet phrases or words that they use unusually often compared to others.

People have their favorite phrases or words, but also as readers we fixate on words that we don't personally use, and project that onto the writer. But as a second language learner, you notice that people get stuck on particular words during writing sessions . If I run into a very unusual (and unnecessary) word, I know they're going to use it again within a page or two, maybe once after that, then never again. I blam…

I do this when I write, to the point where I have to go back and edit myself after using a slightly unusual word several times in quick succession.

I think words I've used recently are easier to access, as if there's a cache for items recently retrieved from deeper layers of memory.

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

#919

Post by ben_w »

auggierose wrote: post #913
ckastner wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if an automated decision happens, and the reviewer looks for a second at it, and says, good enough, that will be OK according to GDPR. Don't see what GDPR solves here. The assumption is that a human review the conditions that led the automated system to make that decision. I think it would be trivial to argue in court that rubberstamping some scalar value that a deep neural net or whatever spit out does not pass…

Why a single score? The AI can generate a whole boilerplate of argumentation of why it made the decision. The reviewer will pretend to read and contemplate it, and then press the "OK" button.

There's a lot of "what can you get away with" in the world; but getting caught cheating like that is likely to go worse than getting caught using an LLM for a final exam.

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

#920

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

recursive wrote: post #887
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it will not sound too preachy. You are right in a sense that it is what he thinks he is paying for, but is actually missing out on untapped value. He will not be able to discuss death as a concept throughout the lens of various authors. He will not wrestle with questions of cognition and its human limitations ( which amusingly is a relevant subject these days ). He will not learn anything. He is and will remai…

It's not wasteful if: the student "values" the credential but not the learning. Some people have no appetite for philosophy or the perspective of notable authors on death. He will probably learn something though. Your characterization of an adult child does not seem fair. What makes someone an adult? If it's academic discourse, then why is it valuable? I mean, if you're into it, more power to you. Go nuts with finall…

Hmm, I could try repeating the value argument from the other end, but lets approach it differently. You mention a credential itself being a value, which is not an unreasonable position to take, which is part of the reason I am not dismissing it outright.

But what is a credential? Oracle that is Google defines it as "a qualification, achievement, personal quality, or aspect of a person's background, typically when used to indicate that they are suitable for something." Are they qualified simply, because they 'put in their time' at an institution of supposed higher learning? If so, that credential is not only wasteful, it is also worthless. It exists for now only because it is riding on the glory of its past.

At least previous poster's argument was more direct: it is not about learning at all. It is a social club, where kids of already successful people are sent. That network of kids of the already successful has its uses, but if it is a social club AND, as we established in previous paragraph, it is a learning institution in name only ( used only for credential ), then it is really just that: a social club, which I characterized in a flight of fancy as an adult daycare. I do stand by this phrasing, because the more I think about it, the more it fits.

Hmm, good question, but I will leave it unanswered. I want to see how you respond to the previous point.

Academic discourse is not valuable. Frankly, at its core, nothing is inherently valuable, because any value is the value we ascribe to things. You might think that this is me saying:

'ok, so anyone can value anything and thus the kid doing for the credential is just as valid in their choice.'

It is a choice. It is valid. It just also happens to be, well, wasteful ( and maybe a little immoral, but that ship has sailed ) as the kid in question leaves the school with a credential that does not reflect that AND then goes into the world making decisions with a weight of that credential behind him. Thank goodness he is not an actual engineer. Future would look pretty grim then.

You may be hanging onto my anecdote, but since that was the only professor at Harvard I had a chance to listen to on the matter, I thought it was relevant and any virtuosity in it is purely coincidental. The point he made was genuinely pretty apt. The point of education at Harvard ( or other notable names ) is not spend your parents money parking your keister for 4 years while waiting for that credential.

No. Just because we perceive things in a certain way, does not automatically mean that there is no objective reality. It just means we don't perceive it ( accurately or otherwise ). This is where I believe this conversation could get interesting, because I think this is what we actually disagree on.

Wasteful is 'expending value carelessly'. Even if we value things differently, using Shelby GT for pizza delivery seems wasteful. I technically have no problem with anyone doing that ( you got money burning your pocket, who am I to judge ), but I am also not going to pretend it is a sensible thing to do.

From where I sit this is not that different from going to Harvard for a credential. Or network. It is just a wasted potential.

And it is sad. For Harvard. Edit: Or society as a whole. I am not sure now.

Ok. I am going to stop here. It is 3am and I clearly typed too much.

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