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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

#491

Post by tancop »

jonahx wrote: post #397
MattGaiser wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions like law. Everywhere else it is just collaboration or learning or simply something nobody cares about. I would say that tech largely rewards the behaviours people in academia call cheating.

> The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions What? The concept of cheating exists in marriages, sports, relationships, business agreements, accounting, and nearly every facet of human life.

when you cheat on your partner you hurt them by betraying their trust. when you score from offside you can steal a win from the other team thats playing fair. if you lie about your company financials you steal from the government or your creditors.

cheating in schools is nothing like that. there is no direct harm to anyone, financial or emotional. the only real thing is if enough students do it thats bad for the schools reputation and others will treat degrees coming from there as more suspicious.

thats a very abstract and indirect harm, and it depends on employers caring about what school you came from more than a basic "reputable or total scam". to be fair thats pretty common in some industries (it shouldnt be) but i dont think the average student will get worse job offers because some of their classmates cheated.

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

#492

Post by Gander5739 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #148
ant6n wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?

A lecture hall full of click-click-click isn't going to be conducive to concentrating on a test.

But the scribble of pens is?

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

#493

Post by Gander5739 »

imron wrote: post #239
dminik wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should definitely take speed into consideration. If your're writing an essay, being able to type it out and still have both the opportunity and time to edit it is great. If you're writing it on paper, you likely have neither. What comes to you first is what's submitted.

If you’re suggesting that the test favors those capable of arranging their thoughts and words before putting pen to paper then.... I’m not sure there’s a problem

You could add someone screaming in their ear to test their focus in strained curcumstances.

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

#494

Post by make3 »

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.

you can give people laptops with Internet disabled, that's a good solution

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

#495

Post by harry8 »

watwut wrote: post #465
harry8 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You yourself are on drugs if you think Lance Armstrong "created the situation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#D... Note the quantity that actually got caught and with enough evidence. Lance won it 6 times without getting caught. Looking at it systematically there's no way all of the top finishers were not taking drugs (how else could they compete with the world's best who were? The advant…

He was literal ring leader and innovator of doping. He was also openly forcing others into doping. That is not controversial statement, but result of subsequent reports. > Lance won it 6 times without getting caught. Yes, he was doping for years before being caught. He found novel ways how to do it. > reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat. No it does not. It just guves credit to…

Oh do come on.

Bernard Thévenet won in 1975 and has said he was using steroids. Armstrong was 4 years old at the time. We don't know about all the drug cheating at the TdF, just what we do know is damning in ways we can't pin on the vile Armstrong. Do continue to loathe him as much as you like. He's earned that.

Ulrich, Riis, Fignon, Zoetelmelk, we haven't caught them all nor tried 1% as hard as those who got Armstrong did.

Look through the list and try and claim with a straight face that Armstrong was first, led the charge or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.

I don't care at all about Armstrong. The sport is clean now despite an ugly past. Just as it was when Armstrong won all those tours. Can I interest you in this bridge at a good price?

Who gets off scot free with the "It was all Armstrong" line.

If Armstrong stayed retired he probably would have gotten away with it, kept lying forcefully and be a secular saint by now. The TdF didn't catch him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#S...

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

#496

Post by ant6n »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #138
ant6n wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?

I'm 50. Optimizing testing for speed is goofy. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.

> Optimizing testing for speed is goofy

That's a strawman. I said bottlenecking testing by requiring hand writing is stupid. Put another way - you're meant to be using the test to be thinking and re-thinking the problem and articulating approaches and solutions, not use your time, effort and energy on managing quill and paper.

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

#497

Post by make3 »

tgv wrote: post #478
cherryteastain wrote: post #37

His 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.

I think you're missing the fact that everyone knows. He just got reliable data from a natural experiment, which makes the chancellor can't just look away any longer.

People for sure have always cheated in these take home exams. This has to have been to protect rich kids with parents who give money to the university. It's insane to learn how many fancy universities have garbage blatantly unmeritocratic evaluation systems like this

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

#498

Post by tancop »

infinite_spin wrote: post #246
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.

Grading is to provide your students with a goal, one that isn't so high-minded as "the goal is education". The human mind uses a "reward system", within a feedback cycle. If you want to do away with that, just because it's what you prefer, then you're ignoring the reality of being human.

grades are important as feedback and to make sure students who learned nothing in a class fail and have to retake it instead of making trouble in more advanced classes. but they should never be a permanent record employers can demand.

the best way to do that would be making it school policy to issue transcripts with any grades you want any time after you finish your degree. set it up so theres no difference between one you got at graduation and years later. even if you never request one the fact that its possible makes it so treating everyone from that school equally is the only rational option.

but for that to work all the schools in a state would have to use the system so employers cant be like "you graduated XY university? thats the one that lets you fake grades right?" and treat you like you got a 1.0 GPA. we need to get the government involved.

or if you want a less radical/more realistic solution let people retake classes after they graduate to retroactively get better grades. the point is some number on a piece of paper you get in your early 20s shouldnt be visible and affect the rest of your life.

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

#499

Post by ekidd »

sgustard wrote: post #311
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…

"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.

> The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion.

Historically, the penalty for cheating at Dartmouth was a 9-month suspension for a first offense (no matter how small, in theory), and permanent "separation from the college" for a second offense. Back in the 90s, there were multiple incidents where this wasn't properly applied to the CS department because the academic committees in charge of punishment were bad at evaluating plagiarism of source code.

Dartmouth certainly should blame the students. Their policy is historically clear on that point. It is the responsibility of professors to use their syllabus to clearly define "cheating" for a particular course, and it is the responsibility of the students not to cheat. The only case where this should be even slightly complicated is if the professor hasn't been sufficiently about what constitutes cheating (and there was one major historic scandal related to this).

I certainly agree that any degree which allows rampant cheating will quickly become a joke to employers.

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

#500

Post by piokoch »

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.

Thanks for the very interesting write up, I am teaching management studies programming Python (people who want to be quants, dana analysts, etc.) and I am struggling with the same problem - how the hell do grading to make it reliable.

LLMs has become good enough so whatever homework task I give, it can be solved easily by any LLM (and, in fact, this becomes unfair to those who are not able to pay for good model). I was asking to add comments & interpretation of results, this slightly helped, but LLMs are increasingly good in all this as well.

So, quite seriously, I am considering some on paper tests & quizes, because what else can be done?

Making people aware about importance of writing code is indeed a good hint to convince, at least part of the people to do this. Another thing is: they will leave university one day, they will search for employment and the employer might be much more hostile towards cheating during job interview and can easily make cheating with AI impossible... Question is, will it still matter?

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