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Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

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121–130 of 771 posts

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

#121

His research is in Game Theory. He should have realized that, in a situation where all competitors are (possibly) using LLMs, the game theoretic optimal choice is to use LLMs.

That depends on the reward function. Should society reward credentials or skill?

Ideally a mix of skill and will.

Earned credentials are a marker that you once demonstrated some sufficient combination of both.

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

#122
It's the old game that he's trying to preserve. It's time to move on to the new game. When the landscape shifts beneath you, its very low probability that the existing structures on the landscape are a good fit for the new landscape, and the structures on the new landscape must be rethought from first principles.

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

#123
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?

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

#124

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?

Because for many a college degree is a pure formality to land a job. My first job out of college, I worked with veterans at the company who all got in with a HS diploma. Now you realistically need a masters degree to be competitive, for no other reason than that where I live (Norway) most applicants have a 5-year masters degree. It is basically academic inflation. Here we have a tongue-in-cheek word "Mastersyken" whi…

The grad school inflation in Europe is incredible. People with five degrees who have never worked a real job in their life, looking for work at 35.

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

#125
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?

A proctored exam doesn't need to have perfect lock-down. The proctor should notice the thumb-drive. They might miss it, but the risk will deter most.

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

#126
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?

Fill the room with typewriters.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?

Do you let students bring their own keyboards? If not, does that disadvantage a Dvorak user? Or a Kinesis user? Or a non-US layout? Or a Mac user? If you do let them bring their own keyboards, how sure are you that those are just dumb keyboards?

I would bet good money, statistically, that forcing hand written tests with pen and paper is much more likely to disadvantage students with a medically documented physical disability than you are to encounter someone who can't type at all on a standard 101 key qwerty layout keyboard.

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

#128

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…

There should be no computer at all just give students a typewriter. It could prompt a resurgence of the typewriter :)

These days pretty sure computers are cheaper than typewriters.

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

#129
post #68

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?

Fruit of labor? Good students of science produce novel science..as in testable ideas without precedent.. a thing llms struggle with, as they at best can interpolate and mash up previous ideas

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

#130
post #48
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but it feels like a Pyrrhic victory to not cheat, then get lower scores than the cheaters.

Are those exams a contest? Like, they will only take the best N percentiles? Because if not, you’re competing only against yourself and should ignore others’ grades

I did not go to an Ivy League but many of my classes at an alright school were graded on a curve and so C was average, B/D was one standard deviation above/below, and A/F was two.
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