Couldn't students ask AI to make a oral defense plan?
Did you know that there is a foolproof way to cheat on any exam? You can just store the answers in your brain. They won't even notice you cheated.
Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
121–130 of 284 posts
Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oral exams are still common in Germany and many European countries in case of smaller courses taken by 20-30 students in a semester, and sometimes even in larger courses, and the task of examining is then split among multiple professors and lecturers. In Hungary it's a pipeline. You go in a room, you pick a piece of paper out of a hat, which gives you some task or topic to prepare for. Then you sit down at a desk (th…
I'm not familiar with the German universiry system, but I think a 1 hour, 2 professors (or one professor and one PhD student) would be impossible to scale. A class of about 100 students could take an entire month! (or better, 2-months of professor-hours!)
At low student counts, like 20, (think specialist niche elective master's courses, not the huge bachelor's courses) it's perceived by profs as more efficient in fact than the ordeal of organizing a written exam.
With an oral exam, the prof blocks off 3 days or so, with ~8 students per day and it's done. It's not a huge additional effort compared to all the effort of giving the course over the full semester anyway.
An added, though minor benefit is that the professor might decide to offer a student assistant job to someone who performs well, because it's much easier to judge who is actually good in an oral exam vs in written. There's a reason that job interviews aren't just tests filled out on paper but involve personal interactions.
Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#123This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments. But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word. When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be han…
I think you have the right observation but the wrong conclusion.
The appeal of digital systems, at a social level, is that they can transmit information accurately for almost no marginal cost. They come at the risk of fraud.
With AI the levels of risk have increased. Anyone can now be a fraudster, and it gets harder and harder to prove anything online. Either of us two, in this conversation, could be a well tuned LLM.
So society, collectively and at an individual level, is forced to reassess reliance on purely digital information. Which means that the advances in the technology, actually end up reducing the utility of digital systems more generally.
You can argue that this makes education costly and less accessible. It does. It absolutely does. There is also no alternative except to see higher education get wiped out, which would have devastating economic and social effects.
So we are going back to blue books and vivas.
Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#124Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#125This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments. But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word. When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be han…
> Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective? Universities are entirely elective…
I feel this was already a severe problem pre-AI. From what I hear from my partner (in university administration), nearly half the students demand accomodations for disabilities. Many of those conditions are very difficult to falsify
It doesn't feel good, but at some point we have to ask, can we support every single case, at the expense of the whole? I'd like to be convinced that's not a necessary tradeoff
Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#126That's going to be a hard test. Have you ever heard Danish?
Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#127As an educator myself, this quarter for the first time for my course's final project, I've switched to actually asking my students to provide an "AI Authenticity Audit" of their (project-relevant) chats in the construction of said projects. All my students' output over the last two years went from pre-AI level quality to boardroom-ready polish, and I'm actually more interested to see how they arrive at an outcome rather than the final output itself - focusing on their questioning, curating, editing, and iterating process. Didn't think we'd get to somewhere like this so soon, but here we are. Strange, but I'm trying it out.
Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#128This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's ve…
Welcome to the real world. One cannot be coddled forever.
Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#129This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's ve…
I have always disliked public speaking and oral defense since I was a child, to the point of fairly profound anxiety. But please withhold you woe—these people are, as I am today, adults. Masters students. Coddling them and holding low expectations has proven to be a sort of “killing them with kindness” approach to handling modern youth. People need to be encouraged (and required) to do things they don’t like to becom…
> But please withhold you woe
as a side note, "woe betide you" roughly means "you're in for a very bad time", not "I feel sorry for you".
Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
#130Watching tech cannibalize itself is about as entertaining as watching Hollywood do it in the mid-2000s.