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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

#653
there are quite a few companies are developing 'proctoring' system to defeat the cheat so you can take self-exam in realtime and everything will be recorded and anything suspicious will be reported, that should be a must-have these days unless something better come out? or current products are not doing their jobs well?

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> And then please, please test for prompting with challenging assignments that would usually be beyond a student's skills Does this mean you will requre all students to pay for a subscription to an llm provider?

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

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be a huge discrimination problem. I (as part of a small team) run the IT side of exams for a UK University and as well as the many exams intended to be taken entirely with computers, we also deliberately have an exam that's always marked as "Available to take" regardless of where on campus you are and what machine you're using, that exam just launches a stripped down Microsoft Word, with no way to start…

Accommodations for those who have problems with writing has been a thing for a long time. It's fascinating to see all the people here who are arguing that it is impossible to do what we did all the time in my step-daughter's childhood, my childhood, my parents' childhoods, my grandparents' childhoods, etc.

> Accommodations for those who have problems with writing has been a thing for a long time.

What is practical changes over time. Insistence that "We always did X => That's enough" makes no sense in a universe where the only constant is change itself.

In 1926 it's not really practical to even have a global voice conversation, even world leaders must travel in person to properly negotiate or send trusted negotiators. By 1976 you can just pick up a phone and call from say Birmingham in England to Birmingham in Alabama, because why not. By 2026 you don't even think about which Birmingham the other party is in, they're both on the Network so you can talk to them, who cares?

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

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are optimizing for themselves, which almost always means getting a job. Instead they should optimize for keeping a job. Since you mention Amazon, I work there as a senior software engineer (almost 10 years of tenure) and the quality of interns has massively degraded since LLMs are available. The result is that where the majority of interns used to receive return offers, now the vast majority doesn't. Similarly…

That is funny, because job hopping has been the recommended advice on this forum for 2 decades, especially job hopping away from Amazon to greener pastures.

Leaving a company in less than 6 months is not regarded as job hopping by anyone.

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

#657

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?

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.

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

Pen and paper are literally designed to produce text.

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

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The student has to submit one exam. The grader has to grade N exams.

Which is literally what graduate students get paid to do. How do you think English, philosophy, or history tests get graded?

Do you think every institution of higher education has a ready supply of grad students to just throw at problems that require manpower?

Or were you just assuming your experiences (large university, I'm guessing) are universal?

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

#659
post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should anything more complicated than what could be automated with a paper ScanTron form really be subject to automated grading anyway?

Right? For all the money paid by modern students is it unreasonable to expect some expert human interaction? The cost explosion has been centered outside the classroom, elsewhere in the org, so can't play that card.

You should see how little many of the people providing that expert human interaction are paid. My wife is a professor (in the humanities) with 2 decades of experience and degrees from excellent schools, gets top reviews from students as well and she barely earns enough to live on. If I weren't in tech we would be financially destitute. She already works 60 hours a week with just the courses, prep, grading and meetings she has... any more and she would probably just keel over and faint.

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

#660

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.

All my university (Oxford, UK) exams were in-person and had written. I had 6 exams over 6 days in 2012, in which my entire undergraduate degree was examined.

It's not easy, but I think that method is just as good (or bad) now as it was then.

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