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Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

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Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#161

Post by bird0861 »

heddycrow wrote: post #20
Someone1234 wrote: post #6

I've started do this on social media. I got "called out" after using big words or using a - in a sentence. So now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt. As soon as someone yells "witch" you cannot disprove you're not one, and I've even had people put my handwritten comments through "AI detector" websites that "proved" they were AI (they weren't).…

Here's one vote for just be the witch if that's what people need from you. Just make it be what you want to say and how you want to say it. And when they come after you, shame them to the best of your ability or treat them like they are not there.

A good general rule in life is that people get one chance to show why they're not worth communicating with, and that's it.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#162

Post by Wowfunhappy »

> Rather than taking a “guilt-first” approach, he took one that dealt with reality and focused on what would actually be best for the learning environment: teach students to use the tools appropriately, not as a shortcut, and don’t start from a position of suspicion.

Then no one learns to write.

And someone will argue that writing is outdated, and maybe thinking is outdated, and no one needs to learn it anymore. But AI isn't actually better at writing than the best humans, it's just better at writing than students, who are still learning the craft. And in order to reach a point where you're better than the AI, you have to practice without the AI.

I think we need more writing to be done in proctored environments. Yes this sucks, for students who will need to work under some amount of time pressure, and for faculty and staff who will need to proctor. But it's the only way.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#163

Post by carcabob »

ghaff wrote: post #59
carcabob wrote: post #36

A few times in some Discord communities, I've been accused of being A.I. because of how I write. Kind of sad and a bit annoying. I also quite like em dashes, but have felt the need to reduce how much I use them. Glad to see some schools and teachers teach how to use them well, rather than ban them outright.

em-dashes have been house style for where I've worked for over a couple decades. If people don't like it, F them. I'm not going to change how I write because people may think it make me more AI-like.

I am not actively changing how I write, but I think it's still affecting me, is what I meant to say.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#164

Post by Wowfunhappy »

abathur wrote: post #101
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have spent several days structuring a 20 page argument in October on any topic you'll have learnt a great deal about the subject matter. When you get to the exam hall in, say, May it will stand to you. That knowledge will show up in the blue book vis-a-vis the other exam candidates.

Sure--yes--the student will learn something if they actually wrote a 20-page paper on some given topic. But how are you going to evaluate their ability to compose the 20-page argument ? I would prefer not to be confrontational here, but I am having a hard time imagining that you've deeply considered the pedagogy of how to teach and evaluate students on squishy skills like this. Knowing a bunch of facts about somethin…

I think schools need to set up additional, new proctoring sessions for this type of work. This will likely be something they have to hire for. A student can come and work for four hours, then hand in their in-progress draft and leave, then return later to finish it. (And please for the love of god, let students do this on offline computers, don't make them handwrite everything!)

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#165

Post by gitaarik »

dawatchusay wrote: post #13

Did they not even test their AI detection tool to verify that it can detect when something is human written? That should have been exactly as important as the opposite. Maybe a tool that checked that would be equally as ineffective and we’d move on from the subject entirely

How can you be sure it's human written if the oh so reliable AI AI detection tool tells you it isn't?

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#166

Post by pibaker »

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #40

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They ca…

Let's just focus on CS for a moment because this is HN and I have a CS degree. How do you evaluate a student's ability to implement a piece of non trivial software following a specification that would take, say, over five thousand lines? This is a fairly common type of coursework for CS students. It's not possible to do it in one exam setting. Well, unless you can type continuously without having to stop to think or check your work.

What will likely happen if you have to force all evaluation into one exam is you will get a Leetcode style programming quiz, that tests something, except that something is only barely connected to your daily job after college. Or you end up with something like a multiple choice exam that is again disconnected from your work and can be gamed by studying just for the exam.

This exact line of argument that we should just abolish coursework keeps coming up on HN. Courseworks exist for a purpose. You can't just throw it away and pretend it never did anything useful.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#167

Post by pibaker »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #164
abathur wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure--yes--the student will learn something if they actually wrote a 20-page paper on some given topic. But how are you going to evaluate their ability to compose the 20-page argument ? I would prefer not to be confrontational here, but I am having a hard time imagining that you've deeply considered the pedagogy of how to teach and evaluate students on squishy skills like this. Knowing a bunch of facts about somethin…

I think schools need to set up additional, new proctoring sessions for this type of work. This will likely be something they have to hire for. A student can come and work for four hours, then hand in their in-progress draft and leave, then return later to finish it. (And please for the love of god, let students do this on offline computers, don't make them handwrite everything!)

What stops a student from going home and asking chatGPT to write about few bullet points about how to answer and coming back the next day doing what chatGPT told him to do?

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#168

Post by mold_aid »

ipcress_file wrote: post #107
with wrote: post #90

nobody's asking who profits from false positives. these AI detection vendors have a direct financial incentive to flag aggressively. more flags = "more value" = more school contracts renewed. same playbook as selling antivirus to your grandma. sell fear, charge per seat, and make the false positive rate someone else's problem.

Do you have any evidence to back this up or is it speculative? My institution subscribes to TurnItIn's AI detector. The documentation is quite clear that the system is tuned in a manner that produces a significant number of false negatives and minimizes false positives. They also state that they don't report anything under "20% AI-generated" content. So the marketing I've seen is intended to reassure skittish adminis…

>So the marketing I've seen is intended to reassure skittish administrators that the software is not going to generate false accusations.

This is it, right here. All policy I've seen lately has been geared towards students having expanded "due process" rights.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#169

Post by mold_aid »

bird0861 wrote: post #160
mold_aid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know you can't just say "I detect AI written prose" and then do whatever you want about it, right? It's not difficult, sure, to detect it. It's difficult to prove that it's true and then punish the student for it.

It's very easy to convince yourself it's true and then hand out punishment like it was on sale.

I suppose the hard part then is sitting through 26 grade appeals.

Re: Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

#170

Post by foxglacier »

pibaker wrote: post #166
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #40

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester. How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term? All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They ca…

Let's just focus on CS for a moment because this is HN and I have a CS degree. How do you evaluate a student's ability to implement a piece of non trivial software following a specification that would take, say, over five thousand lines? This is a fairly common type of coursework for CS students. It's not possible to do it in one exam setting. Well, unless you can type continuously without having to stop to think or…

A clever solution my professor did was we write the program in our own time, then take the code into an exam where we have to modify it to answer some novel question. It doesn't matter if we "cheated" writing the code as long as we understand it enough to change its behavior.
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