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Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

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Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#151

Post by fabian2k »

datahack wrote: post #56

This 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…

Oral exams can also compensate a lot for different types of exam anxiety. Blanking on individual points doesn't matter as much, the examiner will help you along or ask along a different path. Doesn't help for someone that completely shuts down, but it's much easier to determine if a student was just stuck on some minor point and actually knows the topic in an oral exam.

They are likely prone to more biases than written exams, and the variability among examiners is likely high. My experience is both in taking these exams myself, and also sitting in on them as the note taker many times. Though that was only with one specific professor, and almost always on the same course. But that was in my experience a very fair exam, even for those students that were very noticeably nervous.

Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#152

Post by audreyfei »

oynqr wrote: post #121
sudo_cowsay wrote: post #117

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.

maybe the policy will succeed in encouraging learning for most students (at least I hope so!!); otherwise some might still rely on ai because of the trust they've built up with it, a lack of connection to and therefore faith in the info they're expected to just memorize, low confidence in their abilities, etc

Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#154

Post by khazhoux »

talon8635 wrote: post #106
azalemeth wrote: post #3

This 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…

Classic “get over it” condescension. Some people are unable to control their strong physiological reaction to in-person judgement. Go tell professional orchestra players who rely on propranolol to control their stage fright to just grow up and start becoming a “proper functioning adult.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.70031

https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-night-at-the-symphony/ar...

Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#155

Post by Neil44 »

datahack wrote: post #56

This 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 graduated in 2000 and remember doing the oral defence. It wasn't a huge deal. You already have a personal relationship with your tutors and they are familiar with you and your communication style. They are not the Gestapo.

Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#156

Post by otterley »

hackyhacky wrote: post #146
otterley wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a customer in the same way that a martial arts student is a customer: getting your butt kicked is literally what you're paying for.

Sure. And just like with a martial arts student, if you kick their butt too hard, you will lose the customer and might get sued.

Sued for giving out hard work assignments? That doesn't sound plausible. Under what theory would a student have a case?

Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#157

Post by cpburns2009 »

khazhoux wrote: post #154
talon8635 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Classic “get over it” condescension. Some people are unable to control their strong physiological reaction to in-person judgement. Go tell professional orchestra players who rely on propranolol to control their stage fright to just grow up and start becoming a “proper functioning adult.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.70031 https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-night-at-the-symphony/ar...

Good luck working in the real world if you can't handle interpersonal interactions or being judged. The coddling has to stop. It's doing no one any good.

Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#158

Post by IFC_LLC »

I mean, this is pretty much the easiest way of handling the problem.

When I was teaching in a university the easiest thing to test someone's understanding was a simple question: "Explain me how would you use this in a day-to-day situation."

If the guy knows his business, he'll go on a long lecture obsessing over every new feature of C# 2.0 or PHP 3. He would give you all the differences between Firefox 3.5.1 and IE 6 with Maxthon. (Goddamn I'm freaking old)

Should you not find a spark of interest but just random mumbo-jumbo of words that don't constitute sentences, you can clearly see that there is no understanding present in the subject.

In this case you work as a teacher, helping the guy to figure out what he does not understand in a subject and simplifying things for him till this clicks. After that he will be able to talk about said subject for hours with gusto.

Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#159

Post by Athas »

azalemeth wrote: post #3

This 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…

Clarification for non-Danes: this post is not entirely accurate. Not all Master's courses in Denmark have oral examinations, and many courses before the Master's level (including elementary school) have oral exams. It is unrelated to the academic level, and instead related to the academic discipline and the size of the course. The latter is in my experience the main constraint, as oral exams are difficult to scale. They usually take 20-30 minutes per student, and if you have a course with 200 students, well, you're in for a long time.

The oral exam format described is also somewhat unusual, in my experience. It is usually the case that there is one internal examiner and one external examiner in the room. More than that would be ruinously expensive. The format varies; usually it's a combination of a short presentation and questions asked by the examiner. Drawing a random topic is very common.

Source: I am a university teacher in Denmark who teaches master-level courses without oral exams, and I have been an examiner for many oral exams at university level.

Re: Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

#160

Post by otterley »

bonoboTP wrote: post #82
otterley wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happens when American students first join US universities too. It takes a few weeks for freshmen to get acquainted with the new reality of being completely responsible for handling their affairs and ensuring their success. It’s nothing to slam them about; that’s an artifact of coming from a system that provides more guide rails during primary education and childhood than European children might enjoy.

American colleges give way more support throughout the studies though. In Europe you're literally alone and nobody cares if you miss deadlines or you're failing out. No general consultations, no extra departments and admin bloat. You have to have your shit together.

It really depends on the university. Mine wasn't particularly helpful in this regard. They sent me a form-letter warning by mail once, when my GPA sank too low one quarter (this was before email was ubiquitous). And they did have some counseling resources available, but the resource-to-student ratio was very, very low. I would not call it white-glove service by any means.

Perhaps you also don't have a comprehensive picture as to what is available to students across every university in Europe. Europe, like America, is a big place and, like America, the situation probably varies by institution. As with most things, the answer is probably more nuanced than general observations would make it seem.

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