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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

#631

Post by intended »

ZiiS wrote: post #605
cycomanic wrote: post #568

> When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34…

Are you asking for the president to make a snap decision undermining the authority of the Academic Code Committee? How to teach and test students who have to start work under the current AI frenzy let alone who will still be working alongside whatever it becomes in forty years is an extreammly under-researched and unanswerable question. Even an interim answer will require the full consideration of the faculty and bey…

I agree with your position, however the absolute silence, as quoted, paints it in a poor light.

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

#632

Post by intended »

Another amazing benefit of AI, the increased expense of training and teaching.

I’ve studied in classes of 40 to 50 students to one teacher. The challenge of grading students at that ratio, means you need automation. It also reduces the kind of teaching possible. You really can’t provide one on one attention when you have multiple classes of 40+ students to teach.

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

#633

Post by shagie »

robcohen wrote: post #168
shagie wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them. ... And there are jobs that use those skills. Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/ My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order…

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?

It's a matter of spending 200 to 300 hours of practice on it.

Learning cursive (and other skills) in school is about trying to make sure opportunities for professions are not excluded.

While cursive is not a foundational skill (compare math and reading), it is a way to train fine motor control.

And it's not only the dental surgeons, but also dental hygienists... and doctors and surgeons (anyone who uses a scalpel). One could also look at various craftsmen such as jewelers and watchmakers.

Learning cursive is a way to make sure that we don't exclude people at an early age from professions that they might want to go into.

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

#634

Post by lmc »

lgcmo wrote: post #620
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.

Ah yes, the good old days.

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

#635

Post by a1o »

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…

Meanwhile I had to do VHDL to design a chip and then write code for it in paper, and get the actual solution the software that was meant to run in my imaginary processor to work, detailing both the code and what we thought our code was doing. Teacher and TAs would later make it run in a Xilinx to grade and make themselves available at a few hours if you wanted to discuss your grade/solution with them at a later time with the thing actually running in a board.

We had 3 hours to make the test. The papers the teacher delivered had differences between them (I think it was four different versions of the test?). The Teacher didn’t stay in the class also, you had to deliver the test to them later in their office.

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

#636

Post by intended »

rocqua wrote: post #504
sgustard wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

The issue is that education is the only way to get a well paying job. This means that students aren’t there to study the subject, they are there to get to a job.

When further education wasn’t mandatory, things like the honor code made sense.

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

#637

Post by peterbell_nyc »

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…

The problem isn't the AI - it's the assessments. It used to be that shipping a large, well-researched essay with multiple citations was proof of work. Now it's proof of prompting, not learning or effort.

If you want to test for memorization, you need a live test to do so.

If you want to test for comprehension and understanding, require sessions with a tutoring AI and grade the level of comprehension exhibited.

And then please, please test for prompting with challenging assignments that would usually be beyond a student's skills and make sure they know how to drive the machines to do valued work.

I totally agree that there is utility in memorization and comprehension. I also know that by the time students graduate, AI will be the job and if they can't pair successfully with agentic workflows they will not be much use in the work force for many roles.

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

#638

Post by doodlesdev »

fn-mote wrote: post #365
doodlesdev wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's exactly the point! By making sure the student can't edit the entire text once its written, you force him to think about the essay's structure and force him to plan much more before writing :)

Sure, but you know that professionals edit, right? It improves the quality of the product.

Absolutely! That's why they are students: you learn to walk before you learn to run. Students should be forced to plan their texts and practice getting better at that. Whenever they leave school, they'll be able to write even better texts than the essays.

Honestly, school essays, as a text genre, suck to read. They are not meant to be enjoyable, beautiful texts! Instead, they are meant to help gauge the student's ability at text planning, the quality of their text project, their grammatical knowledge, and orthography.

I must say I'd be open to seeing schools attempting other models, though, and measuring the results thereafter to see in practice what happens when students type their essays instead. In terms of text projects and planning, that could be interesting and train different skills.

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

#639

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

tengwar2 wrote: post #191
forgetfreeman wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm 60+. I'd be more concerned about the student's physical ability to write for several hours continuously. Writer's cramp used to be a problem, and that was when we were used to hand-writing everything. Legibility is also a consideration: I have to hand-write a lot(keyboards would not be socially acceptable for some of my work), and even with decades of practice and a hand that I designed for legibility, sometimes…

We have to notice that high stakes exams on paper worked for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, and high stakes exams on personal laptops have been tried for approximately six years and worked for none of them. With that framing, I don’t think the burden of proof is on the side saying that kids can take exams on paper?
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