381–390 of 451 posts
The college instructor might as well ban calculators and use abacuses then.
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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.
That would make sense if the stated goals were the actual goals.
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'm sure they had some kind of submit your code as assignment and using testing as a way to grade the assignments.
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’m guessing we’re similar vintage. My CS classes were like this as well. The only exception is that when I got into grad level classes we did have some big programming projects. But most of that programming happened on sparc stations, and it was actually just easier and more productive to sit at the machine in person with its nice big (at the time) display with all the other folks doing programming projects. Those m…
I don't want to be polemic, but I really miss those days.
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I’m guessing we’re similar vintage. My CS classes were like this as well. The only exception is that when I got into grad level classes we did have some big programming projects. But most of that programming happened on sparc stations, and it was actually just easier and more productive to sit at the machine in person with its nice big (at the time) display with all the other folks doing programming projects. Those m…
Same. Coding by hand was really, really hard at first, I remember. Then one day it just clicked and it was like I could think so clearly in my head, without making mistakes, and write code that would have compiled by hand during an exam. We would just practice and work for it. I don't want to be polemic, but I really miss those days.
One thing I recall is that the grading policy made it very clear that minor syntax issues were inconsequential in handwritten answers. And more advanced classes only wanted pseudocode. Which are exactly the right priorities.
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>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…
The part you're missing is that the evaluator already knows the answer. They're not looking that you can arrive at the correct answer, but that you know how to arrive at the correct answer. If "arriving at the correct answer" just means retrieving data from a Baysian database using a Markov chain you have only demonstrated you provide no value in the chain and should indeed get a mark of zero or get recycled.
The university evaluator is not the one paying you, the one paying you is your boss or customer. It doesn't matter how highly your university professor thinks of you, if you can't solve difficult problems as fast because your university never taught you to solve hard problems with AI, you're going to be at a competitive disadvantage in the workforce when you graduate.
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>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…
There's also no reason to learn to read and write! First graders could just point their phone at some text and have it read to them, or dictate to their phone to achieve the reverse. Why learn to swim, walk, run? Machines can do that for you too! For now there's plenty of people who are significantly more capable than AI models. Someone who fully outscources to machines will never join that club. You have to evaluate…
If at some point AI models won't be able to help them, then give them assignments that reach the point where AI alone isn't enough, so they'll only be able to solve them if they learn whatever is necessary. This is what's meant by "making assignments harder". Students who learn to solve harder problems with AI will be more competitive in the workforce than students who only learn to solve easier problems by themselves. Because AI already allows people to solve harder problems than they could unassisted, but it's a skill that needs to be learned.
As an example, with AI, it'd be a reasonable assignment to ask students to write a working C compiler from scratch. Without AI that'd be completely beyond the reach of the vast majority of students.
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.
A lot of people in this thread are talking about how they did in-person exams, handwritten problem sets in class, etc. This kind of thing is more challenging in the humanities, where the research paper is kind of our bread and butter. A lot of us have since turned to different kinds of assignments, but I am not ready to forego research papers in favor of blue book exams. I think there's some value in having to develo…
Student turn-in a mid-term paper. A professor chooses a certain number of points from the mid-term paper and asks for explanations of these in long-hand. Pulling questions this way doesn't seem like it would take more time than a thorough reading of the text.
Oh, but paper reading has been delegated to a drudge you wouldn't trust with pulling question, oh how inconvenient. Which is to say the problems AI introduces to education are strongly related to much of work already being made mindless before AI appeared.
Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months.
No, High school students can do this. Well, they get impelled to do this. They can't do this now but that's a testament to current education.
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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.
> It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI. They were more prone to cheating before AI, too. Cheating has always existed at some level, but from talking to my couple of friends who teach undergrad level courses the attitudes of students toward cheating have been changing even before AI was everywhere. They would complain about cohorts coming through where cheating was obvious and rampa…