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Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

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Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#51

Post by piloto_ciego »

protocolture wrote: post #42
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I’m enrolled in an online degree program and use of AI in exams would be quite difficult. The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify…

Thats my experience + they are listening the whole time. A loud noise from another room disqualified a coworker of mine.

Hell, I got flagged for possible cheating in an online proctored test because I had a whiteboard behind me that had unrelated equations on it or some nonsense. I didn't even look at them lol.

The instructor reviewed the footage, laughed, and said, "wow, what a pain in the butt to deal with" and cancelled the alert or whatever. Almost all the classes I've taken online have been way harder for potential cheating than in person classes.

I'll say this too, I took a course called something like "applied mathematical methods" online a long time ago. That class's final basically said, "use whatever resources you want except for other people" - ChatGPT would have probably made short work of the exam, but at the time, even with the power of the internet about 10 years ago, there's no way I could have used it to help me. I doubt even teaming up would have helped that much to be honest lol.

I had 24 hours to do the test and it was pretty hard to get done in that time. I think it took me something like 5 or 6 hours to do it? Making your tests muderously difficult is one way to handle the temptation to cheat in online courses. I don't know that that's the best solution from a pedagogy standpoint, but hey, I'm not a prof.

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#52

Post by episteme »

iepathos wrote: post #45

The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way? Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Cal…

I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for things that can be prompted. You still need to understand the why behind things, being able to reason about them and choose between options. How will you teach this level of understanding or certify them without exams?

Of course, not all testing is good, but the written exam has survived and proven useful despite the internet age, I'm not sure an even better search engine really changes that.

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#53

Post by yamillove »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #50
yamillove wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had read the whole sentence, you would have found a few other words, which say “just because you have privilege.” All men are created equal. Civic duties apply equally to everyone. Once people have met their legal obligations (say, paying taxes and obeying the law), any additional generosity is voluntary, not owed, so having more privilege does not automatically create greater moral obligations. Say, I am beau…

What an odd world view. Of course the priviliged have greater social obligations, because they are greater benefactors of life. We're all equal under the law but that doesn't mean that those with greater means shouldn't have greater impacts on society. Meritocracy is often a buzzword of the elite to avoid paying their fair share.

[flagged]

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#54

Post by piloto_ciego »

overgard wrote: post #49
piloto_ciego wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc. I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something. Now what's t…

While I think there are a lot of problems created by capitalism right now, I would argue that nothing about the current AI industry is actually capitalist at all. These are companies that are surviving despite absolutely bleeding cash because the ultra-rich have decided that things would be so much more convenient for them if they didn't need to deal with employees anymore. This isn't "well, people are doing this bec…

Honestly, and this is my "hot take of the decade" but I think we're going to get some sort of AI modulated/managed form of capitalism that will approach socialism in some regards but still allow for people to try to "get rich" or whatever.

What that's going to look like I couldn't begin to imagine, but I think you might onto something about the AI industry not being all that capitalistic presently. Not an economist, but we're definitely in oligopoly territory here? Because there are only like 4-5 serious companies here.

I too may be accused of having the faith that it's "all going to work out" though. I think it will. I think when things start getting weird enough a bunch of creative people will figure out logical solutions that work in the moment and we'll run with those. Barring revolution, that's kind of how things have always been. Things get weird, then we figure out how to fix it or go to blows over it. I think going to blows domestically is pretty unlikely as of yet though despite the "dooooom" narrative that a lot of people tout.

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#55

Post by versteegen »

Drupon wrote: post #40
cm2012 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people, college is a box to check off. And individual classes are even more so.

The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago. People were like this a few decades ago as well when I got my degree. I didn't have consistently great classmates until honors and accelerated grad courses in my 3rd and 4th year, along with various domain specific student orgs like groups for hardware hacking, computer s…

> The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college

Seems obvious now that this is the solution. Unfortunately, universities would never agree to downsize, not due to politics or any US-specific problems.

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#56

Post by mattas »

iepathos wrote: post #45

The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way? Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Cal…

Why bother learning anything when you can just use AI?

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#57

Post by MarsIronPI »

mattas wrote: post #56
iepathos wrote: post #45

The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way? Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Cal…

Why bother learning anything when you can just use AI?

So you can call out the AI's mistakes. Everyone seems to be saying that AI is really good, except at their particular field. Make of that what you will.

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#58

Post by versteegen »

iepathos wrote: post #45

The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way? Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Cal…

> whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing ... It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category

It's very clear from the (excellent) article linked by dang [1] what the exams required:

> This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” In this case, Serrano changed some of the model assumptions they had seen in class, and asked students to demonstrate whether certain statements were true or false under the new assumptions.

[1] https://english.elpais.com/education/2026-06-28/ai-fraud-at-...

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#59

Post by eventualcomp »

lapcat wrote: post #3

> Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. I stopped reading after the first sentence.

Why jump on the opportunity to prune reading by rejecting the lot as soon an unrelated premise you disagree with is presented?

Perhaps at that point if you stop reading after the first sentence, you could churn the entire article through AI to summarize it into a single sentence, and see if the invalid premise is core to the message?

Re: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

#60

Post by phist_mcgee »

yamillove wrote: post #53
phist_mcgee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an odd world view. Of course the priviliged have greater social obligations, because they are greater benefactors of life. We're all equal under the law but that doesn't mean that those with greater means shouldn't have greater impacts on society. Meritocracy is often a buzzword of the elite to avoid paying their fair share.

[flagged]

>America is the Greatest Country on Earth

Yeah ok mate. Have a good one.

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