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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

#501

Post by AlecSchueler »

mbreese wrote: post #431
hansvm wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If you're doing a good job I think the problem is that the grader has to run your code in their head. That's a whole different problem.

They can OCR them and run them for real.

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

#502

Post by duncangh »

paul7986 wrote: post #112
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…

There should be no computer at all just give students a typewriter. It could prompt a resurgence of the typewriter :)

My dad is an English professor and wrote his first manuscript turned book on a typewriter much to his editor’s dismay in the late 1990s. He used to compel me to type my Christmas wishlist / letter to Santa on it as well perhaps with the added benefit of reducing its length.

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

#503

Post by bobthepanda »

mbreese wrote: post #431
hansvm wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If you're doing a good job I think the problem is that the grader has to run your code in their head. That's a whole different problem.

do they? OCR has gotten pretty good in 2026.

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

#504

Post by rocqua »

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.

Sure, blame the people not the system.

Our whole education system is setup as a skinner box for grades. People finding tricks for better grades are massively rewarded. Study methods are optimised for recall within a month. And educators are accountable only to the measured outcomes.

Very little of the designed system of education is aimed at teaching. Most of it is aimed at measuring and certifying. Treating students as adversarial grade maximisers will likely teach a lot of them they are expected to grade maximise adversarially.

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

#506

Post by ekidd »

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…

> It's best not to blame the students. They are good at optimizing metrics; that's how they ended up here in the first place.

As an alumnus of Dartmouth College's CS program, I am sad to hear that my alma mater has sunken so low. Look, I know that the Committee on Students was historically bad at handling CS plagiarism cases back in the 90s (compared to ones in the humanities). But Dartmouth's historic solution to this sort of pernicious "optimization" was to reduce the expected value of cheating by imposing extreme negative consequences on anyone they caught, with a 3-term suspension and a permanent transcript notification for a first offense.

Allowing widespread cheating and LLM regurgitation will destroy a school's reputation with graduate schools and employers, and rightfully so.

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

#507

Post by anal_reactor »

sixtram wrote: post #479
aabajian wrote: post #474

The last take-home test I did was for EE364a: Convex Optimization. It was a 24 hour test, and I had a cold. I booked a hotel room as my apartment didn't have air conditioning. It was brutal. I got most of the programming questions correct, but only a few of the proofs. The average of the class on this test (and most every other assignment) was 80%+. I got an A- overall in that class. Perhaps this class isn't too hard…

Is it really cheating if you work hard and memorize all the questions? That's basically learning.

I never understood the concept of "learning questions from previous years is cheating". Like, does the entire field of study answer hundred questions and that's it? Or is the professor just too lazy to invent new questions each year?

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

#508

Post by rahimnathwani »

onion2k wrote: post #468
rahimnathwani wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating two different types of work, which each have a different purpose: - making a change to your own mind and/or body (studying math, lifting weights) - making a change to the world (optimizing ad placement, operating a forklift truck) Do you think gyms should allow people to lift heavy weights with forklift trucks, so that they can work like they do in the real world?

That's an amusing analogy, but it's conflating university as a purely academic pursuit (learn these things in order to know the things) with university as vocational training (learn these things so you can get a job.) As people have to pay for their degree through loans now, people see it as a means to get the career they want. It's not learning any more. It's training. So, to continue the analogy, a degree is the eq…

If you use AI to complete all your assignments and exams, then getting a degree is less like getting a forklift truck licence (which indicates you've learned some useful skill that few people have) and more like getting a Waymo account (showing that you're competent enough to enter your credit card details and destination into a mobile app).

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

#509

Post by ninalanyon »

BeetleB wrote: post #247
ninalanyon wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

3 hours for us as well. When you start doing graduate level work, a problem could easily last over an hour. And many people will have false starts before they figure it out. It's not a problem with homework assignments as they have multiple days to finish. So the professor has to decide between poor data with high variance, or good data with lower variance. > I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helpe…

Such scores were expected when I was studying. No one got 100% in the kind of exams we had, not even those who got firsts.

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

#510

Post by recursive »

tazard wrote: post #292
robcohen wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?

Learning cursive won't automatically give you the dexterity of a dental surgeon, that's just a silly conclusion you have drawn from one example. What is the downside of learning cursive?

I learned cursive in elementary school. For me the downside is that it's a waste of time and attention that could be spent on something else.
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