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College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

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

#331

Post by sarchertech »

llbbdd wrote: post #175
sarchertech wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least one of my own professors also openly wondered why I was there at all. I think you completely misunderstood this interaction. There are 2 possible explanations. 1. You are so smart/knowledgeable that the professor thinks you are beyond college. 2. You were acting like such an arrogant know-it-all that the professor was being sarcastic. I’ve seen #1, but I’ve seen #2 many times. You sound like you have a hug…

I had excellent interactions with my instructors. I interacted with them like human beings and they understood that their limited time would be better spent with students who didn't have the same energy I did. Several professors, when asked, put me through an impromptu whiteboard quiz and said yeah, do your own thing. It's great that you participated in the process in your own way. In my case I asked if I could show…

1. There’s already a process for testing out of general education classes. You show up, pay $50, and pass a test. You could have saved most of your first year of tuition.

2. These classes that you blew through weren’t upper level classes. They couldn’t have been because you wouldn’t have had the prereqs to take them. If you already had some knowledge of the field and didn’t need lower level classes, you could have talked to the department about testing out of some of them.

I know you didn’t walk into an upper level class on Automata theory and come up with the proofs on the spot.

No professor would in good faith tell you to go do your own thing based on what you’re describing.

If they thought you were very smart and sincere about learning, they’d encourage you to do independent study with them, do research, work with the department to move into higher level classes, or take cross listed graduate classes.

If they thought you were kinda smart, but a huge asshole, they’d tell you to go do your own thing because they didn’t want to deal with your crap.

This is all coming from experience as someone who came into school not needing the intro classes, and someone who used to be that arrogant.

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

#332

Post by Y-bar »

altmanaltman wrote: post #309
phatskat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds more like a gameshow than education, like IT version of Hogwarts

I agree. But it hinges a lot of how it is graded.

If it is mostly a ”show your work”/”show your reasoning” kind of grading where your width and depth of attempts are more important than success then it seems OK.

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

#333

Post by kelipso »

mattmanser wrote: post #328
cataphract wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only defense of the new model is that it forces students to learn throughout the semester, rather than just before the exam. Which is easier and more effectively engages long term memory (like doing more rounds of spaced repetition). I definitely could tell the difference, though most of the time I just studied full 4-7 days before the exam.

In the UK they claimed that girls did worse on one-off exams and so the one-off exams structure favoured boys. When course had more graded coursework, girls did better. So that was the justification used to switching to a less impactful final exam. No idea how true that is. We were also told learning a phonetic alphabet was better for young children learning to read than using the old ABC system. As far as I have hea…

Getting the feeling most education research papers are written by high school teachers lol.

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

#334

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #30

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.

I remember those 6 page essays i wrote by hand at high school. Poor teachers trying to decipher my writing

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

#335

Post by sarchertech »

tim-projects wrote: post #239
sarchertech wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe you chose to waste your time because you treated college as a way to get a piece paper instead of as the only time in your life when you are surrounded by experts who will spend an hour a week answering any questions you can think of.

That doesn't work in tech based professions. In college I took music technology. It was 2 years of my own learning and explaining how everything worked to my tutor.

If you’re talking about a purely vocational program, you’re not likely to be dealing with world class experts.

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

#336

Post by mystraline »

mold_aid wrote: post #330
curun1r wrote: post #229

I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, an…

It's not a bad point, but the "calculator" metaphor is not the best one. First, schools don't create schoolwork. Teachers in different disciplines do. Second, calculators aren't in pervasive use across disciplines; AI products are. Third, schools provide these AI products for free - teachers don't. So a student in a psych methods class uses a free tier to create lit reviews, or whatever. The asymmetry there creates a…

> The only reason there is pervasive student use is because someone made it free. The CoPilot window that comes with the basic tier of 365 and all the other in-app copilots are what my students have; the Google Docs stuff exists, and the Grammarly stuff exists, and the best way to "ban" it (which is just fine as an approach) is to make it even slightly more expensive. If someone does that, yeah, I think some of these products might cease to exist.

So the solution is raise cost, thus making the richies have access but the poors not to?

I guess thats one way to academically bin students; just put yet another financial gatekeeping to the academic process?

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

#337

Post by Dumblydorr »

logicchains wrote: post #287
PunchyHamster wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? Because using AI is the complete opposite of "I learned programming just to make tests easier". By learning how to program solver, you not only learned how to program but also learned the method well enough t…

>By pawning it off to AI to solve, you have learned nothing, not even how to prompt correctly as test questions are usually formulated well enough that AI doesn't need prompt massaging to get it. If you got AI to produce a working solution, you solved the problem. In the real world nobody who's paying you cares about the method as long as you deliver results. Students taught to solve easy problems by themselves will…

“You” being the operative word in You solved it. Typing a question into AI and having it solve it is not “you” solving it by any stretch.

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

#338

Post by wongarsu »

cataphract wrote: post #322
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person. Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like…

I think the only defense of the new model is that it forces students to learn throughout the semester, rather than just before the exam. Which is easier and more effectively engages long term memory (like doing more rounds of spaced repetition). I definitely could tell the difference, though most of the time I just studied full 4-7 days before the exam.

When I studied CS in Germany in the 2010s (also in the Bologna Bachelor/Master system) most courses had weekly graded assignments. But the assignments didn't count towards your grade, instead you needed to reach a certain total of points to be allowed to take the exam. The actual grade was entirely composed of midterm and final exam (pen and paper exams, no computers, no multiple choice).

It was easy to cheat on the assignments. Working on them in groups was common and sometimes encouraged. The only person you could really cheat was yourself (and a TA who had to grade one more exam)

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

#339

Post by cornholio »

mattmanser wrote: post #328
cataphract wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only defense of the new model is that it forces students to learn throughout the semester, rather than just before the exam. Which is easier and more effectively engages long term memory (like doing more rounds of spaced repetition). I definitely could tell the difference, though most of the time I just studied full 4-7 days before the exam.

In the UK they claimed that girls did worse on one-off exams and so the one-off exams structure favoured boys. When course had more graded coursework, girls did better. So that was the justification used to switching to a less impactful final exam. No idea how true that is. We were also told learning a phonetic alphabet was better for young children learning to read than using the old ABC system. As far as I have hea…

That sounds like a good reason to keep the exam model, since boys are already at a strong and widening educational disadvantage compared to girls.
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