AI Detection services are the oiliest of snake oils. Seems like education is going to need to change drastically in the next few years. Maybe we'll go all the way back to oral examinations again.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
When I was a student decades ago it was when they first introduced anti-plagiarism software. We all had to submit a printed out copy of our book reports along with a floppy disk or cd-rom of our report in the latest Microsoft Word format. Almost the whole class was flagged for plagiarism. Of course the school takes plagiarism very seriously so we all had to have a one-on-one with the principal. The real truth is no one copied each others work and it was the anti-plagiarism software flagging essays because students quoted parts of the book and expanded on that. In hindsight as an adult I think the excessive principal one-on-ones was the teachers way of shoving it to him and his new software.
I doubt oral examinations come back in general. The undergrad model relys on massive classes, I don’t see how you can do oral exams in those 300 person classes without massive cheating as the first students tell everyone else what to expect.
Mathematics programs in Europe still use oral examinations, though they are increasingly rare in the United States. I'm not European, but I have always preferred oral examinations over written examinations because I can actually communicate my understanding of the problem to the professor and outline my thought process towards a solution, something that is much harder to do in writing, especially since you cannot get any hints or feedback on your attempts during a written examination -- you're on your own.
Students should have the right to be shown exactly where and why texts are flagged. Much of the snake oil will disappear pretty quickly if the solutions are required to provide any form of proof.
It's would be funny, if it also wasn't so sad, that the point is that the students need to prove that they did the work, while shitty software can flag their work as being plagiarism or AI generated while providing no proof.
As per usual the problem isn't the technology or the tools, it's the dumb meatbag using them.
This teacher should have thought "hmm, well if I'm going to pull up students on this then it's probably important I do my own research to make sure that I know that the score means and how reliable it is" but nope.
"LLMs are bad cause people will use them to generate spam and fake news!" LLMs aren't the bad actor there...it's the human doing the spamming.
There is a fine line, though. For example the "guns don't kill people argument" is pretty moot, gun control saves lives. If someone grabs an LLM, tells it to "generate text telling young impressionable teens to kill themselves" and spam it on Twitter...well the human is doing bad stuff but they're still enabled by the LLM. However it's easy to enact something like gun control on a physical object. Software? Well, damn that's gonna a problem - especially when the metric by which these LLMs "do better" is how closely the text resembles a hooman.
The entire idea of "spit out knowledge in 1 hour without references" is such a terrible test of one's capability in the real world that it should not be done at all.
They need to be sued into pain. They are part of the problem and are hurting people. People are going to cheat, we know this, it is an incentive problem. But there is no excuse for false positives
It feels more and more like we need to rethink what scoring schoolwork means.
Worksheets and exams can show how familiar you are with the material, or they can be gamed or useless in some other way. But the best they can ever do is show familiarity.
What I really want as a consumer of someone's grade or academic history is how well they WORK in the subject area, along with how well they work with other people, not just a score that may correlate with regurgitation of facts.
I feel cheated by my school years, because I was led to believe that regurgitation of facts is very important. I also feel like this previous comment will be very emotional for some people.
One of the best professors I ever had took a radically different approach to grading than I've seen anywhere else but history books: he gave you a grade based on his perception of your understanding of the material.
He graded assignments and exams, out of a courtesy to those who needed a numeric style of feedback, but there was no set way to translate your total scores on assignments into your final grade in the course.
Exams would be, in a word, brutal, in that no one was expected to ace them, or even complete them. What he wanted to see was that you'd be able to apply the course material to novel situations. He'd meet with every student during the course of longer term projects, just to get some insight into their work.
Ultimately, it wouldn't have scaled well beyond the 50-odd of us were in his course, but it was certainly AI proof.
At the time, I thoroughly enjoyed it because it drove the kids who were hyper-fixated on grades and point grubbing up a wall. Looking back, it was the best teaching style I ever experienced.
> I feel cheated by my school years, because I was led to believe that regurgitation of facts is very important.
Which school is that?
