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College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

sentinelcolorado.com

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

#371

Post by bee_rider »

acbart wrote: post #38
bee_rider wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things I don’t like about putting too much weight in the exams are: * It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying. * It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. This puts a pretty low ceiling on the level of complexity you can actually throw at them.

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 don’t completely disagree with this and I do appreciate the well thought out response. I should say that most of my recent relevant experience was as a grad student teaching assistant so I’m neither just somebody grouching that I didn’t like taking exams, nor somebody with deep experience setting the things up. Some respectful quibbles, then, since I gather you have more direct experience than me.

> Proctored, in-person exams are the only reliable mechanism we have for ascertaining if a specific individual has mastered key fundamentals and can answer relevant questions about them in a relatively timely fashion. Everything else is details and thresholds - how fast do you need to be able to recall, how deep, what details are fundamental.

I don’t think this is how people actually engage with exams. I had a lot of folks in office hours who treat the exam as the ceiling of their competence, rather than the floor, and do things like cram or try to figure out exactly what topics will be on the test to study just those. If the goal is to establish a 100% solid foundation for things you have to know to be a professional (which I think is a great goal), I prefer something like Mastery Learning to the conventional exam process. (Maybe we could call Mastery Learning conventional exams a different set of thresholds, unusual thresholds if we want to look at it that way).

> From there, I think it's fine to hate poorly made exams, and it's a given that many folks making exams have no idea what they're doing (or don't have the resources to do it right). But the premise of an exam is not completely divorced from reality.

I worked with some professors who I thought gave good exams, some who gave less good ones, so I don’t think the premise is completely divorced from reality. But it seems more like something the good instructors overcame, rather than a construct that is really helpful.

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

#372

Post by JoeJonathan »

A lot of people in this thread are talking about how they did in-person exams, handwritten problem sets in class, etc. This kind of thing is more challenging in the humanities, where the research paper is kind of our bread and butter. A lot of us have since turned to different kinds of assignments, but I am not ready to forego research papers in favor of blue book exams. I think there's some value in having to develop and sustain an argument in conversation with some body of literature (scholarly or otherwise), and that is not easily to replicate with in-person writing, at least at the undergrad level. (Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months.)

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

#373

Post by niek_pas »

alex_young wrote: post #370

Surely there's a middle ground? Get some old wordstar capable 86 class clones and leave the GUI off. It's typing on a keyboard without the confusion of the internet or clicking on glowing icons.

Or just chromebooks with a web address blocklist.

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

#374

Post by doctorpangloss »

RhysabOweyn wrote: post #40

Why are people promoting the idea that exams are not written or given in person anymore? I graduated relatively recently and maybe had 1 take home exam during my entire education. Every other exam was proctored in person and written. The professor who made the take home exam also made it much more difficult than a normal exam so I would not really say it was easier than a normal in person test.

on the flip side, surely people know that people cheat all the time on "proctored in person and written" exams

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

#375

Post by make3 »

JoeJonathan wrote: post #372

A lot of people in this thread are talking about how they did in-person exams, handwritten problem sets in class, etc. This kind of thing is more challenging in the humanities, where the research paper is kind of our bread and butter. A lot of us have since turned to different kinds of assignments, but I am not ready to forego research papers in favor of blue book exams. I think there's some value in having to develo…

I'm not sure of if typewriters help for assignments. People will just rewrite what the AI wrote

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

#376

Post by make3 »

randoments wrote: post #99

Reading all these comments, I feel like US universities are a joke. I had to do all the exams in person. 100% of the grade was decided at the exam. Millions of people graduated this way and they are fine. No students were harmed in the process.

for people with medium to high anxiety problems and/or with ADHD, exams are an absolute nightmare that is not representative at all of workplace performance or ability to do good work.

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

#377

Post by burnto »

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.

I’m guessing we’re similar vintage. My CS classes were like this as well.

The only exception is that when I got into grad level classes we did have some big programming projects. But most of that programming happened on sparc stations, and it was actually just easier and more productive to sit at the machine in person with its nice big (at the time) display with all the other folks doing programming projects. Those machines had the standard dev toolchains provisioned that weren’t easy (at the time) to do on a dorm room Mac or windows computer.

I really think a lot of the ways we can reduce reliance on AI for thinking is to just set up systems where it’s not an inviting or rewarding option.

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

#378

Post by bitwize »

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.

When I was in university we had the "Honor System"—no proctors, but you had to sign a statement on every exam and assignment that you did not cheat. And if you did cheat, one of your fellow students could report you to the Honor Board. Basically using the prisoners' dilemma to enforce honesty. And the Honor Board were always threatening to bring proctors back if cheating continued.

But yeah, everything was hand-written. On sheets of paper with pencil. I even had to write x86 assembly out by hand for my CPU architecture class. Of course, laptops were available back then but not cellphones and certainly not LLMs, so cheating by electronic means probably presents a stickier wicket now than it did back then.

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

#379

Post by bitwize »

altmanaltman wrote: post #309
phatskat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds more like a gameshow than education, like IT version of Hogwarts

"For Miss Granger's ingenuity and resourcefulness, finding and patching a zero-day vulnerability in the router firmware... I award fifty points to Gryffindor."

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

#380

Post by nradov »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #314
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.

In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person. Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like…

The lack of any real innovation or major economic development in Spain would appear to be fairly strong evidence that the "Napoleonic" model wasn't actually working. Maybe this new system was even worse but I'm baffled as to why anyone would believe that changes weren't needed. Physician, heal thyself.
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