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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

#541

Post by nneonneo »

zahlman wrote: post #535
nneonneo wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a special computer works too. I do my exams with our institution's Computer-Based Testing Facility, a bank of computers with fixed software and firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site. As a result, I've been able to challenge students to solve interactive software security challenges on the midterm and final with automatic grading - something that would have been impossible with pen and pap…

> firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site. ... did LANs (Ethernet, with wifi disabled) stop being a thing?

The machines are connected via Ethernet (reliability!) but our exams are hosted on Internet sites like PrairieLearn and Canvas. Those are a lot easier to work with than, say, having to load exams onto a machine accessible on a private LAN.

Yes, said machine could have both the LAN connectivity and WAN access, and we could set up the whole exam website on it, but we would lose out on the flexibility to let profs choose the platform that works best for them.

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

#542

Post by watwut »

harry8 wrote: post #495
watwut wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Armstro…

I did not said Armstrong was the first cyclist to dope. I said he made a real innovation in the world of doping. There were computers in 1975, but can you agree with me that several people brought in innovations between then and now? It is the same thing.

Doping existed prior Armstrong, Armstrong revolutionized it and led worsening of the doping situation. His teammates were bullied by him personally to dope. That includes testimonies of people who left for that reason.

> or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.

Yes, plenty of them actually wanted to and Americans were acting butthurt. There were regular accusations of French just being jealous, like it is an international offense to suspect and American sportsman could cheat.

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

#543

Post by nneonneo »

ElProlactin wrote: post #530
nneonneo wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a special computer works too. I do my exams with our institution's Computer-Based Testing Facility, a bank of computers with fixed software and firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site. As a result, I've been able to challenge students to solve interactive software security challenges on the midterm and final with automatic grading - something that would have been impossible with pen and pap…

This is just...depressing. BSL-4-like rooms just to test university students.

I'm sure you're exaggerating, but the exam process in a CBTF is pretty lightweight. Students arrive, drop off their bags and phone etc., check in (swipe an ID card, get their picture matched), log into the computer and the exam website. When the exam starts, they refresh the site and do the exam; we've got proctors in the room as usual to watch for any conventional cheating (using a phone, consulting a friend).

If you find that onerous, I guess a paper exam would probably also feel pretty depressing to you.

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

#544

Post by bjackman »

rsanek wrote: post #256
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you can't concentrate while people are working on computers near you, I don't think you'll do well in any workplace that is based around knowledge work.

... Including a university. Literally everywhere you work as a student is serenaded by keyboard sounds.

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

#545

Post by bjackman »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #96
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…

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?

Well, how many times in that 9 years have you written on paper for 2 hours straight? Even as a kid who did it regularly, it sucked.

Doing it now I really don't think I could deliver my intellectual best while worrying about if anyone can read my handwriting and whether I'm gonna cramp up by the end of the exam.

Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.

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

#546

Post by Ekaros »

rsanek wrote: post #260
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.

Let's play this out further. How about high school, should there be grades there? Tests at all levels also typically involve a grade / metric -- are those included too?

At the end in very large cohort standardised testing. And by very large I mean at least hundreds if not thousands of test takers. At that point you have enough test takers to stack rank them in properly done test. And it smooths things over the years. This is the least bad way of evaluating large number of students.

In class room stack ranking is just meaningless. Either student passes demonstrating various levels of knowledge or not.

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

#548

Post by DonHopkins »

jauco wrote: post #513
AlecSchueler wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can OCR them and run them for real.

This would be HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) not OCR and HTR is a lot harder than OCR especially for modern scripts (i.e. student's scrawls). And at every error the reviewer now needs to check if it was due to an error in the code or due to a bad HTR somewhere in the code. I'd say compared to just typing the code on a disconnected computer: Not worth it.

And then you can grade them on important syntactic issues that really matter, like tabs -vs- spaces.

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

#549

Post by goosejuice »

nneonneo wrote: post #543
ElProlactin wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just...depressing. BSL-4-like rooms just to test university students.

I'm sure you're exaggerating, but the exam process in a CBTF is pretty lightweight. Students arrive, drop off their bags and phone etc., check in (swipe an ID card, get their picture matched), log into the computer and the exam website. When the exam starts, they refresh the site and do the exam; we've got proctors in the room as usual to watch for any conventional cheating (using a phone, consulting a friend). If yo…

The loss of trust would be the depressing part (to me). That said the amount of cheating I witnessed in undergrad was also depressing.

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

#550

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

It's not about the difficulty of writing, it's about the difficulty of cutting and pasting text with a knife and glue versus a text editor.
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