I guess that's probably true of primary or middle / lower secondary school, but I don't feel like regurgitation of facts was particularly endorsed in my experience at upper secondary level, let alone at university level.
There might of course be quite a bit of variation between countries, schools and even individual teachers in this.
I like your direction of thought, but I think we should make sure we don’t over correlate education with vocational utility. School isn’t always about work, and not all education should be about work or jobs or whatever.
That’s why I really like that you included how well they work with others.
Personally, I never felt like school was about memorizing facts (maybe some history classes…), but I also had two parents with advanced degrees who repeatedly told me that school was about learning to think and learning to learn (and learning to time manage). I feel like the vocational focus a lot of people have on education really hurts some fields of study - the humanities gets a lot of hate both on HN and in the media.
Ideally, classes with projects and essays should push people to think and show understanding of the subject not facts, like you said. The infinitely mocked “why did the author say the curtains were green” tropes actually show this - understanding why authors use certain imagery requires understanding intent, historic context, deeper understanding, etc. especially when applied to new works. I think people like cut and dry fact memorization and objective grading, and this doesn’t fit that cleanly.
Grades in university have done absolutely nothing for me. Good grades nor bad grades. What I got out of schooling was quite literally an education – access to perspectives and paradigms, learning methodologies, some expertise in a couple of fields, confidence in working with others. You know... learning.
There's not a lot of value in using AI for targeted tasks like a school essay. Nor is there much value in getting a grade for a targeted task like an essay (not only would the grade be high-noise and low-signal, it also has a tiny or non-existent practical effect).
I wonder if these AI tools will to some extent highlight the meaningless fluff (crust?) that vestigially hangs around. If our current incarnation of task-oriented AI is really good at some particular thing, and we humans readily hand that thing over to AI without regret/loss, what are the chances that that thing really mattered in the first place?
(Note that this is not to hypothesize that all things AI does are non-important.)
I personally believe that we have a weak grasp on the things we do that don't matter. We do a lot of things because we have always done them, and some of these have not been adequately questioned in years/decades. So any indication of what's important or not is very helpful.
(I'm aware my circumstances are unique – maybe for some grades in school have had a significant influence in their lives – I personally have not witnessed this, in myself or others.)
This kind of thing infuriates me so much. Not only are the detectors not accurate, but the damned thing gave it a 27% score that it was written by an AI which means it actually predicted it WASN'T written as AI and this teacher is threatening their success over that. It's absolutely absurd.
Right?! What's the maximum acceptable level of AI-ness, anyway? If I have an AI proofread my paper and suggest a few alternative turns of phrase which sound better to my ear but earn me a 7% AI score, is that okay?
I am an Eagle Scout and was awarded it in 1995. As part of that process, I had to write up a detailed document outlining my project including how it was conceived, the work, and the outcome.
It was rejected on my initial submission because the reviewers felt I it wasn’t written by a sophomore in HS.
My parents rewrote the entire thing in what they described as “baby talk” and it was then accepted. The irony is not lost on me to this day.
This is nothing new; it’s been happening forever and will continue to happen, we just have a new reason to drive a race to the bottom.
If they don't trust an Eagle candidate's attestation of authorship, they probably shouldn't have let (or been the ones to let) the candidate progress that far.
> This is nothing new; it’s been happening forever and will continue to happen, we just have a new reason to drive a race to the bottom.
The joke about the pinewood derby was that you could always tell the one kid who actually built his own car (which was the whole point, after all). Because every other car had been carefully engineered, carved, machined, sanded, painted, lacquered, and weighted by a dad.
Sounds like you had the honor of being in the only scout troupe that at least tried to keep this kind of thing from happening. And your singular false positive seems to have somehow projected itself onto the world.
> I am an Eagle Scout [...] I hate the world we live in.
Isn't there a merit badge or something in Optimistic Can-Do American Spirit? :)
> My parents rewrote the entire thing in what they described as “baby talk” and it was then accepted. The irony is not lost on me to this day.
