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Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

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Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#581

Post by TallonRain »

squigz wrote: post #416
yazantapuz wrote: post #349

I teach on a small university. These are some of the measures we take: - Hand written midterms and exams. - The students should explain how they designed and how they coded their solutions to programming exercises (we have 15-20 students per class, with more students it become more difficult). - Presentations of complex topics (after that the rest of the students should comment something, ask some question, anything…

I hope by 'handwritten' you don't literally mean pen and paper?

Yes, pen and paper. The approach is to pseudocode the solution, minor syntax errors aren’t punished (and indeed are generally expected anyway). The point is to simply show that you understand and can work through the concepts involved, it’s not being literally compiled.

Writing a small algorithm with pen & paper on programming exams in universities of all sizes was still common when I was in uni in the 2010s and there’s no reason to drop that practice now.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#582

Post by coderatlarge »

harvey9 wrote: post #260
coderatlarge wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, that’s intense. i wonder how much actual cheating they must have caught to arrive at such a draconian model. it would be interesting if they published their statistics to make it clear whether all these things are truly necessary.

What stats would convince you? A woman was jailed in the UK last week for taking in person tests on behalf of others. She wore a variety of wigs to fool test centre staff. Where there's demand there's people who will try to supply it.

i guess i would expect them to publish some rates of disciplinary actions per sitting and the type of attempted behavior.

ex “1% of test takers were disciplined for attempting to contact someone for help using a disallowed electronic device surreptitiously”

minimally as deterrance

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#583

Post by mythrwy »

nathan_compton wrote: post #3
TimorousBestie wrote: post #2

I predict that asking students to hand-write assignments is not going to go well. Unfortunately, universities built on the consumer model (author teaches at Arizona State) are incentivized to listen to student feedback over the professor’s good intentions.

The bigger problem is that kids can just hand write an essay that an AI gave them. I teach at a university and I just scale my homework assignments until they reach or exceed sightly the amount of work I expect a student to be able to do with AI. Before I would give them a problem set. Next semester homeworks will be more like entire projects.

As long as you are upfront that you expect AI will be used, this seems like a solid and practical approach to me.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#584

Post by ijk »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #538
Balgair wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've identified the main issue here: LLMs aren't destroying the University or the essay. LLMs are destroying the cheap University or essay. Cheap can mean a lot of things, like money or time or distance. But, if Universities want to maintain a standard, then they are going to have to work for it again. No more 300+ person freshman lectures (where everyone cheated anyways). No more take-home zoom exams. No m…

>I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows you and if you've done the work. And I know, that is not a cheap way to churn out degrees. I could understand US tuition if that were the case. These days with overworked adjuncts make it McDonalds at Michelin star prices.

Given that the adjuncts often aren't paid all that much better than the McDonalds workers...

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#585

Post by sshine »

thresher wrote: post #322
sshine wrote: post #69

I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is. On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is not…

I teach computer science / programming, and I know what a good AI policy is: No AI. (Dramatic. AI is fine for upper-division courses, maybe. Absolutely no use for it in introductory courses.) Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab. Computers in the lab have editors/compilers/interpreters, and whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for grading and submission. No internet access otherwise. W…

> Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab. Computers in the lab have editors/compilers/interpreters, and whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for grading and submission. No internet access otherwise. We've used it for one course so far with good results, and and extending it to more courses in the fall.

Excellent approach. It requires a big buy-in from the school.

Thanks for suggesting it.

I'm doing something for one kind of assignment inspired by the game "bashcrawl" where you have to learn Linux commands through an adventure-style game. I'm bundling it in a container and letting you submit your progress via curl commands, so that you pass after having run a certain set of commands. Trying to make the levels unskippable by using tarballs. Essentially, if you can break the game instead of beating it honestly, you get a passing grade, too.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#586

Post by kesslern »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #541
stonemetal12 wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows you and if you've done the work. And I know, that is not a cheap way to churn out degrees. I could understand US tuition if that were the case. These days with overworked adjuncts make it McDonalds at Michelin star prices.

Funnily enough I only had 10-person-classes when I paid $125 for summer courses in a community college between expensive uni semesters.

This matches my experience. I attended the local community college, which works closely and matches curriculum with Ohio State University. The same classes, with the same content, were taught at both schools.

The biggest difference between them is the community college offering class sizes of about 20 people, while the university equivalent was taught in a lecture hall with hundreds of students, and cost significantly more.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#587

Post by sshine »

photochemsyn wrote: post #516
thresher wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach computer science / programming, and I know what a good AI policy is: No AI. (Dramatic. AI is fine for upper-division courses, maybe. Absolutely no use for it in introductory courses.) Our school converted a computer lab to a programming lab. Computers in the lab have editors/compilers/interpreters, and whitelist documentation, plus an internal server for grading and submission. No internet access otherwise. W…

Isn't auto-grading cheating by the instructors? Isn't part of their job providing their expert feedback by actually reading the code the students have generating and providing feedback and suggestions for improvement even at for exams? A good educational program treats exams as learning opportunities, not just evaluations. So if the professors can cheat and they're happy about having to do less teaching work, thereby…

> Isn't auto-grading cheating by the instructors?

