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https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-12-31-how-agent-evals-ca...
Students cheat when grades are more valuable than knowledge.
In reality, they cheat when a culture of cheating makes it no longer humiliating to admit you do it, and when the punishments are so lax that it becomes a risk assessment rather than an ethical judgment. Same reason companies decide to break the law when the expected cost of any law enforcement is low enough to be worth it. When I was in college, overt cheating would be expulsion with 2 (and sometimes even 1 if it was bad enough) offenses. Absolutely not worth even giving the impression of any misconduct. Now there are colleges that let student tribunals decide how to punish their classmates who cheat (with the absolutely predictable outcome)
So what's next? Students using AIs with text-to-speech to orally respond to the "oral" exam questions from an AI? Where do we go from there? At some point soon I think this is going to have to come firmly back to real people.
Just a teleprompter is already enough to cheat at these, even filmed. With a two-way mirror correctly placed, you can look directly into the camera and look perfectly normal while reading. Next steps are bone conduction microphones, smart glasses, earrings... And the weeding out of anyone both honest and with social anxiety.
Ask about any teacher, scalability is a serious issue. Students being in classes above and under their level is a serious issue. non-interactive learning, leading to rote memorization, as a result of having to choose scaling methods of learning is a serious issue. All these can be adjusted to a personal level through AI, it's trivial to do so, even.
I'm definitely not sold on the idea of oral exams through AI though. I don't even see the point, exams themselves are specifically an analysis of knowledge at one point in time. Far from ideal, we just never got anything better, how else can you measure a student's worth?
Well, now you could just run all of that student's activity in class through that AI. In the real world you don't know if someone is competent because you run an exam, you know if he is competent because he consistently shows competency. Exams are a proxy for that, you can't have a teacher looking at a student 24/7 to see they know their stuff, except now you can gather the data and parse it, what do I care if a student performs 10 exercises poorly in a specific day at a specific time if they have shown they can do perfectly well, as can be ascertained by their performance the past week?
Humanization and responsibility issues aside (I worry that the author seems to validate AIs judgement with no second thought) education is one sector which isn't talked about enough in terms of possible progress with AI. Ask about any teacher, scalability is a serious issue. Students being in classes above and under their level is a serious issue. non-interactive learning, leading to rote memorization, as a result of…
But isn’t the whole point of a class to move from incompetent to competent?
At the price per student it probably makes sense to run some voluntary trial exams during the semester. This would give students a chance to get acquainted to the format, help them check their understanding and if the voice is very intimidating allow them to get used to that as well. As an aside, I'm surprised oral exams aren't possible at 36 students. I feel like I've taken plenty of courses with more participants a…
> And here is the delicious part: you can give the whole setup to the students and let them prepare for the exam by practicing it multiple times. Unlike traditional exams, where leaked questions are a disaster, here the questions are generated fresh each time. The more you practice, the better you get. That is... actually how learning is supposed to work.
...if I was a student, I just fundamentally don't think I'd want to be tested by an AI. I understand the author's reasoning, but it just doesn't feel respectful for something that is so high-stakes for the student. Wouldn't a written exam--or even a digital one, taken in class on school-provided machines--be almost as good? As long as it's not a hundred person class or something, you can also have an oral component t…
Why is it disrespectful? It is just a task. And it is almost an arms race b/w students and profs. Has always been (smuggling written notes into the exam etc)
If the class cost me $50? Then sure, use Dr. Slop to examine my knowledge. But this professor's school charges them $90,000 a year and over $200k to get an MBA? Hell no!
At the price per student it probably makes sense to run some voluntary trial exams during the semester. This would give students a chance to get acquainted to the format, help them check their understanding and if the voice is very intimidating allow them to get used to that as well. As an aside, I'm surprised oral exams aren't possible at 36 students. I feel like I've taken plenty of courses with more participants a…
At my university (Charles University in Prague), we had oral exams for 200+ people (spread over many different sessions).
this is also known as 'logistical nightmare', but yeah it's the only reasonable way if you want to avoid being questioned by robots.
Just let students use whatever tool they want and make them compete for top grades. Distribution curving is already normal in education. If an AI answer is the grading floor, whatever they add will be visible signal. People who just copy and paste a lame prompt will rank at the bottom and fail without any cheating gymnastics. Plus this is more like how people work. https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-12-31-how-agent-…