If you could do it over, would you let yourself be pressured into ironically submitting something that your parents wrote?
Also, do you think whomever rejected your initial writeup did so because they didn't think you did it yourself? Or more like they thought you did it, but they wanted a more stereotypical youth style, maybe because they thought it was more the intent of the exercise? Or maybe for optics reasons, so that it looked like the image people have of a Scout, when upper officials and donors read it?
In my country's equivalent to the UK sixth form or later US high school years (ages ~16 to ~18), I once forgot an English as a foreign language essay assignment until late in the evening before the deadline.
Being a somewhat lazy and absent-minded teenager, by then I had also completely forgotten what exactly the assignment was or what I was supposed to be writing about. So I wrote some kind of a bleeding heart piece about the prevalence of violence and war in the world or whatnot.
I was quite pleased with it. Of course it was probably naive teenager stuff, exactly the kind you'd think is pretty smart when you're in high school, but I felt good about it at the time. I also felt the English was pretty good, which of course was the point of the assignment. And I pulled it off in some kind of a flow state I conjured up at the last moment.
The teacher didn't think I had written it. She asked me if I had got the text from some IT firm or something. (This was around the dotcom boom, and I probably seemed like an obvious nerd. Those local dotcom firms had the image of being at the forefront of internationalization and anglicization. I still don't know why she'd think IT firms would make a point of writing high school English essays for nerds.)
It was my mistake, of course, and I understand her suspicion because I turned in something that didn't conform to the specific assignment at all. It's different than submitting work that is actually what was asked for and being rejected for doing it too well. But I did honestly feel a bit bitter about it nevertheless. And possibly a little proud.
I had a similar experience in the 5th grade. We had a creative writing assignment (write x many pages), and I wrote a short story about "space spiders" that spun giant webs between planets and moons to catch something. I can't recall.
The only thing more mundane and unimaginative than that two pages was my teacher, who accused me of plagiarizing it.
wow, computers writing essays that cannot be distinguished from human written essays and the ramifications of this have been going on for… ever. i dont know how to say it nicely… youre just blatantly wrong.
Has anyone field-tested strategies to fighting allegations like this and would like to share them?
Something I remember from a previous discussion around this topic was writing everything in e.g., Google Docs, where there are captured versions every few seconds. The idea being that the version log shows that one did not copy-and-paste larger chunks of the text.
As a professor at a community college, I am very hesitant to just declare something is AI generated unless is it very clear. If I suspect something is AI generated I run it through 3 different checkers that I found online and if they don't all agree then I don't call it plagiarism. Normally the writing is so vague that it isn't more than a C anyway.
"I know their predictions are statistically quite bad, so I used a magic 8 ball three times to make sure there wasn't any doubt."
----
How much allure for these products is there that a college professor can be on HN, know that the tools don't work, and still use them anyway?
And how are students supposed to combat that kind of misuse if even educating professors about the problem isn't enough to make them stop trusting the detectors? And for a professor to then to brag about it on HN that they're being responsible as if they expect to be praised for it?
It's just so frustrating to read... What do you do if you're a student in that situation, do you have to sit your professor down and not only show that the tools have problems but also explain the concept of correlated error?
I kind of feel like the only way this changes is with legal challenges to colleges until they eventually ban the tools from being used in grading. Public pushback isn't going to change it, schools aren't going to care about that. And if educating about the problems isn't going to change behavior, I can't expect students to walk every one of their professors through a stats class. I don't know what if any legal rights at all students actually have in these situations, I'm guessing most colleges have boilerplate that if they decide to randomly fail you tough luck.
But at the very least, @jccalhoun you should stop using these programs yourself; you have the individual ability to make your own classroom better, and you should.
I would sue the teacher and school if this happened to me… total BS.
Also plagarism and having other people do your work, or even take exams for you is as old as time. How is AI any different? Some trust is in order here. The students are the ones paying to be educated, if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways.
>if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways.
