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Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

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Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#371

Post by customguy »

vector_spaces wrote: post #163
customguy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now…

I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class. That obviously isn't to say…

Well sure, but if you force feed anything clumsily you can ruin it. We had a nice teacher, and took our sweet time in first grade learning to write the alphabet in first grade. Then it was done. IMO it wasn't "additional material", or material at all, it was part of the fundamental skill set with which to interact with the material. And there wasn't a thought in my mind that it could be any other way, of course you learn to read and write when you go to school.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#372

Post by MattGaiser »

sgustard wrote: post #311
bkallus wrote: post #174

I have seen it firsthand in the CS department here at Dartmouth. It is bad. We're currently designing a new intro systems curriculum, and we're thinking of it as an adversarial problem. That is, we're designing the course to ensure that a student optimizing for the best grade per unit work still meets our learning objectives. That means, as everyone else is saying, paper exams, but also 1-on-1 interviews to check tha…

"best not to blame the students" There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.

I doubt it. The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions like law. Everywhere else it is just collaboration or learning or simply something nobody cares about.

I would say that tech largely rewards the behaviours people in academia call cheating.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#373

Post by MengerSponge »

Paracompact wrote: post #205
bkallus wrote: post #174

I have seen it firsthand in the CS department here at Dartmouth. It is bad. We're currently designing a new intro systems curriculum, and we're thinking of it as an adversarial problem. That is, we're designing the course to ensure that a student optimizing for the best grade per unit work still meets our learning objectives. That means, as everyone else is saying, paper exams, but also 1-on-1 interviews to check tha…

> Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own. Unrelated, but once you get to a more mature level, say grad school and above, I can say this is not always the case! Just like it's easier sometimes to Roll Your Own Damn X in programming, so too are some expositions of proof so dense (necessarily or unnecessarily so) that it is a less taxing affair to simply figure it out yourself…

Understanding 90-95% of someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own ;)

It's hard to verify that you understand someone else's work at 100%, but it's reasonable for an expert to tell once they've built it themselves, right?

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#374

Post by customguy »

encomiast wrote: post #140
customguy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now…

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

I just like it, the same way you hate it. If disliking it is valid, surely so is liking it?

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#375

Post by customguy »

robcohen wrote: post #168
shagie wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them. ... And there are jobs that use those skills. Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/ My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order…

So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?

If everything is just extremes, then acknowledge that the other extreme then is everybody sitting on their ass watching "Ow! My balls!", clad in advertisements. And given the choice between those two worlds, yes, everybody should have the dexterity of a surgeon.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#376

Post by MengerSponge »

sgustard wrote: post #311
bkallus wrote: post #174

I have seen it firsthand in the CS department here at Dartmouth. It is bad. We're currently designing a new intro systems curriculum, and we're thinking of it as an adversarial problem. That is, we're designing the course to ensure that a student optimizing for the best grade per unit work still meets our learning objectives. That means, as everyone else is saying, paper exams, but also 1-on-1 interviews to check tha…

"best not to blame the students" There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.

There are schools with severe penalties for cheating (Army/Navy, Haverford, Davidson), but most aren't set up for that. Professors didn't self-select to be prosecutors, and we didn't spend decades becoming world experts to then become cops.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. If you let yourself start blaming students, you open a pretty corrosive path of moral judgement. Students are clever, and they're making choices informed by what they see in the world. Don't blame them for being unwilling to fail a class that cost a down payment on a house. Don't blame them for seeing powerful people get away with cheating and trying to do the same.

Kallus is right: qualitative assessment is an adversarial problem. Build the assessment correctly, and all of those previous points become moot. By clearly establishing and enforcing the rules you make it more fair to boot.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#377

Post by dwattttt »

xp84 wrote: post #171
dwattttt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your test is bottlenecked on the speed it takes to write it, you're testing writing skills. I also challenge that "hand writing is harder to revise"; again, why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?

> challenge "hand writing is harder to revise" What? Suppose you want to fix the opening of your essay. Best case it's pencil and you can erase some, but worst case you have a longer sentence you want to put in there so you can't do it without scribbling all over and making a mess of the page. Word processors let you edit. How is this controversial? > why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant? Okay, so fr…

> 5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.

I think you're missing some logic in there somewhere. If a student fills in as many pages as they can, each with the number 1 written on it as large as possible, was this a good conclusion? The quantity of writing is not a good metric.

EDIT: to give a closer to reality example, an essay that's 4 times longer than a competing essay does not make it better.

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#378

Post by MengerSponge »

userbinator wrote: post #359
yiyingzhang wrote: post #199

As a university professor, I honestly don't understand the point of grading. Who will look at and care about grades? Likely company HR. But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Also, grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

Wow. Do you care at all about the reputation of your university? I worked briefly in post-secondary CS education a long time ago, before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today, and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job. Also, grades have long been inflated Then stop inflating them. This is also what standardised testing is good for --- but no surprise, so many are against it becaus…

Good idea! Nothing bad could possibly come from advocating for centralization of academic assessment! Let's give more authority to a handful of private publishers who adapt their curricula to the whims of Texas!

It's not just because "it would just show how terrible they actually are"

Re: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

#379

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

sgustard wrote: post #311
bkallus wrote: post #174

I have seen it firsthand in the CS department here at Dartmouth. It is bad. We're currently designing a new intro systems curriculum, and we're thinking of it as an adversarial problem. That is, we're designing the course to ensure that a student optimizing for the best grade per unit work still meets our learning objectives. That means, as everyone else is saying, paper exams, but also 1-on-1 interviews to check tha…

"best not to blame the students" There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.

Yes. Best not blame the technology that was specifically built to pass up automatically generated text for human work, or companies that profit from students using it, or government that won't introduce measures that would at least make it possible to comprehensively ban it on campuses.
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