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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

#201

Post by [deleted] »

willis936 wrote: post #173
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.

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by energy123 »

danny_codes wrote: post #7

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?

Take home tests were always rife with cheating, although it's probably worse now.

Teachers really need to stop doing it, it's so destructive to create a metric that tracks how well you can cheat and lie, and basically forces you to cheat and lie (because everyone else is) if you want to get a job.

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

#204

Post by tialaramex »

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…

It would also be a huge discrimination problem.

I (as part of a small team) run the IT side of exams for a UK University and as well as the many exams intended to be taken entirely with computers, we also deliberately have an exam that's always marked as "Available to take" regardless of where on campus you are and what machine you're using, that exam just launches a stripped down Microsoft Word, with no way to start other software or access your own data.

So instead of reading the instruction book and writing either in the book or on separate provided paper, you read the book and type your answers in Word, when you're done either your work is printed or these days often it's automatically sent to the markers electronically.

There's a spectrum of people using this, going from the profoundly blind who couldn't have attempted an actual hand written exam through to people who have dyslexia or similar problems and would be able to write but it might be very difficult to mark. It also becomes a "last ditch fallback" for a number of scenarios where plans went wrong or something was forgotten and so that's why it's always available - we do run exams specifically planned to be in Word, but those have distinct IDs so that you know you're taking the exam "HIST1234/C4 History of Clowns and Clowning. Essay on prepared topic" or whatever, as well as "Multiple choice" style exams, and a large number of exams which involve using computer tooling, e.g. R, Stats packages, programming.

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

#205

Post by Paracompact »

bkallus wrote: post #174

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 tha…

> Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own.

Unrelated, but once you get to a more mature level, say grad school and above, I can say this is not always the case! Just like it's easier sometimes to Roll Your Own Damn X in programming, so too are some expositions of proof so dense (necessarily or unnecessarily so) that it is a less taxing affair to simply figure it out yourself, or at least figure out 90% of it, consulting a suggestive sentence or two in the proof in order to get at that last 10%.

Maybe this observation of mine is not so unrelated after all. I don't regret many of the times that I've thrown up my hands at the rococo explanations or solutions given to me by LLMs and simply did my own work. The Socratic method with AI is sometimes more effort than it's worth.

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

#206

Post by nerdsniper »

willis936 wrote: post #173
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.

> Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life.

Yes it was. This was the pitch for as long as Google has existed. The only relevant change from the early days of Google is that now you also need to go to a T20 school and GPA inflation has gone completely insane.

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

#207

Post by Barrin92 »

All these over-complicated "solutions" are incredibly funny. At my uni in Germany education worked in a very straight forward way. There is no graded homework (you're in a university not an elementary school), at the end of the semester there's a three hour exam, on pen and paper (our CS profs deducted a point per syntax error btw so mind your parentheses) and if you don't do any homework or don't show up that's on you because you're an adult, but good luck making it through the test.

Of course 70% or so usually crashed out in particular in Calculus and I suspect given that US education is paid for daycare that's exactly the thing that can't happen which is why they're never fixing it

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

#208

Post by jasondigitized »

bkallus wrote: post #174

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 tha…

Without a hint of irony, wouldn't a Voice AI solution help better manage the 1-1 interview process?

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

#209

Post by encomiast »

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…

If anyone is interested, here is a link where you can download the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221770027_Correlati...

I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a pStill, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.

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

#210

Post by jdshaffer »

I've been trying to figure out how to avoid AI fraud in my classes, like many others. While not perfect, I've written down my thoughts and attempts in the hope it might help someone else:

https://web.hedc.shizuoka.ac.jp/msg-from-center/creating-mea...

Edit: Didn't realize the original URL was paywalled. Sorry. This newer URL is open. Apologies.

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