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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

#611

Post by sombragris »

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…

> I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.

Interesting. This reminds me of COBOL and FORTRAN "code sheets" that were used back in the day...

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

#612

Post by ButlerianJihad »

sombragris wrote: post #606

I was born in 1970. My teenage years were in the 1980s, in coincidence with the emergence of the home computer. I had a Timex-Sinclair 1000, then a C64, then a C128. One of my main forces that drove myself to learn computers was (besides games) the ability to produce text that was clearly written and readable, thanks to word processors and printers, because my handwriting was abysmal, and I got tired very quickly whi…

I was in high school from 1986-1989, and my experience began with TI-99/4A in grade school, a VIC-20 at home, and then a C=64 (high school offered a Commodore-based lab as well.)

Dad indulged me with many peripherals, including an Epson dot-matrix tractor-feed printer that printed 132cps! Among its features were configurable fonts and point-size. I discovered that this device could be set up for extremely small fonts that remained legible.

So, for Spanish and other classes, I decided to go into the "cheat sheet" production business. I worked out how to print a sheet full of little 2x2" sheets that contained Spanish vocab, or the study answers for our next quiz or whatever, and I used them myself, and then I began to sell them!!

And the most ironic thing happened, when I discovered that I never needed the cheat sheets: having created them by typing them in, repeatedly, correcting errors and checking against our textbooks, I had internalized, memorized and learned all the answers as any ethical student would!

I got caught, once or twice, and disciplined for distributing those cheat sheets, and I definitely did not continue cheating in classes, because I'm not that kind of guy, but the process was a revelation to me, and ever since the 1980s I have relied on hand-written notes to reinforce my memory of those words and facts that flow from ears, to mind, to hand muscles, to pen, and onto ye olde fashioned paper.

Now can we see a reason that "writing 100 times on the chalkboard" may have been an edifying exercise, beyond its punishment value?

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

#613

Post by cesarb »

dzink wrote: post #126
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?

Fill the room with typewriters.

> Fill the room with typewriters.

Playing devil's advocate: one reason I'm good at typing on computers is that I learned on typewriters, which need much more force for each key press, especially the little fingers. Someone who learned on computer keyboards won't have trained the muscles on their fingers as much, and will have a hard time pressing the outer keys strongly enough (and if you press the keys too lightly, the mechanism won't hit the ink ribbon with enough force to transfer the ink to the paper).

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

#614

Post by sdevonoes »

sombragris wrote: post #606

I was born in 1970. My teenage years were in the 1980s, in coincidence with the emergence of the home computer. I had a Timex-Sinclair 1000, then a C64, then a C128. One of my main forces that drove myself to learn computers was (besides games) the ability to produce text that was clearly written and readable, thanks to word processors and printers, because my handwriting was abysmal, and I got tired very quickly whi…

> I'm finding AI increasingly harder to like.

That summarises pretty well the whole situation. AI is cool and all, but not worth it considering all the disadvantages

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

#615

Post by bradleyjg »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #598
yehoshuapw wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this isn't quite the right example - a pocket calculator does not need you to verify its output. It is better to be able to calculate, but if you can't seems much less a issue then using a AI without being able to do whatever you asked of it (So I fully agree with your point, but I think your example is not strong enough)

I think a better example is that we also don't allow people to pass their driving test in a Tesla with FSD.

Yes, that’s where we are today. Colleges definitely can’t avoid fundamentals right now. But at the same time, they should be skating ahead of the puck. Once the calculator has been invented—-even when it’s rare and awkward—-they begin easing off the slide rule reps.

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

#616

Post by boelboel »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #424
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.

Haven't you heard if you don't get one of these jobs and get a tc of 500k+ you're destined to the permanent underclass. So cheating is the answer.

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

#617

Post by [deleted] »

tancop wrote: post #491
jonahx wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 scho…

[deleted]

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

#618

Post by yubblegum »

Paracompact wrote: post #205
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…

> Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own. Unrelated, but once you get to a more mature level, say grad school and above, I can say this is not always the case! Just like it's easier sometimes to Roll Your Own Damn X in programming, so too are some expositions of proof so dense (necessarily or unnecessarily so) that it is a less taxing affair to simply figure it out yourself…

> The Socratic method with AI is sometimes more effort than it's worth.

lol, so true.

I think the main issue here is that LLMs don't have the ability to produce the terminal "I don't know".

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

#619

Post by derektank »

Espressosaurus wrote: post #514
derektank wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 av…

It's not JUST about output, it's also about learning . The output is a way to measure the learning, it's not important of itself except as a reflection of the student's mastery of the curriculum. You're thinking of the output as the goal rather than as the means to an end.

No, I’m not? As I said, you should assess whether people know the basics (I.e. are they learning) by testing without AI tools available. However, I believe you need to learn how to employ AI tools, just as you need to learn how to use a word processor. And the best way to do that is through experience.

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

#620

Post by lgcmo »

sombragris wrote: post #606

I was born in 1970. My teenage years were in the 1980s, in coincidence with the emergence of the home computer. I had a Timex-Sinclair 1000, then a C64, then a C128. One of my main forces that drove myself to learn computers was (besides games) the ability to produce text that was clearly written and readable, thanks to word processors and printers, because my handwriting was abysmal, and I got tired very quickly whi…

I was a teacher assistant circa 2023. I required every student to submit the assignments typed digitally, since grading a single handwritten one would take as much time as 5 typed. I saw a single fully AI generated assignment and it was laughable and an easy zero. I wonder how I would do it now.
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