I've heard people say this a lot. It's a very old-school liberal arts perspective that doesn't fit with the modern world. In practice, for most students, education is a third-place benefit of university behind 1. the certificate and 2. networking.
That's a waste of your time and your money. When you consult with your lawyer they're going to point out the Code of Student Conduct you agreed to that stipulates how automated tools are being used to detect plagiarism - tools that have been in place and in use for over ten years at this point.
If anything, the new generation of AI tools should reduce the false positives. As another commenter here noted, even humans weren't perfect at this task. We've never been able to reduce the false positives to zero.
Meanwhile, you owe your lawyer $350 for your initial consultation.
I am an educator at a UK university. The essay is rapidly ceasing to be an appropriate way to assess students knowledge and critical thinking.
We regularly organise in person face to face practical exams for our entire several hundred strong year group of undergraduates. It is possible to do assessment properly if the will is there.
When I was in college, they were going to put carpet in the science labs, and a few of us thought it was a really stupid, dangerous idea.
We started a petition and asked for signatures at the on-campus cafe.
After a few days, the administrators asked us into their office for a chat. They asked us stupid questions and tried to talk us out of our petition. When it didn't work, they eventually caved and didn't do the carpet that year.
They waited for the next year. Then a couple years later, they put back the tile.
I don't know why they were so scared of our petition, but I'm sure this is another situation that could benefit from one. It sends a very clear message about the situation to people very high up in the food chain. And I'm sure it could get a ton of signatures.
The message from the teacher looks like it was written by a bot. Compare notes with other students. If two students got exactly the same text, the teacher is outsourcing their own job to a program. Publicize that.
Comical. Back in the day, when I had to write research papers I would go to Wikipedia by copying the citations verbatim, outline the page, and then essentially rewrite the whole thing in my voice but keeping the exact quotes from the original article since they were cited.
At that point, 70% of the hard work is done and you're just regurgitating. Liberal arts is long dead.
This is apparently unpopular but my take on this is that if teachers want students to write something on which AI can get high scores, then whatever they're teaching is obsolete and will be replaced by AIs anyway. Of course, not mentioning AI as co-author remains cheating. But I think the best course of action is to simply allow students to use AI while mentioning it (and the prompts they've used).
I'm in philosophy and so far no AI has produced a text of interest to me. If it did, then I'd deal with it like with any arguments by colleagues.
> if teachers want students to write something on which AI can get high scores, then whatever they're teaching is obsolete
Doing trivial things is often the first step in learning how to do non-trivial things. No one has ever needed a five paragraph essay. It's a completely artificial construct that, hopefully, teaches people to structure an essay.
Electronic calculators have existed for decades but we're still teaching kids arithmetic.
What is the actual problem with AI generated text in and of itself?
If it was completely AI generated without any human intervention, it likely would have been fairly generic / poor writing anyway. At least for the time being, AI is a new tool at our disposal but it's still just a tool, like a calculator or a hammer.
Students should be judged on the merit of the work even if some of the work is AI generated.
I have always spelled really well (almost won a spelling bee) and as soon as personal computers became a thing, I realized how useless a "superpower" it was. And now it might become an actual liability as nearly perfect spelling/grammar is an easy attribute to hang "possibly AI-generated" on.
If you submit a word document, is there some way to detect if the words were typed out, how long the document was open etc? Basically trying to detect if the student pasted the text? Obviously students would get around this simply by typing it out word for word, but could work here.
[+] [-] gustavus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GloriousKoji|2 years ago|reply
When I was a student decades ago it was when they first introduced anti-plagiarism software. We all had to submit a printed out copy of our book reports along with a floppy disk or cd-rom of our report in the latest Microsoft Word format. Almost the whole class was flagged for plagiarism. Of course the school takes plagiarism very seriously so we all had to have a one-on-one with the principal. The real truth is no one copied each others work and it was the anti-plagiarism software flagging essays because students quoted parts of the book and expanded on that. In hindsight as an adult I think the excessive principal one-on-ones was the teachers way of shoving it to him and his new software.
