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Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

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Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#11

Post by hgoel »

hackermailman wrote: post #8
hgoel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge I think is that students then struggle because they used AI throughout the semester and didn't actually learn. The proper response would be to be strict and fail students that don't perform to a satisfactory level, but this messes with the funding incentives. You can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. Maybe a student's sincerity should play a larger role in the admission process, maybe…

It's a welfare economics theory course that requires many frameworks with measures where you are maximizing some graphical representation. It also requires assumptions to work and can be visualized in a model where you can see what happens when one of the assumptions doesn't hold. For example the old and new Berkeley model to study rent control effect on market prices

I should've been clearer, I meant AI model. If you're referring to financial models, then yeah, that can be a reasonable direction.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#12

Post by carljungslabtek »

fhn wrote: post #2

the professor has all the power in the classroom. If you don't want cheating, define better conditions for the exam. You allowed a take-home exam which means students are able to use any and all resources.

The thought of a closed book take home exam really made me laugh. They also mentioned Princeton hasn’t had professors in the room for exams since the 1890s… They just have a code of honor and rely on other students to report cheaters??

Ivy league is such a scam, in so many different ways.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#13

Post by rsfern »

fhn wrote: post #2

the professor has all the power in the classroom. If you don't want cheating, define better conditions for the exam. You allowed a take-home exam which means students are able to use any and all resources.

> You allowed a take-home exam which means students are able to use any and all resources.

It was a closed-book exam. The professor shouldn’t have to hold students’ hands for them to act with integrity, they are all adults.

In this particular class, the professor made the final exam in-person, and didn’t count the take-home midterm because the score distribution wasn’t consistent between the two exams. I think that’s a reasonable approach, but it’s kind of sad that it was necessary

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#14

Post by DANmode »

danny_codes wrote: post #7

Damn that's crazy. Guess the take home test is dead now. I never understood this behavior from undergrads though, you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?

They’ve been taught that not having the piece of paper will keep them from having even a menial job,

so you have a huge population of people bullshitting their way through to the piece of paper.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#15

Post by pants2 »

When you're a student in a competitive program at a top university, graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same. Especially when jobs for new grads are harder to come by and there's more pressure to also go above and beyond with internships and side projects during your time in school. There's no way to compete without cheating.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#16

Post by onemoresoop »

stackskipton wrote: post #10
danny_codes wrote: post #7

Damn that's crazy. Guess the take home test is dead now. I never understood this behavior from undergrads though, you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?

>you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother? Because you are viewing the motivation of college wrong for most people. For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities. Ergo, they are just doing whatever required to get said piece of paper with least amount of effort. Until degrees, in particular, degrees fr…

Sadly this is true. Another take is that if you don’t use AI but everybody outperforms you on exams using AI at some point you’re forced into it as well.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#17

Post by mariusor »

pants2 wrote: post #15

When you're a student in a competitive program at a top university, graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same. Especially when jobs for new grads are harder to come by and there's more pressure to also go above and beyond with internships and side projects during your time in school. There's no way to compete without cheating.

> you have little choice

I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#19

Post by bmitc »

stackskipton wrote: post #10
danny_codes wrote: post #7

Damn that's crazy. Guess the take home test is dead now. I never understood this behavior from undergrads though, you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?

>you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother? Because you are viewing the motivation of college wrong for most people. For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities. Ergo, they are just doing whatever required to get said piece of paper with least amount of effort. Until degrees, in particular, degrees fr…

That motivation isn't necessarily inherent in the attendees though. That has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.

It's why we're seeing the death of the liberal arts majors. It's sad, because usually the smartest and most creative people I've worked with in the field of engineering and software have been liberal arts majors. But corporations don't want intelligent people. They want people who have been molded to whatever the soup du jour is.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#20

Post by rsa4046 »

pants2 wrote: post #15

When you're a student in a competitive program at a top university, graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same. Especially when jobs for new grads are harder to come by and there's more pressure to also go above and beyond with internships and side projects during your time in school. There's no way to compete without cheating.

After retiring at 65 from a university teaching and research science career (all pre-AI), I went back to teaching, but this time teaching high school science, mostly AP STEM courses at an A-ranked public high school. The cheating/AI problem is now a crisis greater than COVID. My experience: very few students in advanced and AP classes do not cheat — largely for the reasons given above — and it takes enormous resourcefulness on the teacher's part to design coursework and examinations in which cheating through AI is not an issue. Many teachers I know have all but given up — the cost and effort required to circumvent cheating are simply too great given the already sky-high demands on teachers' time and energy. And school administrations are little help, due to thoughtless and enthusiastic reliance on software at every level. In some ways they are part of the problem. I don't know what the situation is in schools outside the US. But here it had become an arms race.

[Edit: typos]

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