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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

#401

Post by hansvm »

rtpg wrote: post #257
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> have to manually run the code in your head

If you're doing a good job, you have to do that anyway, or at least have enough of a spidey sense for broken code to know when to investigate and add an extra test case.

Something like 30% of the time at $WORK, interviewers report the candidate as having solved the problem when a closer inspection reveals UB, memory corruption, and other bullshit. The test cases pass, and I think that's part of the problem. You can't tune out and avoid deeply understanding the submission.

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

#402

Post by nerdsniper »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #379
sgustard wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"best not to blame the students" There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.

Yes. Best not blame the technology that was specifically built to pass up automatically generated text for human work, or companies that profit from students using it, or government that won't introduce measures that would at least make it possible to comprehensively ban it on campuses.

What sort of measures would those be? The government also banned alcohol on campus (except Louisiana) but as a 20 year old I was too stubborn to care.

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

#403

Post by Balgair »

It seems that the Oxbridge model is really going to be the only workable one here in the future. Small groups of about 8 total, lead by a proctor, meeting regularly. The social pressures to not cheat in such small groups keep it honest.

The obvious problem with that is it is terribly expensive. You need Masters or Doctoral level people for long periods alone with students and you need to trust that these proctors won't be some form of -ist towards the students and also that their grades will be fair.

It is by design not something that scales.

But it seems that is where the path lies at this point.

Essentially, the aristocracy gets education again and the plebs get to fight/cheat it out amongst each other and paying to do nothing in the end.

Damn it

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

#404

Post by baby_souffle »

sarchertech wrote: post #231
bagels wrote: post #216

Earlier 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…

> 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.

We had a 'fix' for this back when they checked your TI83. It's a 2 line basic program to display "MEMORY CLEAR" the exact same way as if somebody had spent the time to find the actual memory clear function in the settings.

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

#405

Post by derektank »

fn-mote wrote: post #365
doodlesdev wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's exactly the point! By making sure the student can't edit the entire text once its written, you force him to think about the essay's structure and force him to plan much more before writing :)

Sure, but you know that professionals edit, right? It improves the quality of the product.

If the goal is to assess the ability of the student to produce a professional product, then why prevent them from using AI in the first place? The vast majority of professionals have access to AI nowadays?

Most curricula should probably feature both forms of assessment, demonstrating your knowledge of the basics in a closed book assessment and your ability to produce high quality final products using all resources available to you in take home assignments.

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

#406

Post by hansvm »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #301
tengwar2 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 60+. I'd be more concerned about the student's physical ability to write for several hours continuously. Writer's cramp used to be a problem, and that was when we were used to hand-writing everything. Legibility is also a consideration: I have to hand-write a lot(keyboards would not be socially acceptable for some of my work), and even with decades of practice and a hand that I designed for legibility, sometimes…

I have absolutely no concern over a 20 yr old's ability to weather the rigors of manipulating a 7 gram pencil. It's not like we're talking about getting them to spend a week on a roofing crew or swap their gaming mouse for a set of post hole diggers here. If someone needs an accommodation then that should absolutely be made available.

I'm all for handwritten tests, but it's more complicated than that. If you're actually writing for 2hr+ and haven't studied appropriate technique or bought some sort of crutch like a pencil holder then the repetitive motion will absolutely cause cramps for a fraction of the class regardless of being 20ish and healthy, and they might not find that out until they're forced to write for 2hr. The muscles manipulating a pencil (with poor technique) are much smaller than those manipulating a post hole digger, so that comparison isn't fair.

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

#407

Post by rtpg »

fn-mote wrote: post #361
rtpg wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet How practical is this? 1. Is your institution able to provide this support? 2. Do you believe you are able to supervise the room well enough that students will be caught if they cheat? (Eg, bring a phone and look up answers.)

2 is “fine”, or that’s just the status quo. The friction from copying over stuff from a tiny phone screen discretely is the cost to cheat as well

I don’t know about 1s practicality. In my schooling it would always be doable but I have the impression US schools are a different scale

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

#408

Post by theamk »

billsmithaustin wrote: post #291

A similar thing happened in a first-year CS class at Purdue this year: https://thecheatsheet.substack.com/p/432-cheating-at-purdue-... .

I was nodding along until that part:

> Turkstra said he’ll still use the AI detection tool going forward.

That's crazy! AI detection tools are notably unreliable, and even if they had only 1% false positive rate (I am sure it's actually much higher) that'd still be multiple innocent people failing the class for no reason.

Imagine enrolling in the class, and the professor says: "oh, and btw I am going to randomly pick three students and accuse them of cheating". Would you want to stay in this class

I think the future is going to be proctored exams on paper or on locked-down devices. If there will be projects, they should be accompanied by secondary evidence, like interviews about them.

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

#409

Post by seanxx »

rtpg wrote: post #257
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

[flagged]

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

#410

Post by teaearlgraycold »

bkallus wrote: post #174

I have seen it firsthand in the CS department here at Dartmouth. It is bad. We're currently designing a new intro systems curriculum, and we're thinking of it as an adversarial problem. That is, we're designing the course to ensure that a student optimizing for the best grade per unit work still meets our learning objectives. That means, as everyone else is saying, paper exams, but also 1-on-1 interviews to check tha…

People optimizing for grades is so sad. I got a BS in CS and no one has ever asked about my grades. I tried to optimize for learning and it turns out that pays off really well once you hit the real world.
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