Live data from Hacker News

College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

sentinelcolorado.com

211–220 of 451 posts

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#211
post #74
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally dislike placing a heavy emphasis on exams. Assignments/projects have been consistently the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of the courses I've taken so far in university. It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI.

Then I suppose we can go back to having computer labs that can only access white listed domains and other study materials. Students code there to ensure no cheating.

Will the students have to go through security screening for personal devices?

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not inherently contradictory, just like using a calculator could be considered cheating depending on the context. If you're just learning basic arithmetic, a calculator is cheating since it shortcuts the path to learning. OTOH in calculus, a calculator is necessary. You still have to have a deep understanding of the concepts and functions to succeed. It's still a new tech so I'm not surprised a lot of teachers h…

Exactly, AI is the next calculator. Right now the consensus is that it just does the work for you, in my opinion that says more about us not having the right questions than actual laziness. In a world where the only questions are basic arithmetic, calculators do all the work for you. My opinion is that the future what used to be done by academics will be done by high schoolers and new academics will be producing work…

[deleted]

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#213
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? And after all that money you paid them? The nerve!

Your worldview sucks. Essentially claiming that in order to receive information, you must also receive garbage useless information to brainwash you.

Just because you expect someone to owe something to you, doesn't mean they think they owe you that thing.

If someone gives away something free, they can and sometimes do wash their hands of it. That doesn't prevent you from expressing your opinion on what you think they should change about the work, but they're not under any obligation to do anything about it.

Someone made a thing available. You can take it as it is, you can make noise about what you don't like, you can make it better, or you can ignore it and move on.

If someone is providing a mix of useful and garbage information, well, take your pick from the above.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#214

When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.

My networking final in high school was probably my favorite test taking experience - there was a small written portion on eg subnets, but the bulk of our grade was setting up a physical network, testing it, and leaving the room. Our teacher sabotaged three parts of our network - could be hardware, router misconfiguration, etc. when we came in we had iirc 20-ish minutes to diagnose and fix it.

The best was when she barely unscrewed one of this big DIN connectors so at quick glance it looked fine, but wasn’t fully connected.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think spelling is trivial and irrelevant in a foreign language class?

That's a poor comparison given they said CS theory . I could easily imagine a CS theory course that doesn't involve any programming language at all.

Yes, there are some university CS courses on topics like discrete mathematics, theory of computation, and ethics that don't involve any programming.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#216
post #105

Reading all these comments, I feel like US universities are a joke. I had to do all the exams in person. 100% of the grade was decided at the exam. Millions of people graduated this way and they are fine. No students were harmed in the process.

No projects, no labs, no teamwork, no papers? What a narrow set of skills to send into your economy.

Just because those things don't contribute to your final grade doesn't mean you don't do them.

At Oxbridge, for CS we still had lab work. We still had problem sets assigned for CS and for math which were graded. We had one large CS group project in, I want to say, our second year. Humanities students were still assigned essays. It's just that none of this stuff contributed to your final degree classification which was based entirely on your exams (although if you didn't do your CS practicals you wouldn't be allowed to pass).

Obviously Oxbridge isn't exactly representative but certainly my experience showed me that the American style is not the only way of making education work.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#218
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge is built on foundations. Knowing syntax in one language is necessary to be able to do anything practical, which interacts with theory. You build valuable schema of the world by iterative theory and practice.

Nah. Syntax is trivial and irrelevant for teaching CS theory.

Would you say the same thing for teaching math or music?

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#219

When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.

My networking final in high school was probably my favorite test taking experience - there was a small written portion on eg subnets, but the bulk of our grade was setting up a physical network, testing it, and leaving the room. Our teacher sabotaged three parts of our network - could be hardware, router misconfiguration, etc. when we came in we had iirc 20-ish minutes to diagnose and fix it. The best was when she ba…

That does sound like fun, but it would probably be even more fun. to be the instructor giving this test.

Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

#220
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things I don’t like about putting too much weight in the exams are: * It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying. * It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. This puts a pretty low ceiling on the level of complexity you can actually throw at them.

Exams happen all the time in real life. Or rather, situations where you can't just look up fundamental knowledge. Job interviews, presentations, even mundane work tasks - all these require you to know the basics quickly "The basics" are relative, of course, but I often point out to my students: "you don't care if your doctor needs to look up the specific interactions of your various meds. You do care if you see them…

I think many of us would agree that job interviews (in tech at least) are horribly broken, because they don't do a good job of testing candidates' ability to do the actual work they'll be doing day-to-day. So saying exams are like job interviews is not a positive for exams. And, for most people, the ideal is to find a job and stick with it for years, so it's not like job interviews are common, everyday occurrences.

For presentations, usually you spend a lot of time preparing for them (similar to exams), building a slide deck or pages of notes that you refer to while giving the talk (not similar to exams). Sure, you do have to be able to think on your feet, but I don't think the comparison to a sit-down exam is all that apt.

For mundane work tasks, you have the internet and whatever reference materials you want (including LLMs, these days); this sort of thing is so different from a sit-down exam that it's almost comical that you'd try to equate the two.

I'm not saying I know of a better way to evaluate learning than proctored, in-person exams, but suggesting that sort of situation is particularly relevant to real life... no, no way.

Post reply on HN