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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

#91
post #75
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.

Care to explain?

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

#92

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…

Can you fit a decent LLM on a thumbdrive?

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

#93
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.

Care to explain?

See my other comment. I want my doctor/plumber/etc to be able to recall faster, type faster, work better under pressure. If you're better at those things you should get better grades and be paid more.

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

#94
post #92

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…

Can you fit a decent LLM on a thumbdrive?

Probably safer to use typewriters.

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

#96

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…

I’m 30 and “we can’t do tests in paper” seems _insane_. Just how metastatic has ed tech been in what, 9 years since my undergrad?

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

#97
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A master's in CS can teach you interesting and very useful things, like how OS kernels, distributed systems, networks, and microprocessors work. A master's in EE will teach you things like signal processing and analog circuit design as well. Knowing these things helps you to design, build, and evaluate systems that are reliable and efficient. A master's in science helps you understand how the physical world works and…

Don't assume that TrackerFF is doing the kind of job that requires higher education. It's also dangerous to assume that higher education is for everyone. (Although I agree the opportunity needs to be there for anyone who wants to try it.) Some people just want to get on with their life after high school. (I raise my children assuming that they will go to college, and if they want to seek an alternate way through life…

(Serious answer in spite of the punch line at the end of my parent post which perhaps addresses your first point.) I think it's good for people to be educated, and to have the opportunity when they want it, but it can be self-defeating to force people to be there who don't want to be.

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

#98
post #75
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.

Define “smarter” —- already a vague and overloaded term.

And then consider whether the point of the class is to test smarts, or something else.

I’d expect that’s not the intent of most undergraduate degrees.

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That [motivation] 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. I don't think so. The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universit…

If only they could communicate with each other and explain their reasoning. Corporation A "Hi University, here is what we hire highly paid people to do, and what we need to improve as a company." University B, "Hi Corp A, here is our educational mandate to create well-rounded, highly educated people, we can probably fit your needs into the curriculum in the last couple of semesters, let's work together to make sure y…

I basically do agree with you. The only problem that I see with your suggestion is that companies often don't know what they actually, really want from their employees.

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

#100

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

My favorite exams (as a ugrad for classics, and in grad school to advance to candidacy in CS) were in person, hand written, open book.

We had lots of time, and a fair idea of the range of questions. It rewards actuality mastering the material vs memorizing it.

For the CS exam some people brought more books than they could physically carry, I don’t think it helped them much.

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