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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

#691

Post by muwtyhg »

jnwatson wrote: post #602
nneonneo wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a special computer works too. I do my exams with our institution's Computer-Based Testing Facility, a bank of computers with fixed software and firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site. As a result, I've been able to challenge students to solve interactive software security challenges on the midterm and final with automatic grading - something that would have been impossible with pen and pap…

But what's wrong with pen and paper?

Writing by hand is very painful for some people. I always dreaded blue book exams for this reason, and ended up not writing as much as I wanted because I could not stand the hand pain. Or I got incredibly sloppy so that I could write as fast as possible and get it over with.

I've got kind of messed up hands, but not enough that you'd look at me and say "that guy should get special treatment". From the comments here, there are others like me who similarly hated hand-written tests due to the physical pain of hand writing.

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

#693

Post by tedd4u »

bjackman wrote: post #545
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 30 and “we can’t do tests in paper” seems _insane_. Just how metastatic has ed tech been in what, 9 years since my undergrad?

Well, how many times in that 9 years have you written on paper for 2 hours straight? Even as a kid who did it regularly, it sucked. Doing it now I really don't think I could deliver my intellectual best while worrying about if anyone can read my handwriting and whether I'm gonna cramp up by the end of the exam. Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.

> Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text

Can you say more? It's worked well for 4,500 years. Probably the most important invention ever.

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

#694

Post by tedd4u »

onion2k wrote: post #435
sgustard wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. Universities need to stay ahead of how people actually work. Framing the use of AI as 'cheating' gives a university a reputation that it isn't keeping up with industry, which has a wildly negative impact on admissions. You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.

One problem here is that students that use AI to outsource thinking become people who cannot think. These people are not likely to be very useful to employers or even society. We have to figure out how to allow AI to outsource drudgery but not the thinking itself. It should be a better and better bicycle for the mind not a replacement for the brain.

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

#695

Post by tedd4u »

Royce-CMR wrote: post #666

I was home schooled - so my perspective of education is at best, unique. I finished a dual major undergrad at 18, got an MBA at 21. Based on my own experiences and those of people I’ve watched, I have three points. Sample size of 1 and all that; but it’s a lowkey passion topic for me. - The argument that AI is “the next calculator” and education testing and overall methods need to adapt, is true. - The distance betwe…

I've heard students react this way to seeing problems on exams that are not strictly of the types taught in class or in previously-assigned homework. "It's not fair! The teacher never showed us how to do problems like that!" This kind of thing was expected and assumed when I was in secondary school, that there would be combining of some concepts from the unit into a single problem. Very worried that there's both a cultural change supported by AI tools that will lead to the outsourcing of thought to the AI rather than outsourcing drudgery.

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

#696

Post by atiedebee »

tancop wrote: post #491
jonahx wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions What? The concept of cheating exists in marriages, sports, relationships, business agreements, accounting, and nearly every facet of human life.

when you cheat on your partner you hurt them by betraying their trust. when you score from offside you can steal a win from the other team thats playing fair. if you lie about your company financials you steal from the government or your creditors. cheating in schools is nothing like that. there is no direct harm to anyone, financial or emotional. the only real thing is if enough students do it thats bad for the scho…

By cheating you gain a certificate that says you can do things which you cannot. The difference between cheating in university and forging a degree is the time it takes.

When going to a doctor, you wouldn't want them to have cheated for their exams during training. You expect them to be well equipped to practice medicine and to ensure you get correct diagnoses and care. When hiring a programmer or software engineer, you should expect them to be able to provide you a proper, well architected application given the requirements.

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

#697

Post by wtrwqyw »

tedd4u wrote: post #693
bjackman wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, how many times in that 9 years have you written on paper for 2 hours straight? Even as a kid who did it regularly, it sucked. Doing it now I really don't think I could deliver my intellectual best while worrying about if anyone can read my handwriting and whether I'm gonna cramp up by the end of the exam. Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.

> Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text Can you say more? It's worked well for 4,500 years. Probably the most important invention ever.

Well to be fair humans had to suffer through all kinds of miserable practices over those years. Modern style of writing as we understand it didn’t really develop until the 800s or so (if not way later).

So it’s like saying that clay tablets worked just fine for 1000+ years why would we switch to papyrus? Or who needs character for vowels? Or spaces between words, it’s not like anyone reads texts silently?

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

#698

Post by telchior »

azangru wrote: post #648
peterbell_nyc wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't the AI - it's the assessments. It used to be that shipping a large, well-researched essay with multiple citations was proof of work. Now it's proof of prompting, not learning or effort. If you want to test for memorization, you need a live test to do so. If you want to test for comprehension and understanding, require sessions with a tutoring AI and grade the level of comprehension exhibited. And th…

> And then please, please test for prompting with challenging assignments that would usually be beyond a student's skills Does this mean you will requre all students to pay for a subscription to an llm provider?

Yes, but it must be the university approved version that costs 20x the consumer / business version.

Sounds like sarcasm, but the wheels appear to already be in motion on this.

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

#699

Post by wtrwqyw »

close04 wrote: post #511
rtpg wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams. It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"), but it limits what kinds of problems you can reasonably put on the exam. You'll definitely lean a bit more into theoretical stuff than practicals. Which is fine for some courses, I think a bit less interesting in other courses. Remember, the hand written code is also h…

GP is talking about every test being done on a computer presumably to avoid handwriting. Handwriting isn’t the usual “get with the times, grandpa” situation. It’s been proven again and again that writing by hand develops the brain and helps store that new knowledge better. It would be a disservice to the students to only use typing. Or TikTok shorts, or whatever is the tech of the day.

Exams shouldn’t probably be used for learning new information and typing is a lot more efficient and allows editing and revising so there are advantages to that.

> or whatever is the tech of the day.

Rote memorisation has been the standard technique probably for way longer that anything else so I’m not sure that every innovation is inherently inferior to what we had before

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

#700

Post by wtrwqyw »

LoganDark wrote: post #417
throwaway152321 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would struggle to do it by hand. If you did it before then, barring physical limitations which have occurred since then, you would struggle for a short while and then you would be fine. I also did coursework purely on paper, got out of practice, and then once my kids were in school got back into the habit of handwriting. I can even write cursive again. Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist. There's a…

I have never been able to handwrite well and my family suspects I have dysgraphia. I can write, but slowly and unreadably. But I can type over 160 wpm. Typing for me is strictly superior, probably by an order of magnitude.

It’s rather peculiar that people are downvoting somebody sharing their perfectly valid perspective..
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