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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

#141

Post by subygan »

customguy wrote: post #120
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…

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now…

i don't at all think it's that obvious / easy.

i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written.

and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged.

i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.

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

#142

Post by bryanlarsen »

rsa4046 wrote: post #20
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 resource…

My daughter just finished her Grade 11 finals in Canada. They were done on locked down school Chromebooks, which should be enough to prevent cheating by all but the most dedicated.

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

#143

Post by noxvilleza »

mullingitover wrote: post #133
krackers wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game Theory seems sort of useless in the real world because people are not rational players, and the real challenge is in getting an accurate model of their behavior. The honor system would work probably fine in a tiny close-knit liberal arts college, while it would obviously wouldn't in a place where the degree itself is the target.

Aside from evolutionary biology, cancer research, embryonic development, economics, internet routing, spectrum auctions, counter-terrorism, kidney exchanges, generative AI, and preventing nuclear apocalypse...What HAS game theory done for us?!

Proved that everyone asking that question is playing a signalling game!

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

#144

Post by eredengrin »

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.

> Fast students are smarter.

Assuming this is true (others have already addressed a few of the many reasons it might not be), wouldn't that imply that practically all existing tests are already flawed? If you want to grade on time, every exam should be graded with a formula taking both the time and the correctness into account. A binary "fast enough" vs "not fast enough" is about as useful as a pass/fail class grade.

The exams that felt like the fairest reflections of my own knowledge were proctored in-person, closed book, and time unlimited. Of course, being time unlimited works better for quantitative/engineering exams. I haven't put much thought into more qualitative/liberal arts type exams.

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

#145

Post by shagie »

encomiast wrote: post #140
customguy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now…

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.

... And there are jobs that use those skills.

Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/

My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.

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

#146

Post by ewild »

dgellow wrote: post #48
gedy wrote: 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

It's an incredibly privileged Pov to say it isn't a contest. These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.

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

#147

Post by dekdrop »

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…

how do you make sure they are not using their mobile phone with llms while the exam? I have seen that happening.

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

#148

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ant6n wrote: post #106
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #96

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?

A lecture hall full of click-click-click isn't going to be conducive to concentrating on a test.

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

#149

Post by xp84 »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #138
ant6n wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm 50. Optimizing testing for speed is goofy. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.

Sure but given any length of time, which does tend to be finitely allocated for a test (if for no other reason than the prof or proctor does have other places to be eventually), having to hand write is slower and harder to revise, which means it's harder to get that full, understanding-demonstrating essay, done and polished.

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

#150

Post by vcf »

walrus01 wrote: post #127
sokoloff wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At my university, students with verified disabilities are allowed to use a university-provided laptop (properly locked-down, with allowed tools such as screen readers). But these are special cases. Computers for everyone would be costly and impractical given exams are punctual but all roughly over the same week or so.
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