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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

#421

Post by theamk »

linzhangrun wrote: post #314

AI has drastically reduced the cost and concealment for cheating, even in offline exams. A single person can easily do that using glasses with a micro-camera & rice-sized earbuds, and almost impossible to be caught.

Not really, bluetooth/wifi detectors are absolutely a thing, and emissions from camera in glasses are easily detectable by the right equipment.

This equipment is not very common today, but if the smart glasses become popular, then universities (or proctoring centers) will get it.

And if they don't become common, then some fraction of cheating is acceptable, as long it's not too high. After all, one could do micro-camera + earbuds even before AI, with human conspirator.

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

#422

Post by topgrain2 »

remashedspood wrote: post #228
WalterBright wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.

And I strongly disagree. The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap. And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again. Different strokes

Same here, apparently it’s a major ADHD thing. I can take notes or I can pay attention and try to understand, but I can’t do both, you have to pick one (a calculus teacher in high school was very insistent that constant note taking for her rapid-fire example-heaving lectures was required, so… yeah I didn’t have a clue WTF we’d even been covering after each of those classes, though I’d have lots of notes!)

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

#423

Post by cholmdomsky »

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.)

Jfc, this is a solved problem at the community college near me. All of the computers in the testing room are thin clients that effectively remote into a vm, and you get checked with a metal detector before going into the room with the computers.

If you can escape the vm on the fly and manage to use an llm to cheat, you deserve that A.

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

#424

Post by zaptheimpaler »

pants2 wrote: 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.

This is bullshit and basically this kind of justification is part of the moral and ethical rot of most institutions in the US now. You do have a choice, you just want to pretend you don't to get away with it. Besides, no one outside of a few stuffy finance/quant shops ever even asked what my GPA was in college, they don't care.

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

#426

Post by zaptheimpaler »

walrus01 wrote: post #80
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.

> 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…

With all the work around AI sandboxes, microVMs, browser sandboxes, device attestation, secure boot etc. I feel like we should be able to construct a proper software sandbox that works on most PCs and guarantees that e.g nothing outside of the word processor runs now. Like the OS would need to guarantee that nothing outside some narrow well-defined qemu VM runs for some time an the VM takes care of the rest.

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

#427

Post by mbreese »

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…

> barring physical limitations

I think you're missing the point. This is a physical limitation. People don't write as much as they used to. I used to be able to write for hours, taking notes, writing papers, etc... Now, I try to take notes during a meeting and my hand cramps. And as a bonus, my handwriting never was great, but now it's illegible for me.

Yes, we all "could" re-learn this skill, but how many people will? If you asked me to type a paper on a locked-down computer, I could easily. If you asked me to write a 2000 word paper by hand in an hour, I doubt it would happen.

If we expect students to take in-person tests on paper, then you should also do the rest of the classwork on paper. I am completely in the camp that we learn more when we write something. The physical act is part of the learning process. But you can't expect students to write an in-depth exam without having the practice of doing it often.

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

#428

Post by tim-tday »

Law schools are entirely essay driven. They’ve had armored word processors for testing for at least twenty years. I’m sure those companies would license a version for the rest of campus (most universities have a law school already so they have a contract they can simply extend to the whole campus)

I seem to recall they submit the exam via usb drive.

now they may have a closed exam mode where they can finish the exam without network and the. Submit over the network.

Of course this type of exam must be conducted in person or else the examinee could simply use a phone and type the ai provided answer.

Also is the professor living under a rock? Everyone is going to use AI if they can. So if you want them to not, asking them nicely isn’t going to cut it.

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

#429

Post by protocolture »

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.

During my bachelor I remember getting a distinction for an assignment that I put a shit ton of effort into and being elated. And then finding out that my tutor had taken it to the board trying to make the case for a high distinction, and narrowly failing, but it then being archived as an example of the output that the class wanted anyway.

That bowled me over when I was young and still sort of working out effort/reward sort of stuff. I had put a lot of work into a lot of subjects where I wasnt very naturally talented and got a lot of mediocre results, but seeing that if I put the effort in continually I could make stuff thats worthy of recognition was amazing.

Meanwhile, my (now) wife was completing a diploma subject at the same institution and they were handing out pass/fail only. You could see a lot of people really confused about that. The quality of work that fit into "pass" ran a very large gamut.

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

#430

Post by fn-mote »

dzink wrote: post #268
walrus01 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Frankly, the problem is finding someone with the knowledge to administer it.

Initial cost is almost certainly not a factor; the components could be so old as to be free.

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