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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

#661

Post by jmmcd »

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…

A lot of us went through a similar system and still retained both honour and desire to actually learn.

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

#662

Post by tpoacher »

cyberax wrote: post #475
encomiast wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

There are studies showing that cursive is better for some purposes: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... But the results are quite weak. What's really important is handwriting itself. Block letters are honestly fine. Writing in a good cursive (like the Spencerian script) is a bit faster and much easier on your hands, as you don't have to lift the pen as often. But that matters only when you…

> Writing in block letters was seen as a sign of illiteracy

How interesting. I've always thought the cyrillic block letters look beautiful, whereas the cursive variant not so much. I learnt some russian and I've never bothered writing cursive because of this perception. Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!

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

#664

Post by bpicolo »

peterbell_nyc wrote: post #637
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 th…

> require sessions with a tutoring AI

There are few things more unenjoyable than parroting things I know to AI. I hope this is not the future we create for the next generation

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

#666

Post by Royce-CMR »

I was home schooled - so my perspective of education is at best, unique. I finished a dual major undergrad at 18, got an MBA at 21.

Based on my own experiences and those of people I’ve watched, I have three points. Sample size of 1 and all that; but it’s a lowkey passion topic for me.

- The argument that AI is “the next calculator” and education testing and overall methods need to adapt, is true.

- The distance between learning concepts to passing memorization tests(or worse, non-reality test specific logic) has grown significantly in my lifetime, and the AI education problems are really a mix of the cascade impacts of this issue + the AI impacts on conventional education measures.

- The problem with students who use AI to get past (often arbitrary) difficult courses or testing scenarios may look like one problem compensating aka solving for another (and I love AI for it!) but the parallel problem of AI (and our education system baseline) enabling students to normalize non-cognitive drone like approaches to any problem is super problematic.

The last point is an admittedly recent eye opening moment for me. Working with younger students recently, they are shocked at anything less than a fully clearly defined problem (education system training) and anytime thinking is required, they go to AI (which is fine!) and they can’t think beyond the AI output (which is super not fine!) The latter has been astonishing for myself and coworkers and really has us reconsidering our young talent programs.

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

#667

Post by hansvm »

aetch wrote: post #419
hansvm wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for handwritten tests, but it's more complicated than that. If you're actually writing for 2hr+ and haven't studied appropriate technique or bought some sort of crutch like a pencil holder then the repetitive motion will absolutely cause cramps for a fraction of the class regardless of being 20ish and healthy, and they might not find that out until they're forced to write for 2hr. The muscles manipulating a p…

What are you even talking about? It’s normal for young students to be using a pencil to write for multiple hours in a day in school.

With breaks, and it's also normal that in a class of ~30 you'll still find a couple students with cramps.

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

#668

Post by jhbadger »

wnevets wrote: post #92
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…

Can you fit a decent LLM on a thumbdrive?

These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive

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

#669

Post by tpoacher »

Most people here seem to thank that the only realistic alternative for submitting code / written reports in the age of AI is handwritten invigilated exams.

So just mentioning my own anecdata here; I've had reasonable success converting a "code + written report" assignment into a "code + structured video report", where the code is assessed "exclusively" through the video report, and where the student needs to demonstrate ownership and understanding of the code, explain and defend design decisions, etc.

Yes, in principle it is possible for the student to generate a "script" and narrate it during the video presentation, but this is fairly easy to detect, and in general, given enough flexibility / subjectivity in the marking scheme, you can always downmark such students on the basis that their presentation demonstrated lack of understanding and ownership of the codebase, without having to go into too much specifics.

Obviously one implication of the above is that you no longer care if their code was "manually" written vs AI "assisted"; only if they have a good grasp / ownership of it, and can defend the broader architecture and design decisions. But I feel that this is realistic in the age of AI, since this is largely what will be expected from their future employers too.

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

#670

Post by anthonypasq »

azangru wrote: post #648
peterbell_nyc wrote: post #637

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?

does this mean that every student will need to pay a computer manufacturer to finish university?
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