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Inside the university AI cheating crisis

theguardian.com

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Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#61

Post by User23 »

metal_am wrote: post #30
indymike wrote: post #12

This is an easy to solve problem: oral exams / interview exams.

That's how grad degrees are done. But there's simply not enough time to do this at an undergrad level with potentially hundreds of students.

Today’s first year undergraduate is roughly as literate as a sixth grader was a century ago. College was never meant to be a mass remedial education program and by attempting to be one it’s failing at its core mission.

All this nannyware of various sorts is just more evidence, proof even, of how few of those students should even be there.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#62

Post by histriosum »

proteal wrote: post #43
carabiner wrote: post #9

I am enormously glad I went to college before these tools existed. I don't know how I would handle myself with access to them.

I did undergrad before chatGPT and now I’m back in school for an MBA at a school where the school pays for all students to have access to GPT4o. Maybe because we’re all older the tools are less of a problem, but I would say they have been a net positive. GPT3 was ass and students could easily tell when a classmate used it for their group contributions. Profs seems to be about 6-12 months behind the curve in terms of…

> In my program, grades don’t matter (so employers can’t stack rank us).

Can you expand a bit on how that works? I have limited academic experience, so I’m fascinated. Does everyone end up with a 4.0 if they pass, or..?

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#64

Post by gizajob »

krunck wrote: post #26

My wife is an English prof at a local University. She is tired of being put in the position of being an AI cop. She is tired of 10% students whose work was flagged wasting 50% of her office hours trying to convince her that their work is real. For her literature classes - where the class grade is composed of a participation grade and a written work grade - she is strongly considering getting rid of all written homewo…

I've been saying for a couple of years now that academic essays are going to have to go back to being handwritten. It seems like possibly the only solution.

The job of essays isn't to produce a Word document of text that can get a grade above 70 - it's to demonstrate and improve the student's writing and thinking. The computer seems to have now completely messed this up.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#65

Post by MrMcCall »

In an world with honorable human beings raised in Wisdom, we would understand that cheating only hurts ourselves in the long run, but that is not our world majority's ethical zeitgeist at the moment.

The lack of ethics, like all selfishness, propagates inefficiencies into the greater society, as exemplified here for our overworked and underpaid teachers.

Our son has become quite a good chess player over the past 6ish years, during which online chess cheating via engines has proliferated. I explained to him that he is completely responsible for being able to honestly say, "No." in answer to the question, "Have you ever cheated in online (or over-the-board) chess?".

Having a decision matrix that leads to ethical action confers a specific peace that accompanies knowing that one has done nothing wrong. In a world full of liars and cheats, being honest is its own very special and quite rare power, looks to me.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#66

Post by carabiner »

ars wrote: post #11
carabiner wrote: post #9

I am enormously glad I went to college before these tools existed. I don't know how I would handle myself with access to them.

It depends on your goal: Do you just need that piece of paper with your name on it? Or are you going to school to really learn material?

We all start out with good intentions. Do we all know if we would follow them to the end?

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#67

Post by User23 »

falcor84 wrote: post #33
ARandumGuy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we teach kids how to do basic arithmetic by hand? After all, calculators are basically ubiquitous at this point. Why waste the time teaching a skill that's not necessary as an adult? The reason is because doing arithmetic by hand teaches kids how math actually works, while using a calculator just teaches them how to find the answer. This base-level understanding is crucial for understanding more advanced math.…

> Why do we teach kids how to do basic arithmetic by hand? I think kids waste way too much time doing hard arithmetic by hand. As a particularly egregious example, I visited a Montessori primary school where they demonstrated what is essentially a complex single player board game, for calculating square roots by hand. It's a process whereby a 5th grader would take ~10 minutes to calculate the root of a 3 digit number…

> what is essentially a complex single player board game

Perhaps this sounds silly, but I think that’s actually deeply interesting. There is a profoundly deep relationship between calculation and games. This applies not just to ordinary arithmetic, but also things like game theoretic proofs to prove the soundness of logical inference rules. Exposing children to that relation, even with a toy case, sounds like it could be fruitful.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#69

Post by michaelmior »

proteal wrote: post #43
carabiner wrote: post #9

I am enormously glad I went to college before these tools existed. I don't know how I would handle myself with access to them.

I did undergrad before chatGPT and now I’m back in school for an MBA at a school where the school pays for all students to have access to GPT4o. Maybe because we’re all older the tools are less of a problem, but I would say they have been a net positive. GPT3 was ass and students could easily tell when a classmate used it for their group contributions. Profs seems to be about 6-12 months behind the curve in terms of…

> I hope they transition to talking about using LLMs like one uses gambling - a little is fine here and there but if it’s all you do that’s a problem.

If I hire someone to manage my money, I don't want them to do any gambling. Although given that investing is somewhat of a gamble, I at least want to set the terms and have them to disclose to me exactly how they're gambling.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#70

Post by from-nibly »

babkayaga wrote: post #68

there is no crisis. stop teaching students to write trash, using ai or not. if the essay is good, it should get an A.

Just came to the same conclusion with my professor father in law. If AI can actually do a good job at writing some assignment then people shouldn't be bothering with that thing. If it can't it will not matter that it was written by AI it will just be bad.

Also our universities are failing us if the only thing we get at the end is a boolean piece of paper (or even one represented by a floating point number).

This is like servers at McDonald's complaining that the customers are cheating with trash cans because they aren't eating the meals they buy, just throwing them in the trash. Why would they do that?!?!? Because someone told them they need to go to McDonald's "for the experience"?

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