> He thinks the time has come for an in-depth debate so the technology does not signal the end of higher education
I hope it does.
Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
261–270 of 771 posts
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#262Earlier 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'm quite a bit older than you, old enough that I remember learning to touch type in elementary school on Apple IIe and IIgs desktop computers. It's not reasonable these days to expect people to hand write a 4, 6, 8 page length essay on paper and pen with a finite time limit in a classroom. Being able to edit and revise things in a word processor type interface is an essential part of writing an academic paper.
Additionally expecting whoever is reading the paper to comprehend everyone's (likely very sloppy, in this era) handwriting is an exercise in frustration for the person who would be evaluating the papers.
Not that tests/exams can't be given on paper, ever (multiple choice still works), but for something where people are expected to provide multiple pages of coherently written essay output, I would struggle to do it by hand. And I'm old enough that we did do a lot purely on paper when I was in school.
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#263Earlier 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…
I think “take home open book exam, good luck,” followed by evil laughter, is mostly a math department thing.
And physics
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#264He is fighting a losing battle. That's why nobody in the administration cared. Academic integrity already doesn't exist anymore. As Nassim Taleb would say; there are plenty of highly educated idiots with PhDs.
Even the idea that MIT is somehow better than some other universities is itself a fiction. People are conflating financial success with academic ability. The former is mostly the result of social connections which are formed within the academic institutions and have very little to do with actual capabilities.
Universities should just sell degrees for a high price without requiring the students to attend. If they're rich enough, their skills aren't going to matter anyway; they'll succeed in their careers regardless so the university will still look good. 'Academic integrity' will be intact. Especially true for business, economic degrees or other humanities.
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#265His research is in Game Theory. He should have realized that, in a situation where all competitors are (possibly) using LLMs, the game theoretic optimal choice is to use LLMs.
That depends on the reward function. Should society reward credentials or skill?
Students aren’t optimizing for what is best for society. They are optimizing for themselves, which almost always means getting a job.
The credential is a prerequisite but skills are a differentiator. Problem is, not all skills are equal.
Amazon isn’t going to ask you about your opinions on The Illiad, they are going to check if you can write an efficient algorithm to rob houses or merge sorted linked lists.
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 subscri…
I think this can already be implemented through a fairly mundane thin client approach, such as Dell/Wyse type thin clients, citrix stuff, or an ordinary x86-64 desktop PC setup with an absolute barebones OS that connects a graphical desktop session to something centralized over a LAN.
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#267take-home, closed-book type What an oxymoron. I agree with the others here that AI isn't the problem.
The final exam was not take-home, which is where the massive discrepancy showed up.
I do agree that the idea of giving take-home exams and expecting students not to cheat has long since passed its prime. There may have been a time when it was reasonable to expect most students to behave honestly, but that does not hold at all in today’s climate. Especially post-COVID, for whatever combination of reasons, students just don’t seem to care at all about anything other than min-maxing their effort to grade ratio.
Which leads to a lot of outcomes like this one where students start using ChatGPT early, think it will continue forever, and then get completely crushed when they encounter the first assignment where they can’t cheat.
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 subscri…
I think this can already be implemented through a fairly mundane thin client approach, such as Dell/Wyse type thin clients, citrix stuff, or an ordinary x86-64 desktop PC setup with an absolute barebones OS that connects a graphical desktop session to something centralized over a LAN.
Or you can do a much cheaper tiny esp32 typewriter with a basic display and a usb for a keyboard. But who wants cheap for education.
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
About 95% joking, but in that case, have everyone lock their phones in a tiny locker shelf thing and wand everyone with a nonlinear junction detector. If we get to the point in technology and battery capability where camera glasses are compact enough to be indistinguishable from ordinary metal eyeglass frames, we'll probably also have really good low cost portable tech to detect any on-body electronics (vs the flesh and clothing and metal accessories like belt buckles on a human body).
Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
#270These articles consistently fail to acknowledge students were cheating in large numbers prior to these AI tools being available. It was certainly not difficult to cheat at a "closed book" take home exam before.
Different magnitude of cheating altogether
Not quite true. As a student who had many friends in Serrano's class in question among others at Brown, I'm be quite doubtful that AI has led to an increase in this particular class. The truth is that (at least post-covid) cheating is very widespread on take-home exams. If you are taking an introductory class such as Serrano's, you will have many friends in the class and cheating is so widely accepted that there is little to no stigma to doing it and so many people do. The primary limiting factor on whether a student cheats is not access or ease but desire.
It's a sad state of affairs.