Live data from Hacker News

Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

english.elpais.com

251–260 of 771 posts

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

#251
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.

Schools should forbid grading on a curve. MIT does, for example. Standards should be absolute.

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

#252
post #70
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.

I really don't see how it would cost too much to pay TAs some more proctor hours.

A lot of challenging problems are not solved in one go. You work on it, don't get too far, and then you get more ideas later at night while cooking dinner.

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure people cheated even in my day. But this is the spirit - they're trying to give problems as challenging as they would for homework - and a lot of those classes have very challenging homework problems.

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

#253
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fill the room with typewriters.

Typewriters are an expensive and niche item these days, due to no longer being manufactured, and the good ones being collected by weird nerds. Sort of like buying a 40-year-old vinyl turntable that is in good and usable condition.

If I build you a custom device that receives questions from a central computer and lets the user plug in whatever keyboard they want via bluetooth or usb to only type and answer the questions (ability to edit the text and submit when ready). The central computer can receive all the questions submitted to any of these devices connected to it via wifi or cloud. How much would pay per device? Would you pay for a subscription?

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

#254

As of now chatgpt subsidies its consumer subscription-I wonder if cheating on exams will be still promiment once students are forced to pay $30 a month Since students are notorious for being cheap

Students may be notorious for being cheap (rightfully so, given the financial situation they are placed in) although when a single textbook cost $200 and you need 3 different ones every term, a $30/m subscription that effectively is a magic textbook that writes for you is worth its weight in gold.

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

#255
post #75
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.

Dubious assertion.

> "smarter" here means how well the student will perform in a career in their chosen field. Fast + accurate is the ideal.

Still dubious.

Also, I don't know where you work, but in most of my jobs, career growth is not limited by speed with which you do the work. It's one factor among, say, 10. Most of the people who got ahead were not the fastest.

They're not trying to gauge who is the fastest. Or even the smartest. Just those who have the skills. In the real world, you'll rarely (as in, never) have to solve those same problems with the same speed you will in the exam.

In a lot (all?) of the jobs I worked, taking a day to solve a Medium level Leetcode problem was quite OK.

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

#256
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?

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

If you can't concentrate while people are working on computers near you, I don't think you'll do well in any workplace that is based around knowledge work.

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

#257

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…

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 had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.

It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"), but it limits what kinds of problems you can reasonably put on the exam. You'll definitely lean a bit more into theoretical stuff than practicals. Which is fine for some courses, I think a bit less interesting in other courses.

Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example

Having said all that... "we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet, go type up all your stuff in this VM we have set up" feels fine if you don't like this constraint IMO

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1-on-1 interviews with a LLM sounds like it'd go over about as well as AI customer service.

Do you mean very well? Lots of proof out there that it works; Fin, Sierra and others already operate on a value based pricing model where they only get paid if the AI actually resolves issues.

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

#259
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.

> Imo, the fix should be to work on culture.

We can’t even agree on what’s wrong with it. We aren’t going to be able to fix it.

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

#260

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.

Let's play this out further. How about high school, should there be grades there? Tests at all levels also typically involve a grade / metric -- are those included too?
Post reply on HN