Just use closed-notes pen and paper exams and allow AI use entirely for everything else. Also women's and gender studies degrees were already a scam unless you have a trust fund.
I suspect the move back to pen-and-paper exams is being resisted by the teachers. It shouldn't be that hard though--when the workload became to great, most of my own professors would offload part of the grading task to TAs and grad students.
It does seem like in-person pen-and-paper exams would hold the line pretty firmly with respect to competence. It's a simple solution and I haven't heard any good arguments against it.
Good article though rather than philosphizing about lost souls, we probably should go back to the future. Pen-and-paper exams only. No take-home essays or assignments. Assessments done in person under supervision. No devices in class. Heavily reduced remote learning or online coursework. Coursework redesigned so that any out-of-class work is explicitly AI-collaborative. Frequent low-stakes in-class writing to verify…
My parents had oral exams in university. I feel like that actually is a better format that does not rewarding cramming, but is interactive and over quicker. It means that there is a dynamic that actually allows for grading problem solving over regurgitation.
I agree, though I shudder to imagine how cringey the switchover would be. A significant number of students already had poor diction and linguistic skills when I was in college, and recent evidence shows this situation has likely become worse.
That is perfectly on topic and you are identifying correctly flaw in the argument Technology is neutral it’s always been neutral it will be neutral I quote Bertrand Russell on this almost every day: “As long as war exists all new technology will be utilized for war” You can abstract this away from “war” into anything that’s undesirable in society. What people are dealing with now is the newest transformational techno…
> Technology is neutral it’s always been neutral it will be neutral I agree with a lot of what you say here but not this. People choose what to make easy and what to make more difficult with technology all the time. This does not make something neutral. Obviously something as simple as a hammer is more neutral but this doesn't extend to software systems.
> People choose what to make easy and what to make more difficult with technology all the time.
Right. People choose.
More specifically people with power direct what technologies get funded. How society chooses who is in power is the primary problem.
The core premise is decidedly naive and simplistic -- AI is used to cheat and students can't be trusted with it. This thesis is carried through the entirety of the article.
So you believe students don't use AI to cheat, and you are calling the OP naive?
That's an utterly hilarious straw man, a spin worthy of politics, and someone else would label, a tautological "cheat". Students "cheated" hundreds of years ago. Students "cheated" 25 years ago. They "cheat" now. You can make an argument that AI mechanizes "cheating" to such an extent that the impact is now catastrophic. I argue that the concern for "cheating", regardless of its scale, is far overblown and a fallacy to begin with. Graduation, or measurement of student ability, is a game, a simulation that does not test or foster cognitive development implicitly. Should universities become hermetic fortresses to buttress against these untold losses posed by AI? I think this is a deeply misguided approach. While I had been a professor myself for 8 years, and do somewhat value the ideal of The Liberal Arts Education, I think students are ultimately responsible for their own cognitive development. University students are primarily adults, not children and not prisoners. Credential provisions, and graduation (in the literal sense) of student populations, is an institutional practice to discard and evolve away from.
You can straw man all you like, I haven't used an LLM in a few days -- definitely not to summarize this article -- and what you claim is the central idea, is directly related to my claim. Its very easy to combine them directly: students intellectual development is going to be impaired by AI because they can't be trusted to use it critically. I disagree.
> You can straw man all you like No one is misrepresenting your argument, it's well understood and being argued that it is false. > students intellectual development is going to be impaired by AI because they can't be trusted to use it critically. This debate is going nowhere so I'll end here. Your core premise is on trust and student autonomy, which is nonsense and not what the article tackles. It argues LLM literal…
You said I didn't read the article. That is your weak and petty straw man. Very clearly.
Good article though rather than philosphizing about lost souls, we probably should go back to the future. Pen-and-paper exams only. No take-home essays or assignments. Assessments done in person under supervision. No devices in class. Heavily reduced remote learning or online coursework. Coursework redesigned so that any out-of-class work is explicitly AI-collaborative. Frequent low-stakes in-class writing to verify…
My parents had oral exams in university. I feel like that actually is a better format that does not rewarding cramming, but is interactive and over quicker. It means that there is a dynamic that actually allows for grading problem solving over regurgitation.
> As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools, we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; social media transformed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth. That doesn't feel right. I thought that…
BTW that line you are quoting is probably itself AI generated :^)
Good article though rather than philosphizing about lost souls, we probably should go back to the future. Pen-and-paper exams only. No take-home essays or assignments. Assessments done in person under supervision. No devices in class. Heavily reduced remote learning or online coursework. Coursework redesigned so that any out-of-class work is explicitly AI-collaborative. Frequent low-stakes in-class writing to verify…
In 7th grade history, once a week the class started with a brief (written) quiz.
The core premise is decidedly naive and simplistic -- AI is used to cheat and students can't be trusted with it. This thesis is carried through the entirety of the article.
You can straw man all you like, I haven't used an LLM in a few days -- definitely not to summarize this article -- and what you claim is the central idea, is directly related to my claim. Its very easy to combine them directly: students intellectual development is going to be impaired by AI because they can't be trusted to use it critically. I disagree.
I’m not sure how you lived through the last decade and came to the conclusion that people aged 17-25 make rational decisions with novel technologies that have short term gain and long term (essentially hidden) negative side effects.
My parents had oral exams in university. I feel like that actually is a better format that does not rewarding cramming, but is interactive and over quicker. It means that there is a dynamic that actually allows for grading problem solving over regurgitation.
Anyone with oral exams was privileged.
> Anyone with oral exams was privileged.
No, they really weren't. These were state school's in 1970's eastern Europe. No tuition, and neither parent was from a privileged background.