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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

#671

Post by anthonypasq »

sithadmin wrote: post #607
atakan_gurkan wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grading cannot be automated easily and becomes time consuming.

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

the existence of scantron and the laziness of teachers have turned nearly all assessments into multiple choice which is a terrible type of question. Now we have the technology to have better more signal-heavy types of questions to also be graded automatically. seems like a good thing.

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

#672

Post by tengwar2 »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #639
tengwar2 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They have, but antiquity is not necessarily a good argument. I attended a university which required examinees to wear a black suit, white bow tie, bands, and a gown. I don't recommend it.

But this is missing the point. The issue is not that people in general can't write by hand for hours, but that these particular people may have difficulty.

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

#673

Post by pixlmint »

bradleyjg wrote: post #585
pixlmint wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently getting my Bachelor's in Computer Science, while in-person is absolutely necessary, it doesn't necessarily need to be hand-written. We now have the exam questions printed out, and we respond on the online exam platform, just like we would before. It is explicitly stated that no aids, including AI, are permitted. There's usually the prof and at least one more TA walking around the room, if anyone is seen…

In 2024, we had some coding exams, and AI was explicitly NOT forbidden, which lead to them making the exam more difficult (because with AI, you can solve it so much more quickly, so gotta make it harder), which was really annoying, because it made it practically impossible to solve it yourself because of the time crunch. I hope they realized how wrong that was. There should be at least one class, probably more, that…

I don't really see the value in testing something like this in the exam format. We have a lot of programming projects we do, where software engineering is the primary focus, and there I think is space to give an introduction on how to use AI for software engineering, what to avoid, current best practices.

But the class I was talking about in my earlier comment was specifically on the fundamentals of programming (how to write a for loop, how to write and call functions... all that sorta stuff). If you need AI to complete this, why even get the degree. Maybe in 10-20 years we'll think differently about this, but as it stands right now, I think someone holding a degree in computer science should absolutely know the fundamentals of computer programming.

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

#674

Post by vel0city »

cyberax wrote: post #473
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist. For righties.

You can write cursive left-handed just fine, slanting letters the other way helps. I'm right-handed, but I had to learn left-handed cursive at school when I spent 5 months with a cast on my right hand.

Being left-handed I've done left-handed cursive for far more than 5 months. I pushed myself to also try and learn to write right-handed. In a left-to-right writing style, its more than just slanting the letters slightly the other way. In the end, the right-hander is overall dragging the pen across the page while the lefty is overall pushing the pen across the page.

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

#675

Post by recursivedoubts »

1659447091 wrote: post #331
recursivedoubts wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More expensive than you'd think, but I am pushing for something like that.

> More expensive than you'd think Even a setup with cheap Raspberry Pi's? And Vim. (built-in bonus points for students being able to save and exit). Was just reading about LEAP[0][1] that thought you may find interesting if you have not yet seen it. Separately, wanted to say I enjoyed your essay and appreciate how you think about improvement with a focus on the practical usefulness for the student. TL;DR: I especiall…

less the hardware (although that is still expensive at scale) and more the management, physical space and maintenance.

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

#676

Post by xhkkffbf »

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?

I'm much older. I've always been able to type faster than I can write by hand. Forcing me to handwrite an answer slows me down -- and produces something that's much harder to read.

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

#678

Post by buzzcut_ »

I took an EE course last year that had a pretty effective way to assess, in my opinion.

Exams are definitely in person. Homework is not graded, except that once a week, one problem would be randomly selected from the homework for an in class quiz. The numbers would be changed up.

From my perspective, you didn't really have a choice but to be able to solve all of the problems on the homework unless you wanted to gamble failing that week's quiz. The answer key and AI are always available, but the learning got to happen on my terms. It was a good balance. And grading for the professor was relatively light since it was only one problem per student.

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

#679

Post by hasteg »

jhbadger wrote: post #663

Even before AI, take home exams were a bad idea. In theory students were supposed to promise to work alone and not share work but in practice many people, especially those taking the class with friends, worked together.

When I was studying my CS degree (2018-2022) it was actually encouraged to work together outside of classes with fellow students. We had a CS discord run by the school (or maybe volunteers from the school? I dunno) with diff channels for different classes. I also worked a ton on studying with my friend who was in a lot of the same classes as me. I think that was insanely helpful, especially for a lot of the theory heavy classes it was great to have someone to bounce ideas off.

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

#680

Post by nearlyepic »

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…

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