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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

#341

Post by odyssey7 »

genghisjahn wrote: post #293
Aurornis wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The decline of actual consequences for cheating has played a big role. When I was in college, people who got caught cheating found themselves in a world of trouble. Repeat offenders faced severe consequences like failing courses, which could delay their graduation date if it…

and there's also the Ivy League grade inflation... https://jamesgmartin.center/2025/11/harvard-admits-that-grad...

That’s a different debate, and imo, the lack of a severe curve makes it safer for students to resist temptations to cheat. Severe curves ratchet up structural pressures for students to cheat, due to a prisoners’ dilemma effect in a zero-sum competitive environment. When there is a severe curve and students are able to cheat, acting with integrity becomes a failing strategy.

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

#343

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

If I'm studying something, it's nice to get an external assessment of how well I'm doing, so i don't fall victim to over-confidence or imposter syndrome. When you're dealing with new material it's hard to be truly objective about your own project level.

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

#344

Post by cm2187 »

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.

Same with job interviews. Right now Hr insists on us doing them over zoom so we get this absurd result that we eliminate candidates that perform too well to be true, at the risk of eliminating a genuine excellent candidate. You have to look a bit messy!

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

#345

Post by zabzonk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #321
zabzonk wrote: post #307

While I am in no way a supporter of AI cheating, or whatever we want to call it, I can tell you from experience that there is nothing more tedious or soul destroying than invigilating a written multi-hour exam. It put me off teaching in higher education. IMHO to solve many problems we should go with Ivan Illich's ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society and make education about education, not testing…

> make education about education, not testing and certification We tried this. The whole grades-are-racist nonsense movement (in part a reaction to NCLB). It doesn’t work. Learning requires confronting difficulty and evaluation, even if you’re learning alone. If you want to see what attempting to learn without tests looks like, see people who think they’ve taught themselves a topic by chatting with AI. Nine times out…

I have learned a lot about computer programming from reading books and from more experienced programmers. This is what Illich was talking about - give people an allowance and let them spend it as they will, for example on books and mentors, or indeed on classic universities.

> The whole grades-are-racist nonsense.

Wow, swerve off topic. I never mentioned anything like that and I do not want to.

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

#346

Post by bonoboTP »

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.

"Fixing" the culture includes a much much broader context than just what an individual professor preaches about to a set of students. It includes the entire intergenerational contract, earning the trust of students as well, getting their buy-in. There's a lot of cynicism and distrust against it all and a lot of disengagement because they just don't buy into it anymore with sincerity. It's not simply about scolding them a bit more and telling them that actually cheating is bad, mkay.

One place to start is to question seriously who actually needs a university degree and why, how this credentialism has been stealing years of productivity from young people. Though at least the deal was that in exchange you could expect some middle class job, even if gated behind a totally unrelated bachelor degree. But then this deal also got soured.

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

#347

Post by epihelix »

metalcrow wrote: post #135
customguy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now…

What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?

What's the benefit of a HNSW KNN search over brute forcing it? Speed, with minimal loss of accuracy.

Cursive vs printing (I'm guessing that's what you mean by "standard writing") is exactly the same, provided you can actually write in cursive. If you weren't taught in school, then sucks to be you, I guess? Modern pedagogy has a lot to answer for :(

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

#348

Post by anigbrowl »

dgellow wrote: post #48
gedy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but it feels like a Pyrrhic victory to not cheat, then get lower scores than the cheaters.

Are those exams a contest? Like, they will only take the best N percentiles? Because if not, you’re competing only against yourself and should ignore others’ grades

Yes they are, that's what 'graded on a curve' means. It's common in the US to give students a percentile or Z-score or T-score rather than the raw score for the examination. This was a source of massive frustration to me when I first encountered because I had no way of self-reviewing my exam performance to guess which questions I might have gotten wrong.

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

#349

Post by epihelix »

dekdrop wrote: post #147
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…

how do you make sure they are not using their mobile phone with llms while the exam? I have seen that happening.

Build a Faraday cage around your examination hall :)

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

#350

Post by epihelix »

ninalanyon wrote: post #88
BeetleB wrote: 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.

How long is too short? Each exam in my BSc Applied Physics final (1977, Exeter Uni.) was three hours and we had similar exams in each of the preceding years to weed out those who weren't keeping up. I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helped the weaker students get through the Quantum Mechanics exam. In addition I had to defend the report (120 pages of typescript and charts) of my final year project…

I sat one exam at uni (in person, invigilated) for History and Philosophy of Science, which had no time-limit. You could take as long as you needed, whether that was one hour, five hours or all day.

Pretty much everyone still took three hours. But you felt so much calmer, knowing you weren't racing against the clock.

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