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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

#81

Post by mlloyd »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #66
gchallen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are limits to what you can assess on timed assessments, and there are students whose performance on such assessments is not a good signal of their intellectual ability. In addition, at many institutions such tests are given infrequently and can be worth a significant component of a student's overall grade, increasing both student stress levels and the tendency for such assessments to measure short term knowledg…

so let say you give the students a pop-quiz. is that not acceptable anymore because some students don't do well when surprised?

Acceptable is different from being an accurate assessment of knowledge. The question is what is the teacher attempting to measure?

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

#82

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

walrus01 wrote: post #80
recursivedoubts wrote: post #57

In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. I have written an article on how I have adjusted my classes to the situation: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/ Ironically, I think the AI era may make university degrees a better signal of the intellectual abilities of students due to the presence of pre-computer infrastructure like large lecture halls, industrial-scale copiers, etc.

> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and…

Nobody is going to do that.

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

#83

Post by tropdrop »

gchallen wrote: post #69

> He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League I'd like a citation for this being the "biggest known scandal" in the "entire Ivy League". Frequently such situations are kept somewhat quiet, for a variety of reasons. But fifty students is not a large number in courses that can enroll hundreds or up to a…

Ivy League classes usually aren't as large as their state school counterparts. At most you might get around a hundred students in a large lecture course; this is rare by design.

You can crunch the numbers on this to verify for yourself – most of these have a population of 6000 undergrads or so. 1/6 of all of the undergraduates need to take a single course for your "up to a thousand" to be true.

I agree that a citation would be nice, but the number of students is indeed large for Ivy League courses (as per the article, in this econ course, he had 86 students for a class that usually only has 30).

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

#84

Post by recursivedoubts »

walrus01 wrote: post #80
recursivedoubts wrote: post #57

In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. I have written an article on how I have adjusted my classes to the situation: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/ Ironically, I think the AI era may make university degrees a better signal of the intellectual abilities of students due to the presence of pre-computer infrastructure like large lecture halls, industrial-scale copiers, etc.

> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and…

More expensive than you'd think, but I am pushing for something like that.

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

#85

Post by walrus01 »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #82
walrus01 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and…

Nobody is going to do that.

Why not?

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

#86

Post by mlloyd »

llbbdd wrote: post #75
BeetleB wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had such exams. It was the honor system. The idea is that a typical exam is too short to evaluate the student's knowledge and a belief that fast students shouldn't have an advantage.

Fast students are smarter. Why avoid grading on that? EDIT: Rate limited so: "smarter" here means how well the student will perform in a career in their chosen field. Fast + accurate is the ideal.

Are they? Or do they just have superior recall? Or maybe lack test-taking anxiety? Or write or type quicker or...?

Lots of reasons a slow student can be just as smart or smarter than a fast one.

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

#87

Post by recursivedoubts »

gchallen wrote: post #62
recursivedoubts wrote: post #57

In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. I have written an article on how I have adjusted my classes to the situation: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/ Ironically, I think the AI era may make university degrees a better signal of the intellectual abilities of students due to the presence of pre-computer infrastructure like large lecture halls, industrial-scale copiers, etc.

There are limits to what you can assess on timed assessments, and there are students whose performance on such assessments is not a good signal of their intellectual ability. In addition, at many institutions such tests are given infrequently and can be worth a significant component of a student's overall grade, increasing both student stress levels and the tendency for such assessments to measure short term knowledg…

I agree and would like to move towards a customized computer setup like you mention. A friend at Berkeley manages a similar setup. Unfortunately Montana State is too small to have set one up yet.

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

#88

Post by ninalanyon »

BeetleB wrote: post #63
userbinator wrote: post #49

take-home, closed-book type What an oxymoron. I agree with the others here that AI isn't the problem.

I've had such exams. It was the honor system. The idea is that a typical exam is too short to evaluate the student's knowledge and a belief that fast students shouldn't have an advantage.

How long is too short? Each exam in my BSc Applied Physics final (1977, Exeter Uni.) was three hours and we had similar exams in each of the preceding years to weed out those who weren't keeping up. I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helped the weaker students get through the Quantum Mechanics exam.

In addition I had to defend the report (120 pages of typescript and charts) of my final year project to my supervisor and another senior academic. And it was clear that they had actually read it.

All those exams were open note; anything in your own hand or a copy of a lecture handout was permitted. Again the weaker students would not have been helped by more time because they hadn't understood that you have to have enough familiarity with your notes to be able find the right information. Some brought in 50 litre rucksacks stuffed with ring binders and the noise of them furiously leafing through was enough for the invigilators to warn them to make less noise or risk being ejected.

In Norway it is typical that an exam of similar standard allows five hours.

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

rfergie wrote: post #68
gchallen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are limits to what you can assess on timed assessments, and there are students whose performance on such assessments is not a good signal of their intellectual ability. In addition, at many institutions such tests are given infrequently and can be worth a significant component of a student's overall grade, increasing both student stress levels and the tendency for such assessments to measure short term knowledg…

> there are students whose performance on such assessments is not a good signal of their intellectual ability Is there a form of assessment that is a good signal of the intellectual ability of all students?

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by llbbdd »

mlloyd wrote: post #86
llbbdd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast students are smarter. Why avoid grading on that? EDIT: Rate limited so: "smarter" here means how well the student will perform in a career in their chosen field. Fast + accurate is the ideal.

Are they? Or do they just have superior recall? Or maybe lack test-taking anxiety? Or write or type quicker or...? Lots of reasons a slow student can be just as smart or smarter than a fast one.

Those are all proxies for "is smarter". They have better memories, perform better under pressure, etc. Universities are meant to prepare students for the real world where these things matter.
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