[+] [-] HDThoreaun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koito17|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|2 years ago|reply
It's would be funny, if it also wasn't so sad, that the point is that the students need to prove that they did the work, while shitty software can flag their work as being plagiarism or AI generated while providing no proof.
[+] [-] RandomLensman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fennecfoxy|2 years ago|reply
This teacher should have thought "hmm, well if I'm going to pull up students on this then it's probably important I do my own research to make sure that I know that the score means and how reliable it is" but nope.
"LLMs are bad cause people will use them to generate spam and fake news!" LLMs aren't the bad actor there...it's the human doing the spamming.
There is a fine line, though. For example the "guns don't kill people argument" is pretty moot, gun control saves lives. If someone grabs an LLM, tells it to "generate text telling young impressionable teens to kill themselves" and spam it on Twitter...well the human is doing bad stuff but they're still enabled by the LLM. However it's easy to enact something like gun control on a physical object. Software? Well, damn that's gonna a problem - especially when the metric by which these LLMs "do better" is how closely the text resembles a hooman.
[+] [-] dheera|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beached_whale|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|2 years ago|reply
Worksheets and exams can show how familiar you are with the material, or they can be gamed or useless in some other way. But the best they can ever do is show familiarity.
What I really want as a consumer of someone's grade or academic history is how well they WORK in the subject area, along with how well they work with other people, not just a score that may correlate with regurgitation of facts.
I feel cheated by my school years, because I was led to believe that regurgitation of facts is very important. I also feel like this previous comment will be very emotional for some people.
[+] [-] OkayPhysicist|2 years ago|reply
He graded assignments and exams, out of a courtesy to those who needed a numeric style of feedback, but there was no set way to translate your total scores on assignments into your final grade in the course.
Exams would be, in a word, brutal, in that no one was expected to ace them, or even complete them. What he wanted to see was that you'd be able to apply the course material to novel situations. He'd meet with every student during the course of longer term projects, just to get some insight into their work.
Ultimately, it wouldn't have scaled well beyond the 50-odd of us were in his course, but it was certainly AI proof.
At the time, I thoroughly enjoyed it because it drove the kids who were hyper-fixated on grades and point grubbing up a wall. Looking back, it was the best teaching style I ever experienced.
[+] [-] Delk|2 years ago|reply
Which school is that?
I guess that's probably true of primary or middle / lower secondary school, but I don't feel like regurgitation of facts was particularly endorsed in my experience at upper secondary level, let alone at university level.
There might of course be quite a bit of variation between countries, schools and even individual teachers in this.
[+] [-] vineyardmike|2 years ago|reply
That’s why I really like that you included how well they work with others.
Personally, I never felt like school was about memorizing facts (maybe some history classes…), but I also had two parents with advanced degrees who repeatedly told me that school was about learning to think and learning to learn (and learning to time manage). I feel like the vocational focus a lot of people have on education really hurts some fields of study - the humanities gets a lot of hate both on HN and in the media.
Ideally, classes with projects and essays should push people to think and show understanding of the subject not facts, like you said. The infinitely mocked “why did the author say the curtains were green” tropes actually show this - understanding why authors use certain imagery requires understanding intent, historic context, deeper understanding, etc. especially when applied to new works. I think people like cut and dry fact memorization and objective grading, and this doesn’t fit that cleanly.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] smrtinsert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurofbabylon|2 years ago|reply
There's not a lot of value in using AI for targeted tasks like a school essay. Nor is there much value in getting a grade for a targeted task like an essay (not only would the grade be high-noise and low-signal, it also has a tiny or non-existent practical effect).
I wonder if these AI tools will to some extent highlight the meaningless fluff (crust?) that vestigially hangs around. If our current incarnation of task-oriented AI is really good at some particular thing, and we humans readily hand that thing over to AI without regret/loss, what are the chances that that thing really mattered in the first place?
(Note that this is not to hypothesize that all things AI does are non-important.)
