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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

#231

Post by sarchertech »

bagels wrote: post #216
walrus01 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that augmented reality glasses, and things in the category of the meta glasses with built-in camera are already banned in most academic test environments, by a blanket policy prohibiting the use of any camera in the room.

Right, they're easy to detect today, that's not going to last long. The whole point is to prevent cheating, well, cheats aren't going to follow the rules. Written tests/in person tests aren't a complete answer to this.

If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection.

If we get to the point where even that doesn’t work then we’ll be at the point where a camera in the room with an AI analyzing eye movements should be able to detect it. And no matter how advanced they get they’ll still need to radiate heat, so a thermal camera should work. If that fails, industrial CT scanners are getting cheaper and cheaper.

Heck if it gets too bad there’s always mm wave body scanners and a set of cheap glasses kept at school.

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

#232

Post by rayiner »

Instead of denouncing them, the professors should expel every single one of these students. These people cannot be allowed into the economy. (And don’t “what about” me about dishonestly already existing in the economy. I know it does. But it’s like littering—you’re not justified in adding another piece even if the ground is already dirty.)

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

#233

Post by WalterBright »

encomiast wrote: post #198
WalterBright wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.

That's been my experience as well. I'm just curious about cursive writing specifically.

point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.

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

#234

Post by shepherdjerred »

yiyingzhang wrote: post #199

As a university professor, I honestly don't understand the point of grading. Who will look at and care about grades? Likely company HR. But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Also, grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

I think the point is that your college/university want the earned credential to mean something.

Presumably you need some way to gauge the quality of your graduates

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

#235

Post by freehorse »

xp84 wrote: post #171
dwattttt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

Re "hand writing is harder to revise", I never had an issue with erasing words or parts of the text and using asterisks, end footnotes, the margins and whatever free space available (with arrows or not) to do revisions in written exams. Nobody complained and afaik it was fairly standard to do where I studied, as long as your exam itself was actually legible. Granted, I refer to math-related exams not essays on literature or philosophy where form may have mattered more. On the other hand, I cannot imagine writing any math during an exam on a computer.

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

#236

Post by fn-mote »

markus_zhang wrote: post #169
redwall_hp wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to test to make sure the student who you are giving the grade to is the student who did the work.

Without certifying someone’s abilities, the degree doesn’t mean much.

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

#237

Post by nlawalker »

yiyingzhang wrote: post #199

As a university professor, I honestly don't understand the point of grading. Who will look at and care about grades? Likely company HR. But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Also, grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

>grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.

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

#238

Post by nekusar »

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.

[flagged]

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

#239

Post by imron »

dminik wrote: post #177
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.

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.

If you’re suggesting that the test favors those capable of arranging their thoughts and words before putting pen to paper then.... I’m not sure there’s a problem

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

#240

Post by wombatpm »

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…

Physics 107 at U of I in the 80’s had all quizzes on the PLATO system. Please for the love of mercy do not not go back to inflexible systems for exams and quizzes.
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