Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside the university AI cheating crisis

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 113 posts

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#101

Post by antifa »

mnky9800n wrote: post #99
MrMcCall wrote: post #65

In an world with honorable human beings raised in Wisdom, we would understand that cheating only hurts ourselves in the long run, but that is not our world majority's ethical zeitgeist at the moment. The lack of ethics, like all selfishness, propagates inefficiencies into the greater society, as exemplified here for our overworked and underpaid teachers. Our son has become quite a good chess player over the past 6ish…

It could represent that the current zeitgeist doesn't believe in the system any longer and thus feels like cheating is a valid answer.

We live in an age when almost all our supposedly honest and self made heroes end up exposed as liars, grifters, cheaters, often with no shame and no consequences. The bad examples are coming from inside the house.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#102

Post by falcor84 »

christianqchung wrote: post #56
falcor84 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do we teach kids how to do basic arithmetic by hand? I think kids waste way too much time doing hard arithmetic by hand. As a particularly egregious example, I visited a Montessori primary school where they demonstrated what is essentially a complex single player board game, for calculating square roots by hand. It's a process whereby a 5th grader would take ~10 minutes to calculate the root of a 3 digit number…

This argument can be extended downwards infinitely. You can argue against teaching addition and writing of any form with this mindset. I also think this argument means that theoretically someone with a 6th grade education and a 12th grade education should have the same economic output, as they both know how to read and add/multiply numbers. In real life the reason someone drops out before/during high school is always…

There are too many confounding variables. But yes, I think that in a future world where kids who grow up in a stable family can choose to easily move between schooling and the real world (including work experience, travel, alternative education and just the occasional slacking off), you'll see improved outcomes for those who do these other things.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#103

Post by MrMcCall »

antifa wrote: post #101
mnky9800n wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could represent that the current zeitgeist doesn't believe in the system any longer and thus feels like cheating is a valid answer.

We live in an age when almost all our supposedly honest and self made heroes end up exposed as liars, grifters, cheaters, often with no shame and no consequences. The bad examples are coming from inside the house.

And their effects are multiplied because most people have zero connection with compassion, making them easily fooled by the most bald-faced of liars. We are filled with a world full of people "too stupid to know how stupid they are".

We must utilize and orient our moral compass consciously in accordance with universal compassion, or we are susceptible to the ravings of the powerful, who, as you accurately said, tend to be callously cruel liars who crave only money, power, and pleasure, at the cost of anyone and everyone.

Peace be with you.

"The Way goes in." --Rumi

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#104

Post by shadowerm »

rinzero wrote: post #82

AI ripped the cover off of a dirty secret of higher education: The bulk of assignments are useless busywork using outdated formats, and educators and educational institutions haven't been motivated to change it. Instead of realizing this and embracing the theories and models of newer education sciences, most institutions have become near ideologues with their inertia.

I would say it is an even deeper issue of credentialism vs education.

True education doesn't need busywork but credentialism does. The busywork is the filter for the credential.

Also, if a person doesn't write essays in college how are we going to have all these authors that turn 20 pages of ideas into 300 page books? It would ruin the whole book industry. It takes a ton of practice to uncompress an idea into a coherent structure using 10X more words than needed so the book is the optimal length for sale when printed.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#105

Post by s08148692 »

indymike wrote: post #12

This is an easy to solve problem: oral exams / interview exams.

Imagine an oral c++ algorithms and data structures exam

This isn't just essays, AI will happily output any known algorithm you ask for in a few seconds. CS coursework can be almost entirely automated in many cases

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#106

Post by me_me_me »

mmooss wrote: post #34

We need validation of GPT detection tool accuracy (false/true & negative/positive), and in what circumstances, or they are useless. Without independent information about whether something is GPT-written [1], there is no way to verify it, so they can't be verified on submitted student papers where the info is from people (students) with very strong incentives to lie (not wanting to be caught). Here are a couple refere…

Is that even feasible? You can affect LLMs output by asking them to form response as some specific person with specific style.

Apart some hidden secret sauce by the LLM provider, detection is always going to be an arms race.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#107

Post by mmooss »

me_me_me wrote: post #106
mmooss wrote: post #34

We need validation of GPT detection tool accuracy (false/true & negative/positive), and in what circumstances, or they are useless. Without independent information about whether something is GPT-written [1], there is no way to verify it, so they can't be verified on submitted student papers where the info is from people (students) with very strong incentives to lie (not wanting to be caught). Here are a couple refere…

Is that even feasible? You can affect LLMs output by asking them to form response as some specific person with specific style. Apart some hidden secret sauce by the LLM provider, detection is always going to be an arms race.

> Is that even feasible?

If you mean, is it feasible to empirically test the accuracy of detection software when the LLM output is so varied? That's an interesting question.

Is there a way to create a representative sample of LLM output for testing purposes? That's an important question, not least because we'd also be able to define the distribution and range of outputs (unless there's a statistical way to create a sample without knowing those things?).

It goes to the question of how deterministic is the output? How predictable, even statistically?

Maybe we just work with a large collection of output. Or maybe we can create a sample of inputs (the prompts), and work from that.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#108

Post by michaelmior »

sabbaticaldev wrote: post #95
michaelmior wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a current academic who uses Turnitin regularly, I find it works fairly well. There are a lot of false positives, but it also regularly identifies actual plagiarism for me.

For what’s worth (for you) the results would be the same if it identified all of them as plagiarism

No, it would definitely not. There are a number of false positives, but significantly less than all submissions. It also specifically highlights areas of concerns along with a cross-reference for me to review. I would not be able to do all this manually.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#109

Post by michaelmior »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #80
michaelmior wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a current academic who uses Turnitin regularly, I find it works fairly well. There are a lot of false positives, but it also regularly identifies actual plagiarism for me.

"lots of false positives" Maybe this is okay when we're talking about plagiarism and you can review manually, but humans can't reliably identify LLM written text

Totally agreed. I'm personally only relying on it to identify cases of material which was directly (with minimal changes) copied from a third party source without attribution.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#110

Post by krunck »

zer8k wrote: post #77
gizajob wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying for a couple of years now that academic essays are going to have to go back to being handwritten. It seems like possibly the only solution. The job of essays isn't to produce a Word document of text that can get a grade above 70 - it's to demonstrate and improve the student's writing and thinking. The computer seems to have now completely messed this up.

If the goal is to improve something don't make it worth 50% of your grade. When you attach a literal degree to something being done "right" and not "demonstrated considerable improvement" you're going to get people that game the system. When you then make me pay $30,000 or more for a piece of paper you will get people that seek an edge. I did my fair share of underhanded tricks in school because I didnt want to pay a…

No one said anything about things 'being done "right" and not "demonstrated considerable improvement"'. Improvement and meeting the rubric is all that is expected in my wife's class. My wife has significantly dropped expectations over the years she has taught. And some students still think they can just whine, cheat, and play victim to get whatever grade they want rather than just working hard.
Post reply on HN