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. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.
But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.
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 (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.
In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.
> 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 their class.
The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Fail 3 times and you're exmatriculated.
This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe.
The US will continue down on the path you describe because it's in the interest of colleges to keep well-paying students around. It's a service. You buy a degree, you are a customer.
Absolutely true, and not limited to the USA either.
In university I can recall a computer graphics course where literally everyone got 100+% on problem sets (there were bonus questions of course) and the median score on the midterm was below 50%. Leading up to the exam I remember the prof leading an exam prep session, opening the floor to questions, and getting a sincere request from one of the students to please go over the whole concept of "matrices" again.
This was a 400 level course, BTW. At one of the highest-rated universities in Canada. (I was taking it as an elective from a different program from the default, so I can't speak to the precise prerequisites to get there.)
This was over 20 years ago, BTW. I'm sure it's only gotten somehow even worse.
I remember taking a math class in college and the professor had a very unique way of dealing with cheating. He let us use our books, notes, and "any calculator capability" from our TI-84's. His rationale is that students will try to use these tricks anyways so just let them and then update the test to be "immune" from these advantages. Before every test he mentioned that we could use all those tools but always said "but please study, your books, notes and calculators won't save you".
Long term I see education going this route, rather than preventing students from using AI tools, update course curriculum so that AI tools don't give such an advantage.
> They are used to doing the necessary work to pass
The same for job interviews. I did a lot of technical interviews in the past as interviewer (hundreds) for Software Engineer positions (and still help companies to hire sometimes, as independent interviewer).
There is insane amount of cheating. I'd say at least 30% in normal companies are cheaters, and 50% and more in FAANG. I can prove it, in private groups, and forums people share tech assignments. And very large number of these people use some kind of assistance while interviewing.
It's interesting to see how sometimes questions that are intentionally sophisticated are getting solved in a few minutes the best way they can be solved. I see this over and over.
Agree. This isn't even necessarily an AI problem, people have been cheating/plagiarizing for years. And schools have failed to find or implement a method to prevent it.
I was in high school when kids started getting cell phones with internet access and basically as soon as that happened it opened up rampant cheating even among the best of students. I can only imagine it being much worse nowadays than even 15 years ago when I was in high school.
I have friends that started a startup trying to tackle this problem. They actually found ways for certain types of exams in certain subjects to make cheating exponentially harder and also provide less of an advantage, so much so that if the student is cheating they are effectively learning.
Some of their stuff works really well, and they have prof customers who love it. The CEO went on a tour to visit their biggest customers in person and several of them said they couldn't imagine going back.
Unfortunately as a whole the industry is not interested in it, aside from a few small niches and department heads who are both open minded and actually care about the integrity of the education. There have even been cases where profs want it and the dean or admin in charge of academic integrity vetoes its adoption. I've been privy to some calls I can only characterize as corrupt.
There is something deeply broken about higher Ed, the economics, the culture of the students, the culture of the faculty, the leadership... This isn't an AI problem it's a society problem.
When the students genuinely want to learn something and they are there for the knowledge, not the credit, cheating isn't a problem.
As a student of the previous generation, I much preferred exams with an oral defence component. Gave an opportunity to clear up any miscommunications, and I always walked away with a much better estimate for how well I did.
> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass.
This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work. Once you get past that level students have already formed bad habits and so still only do what it takes to pass. I don't know how to fix it, I don't know if it CAN be fixed.
I think this is one of positives of standardised public exams (e.g. IB, Abitur, A Levels, etc); the people implementing them take cheating very seriously.
K-12 specifically has it bad. Wake up 7am get to school for 8/9 fill your day with classes you don't have much interest in while also figuring out how to be a social human with other kids and all the stress that entails. Then we require them to go home and continue to do more schoolwork.
Of course they're gonna cheat. They're overworked and overstressed as it is.
I did a "hard" degree and saw classmates who worked half as hard sail by me, because they cheated. Groups that share answer banks, in-class quizzes with answers shared (when they were not supposed to be), group projects that used last year's stuff. All of it, all the way through final exams, which people had answer keys to. I had a few classmates that were formally investigated for cheating by the university; their punishment is to re-take the class -- the cheat's cumulative 3.8 is turned into a 3.75, that's sure to dissuade them from doing it again!