I personally believe that we have a weak grasp on the things we do that don't matter. We do a lot of things because we have always done them, and some of these have not been adequately questioned in years/decades. So any indication of what's important or not is very helpful.
(I'm aware my circumstances are unique – maybe for some grades in school have had a significant influence in their lives – I personally have not witnessed this, in myself or others.)
[+] [-] tracerbulletx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saulpw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garciasn|2 years ago|reply
It was rejected on my initial submission because the reviewers felt I it wasn’t written by a sophomore in HS.
My parents rewrote the entire thing in what they described as “baby talk” and it was then accepted. The irony is not lost on me to this day.
This is nothing new; it’s been happening forever and will continue to happen, we just have a new reason to drive a race to the bottom.
I hate the world we live in.
[+] [-] CoastalCoder|2 years ago|reply
If they don't trust an Eagle candidate's attestation of authorship, they probably shouldn't have let (or been the ones to let) the candidate progress that far.
[+] [-] jancsika|2 years ago|reply
The joke about the pinewood derby was that you could always tell the one kid who actually built his own car (which was the whole point, after all). Because every other car had been carefully engineered, carved, machined, sanded, painted, lacquered, and weighted by a dad.
Sounds like you had the honor of being in the only scout troupe that at least tried to keep this kind of thing from happening. And your singular false positive seems to have somehow projected itself onto the world.
[+] [-] neilv|2 years ago|reply
Isn't there a merit badge or something in Optimistic Can-Do American Spirit? :)
> My parents rewrote the entire thing in what they described as “baby talk” and it was then accepted. The irony is not lost on me to this day.
If you could do it over, would you let yourself be pressured into ironically submitting something that your parents wrote?
Also, do you think whomever rejected your initial writeup did so because they didn't think you did it yourself? Or more like they thought you did it, but they wanted a more stereotypical youth style, maybe because they thought it was more the intent of the exercise? Or maybe for optics reasons, so that it looked like the image people have of a Scout, when upper officials and donors read it?
[+] [-] Delk|2 years ago|reply
In my country's equivalent to the UK sixth form or later US high school years (ages ~16 to ~18), I once forgot an English as a foreign language essay assignment until late in the evening before the deadline.
Being a somewhat lazy and absent-minded teenager, by then I had also completely forgotten what exactly the assignment was or what I was supposed to be writing about. So I wrote some kind of a bleeding heart piece about the prevalence of violence and war in the world or whatnot.
I was quite pleased with it. Of course it was probably naive teenager stuff, exactly the kind you'd think is pretty smart when you're in high school, but I felt good about it at the time. I also felt the English was pretty good, which of course was the point of the assignment. And I pulled it off in some kind of a flow state I conjured up at the last moment.
The teacher didn't think I had written it. She asked me if I had got the text from some IT firm or something. (This was around the dotcom boom, and I probably seemed like an obvious nerd. Those local dotcom firms had the image of being at the forefront of internationalization and anglicization. I still don't know why she'd think IT firms would make a point of writing high school English essays for nerds.)
It was my mistake, of course, and I understand her suspicion because I turned in something that didn't conform to the specific assignment at all. It's different than submitting work that is actually what was asked for and being rejected for doing it too well. But I did honestly feel a bit bitter about it nevertheless. And possibly a little proud.
[+] [-] oceanghost|2 years ago|reply
The only thing more mundane and unimaginative than that two pages was my teacher, who accused me of plagiarizing it.
[+] [-] ugh123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tegmark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linusha|2 years ago|reply
Something I remember from a previous discussion around this topic was writing everything in e.g., Google Docs, where there are captured versions every few seconds. The idea being that the version log shows that one did not copy-and-paste larger chunks of the text.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danShumway|2 years ago|reply
"They don't predict the future."
"I know their predictions are statistically quite bad, so I used a magic 8 ball three times to make sure there wasn't any doubt."
----
How much allure for these products is there that a college professor can be on HN, know that the tools don't work, and still use them anyway?
