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Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

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Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#701
post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting rid of grading sounds crazy, but it's actually happening. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in America, is moving to "equitable grading", which amounts (imo) to pass/fail with extra pageantry. Teachers are being retrained _right now_ to equitable grading. I know an equitable grading champion at an LAUSD school, I'll see if I can get material to share. EDIT: I just received [0][1][2][3].…

In a pass/fail system, what does a student need to do for a teacher to be willing to fail them? What is the minimum bar to pass?

Since this was at LA Unified, I suspect the bar for passing is extremely low. Not commenting on that district specifically, but not graduating from High School on time takes some doing. The system is very good at moving kids through, and it's why a high school diploma means so little.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#702
post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted…

> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. And every non-educational institution after that will see school, degree as a checkbox.

I have hired for many positions over the years and never once asked for grades.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#703
post #178

It is no longer effective to solely use a written essay to measure how deeply a student comprehends a subject. AI is here to stay; new methods should be used to assess student performance. I remember being told at school, that we weren't allowed to use calculators in exams. The line provided by teachers was that we could never rely on having a calculator when we need it most—obviously there's irony associated with ha…

IMHO. With calculators introduced, there is zero add in you learning long division. Worse than zero, you could have done something better with your time. ChatGPT is a calculator for all subjects. People have a hard time letting that sink in.

Long (or short—screw long division, with its transcription error opportunities and huge amounts of paper-space used) division is a good exercise to cement the notion of place value, that happens to also teach you how to divide by hand for when it's occasionally more convenient than finding a phone/computer/calculator.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. In Germany, all exams are like this. Homework assignments are either just a prerequisite for taking exam but the grade is solely from the exam, or you may get some small point bonus for assignments/projects. > But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for…

Germany isn't special, (almost) all exams work like that in the US as well. I don't know why he was implying otherwise. Almost all degrees have required courses in the US as well. You point to a true failure in incentives. And yet, the US has the highest density of renowned universities.

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Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#705
post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions? -> GPA can be gamed, as laid out. -> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use. -> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts -> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot. What should be best practice here?…

> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot They aren't 'fair' in avoiding every false negative, but they at least tell me that the passing candidates know and can do something. If I ask someone who claims to know Python or Java whether or not you can have a memory leak in them, and their answer is 'no' or 'Maybe, but I don't know how', I get a pretty good idea of whether or not they know anything about this topic.…

Back when I was at a small company doing a lot of new-grad interviews, it was really shocking how many people couldn't solve fizzbuzz or something equally trivial, like reversing an array in-place.

When I was at Google, most of these were filtered out before I got to see them, but for a while I was doing iOS development interviews and a lot of the candidates applying to Google clearly didn't know anything.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#706
post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting rid of grading sounds crazy, but it's actually happening. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in America, is moving to "equitable grading", which amounts (imo) to pass/fail with extra pageantry. Teachers are being retrained _right now_ to equitable grading. I know an equitable grading champion at an LAUSD school, I'll see if I can get material to share. EDIT: I just received [0][1][2][3].…

In a pass/fail system, what does a student need to do for a teacher to be willing to fail them? What is the minimum bar to pass?

According to the equitable grading materials I just received (and posted above), that determination is... entirely up to the individual teacher's discretion? I might be misunderstanding.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. And every non-educational institution after that will see school, degree as a checkbox.

I have hired for many positions over the years and never once asked for grades.

> I have hired for many positions over the years and never once asked for grades.

I'm not sure what your point is, but if you're trying to claim that GP is incorrect and companies don't ask for GPA, you are (unfortunately) wrong. There are plenty who do. It seems to be especially the bigger and/or more conservative companies so it's trending away, but it definitely happens.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems more strange in my opinion that you'd never have a course thats popular enough that more than one teacher holds sessions for it. You don't have the choice to not take the class, you just have choice with which professor you would like to take it with. And often you would have to get lucky anyway, since that session may be filled so you'd have to take it with the "harder" teacher anyway. For example with the…

Why would a university need multiple professorts seaching the same subject at the same time? A professor isn't a school teacher that needs to look after each student individually. And even for questions andexcercises those are often already handled by teaching assistants of which there can be many as needed. Having the choice between different professors with supposedly different difficulties for what is supposed to…

Popular classes may have many hundreds of students enrolled, and schools may not have classrooms large enough to fit all the students in. Professor time is finite and may not scale to giving duplicate lectures, supervising tens of TAs and deal with the 5% of students who demand unusual attention.

So schools offer multiple sections of the same class to share the workload. E.g. in recent years Computer Science 101 - often the most popular class on campus.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#709
post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted…

Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions? -> GPA can be gamed, as laid out. -> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use. -> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts -> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot. What should be best practice here?…

It's hard, and interviewing is better suited to answering "nope, not you!" questions than "yes, you'll be a good fit."

Onsite interviews with a range of approaches seem to be the best I've found over the years. As much as it pains me, things like fizzbuzz are still useful, because people still lie about their ability to program in languages. If you claim to know C very well and can't knock that out in 5 minutes, and it takes you 45 minutes of prompting, well, you don't know C usefully.

I've seen good results with having a pre-done sort of template program that's missing functionality, and the person completes it out based on comments (for remote interviews), and you can generally tell by watching them type how familiar with the space they are. Again, perfection isn't the goal, but if someone claims to know C very well and is trying to make Javascript syntax work, well, they're full of crap about knowing C.

That said, probably the best approach I've seen for hiring junior dev sorts is a formal summer internship program - and some places have a pretty solid system for doing this, with 20-30 people coming in every summer for a few months. That's a far better way to get to know someone's actual technical skills. In the programs I interacted with, it's safe to assume that if you have 30 people, you'll have about 15 that are "Thank you for your time, good luck..." sorts, maybe 5 or 8 that are "Yeah, you'd probably be a good fit here, and can be trained up in what we need, you'd be welcome back next summer!" and if you're lucky, one or two "HIRE NOW!" sorts that leave the summer program with a job offer.

It's obviously a lot higher effort than interviewing, but the "Throw things at people for three months and see what they do, with a defined end of the program" process seems to be a really good filter for finding quality people.

Re: Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

#710

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating. The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. B…

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