When I tell people that I never cheated, ever, in any class, through my entire degree, I get mostly surprise. You never? Not once?
But I paid for it, I think. Because it was not easy finding a first position out of school -- I certainly got filtered by GPA. It actually enrages me. What is the point of a degree? What exactly is the point of this thing, if most of the signal is false? Why did I work so hard?
Not even to mention -- many of my classmates (about 1 in 5, one in 6 or so?) were granted "accommodations" which granted them twice as much time to take their exams. There are online services: pay $80, get a letter certifying your ADHD, that you can give the school to get these accommodations. It's completely ridiculous.
> 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
This is kind of astonishing to me, because for most of my math and engineering courses cheating on take home work would not have improved my final grade (much less helped me learn the material, which is kind of the point I thought, and often necessary for subsequent courses.)
It seems common for math (and related) courses to grade almost entirely based on in-person, in-class exams. In some courses problem sets are optional (though they can be turned in for evaluation) but are recommended for understanding and practice.
Exams can go poorly, so perhaps having more of them (e.g. frequent quizzes) can help to compensate for having a bad day. Also exams can include basic problems, ones that are very similar to problem sets or worked problems from lectures, etc.
> If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.
That sounds like an improvement over the current situation?
> 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.
I completely agree, but the entire higher ed system is moving to on-line instruction.
Basically, if the University of <xyz> follows your suggestion, all of the competing institutions will eat their lunch by offering on-line courses with the "convenience" of on-line assessments" and the University of <xyz> will lose enrollment.
I never understood why americans do their exams with multi-option tests. Even if you don't cheat, these tests don't actually test knowledge, just memoization.
For me a proper exam is when you get a topic, spend 30 minutes in a classroom preparing, and then sit down with an examiner to tell him about this topic and answer all the follow-up questions.
We don't do multi-option tests at software interviews, and for a good reason. Why do them in a uni?
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I remember when (almost 25 years ago now) I did first year computer science, you had to hand in your code for an assignment, and then you had to sit with a tutor and answer questions about what it did, how it worked, and why you'd written it the way you did. Cheaters could get someone else to write their code for them but they did very poorly on the oral part.
> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass.
Can you blame students for optimizing for grades rather than "learning"? My first two years of undergrad, the smallest professor-led lecture course I took had at least 200 students (the largest was an econ 101 course that literally had 700 kids in it). We had smaller discussion sections as well, but those were led by TAs who were often only a couple years older than me. It was abundantly clear that my professors couldn't care less about me, let alone whether I "learned" anything from them. The classes were merely a box they were obligated to check. Is it so hard to understand why students would act accordingly?
Well, during the end of the pandemic I had the misfortune of hear some engineers undergrads talking about on how would they supposed to pass classes now that they were going to be in person; apparently a lot of them were doing just "fine" on online classes and tests...
> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass.
I'd like to point out this has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating happens at all levels of academic performance.
I have not been in university for a while, but I do remember that it was rare that I did my best work for any individual class.
For me it was more of a "satisficing" challenge, and I had to make hard choices about which classes I would not get A's in.
I'm sure some professors might have interpreted my performance in their class as indicative of my overall abilities. I'm fine with that. I learned as much as I could, I maxed out my course load, and I don't regret it at all.
> 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.
If all my math professors had done this, I never would have earned my computer science degree or my minor in mathematics.
I have an immensely difficult time memorizing formulas and doing math by hand. I absolutely need to be able to prepare notes ahead of time, and reference them, to be able to complete a math test on paper. Even then, I'm a very slow in-person test-taker, and would often run out of time. I've honestly come around to the idea that maybe I have some sort of learning disability, but I never gave that idea much thought in college. So, I didn't qualify for extra time, or any other test-taking accommodations. I was just out-of-luck when time was up on a test.
The only reason I was able to earn my degree is because I was able to take almost all of my math classes online, and reference my notes during tests. (COVID was actually a huge help for this.)
And by "notes", I don't just mean formulas or solutions to example problems that I had recorded. I also mean any of the dozens of algorithms I programmed to help automate complex parts of larger problems.
