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Inside the university AI cheating crisis

theguardian.com

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Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#81

Post by nomat »

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…

the authors of this paper[0] were able to use AI to figure out if a block of text was written by AI, so hopefully this becomes a tool available to educators very soon.

[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.16107v1

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#82

Post by rinzero »

AI ripped the cover off of a dirty secret of higher education:

The bulk of assignments are useless busywork using outdated formats, and educators and educational institutions haven't been motivated to change it.

Instead of realizing this and embracing the theories and models of newer education sciences, most institutions have become near ideologues with their inertia.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#83

Post by Ancalagon »

gizajob wrote: post #64
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.

youll have to take away their phones/computers in this case too. ChatGPT can write an excellent essay in less than a minute

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#84

Post by indymike »

BrenBarn wrote: post #42
indymike wrote: post #12

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

That's mentioned towards the end. The problem is it requires much more time and labor to give oral exams.

If only there was a new labor saving technology that could be used...

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#85

Post by proteal »

histriosum wrote: post #62
proteal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..?

Internally we get grades. fail, low pass, pass, good, excellent. I tend to get high marks (good+), but there are forced percentages of what grades are awarded. Maybe 15% get excellent? Nobody fails unless you are super truant. Kids hunting for investment banking jobs are advised to study for interviews and not go to class (by peer advisors not the school). They all still pass lol

Grades correspond to a GPA internally that may account for scholarship or whatnot. Mean raw score for some classes is like a 90+. Most grade differentiation comes from class participation. We can pull true GPA from the school if we dig, but we are explicitly told not to share GPA with employers. I’ll share my undergrad grades, but they hardly matter. As far as I can tell, no one shares their grades and employers are expected not to ask for them. This is a top 10 MBA program in the USA, I understand that other programs are very similar.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#87

Post by arp242 »

fardinahsan wrote: post #7
mackross wrote: post #3

We’ve built a solution in conjunction with a university to this problem that is pretty low effort to implement, but very few professors can be bothered to even try it out (the apathy and red tape is unreal). Honestly, it has been disheartening that distribution is so tough, as the results have been great for those who are using it.

Could you share the product and some details about it? I'm curious.

Presumably it's: https://inktrail.co

As I understand it, it records when you're writing, including all edits and such, and verifies it's human based on that. Well, see the demo at https://inktrail.co/in-action

It will probably work well right now, but I don't know how easy that would be to fool once the hucksters build tools to circumvent it.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#88

Post by marcus_holmes »

gizajob wrote: post #64
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.

I think we're looking at a symptom not a cause.

Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations.

Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking".

If we were to write an essay, we would use an LLM to do the actual writing, and feed it a set of bullet points for the points we want to make. Same as our parents moved from handwriting to word processing, we're moving to LLMs as a writing tool.

We're also seeing (that the article didn't mention) that LLMs are being used by staff to grade student essays. Getting to that ridiculous point of an LLM writing content that only an LLM will ever read.

So why not just abandon the essay as a teaching tool? I realise that academia is slow to change, but this might force them to.

Replace it with student presentations, or whatever the actual industry the students are heading for uses to communicate.

As for academia moving away from publishing papers (which are also increasingly being written by LLMs) into journals... that will need to happen too. What replaces that is going to be interesting.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#89

Post by tarboreus »

a_bonobo wrote: post #4

TurnitIn's cheating detection tools have always been garbage - and I say that as an ex-academic who was 'forced' to use those tools extensively (the PDFs submitted by students are only visible in the Turnitin portal with the 'flags' to the right). Even before the 'AI detection' tool (IMHO snake-oil) the features around copy-pasting/plagiarism were so bad I always ignored them. The tool would flag things like commonly…

They're 92% accurate. Sounds good until you realize that's a false plagiarism accusation in every 20 person class.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#90

Post by w4der »

a_bonobo wrote: post #4

TurnitIn's cheating detection tools have always been garbage - and I say that as an ex-academic who was 'forced' to use those tools extensively (the PDFs submitted by students are only visible in the Turnitin portal with the 'flags' to the right). Even before the 'AI detection' tool (IMHO snake-oil) the features around copy-pasting/plagiarism were so bad I always ignored them. The tool would flag things like commonly…

I never once submitted an assignment on a course with TurnitIn turned on, it makes you agree to their terms of service, which I disagree with and I'd just sed my work to the teacher through email, explaining what was my issue with TurnitIn, and most times they'd just turn it off, which I think speaks loads about that "tool".
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