Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by intended » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #157

lich_king wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with predictive policing. I don't understand this example, it has nothing to do with detecting intent. You're looking for evidence of a past misdeed. False positive and false negative rates are non-zero, as with almost anything, but the tools are pretty good. I encourage you to give them a try. Pangram is a good state-of-the-art choice and you can try it for free. They also publish evals and othe…

> but the tools are pretty good. I encourage you to give them a try. I have given them a try and can confirm the exact opposite. Plenty of others have given them tries and have confirmed the exact opposite. Regardless, the “better for a hundred guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to hang” principle applies here.

No it doesn't.

This is armchair philosophy when pragmatism and problem solving serve better.

Fundamentals - Teaching is expensive, and we don't have enough teachers.

Verifying if someone has the skills is difficult.

Given the shortage of teachers, and the difficulty of verification, we ways to bridge the gap.

The first step is always going to be to spend more on education, especially in underserved areas.

The new options we have with LLMs is to increase the rate of testing, and test out the benefits of low stakes testing at scale.

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

#172

Post by intended » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 8:28 AM UTC

ritlo wrote: post #56

Buttons840 wrote: post #22

Tangent: I've noticed I write a lot different because of combative online arguments. I have a problem. So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand. I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me. It's hard to find ot…

One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-re…

This is all communication no?

If people do not share the same context, then they will come up with different interpretations of the same content.

In communities with more homogenous understanding of the context, people are able to get into the details more effectively.

Those communities tend to also be impervious to outsiders, or newbies, because the use of terms/jargon that speeds up conversation abound.

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

#173

Post by watwut » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 8:37 AM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #29

The profit motive is corrupting and polluting every level of the education space. Teachers are being hamstrung on curriculum. The districts enter into contracts that require the use of certain programs for certain amounts of time. We've known for decades (if not a century) that direct instruction works [1] but you can't sell devices, platforms and consulting services that way. We're literally at the point in educatio…

Article is about student writing essay by herself, but using ai detector to prevent false accusation.

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

#174

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

pibaker wrote: post #167

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They'd need a very good memory. You can't make cheating impossible, before ChatGPT they could have asked a friend for help.

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

#175

Post by user205738 » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 1:10 PM UTC

snyp wrote: post #84

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…

This approach does not really solve the core issue. In practice, students often do poorly when evaluation is concentrated in one end of term exam. It also pushes many students to cram at the end of the term instead of learning steadily. A better approach is to rethink what we assess and how we assess it. Research shows that the design of assessments plays an important role in academic integrity. Assignments that requ…

Perhaps students should learn this information throughout the semester instead of on the last night or morning before exams?

If your goal is for them to know the entire material, then it makes sense to test their knowledge of the entire course in one exam, which also allows them to study at their own pace and order. If someone is unable to pass the exam or retain all the information, then consider whether you need such professionals.

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

#176

Post by user205738 » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

khazhoux wrote: post #63

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…

> one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. The resulting grade depends on that, and that alone. I love this idea. And if a student is having a really bad day, or their dog just died, or they have bad cramps, or they have a hard time dealing with the intense stress of your entire grade being decided in one exam... well, those loser stud…

If a student knows how to communicate, they can solve this problem: warn the teacher, take a sick leave if they feel they are not ready, and other options.

If they did not do this, they failed the exam on communication with other people.

In addition, we are not always able to make decisions in ideal conditions. We need to learn how to solve problems under pressure, in emotional turmoil, and when we are not feeling well.

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

#177

Post by stratos123 » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

PufPufPuf wrote: post #116

lich_king wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always startled about how HN approaches these topics. When we have a press release from a university about how researchers can detect thoughts via fMRI, we have no issue with the claim. But if a vendor makes a pretty believable claim that there are repetitive statistical patterns in LLM output, it's all of sudden treated the same as palm reading. The problem isn't that AI detection doesn't work. State of the art…

Eliminating any statistically significant difference between a high-quality human-written text and LLM-written text is exactly what the LLMs are being trained for. At this point, "text is low quality, therefore must be human" is a much stronger signal.

> Eliminating any statistically significant difference between a high-quality human-written text and LLM-written text is exactly what the LLMs are being trained for.

This is true only for base models, but few people would use a base model for writing assignments. Output from models trained to be assistants is, so far, decently recognizable.

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

#178

Post by ritlo » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #172

ritlo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-re…

This is all communication no? If people do not share the same context, then they will come up with different interpretations of the same content. In communities with more homogenous understanding of the context, people are able to get into the details more effectively. Those communities tend to also be impervious to outsiders, or newbies, because the use of terms/jargon that speeds up conversation abound.

No, this goes beyond that. A well-written article or book doesn’t need to be padded with junk to cater to bad readers, or to preempt trolls, because they can’t scrawl all over it such that it disrupts others’ experience. You have to go to e.g. the Amazon reviews to find people complaining that an author didn’t address something that they very definitely did, or claimed something they certainly did not, that stuff doesn’t show up on the page in footnotes or turn into flame wars on the page where everyone sees it.

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

#179

Post by abathur » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #158

abathur wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does crapping on the average school's deep well of expertise for evaluating how effectively AI software solutions address their problems somehow fix the underlying problem (that the cost of catching cheaters is significantly higher than the cost of cheating)? (This is roughly the same problem as evaluating software that only does an approximation of what it claims to do.) (Aside: AI-based variations on this theme are…

> that the cost of catching cheaters is significantly higher than the cost of cheating This is tackling the problem from the wrong direction. The right direction would be to make it harder to cheat in the first place. For example: if the student submits an essay, and that student is able to coherently and accurately answer any questions asked about the essay in a face-to-face conversation, then that student is probab…

I agree with you that a face-to-face q&a is a reasonably good way to detect low-effort cheating, but I'll still quibble a bit:

- I don't think this lowers the cost of detection as much as you imagine. You still need to know the paper better than the student and have to sacrifice already tight instruction/planning/grading time to have all of these conversations. Even if you catch enough to successfully deter most, it likely means not covering something else. It won't be too hard to catch low-effort cheaters who can't be bothered to read the paper, but you're on the low-leverage side of an arms race with the remaining students. You have experience on your side and they can't know what you'll ask, but they outnumber you and can certainly read the paper and use LLMs to quiz them on it. You have to invest your effort without knowing how each student prepared, so you'll spend about as much effort on every low-effort cheat as you do on the highest-effort cheat you are prepared to catch.

- Not sure it is "from the wrong direction" since both approaches raise the cost of cheating and lower the cost of detecting it.

- While this does avoid encouraging students to dumb down their work, it does still raise the cost of not-cheating. Unless you surprise the students with these conversations, the ones that care most will still anxiously prepare.

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

#180

Post by heddycrow » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

bird0861 wrote: post #161

heddycrow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had almost forgotten that one. Thanks for reminding me!