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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

#741

Post by account42 »

hansvm wrote: post #667
aetch wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you even talking about? It’s normal for young students to be using a pencil to write for multiple hours in a day in school.

With breaks, and it's also normal that in a class of ~30 you'll still find a couple students with cramps.

A good exam also has breaks between writing because you need them to think about what you are going to write. An exam that is just about writing down words as fast as you can is going to suck whether that's handwritten or with a keyboard.

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

#742

Post by account42 »

ant6n wrote: post #496
forgetfreeman wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 50. Optimizing testing for speed is goofy. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.

> Optimizing testing for speed is goofy That's a strawman. I said bottlenecking testing by requiring hand writing is stupid. Put another way - you're meant to be using the test to be thinking and re-thinking the problem and articulating approaches and solutions, not use your time, effort and energy on managing quill and paper.

It's not a strawman. If the test is designed so that you have spend most of the time thinking about your answer then even doubling the writing time has not significant impact.

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

#743

Post by account42 »

jdshaffer wrote: post #393
encomiast wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

Not disagreeing with your opinion, just answering your question: The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice. The junk that used to be taught in US schools…

Couldn't you make the argument that training the hands for more lifting and tiny movements has better long-term payoffs as that is also beneficial to many other tasks?

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

#744

Post by account42 »

shmeeed wrote: post #536
WalterBright wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I say "people have two legs", someone is bound to reply "My friend Bob has only one leg."

On average, people have slightly less than two legs.

However the average person has exactly two.

That's because "average" can mean either median, mean or mode depending on context.

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

#745

Post by close04 »

wtrwqyw wrote: post #699
close04 wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Handwriting is still “new information” by the time you are in university? How do you feel about reading when text to speech and LLM summarization are so advanced now?

No wonder some people are so easy to replace with an LLM.

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

#746

Post by account42 »

walrus01 wrote: post #153
dekdrop wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you make sure they are not using their mobile phone with llms while the exam? I have seen that happening.

The same method that any test given in the last 150 years has done to prevent people from using cheat sheets or similar, by having roaming proctors in the room? Or policies like certain models of HP or TI graphing calculator only allowed on the table, for the sort of test that requires one...

I have had a couple exams in university where it was explicitly allowed to bring a (handwritten) A4 cheat sheet. Depends what you are testing though - understanding or memorization.

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

#747

Post by account42 »

pianopatrick wrote: post #230
dekdrop wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you make sure they are not using their mobile phone with llms while the exam? I have seen that happening.

If people wanted to get really serious you could use a cell phone jammer and have students pass through a mini EMP at the door.

That's like preventing crime by locking everyone up.

Much easier is to just have someone with authority in the room to hand out consequences to those who break the rules.

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

#748

Post by account42 »

baby_souffle wrote: post #404
sarchertech wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection. If we get to the point where even that doesn’t work then we’ll be at the point where a camera in the room with an AI analyzing eye movements should be able to detect it. And no matter how advanced they get they’ll still need to radiate heat, so a thermal camera s…

> If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection. We had a 'fix' for this back when they checked your TI83. It's a 2 line basic program to display "MEMORY CLEAR" the exact same way as if somebody had spent the time to find the actual memory clear function in the settings.

And just like with the TI calculators, the school can resort to handing out standardized glasses to those who need them and ban bringing your own.

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

#749

Post by account42 »

panicinducer wrote: post #211
JoshTriplett wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't a one-on-one interview be a better way to establish a broad evaluation of competency. 1) Possibly, depending on the material, but most classes aren't looking for a "broad evaluation of competency", they're looking for the specific material taught. It'd make more sense as a graduation requirement: the equivalent of a dissertation but for undergraduate work. 2) Even in small classes (e.g. 20-30 students) tha…

Maybe not everything needs to "scale"? You're asking each student to spend well over 100 hours in lectures and study for each class. Surely you can find 20 or 30 minutes per student for evaluation.

A problem with not scaling here is that just adding multiple examiners means that now there will be differences in how students are being graded depending on which examiner they get.

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

#750

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

no-name-here wrote: post #736
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Best not blame the technology that was specifically built to pass up automatically generated text for human work, or companies that profit from students using it, or government that won't introduce measures that would at least make it possible to comprehensively ban it on campuses.

Couldn't a similar criticism be made against calculator companies if students used calculators to avoid learning addition, multiplication, etc?

if students used calculators to avoid learning addition that would be a problem. thankfully calculators are easily banned...
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