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Inside the university AI cheating crisis

theguardian.com

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Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#91

Post by patrick451 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #88
gizajob wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations.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 poi…

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

This is patently false, with many counter examples to count. Editorials, blogs, substacks entries, long posts on twitter are all essays.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#92

Post by dieselgate »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #88
gizajob wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations.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 poi…

You just wrote an essay

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#93

Post by tpdly »

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.

Well that's terrible news. Currently building a product for the same market (completely different solution if the nephew comment is correct about your product). I'm already not thrilled to be in ed-tech selling to instructors with admin's money. I thought at least the instructors would have some enthusiasm to solve the problem. Shit.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#94

Post by 2dvisio »

As ex Oxford academic tutor in a college, I was never asked to assess for plagiarism, but this was a time of 1:3 (max) tutorials, very easy to identify students not putting the effort or struggling.

However, as scientific writer and conference/journal reviewer I once spotted a plagiarism using the crude detector (I believe it was Turnitin) embedded in one of the ACM portals we used to use for conferences. The “bad luck” of the submitter was they had plagiarised by copy paste 100% of one of my previous papers :’)

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#95

Post by sabbaticaldev »

michaelmior wrote: post #45
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…

As a current academic who uses Turnitin regularly, I find it works fairly well. There are a lot of false positives, but it also regularly identifies actual plagiarism for me.

For what’s worth (for you) the results would be the same if it identified all of them as plagiarism

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#96

Post by sabbaticaldev »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #88
gizajob wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poi…

> Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay.

ooh-a for the new way to write outrageous essays so to engage people.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#97

Post by Ekaros »

michaelmior wrote: post #45
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…

As a current academic who uses Turnitin regularly, I find it works fairly well. There are a lot of false positives, but it also regularly identifies actual plagiarism for me.

It is a tool like anything else. From student perspective I perfectly understood reasoning for it and how useful it would be when person doing review actually cares. Being able to easily find most obvious things and then cross-reference is very useful.

Problem comes when users do not care and blindly just believe in percentage value and some threshold

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#98

Post by Caius-Cosades »

I, and pretty much all the rest of the class was accused of AI-plagiarization due to TurnitIn flagging it. Since our given task was to write about some niche article quite specific to our profession, TurnitIn flagged any mentions of author names or article titles because some class in the UK had received a similar assignment, where they apparently had to write about the same article.

Therefore by doing as you were instructed and referencing to the article as instructed you would fail the task automatically.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#99

Post by mnky9800n »

MrMcCall wrote: post #65

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…

It could represent that the current zeitgeist doesn't believe in the system any longer and thus feels like cheating is a valid answer.

Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis

#100

Post by spwa4 »

rinzero wrote: post #82

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.

Either that, or, you don't have respect for the fact that one TA has to correct the work of >30 students per class, for perhaps 10 different classes PLUS other work (like actual research), including checking for plagiarism and the like. This only works with certain formats that are characterized by a large asymmetry of work between student and teacher.

You could, of course, pay 30x more and get better service.

And then there's the total disrespect students have for just outright knowledge and practice. Being able to recite a math formularium from memory "is useless". It kind of is. But students who can do this work 5x faster than people who can't, and surely that's a good part of an education. The second thing that really matters for math is doing A LOT of exercises (like 10 intermediate to hard problems per day, ideally) over a prolonged period of time (months, minimum). That's every last exercise in a big calculus book. The exercises "are useless". Mathematica can do it, and in almost all cases, can do it better than a 40-year experience mathematician. But ...

The difference between students who've done both and students who haven't is night and day. Including the difference in using tools like Mathematica. Frankly, you can even see the difference clearly in other subjects.

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