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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

#161

Post by redwall_hp »

bzbz wrote: post #98
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.

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.

Arguably someone who is faster is more likely to just be recalling memorized things faster, while someone who's slower may have a deeper understanding but needs time to actually think it through.

Memorization is already hacking the rules of the game that's supposed to be gauging understanding. An ideal test is resistant to rote memorization as well as outright cheating.

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

#162

Post by Escapado »

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.

I agree that that is probably the lowest stake solution. Alternatively there are solutions like the safe exam browser which locks down the device quite well during the exam session.

—- Disclosure: I run a small start up which offers teachers a platform to create and conduct digital exams and interfaces with the safe exam browser precisely because cheating is the number one complaint teachers I have spoken to have when it comes to digital exams.

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

#163

Post by vector_spaces »

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 appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.

That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here

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

#164

Post by xp84 »

This may be a hot take, but:

The problem is that kids, even (or especially?) in the elite schools, are treating college as a box to tick. At the Ivies, for many students, it's nothing more than the requisite means to get their ticket punched so they can become/remain part of the elite class. This has been the conventional wisdom for half a century.

Now, this paragraph doesn't apply to an economics class like his, which is actually a useful degree, but many students will never use what they learn in college in a professional capacity, so it barely even matters if some (maybe even most?) students cheat because outside of the useful degrees, it's mainly a sorting hat to determine who works at Starbucks to pay back student loans, while rolling their eyes because of their 'valuable degree,' and who works there unironically, to pay their bills.

What needs to happen though is that students at all levels need to either believe that they need to learn what they're choosing to take courses in, or even better, actually innately want to learn it to satisfy their own interest. Either will do. If you have neither intention toward the material, of course you'll cheat your way through it. No student who actually wants to learn would waste their time and money taking a class only to not learn, and cheat their way through it.

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

#165

Post by dwattttt »

xp84 wrote: post #149
forgetfreeman wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your test is bottlenecked on the speed it takes to write it, you're testing writing skills.

I also challenge that "hand writing is harder to revise"; again, why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?

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

#166

Post by cataphract »

metalcrow wrote: post #135
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…

What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?

What is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?

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

#167

Post by BinRoo »

> In the AI era...

Back in my day, you could also just Google the problems and find the solutions. What mitigated cheating at UVA was the honor code and each professor's faith and trust in our integrity. That culture was enough to not cheat.

Imo, the fix should be to work on culture. Cheating should always be a tempting choice, so that the student may challenge their integrity, which is a muscle that can atrophy.

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

#168

Post by robcohen »

shagie wrote: post #145
encomiast wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?

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

#169

Post by markus_zhang »

redwall_hp wrote: post #152
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.

It's news to me that they weren't already. My exams were all in person and on paper in the early 2020s, and even my physics homework was a "do it on engineering paper and drop it in a mail slot" affair. The professors would forbid computers and phones during lectures and would stop to shame anyone who thought they were being sneaky. Computer Science classes were all on paper for exams, and low level ones did the old…

IMO many CS classes should be lab based already, except the theory heavy ones. I still wonder why MIT needs to test students of OS courses on paper when the labs cover a lot of the ground. If I can do well in the labs I wouldn’t bother to memorize stuffs for the exams.
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