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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

#171

Post by xp84 »

dwattttt wrote: post #165
xp84 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> challenge "hand writing is harder to revise"

What? Suppose you want to fix the opening of your essay. Best case it's pencil and you can erase some, but worst case you have a longer sentence you want to put in there so you can't do it without scribbling all over and making a mess of the page. Word processors let you edit. How is this controversial?

> why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?

Okay, so from first principles:

1. Time is finite, we will all perish

2. Unless you are doing open book, needs to be supervised (proctored / or prof/TA is there)

3. That person is paid for a shift

4. That shift must end

5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.

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

#172

Post by know-how »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #155
walrus01 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers good enough to run libreoffice writer or the equivalent and print to a networked laser are thrown in the ewaste trash all the time , the cost really would be in the labor and somewhat custom software setup. Could also reuse old flat panel displays that have been decommissioned from office use.

Lubing typewriters and ensuring they have a fresh ribbon also sounds pretty labor intensive. (Where do you even get ribbons these days)

[dead]

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

#173

Post by willis936 »

BinRoo wrote: post #167

> 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.

Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life. The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement. If you want the honor system back then you need to offer more stable safety nets. It's not "kids these days", it's the natural result of the systems adults have made.

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

#174

Post by bkallus »

I have seen it firsthand in the CS department here at Dartmouth. It is bad.

We're currently designing a new intro systems curriculum, and we're thinking of it as an adversarial problem. That is, we're designing the course to ensure that a student optimizing for the best grade per unit work still meets our learning objectives. That means, as everyone else is saying, paper exams, but also 1-on-1 interviews to check that students understand each assignment they turn in. These interviews feature both factual questions ("You're using this macro from that library. What does it do?", "Please describe what this function does and how it works.") and conceptual questions ("Why is this code structured this way instead of $whatever?", "How else did you try solving this?", etc.) This doesn't stop students from generating code, but at least they have to understand that code in detail.

This is not as good as writing the code yourself, but how much worse is it? For math classes, this gap is gigantic. Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own. For programming classes, I think (without evidence) that the gap is somewhat smaller.

My experience from the past is that when this kind of evaluation is made clear up front, the students know what to expect and either do fine or drop the class in the first week. If you start with take-home exams and then spring paper exams on them halfway through the course, then half the class is cheating and won't be able to recover, as we read in the article.

In general, our students are somewhat motivated by an abstract desire to learn, but are much more motivated by grades. If there exists a straightforward path through your course that leads to a good grade without doing much work, most students will take it. (Our undergrads' course review website is literally called "Layup List." They are actually this shameless.) It's our job as instructors to ensure that all paths leading to a good grade either require learning the material or are more difficult to pull off than just learning the material.

It's best not to blame the students. They are good at optimizing metrics; that's how they ended up here in the first place. We just need to better align the evaluation metrics with the outcomes that we're looking for.

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

#175

Post by techjamie »

subygan wrote: post #141
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 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…

I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s.

These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.

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

#176

Post by Gigachad »

BinRoo wrote: post #167

> 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.

The world is getting more competitive. Integrity goes out the window when cheating in a test can mean meaningful better life outcomes and when you believe everyone else will be too.

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

#177

Post by dminik »

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.

You should definitely take speed into consideration. If your're writing an essay, being able to type it out and still have both the opportunity and time to edit it is great. If you're writing it on paper, you likely have neither. What comes to you first is what's submitted.

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

#178

Post by softwaredoug »

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 think most teachers have adapted pretty well. I'm really surprised to find teachers that haven't reckoned with possibility of AI cheating in 2026.

In person writing, etc. But also for anything take home students have to verbally discuss their work in some fashion. Seems to mostly work. Students still us ChatGPT as a search engine, which seems fine.

(Source: married to a professor. And my son is in high school)

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

#179

Post by handoflixue »

eredengrin wrote: post #144
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.

> 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.…

In my experience, it was common to test speed - my favorite was solving 100 arithmetic problems in, I think it was 3 minutes? Perhaps shorter. The point was that it was basically impossible to solve them all, so it evaluated both your speed and your self-assessment: if you move too quickly, you'll make errors. If you spend too much time second-guessing yourself, you won't get enough problems finished.

It always struck me as an ingenious way to get a feel for a new group of students, since it's quick to administer and equally quick to grade, while revealing quite a lot of information.

Certainly we hold speed to some regard, since a lot of academic accommodations involve granting extra time. If we aren't testing on speed, then surely we should give that to anyone that asks?

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

#180

Post by Atotalnoob »

Escapado wrote: post #162
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 whe…

Sure, and those require kernel level access, strip privacy, and don’t run on all OS
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