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College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

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Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#221

Post by bartvk »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

I used to make my classes 60-80% project work, 40-80% quizzes all online. I now do 50% project work, 50% in person quizzes, pencil on paper on page of notes. I'm increasingly going to paper-driven workflows as well, becoming an expert with the department printer, printing computer science papers for students to read and annotate in class, etc. Ironically, the traditional bureaucratic lag in university might actually…

This. All the drama articles in the media are describing lazy institutions.

My tests are almost 100% in person. Project work included, you can hand something in, but I'm going over line by line and ask what you did there.

I can do this, because while my school hasn't updated the tests yet, my classes are small and I can do all of them in-person.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#222

Post by kelnos »

acbart wrote: post #43
simpaticoder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In real life you need to know the options and their trade-offs to solve a given problem. You don't need to know all the techniques perfectly, but you do need to be able to characterize them and compare them, from rote memory.

I agree, I think many people who rail against exams underestimate how important memory is to more complicated skills. How can you debug a complex application if you have to keep looking up every operator and keyword in the language you're using? It'd be like trying to interpret poetry in a foreign language but you have to look up every single noun. I'm not saying people can't do it, but it's tedious, slow, and you pr…

It still doesn't feel to me that those things are similar. A sit-down exam is a time-limited, high-pressure situation where you're expected to demonstrate proficiency in the things you've learned over the past several months. Sure, much of that learning builds on stuff you've learned previously, but the focus is on the prior semester (or half-semeter, for mid-terms).

When I sit down to debug a complex application, I'm drawing my prior 25+ years of experience. While I certainly would rather fix the problem faster rather than slower, I don't have a time limit, and usually taking my time (or even leaving the problem alone for hours or days) can be more effective than trying to work quickly and get everything done immediate.

The last time I sat for an exam was in 2003, and I honestly have not experienced anything in life since then that feels like that. Even job interviews have not felt similar enough to me to evoke that same feeling. (Frankly, I've enjoyed most job interviews; I don't think I've ever enjoyed an exam.) That's just my experience, of course, but I don't feel like an outlier.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#223

Post by emptybits »

Aside from AI-proofing, IMO there is value in slow typing or writing. We have to think just a little bit more before putting ink to paper. There is also a higher cost to making mistakes.

As a kid, before my family could afford a home computer, I was determined to do something that resembled programming. I borrowed "BASIC Computer Games" (1978) by David Ahl[1] from the library and typed in several programs on a manual Olympia typewriter. More than just reading code and maybe even more than being able to easily execute it, I'm convinced this typewriter exercise forced me to really study the flow and the how of the code.

[1] https://archive.org/details/ahl-1978-basic-computer-games/

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#224

Post by kelnos »

vunderba wrote: post #24
whartung wrote: post #9

What's interesting is that as I understand, folks are using things like Google Docs for papers, and that it's (apparently) straight forward to do analysis on a Google Doc to see, well, the life of the document. How it was typed in, how fast, what was pasted and cut back out. My understanding is that the Google Doc is not a word processing document, it's an event recording of a word processor. So, in theory, you could…

Even Microsoft Word stores revision history inside .docx files, and that’s been used to expose plagiarism. I heard about one case where a student took an existing paper (I believe from a previous year/student) and pasted it into Word. They then edited it just enough to make it look different. However, they didn’t remove the embedded revision history in the .docx file they submitted, so that went about as well as you…

> pasted it into Word

I'd be surprised if copy/paste carries the revision history, though. Wouldn't they have had to start with the original document (from the other student) and make their edits directly, and then submit that file?

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#225

Post by mettamage »

kelnos wrote: post #220
acbart wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exams happen all the time in real life. Or rather, situations where you can't just look up fundamental knowledge. Job interviews, presentations, even mundane work tasks - all these require you to know the basics quickly "The basics" are relative, of course, but I often point out to my students: "you don't care if your doctor needs to look up the specific interactions of your various meds. You do care if you see them…

I think many of us would agree that job interviews (in tech at least) are horribly broken, because they don't do a good job of testing candidates' ability to do the actual work they'll be doing day-to-day. So saying exams are like job interviews is not a positive for exams. And, for most people, the ideal is to find a job and stick with it for years, so it's not like job interviews are common, everyday occurrences. F…

Having been both a data analyst and software engineer I agree. The data analyst one? Here is 50K of Excel rows with all kinds of weirdness in it, you're data analyst right? You have 4 hours to analyze this data. Go!

The software engineer one: here is a takehome assignment. One week later: finished!

To be fair, they both represented pretty well what work I'm going to do. The data analyst didn't show that well how much I'd also be data engineering, but whatever, I was a SWE before having a DA stint. Back to SWE again though.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#228

Post by alanmercer »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #30

When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.

[dead]

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#229

Post by curun1r »

I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, answers were complex and the only way to know whether you'd done the question correctly was to be sure of your method. They even allowed us to write programs in TI-BASIC that we could use on tests, the only limitation was that we were not allowed to share programs with other students. I discovered that rather than trying to cram for exams, I could just write a program that would solve each class of problem we were likely to see on the exam, and by essentially teaching my calculator to pass the test, I also taught myself. It was a vastly better way for me to study. It also led to my decision to major in comp sci and my career in software. I'm forever grateful to those teachers for choosing to see the latest technology as a multiplier of student potential rather than a way students could cheat to avoid learning.

So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? These tools are not going to cease to exist. The students they are preparing are going to live and work in a world where they exist. To my mind, you best prepare students by teaching them how to use the tools most effectively, not by teaching them how to work without the tools. Students should be learning how to prompt AI without hinting it towards a specific answer. They should be learning how to double check the answers AI gives them to ferret out hallucinations. They should be learning how to produce work that is a hundred times more complex than what us older folks had to do in school. We should be graduating students who are so much more capable than any generation before them. I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations. The world they will inhabit has changed radically from the one we entered into following school.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#230

Post by thunfischtoast »

phatskat wrote: post #214
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #30

When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.

My networking final in high school was probably my favorite test taking experience - there was a small written portion on eg subnets, but the bulk of our grade was setting up a physical network, testing it, and leaving the room. Our teacher sabotaged three parts of our network - could be hardware, router misconfiguration, etc. when we came in we had iirc 20-ish minutes to diagnose and fix it. The best was when she ba…

> The best was when she barely unscrewed one of this big DIN connectors so at quick glance it looked fine, but wasn’t fully connected.

That's evil haha. It's the case where you unplug and plug again everything, changing seemingly nothing, but then it works

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