And how are students supposed to combat that kind of misuse if even educating professors about the problem isn't enough to make them stop trusting the detectors? And for a professor to then to brag about it on HN that they're being responsible as if they expect to be praised for it?
It's just so frustrating to read... What do you do if you're a student in that situation, do you have to sit your professor down and not only show that the tools have problems but also explain the concept of correlated error?
I kind of feel like the only way this changes is with legal challenges to colleges until they eventually ban the tools from being used in grading. Public pushback isn't going to change it, schools aren't going to care about that. And if educating about the problems isn't going to change behavior, I can't expect students to walk every one of their professors through a stats class. I don't know what if any legal rights at all students actually have in these situations, I'm guessing most colleges have boilerplate that if they decide to randomly fail you tough luck.
But at the very least, @jccalhoun you should stop using these programs yourself; you have the individual ability to make your own classroom better, and you should.
[+] [-] _yb2s|2 years ago|reply
Also plagarism and having other people do your work, or even take exams for you is as old as time. How is AI any different? Some trust is in order here. The students are the ones paying to be educated, if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways.
[+] [-] Miraste|2 years ago|reply
I've heard people say this a lot. It's a very old-school liberal arts perspective that doesn't fit with the modern world. In practice, for most students, education is a third-place benefit of university behind 1. the certificate and 2. networking.
[+] [-] booleandilemma|2 years ago|reply
The problem is the cheater will then enter into society and tell people "I'm a graduate of $prestigious_university".
At that point they are cheating society.
Would you want to work with people who cheated? Would you want your doctor to be someone who cheated?
[+] [-] paulddraper|2 years ago|reply
A school can assign whatever score they want to an assignment, just as you can leave whatever review you want to a product.
[+] [-] taylodl|2 years ago|reply
If anything, the new generation of AI tools should reduce the false positives. As another commenter here noted, even humans weren't perfect at this task. We've never been able to reduce the false positives to zero.
Meanwhile, you owe your lawyer $350 for your initial consultation.
[+] [-] duped|2 years ago|reply
If a class is graded on a bell curve then kids who cheat are cheating their classmates who don't.
[+] [-] 2ap|2 years ago|reply
We regularly organise in person face to face practical exams for our entire several hundred strong year group of undergraduates. It is possible to do assessment properly if the will is there.
[+] [-] wccrawford|2 years ago|reply
We started a petition and asked for signatures at the on-campus cafe.
After a few days, the administrators asked us into their office for a chat. They asked us stupid questions and tried to talk us out of our petition. When it didn't work, they eventually caved and didn't do the carpet that year.
They waited for the next year. Then a couple years later, they put back the tile.
I don't know why they were so scared of our petition, but I'm sure this is another situation that could benefit from one. It sends a very clear message about the situation to people very high up in the food chain. And I'm sure it could get a ton of signatures.
[+] [-] belkinpower|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsalzman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freitzkriesler2|2 years ago|reply
At that point, 70% of the hard work is done and you're just regurgitating. Liberal arts is long dead.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jonathanstrange|2 years ago|reply
I'm in philosophy and so far no AI has produced a text of interest to me. If it did, then I'd deal with it like with any arguments by colleagues.
[+] [-] dmm|2 years ago|reply
Doing trivial things is often the first step in learning how to do non-trivial things. No one has ever needed a five paragraph essay. It's a completely artificial construct that, hopefully, teaches people to structure an essay.
Electronic calculators have existed for decades but we're still teaching kids arithmetic.
[+] [-] seanoliver|2 years ago|reply
This teacher is failing the test.
[+] [-] antifa|2 years ago|reply
Also, I'd still want a foundation of critical thinking skills to be built inside the brain of the next generation, not outsourced to AI.
[+] [-] seanoliver|2 years ago|reply
If it was completely AI generated without any human intervention, it likely would have been fairly generic / poor writing anyway. At least for the time being, AI is a new tool at our disposal but it's still just a tool, like a calculator or a hammer.
Students should be judged on the merit of the work even if some of the work is AI generated.
[+] [-] pmarreck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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