Certainly not. There's a misconception at play here.

Once you have graded a few thousand assignments, you realize that people make the same mistakes. You think "I could do a really good write-up for the next student to make this mistake," and so you do and you save it as a snippet, and soon enough, 90% of your feedback are elaborate snippets. Once in a while you realize someone makes a new mistake, and it deserves another elaborate snippet. Some snippets don't generalise. That's called personal feedback. Other snippets generalise insanely. That's called being efficient.

Students don't care if their neighbors got the same feedback if the feedback applies well and is excellent. The difficult part is making that feedback apply well. A human robot will make that job better. And building a bot that gives the right feedback based on patterns is... actually a lot of work, even compared to copy-pasting snippets thousands of times.

But if you repeat an exercise enough times, it may be worth it.

Students are incentivised to put in the work in order to learn. Students cannot learn by copy-pasting from LLMs.

Instructors are incentivised to put in the work in order to provide authentic, valuable feedback. Instructors can provide that by repeating their best feedback when applicable. If instructors fed assignments to an LLM and said "give feedback", that'd be in the category of bullshit behavior we're criticising students for.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#588

Post by qwertycrackers »

aketchum wrote: post #375
aaplok wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but…

It is always interesting to me when people say they are "bad test takers". You mean you are bad at the part where we find out how much you know? Maybe you just don't know the material well enough. caveat emptor - I am not ND so maybe this is a real concern for some, but in my experience the people who said this did not know the material. And the accommodations for tests are abused by rich kids more than they are util…

I think the reverse exists as well. I think I am a much better test taker than average, and this has very clearly given me some advantages that come from the structure of exam-focused education. Exam taking is a skill and it's possible to be good at it, independent of the underlying knowledge. Of course knowing the material is still required.

However you are correct in noticing that there are an anomalously high number of "bad test takers" in the world. Many students are probably using this as a flimsy excuse for poor performance. Overall I think the phenomenon does exist.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#589

Post by sshine »

noisy_boy wrote: post #465
paulluuk wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational. I guess this "tough love" attitude helps for some people? But I think mostly it's just that people think it works for _other_ people, but rarely people think that this works when applied to themselves. Like, imagine the school administration walking up to this teacher and sa…

> Yeah, I've had teachers like that, who tell you that you're a "waste of life" and "what are you doing here?" and "you're dumb", so motivational. I'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face. If they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be their criteria here for the name calling, maybe a politely given reality-check isn't that bad. Some will wake up to the gravity of their situation and put in the hard…

> I'm sure GP isn't calling them dum-dum to their face. If they can't even do basic stuff, which seems to be their criteria here for the name calling, maybe a politely given reality-check isn't that bad. Some will wake up to the gravity of their situation and put in the hard work and surprise their teacher.

I certainly am not out to hurt anyone. I have a great deal of sympathy for someone who spent 18 months learning absolutely nothing, hiding behind their study group, making the LLM do the work, and apathetic teachers on prior semesters who could have caught this behavior.

But I will be blunt with them and say: "You have a very limited time before your studies end, and you have so far not learned basic programming. This means you will not be able to use your certificate for anything."

And then I will send an email to them, the teacher they will have on the next semester, and the study councillor, and say that this person urgently needs a better group and extra help. And I'll personally follow up after some weeks to see if they're actually preparing for their re-exam in a constructive way.

It usually came this far because giving a poor student the lowest grade rather than failing them resolves the teacher of paperwork and re-exams, which means they might get a day off.

Being blunt is being kind.

Re: Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

#590

Post by theyinwhy »

Balgair wrote: post #574
armchairhacker wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap "universities" are fine for accreditation. Exams can be administered via in-person proctoring services, which test the bare minimum. The real test would be when students are hired, in the probationary period. While entry-level hires may be unreliable, and even in the best case not help the company much, this is already a problem (perhaps it can be solved by the government or some other outside organization payi…

> Real universities should continue to exist for their cutting-edge research and tutoring from very talented people, because that can't be commodified. At least until/if AI reaches expert competence (in not just knowledge but application), but then we don't need jobs either. Okay, woah, I hadn't thought of that. I'm sitting here thinking that education for it's own sake is one of the reasons that we're trying to get…

> I enjoy learning and think my job gets in the way of that

Spot on, this gave me ideas, thank you for that!

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