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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

#331

Post by 1659447091 »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #84
walrus01 wrote: post #80

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…

More expensive than you'd think, but I am pushing for something like that.

> More expensive than you'd think

Even a setup with cheap Raspberry Pi's? And Vim. (built-in bonus points for students being able to save and exit). Was just reading about LEAP[0][1] that thought you may find interesting if you have not yet seen it.

Separately, wanted to say I enjoyed your essay and appreciate how you think about improvement with a focus on the practical usefulness for the student.

TL;DR: I especially think the concept of Interview-Based Grading would be the way to go.

A couple progressive Whiteboard interviews for CS a semester, power point for Business etc. If they use AI to prepare, create material or learn/improve from then they are gaining the skills that will be required in real-world work. If they choose to not learn the material (or understand/check AI output) it would show during the back and forth with a panel of professors (dunno if you guys like working together though); built-in load sharing with a wider range of questions.

I guess with issues you mentioned the whole system needs overhauled for it to work. Adjusted for different courses -- and I dunno how practical this is but -- but why not let kids do more guided self-learning, keep office/lab hours for individual help. Fewer lectures due to self study with repurposed time for live evaluations. Eliminating non essential courses a student takes for a major/minor would also lessen the collective workload of professors (fewer student, but ones that want to be there).

That learning & evaluation set-up would be my dream college -- I would have pursued completely different life in that setup. I wanted to learn and engage, not prove I can regurgitate rote-memory notes that are handed out while my employment required me to grasp changing context and modify the code while not unwittingly automating the deletion of production dbs.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/leap-low-bandwidth-educatio...

[1] https://github.com/T4EQ/leap

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

#332

Post by AlexandrB »

siva7 wrote: post #217
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.

It saddens me to see how creativity seems to "peak" at "let's go back to how we did it in 20th century" instead of asking the better questions like you did.

The flip side of this is "Chesterton's Fence"[1]. It's easy to propose "better" solutions, but grading has evolved to be what it is over the past 100+ years. Any novel solution will have different (and not necessarily better) second, third, or fourth order effects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

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

#333

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#334

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

throwaway152321 wrote: post #302
walrus01 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Addit…

> I would struggle to do it by hand. If you did it before then, barring physical limitations which have occurred since then, you would struggle for a short while and then you would be fine. I also did coursework purely on paper, got out of practice, and then once my kids were in school got back into the habit of handwriting. I can even write cursive again. Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist. There's a…

> Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist.

For righties.

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

#335

Post by jedberg »

efficax wrote: post #329
jedberg wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS enrollment is declining, but not demand. Everyone is citing the numbers from UC Berkeley showing a 26% percent decline in enrollment. What they fail to mention is that the CS department reduced their admit slots by 25% because the TAs negotiated an $80/hr rate, and they can't afford as many, so they can't open as many classes. But the number of students applying for CS is actually up slightly.

lol they can absolutely afford TAs, i don’t know why they might reduce class slots but that’s not why

They specifically said that is why. Not sure why you think they can afford TAs at that rate (4x the average at other schools).

Here is a whole article about it: https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/2026-summer/...

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

#336

Post by willis936 »

nekusar wrote: post #294
npstr wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems easy to counter all of this. I study at a German remote university, and they require, next to the front camera, a second camera to record the screen + hands and arms of the student while taking exams, and before the exam starts a complete video of the room, below desk areas, ears, etc. I don't see an angle how to reliably cheat in such conditions, and have seen nothing mentioned by any other student. So I would…

In-ear Bluetooth earbud with TTS. There's also TI-84 mods that add esp32 and can hook up an LLM. There's always a defeat.

Wow and I thought I was slick for programming routines for Maxwell's and coordinate transformations in my TI-84.

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

#337

Post by bonoboTP »

Aurornis wrote: post #273
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…

> It's news to me that they weren't already. It’s an old (and outdated IMO) tradition at some Ivy Leagues, as the article notes. It may have worked in the era when students had a little more fear of repercussions and a little more sense that cheating on a test would only cause them problems when courses got harder later. Now it seems there is little interest in dealing with cheating, as evidenced by how hard it was f…

> as evidenced by how hard it was for this professor to even get attention to the matter within his department

This is the crux of it. The incentives don't support cracking down on AI cheating much. At least in the short term, for individual department administrators. Overall it will likely hurt the universities collectively to hand out degrees like candy this way, but grade inflation was already a problem and universities treat students like paying customers and they also want good statistics, fend off possible discrimination accusations etc.

So it's really not just about AI, the AI is simply exposing this underlying misaligned incentive. Professors complain about it all the time. It was similar during covid and cheating in online exams and that was solidly before ChatGPT.

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

#338

Post by thaumasiotes »

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.

Assuming the person you're talking to is still alive, this isn't true.

> The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement.

This isn't true either; if your student body consists of only those people, you don't need any system at all. There is no point in even notionally punishing students who don't want anything from you.

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

#340

Post by __d »

anonbruno wrote: post #290
goobatrooba wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue the barrier to cheating has become lower just by virtue of how easy it is to do it now. You open an app and type your question. Rue if different from Brit where you had to basically have either a skill in cheating to find and adapt the right resources or you would have to have money to pay someone to do it for you. AI as the great equaliser I suppose.

In Serrano's class and other introductory classes like it, cheating has been widespread before AI and after. The truth is that the social stigma around cheating has gone away (perhaps this is only a post-remote-schooling phenomena) so cheating is trivial. All you have to do is go text a friend in the class (most people will have many friends in any large intro class they're taking). Source: am student @ Brown

I think this is an important point.

A time when a take-home, closed-book test, relying on the honesty and integrity of the students, was viable seems completely unrealistic now. I assume there were always some who cheated, but I can imagine that it was sufficiently socially unacceptable that many didn't.

That seems like a very different world.

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