The vast majority of the math classes I took, regardless of whether they were online or in-person, did not use multiple-choice answers, and we always had to show our work for credit. So I couldn't just "automate all the things!", or use AI. I did actually have to learn it and demonstrate how to solve the problems. My issue was that I struggled to learn the material the way the university demanded, or in their timeframe.
So as an otherwise successful student and capable programmer, who would have struggled immensely and been negatively affected mentally, professionally, and financially, had they been forced to work through math courses the way you prescribe, I'm asking you: please reconsider.
Please reconsider how important memorization should be to pass a math class, how strongly you might equate "memorized" to "learned", and what critical thinking and problem-solving could look like in a world where technology is encouraged as part of learning, not shunned.
> 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. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class.
When I was in college, this was every math class. You could cheat all you want on the 20% of your grade that came from homework, but the remaining 80% was from 3-4 in-class, proctored exams.
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Face to face, proctored and standardised exams are, indeed, pretty much the only way most of the rest of world allows kids _into_ university. One thing I was reasonably certain of at my university is everyone _arriving_ at it to study maths knew how to differentiate and integrate a polynomial.
> 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. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.
Just one generation ago this was the norm. The only differences between how exams were given in my math classes were what size of note paper was allowed.
In general students hated the few classes that tried to use online platforms for grading, the sites sucked so much that students preferred pen and paper.
Also, it is a math class! The only thing that is needed is arguably a calculator, a pencil, and some paper. What the hell kind of technology are students using in class?
> The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.
Colleges used to all have tech requirements, the big debate was to allow calculators with CAS or not.
> If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.
What the heck are students doing in college then? I was paying good $$$ to go to college, I was there because I wanted to learn. Why the hell would I pay thousands of dollars to go to class and then not learn anything in the class, that would be a huge waste of my time!
The school I went do did a lot of oral examinations where each student would walk to the front of the class then answer questions, do math problems, recite poetry, etc.
Honestly, the problem is not the cheating, per se.
The problem is the lack of learning the material. You don't, IMO, directly care how they produced the answer, you care about it only as a proxy for them learning the material well enough to solve the problem.
And making people do them in person with no technology is unrealistic - not because it can't be done, but because at that point, it's not a reflection of how you'd use it outside of that classroom, and people are going to call it pointless, and IMO they'd be right. You would be correct that anyone who met that bar would have likely learned the material, but you'd also have excluded people who would have met the bar of "can use the material to the degree of familiarity needed going forward".
I think a reasonable compromise would be to let students collaborate on the exams in the classroom, without external access - while I realize some people learn better on their own in some subjects, as long as everyone contributes some portion of the work, and they go back and forth on agreeing what the right answers are, then you're going to make forward progress, even if that ruins the exam process as anything other than a class-wide metric. You could subdivide it, but then that gets riskier as there's a higher chance that the subset of people doesn't know enough to make progress. Maybe a hint system for groups, since the goal here is learning, not just grading their knowledge going in?
Not that there's not some need for metrics, but in terms of trying to check in on where students are every so often, I think you need to leverage how people often end up learning things "in the wild" - from a combination of wild searching and talking to other people, and then feedback on whether they decided you could build an airplane out of applesauce or something closer to accurate.
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 having 'calculators' in our pockets 24/7 now.
We need to accept that the world has changed; I only hope that we get to decide how society responds to that change together .. rather than have it forced upon us.
The part that annoys me is that students apparently have no right to be told why the AI flagged their work. For any process where an computer is allowed to judge people, where should be a rule in place that demands that the algorithm be able explains EXACTLY why it flagged this person.
Now this would effectively kill off the current AI powered solution, because they have no way of explaining, or even understanding, why a paper may be plagiarized or not, but I'm okay with that.
FWIW, I'm a consultant for a large University hospital, and Dutch. My PhD thesis, years ago, got the remark: "Should have checked with a native speaker."
So, now I use ChatGPT to check my English. I just write what I want to write than ask it to make my text more "More concise, business-like and not so American" (yeah the thing is by default as ultra enthusiastic as an American waiter). And 9 out of 10 times it says what I want to say but better than I wrote myself, and in much less words and better English.
I don't think it took less time to write my report, but it is much much better than I could have made alone.
AI detector may go off (or it goes on? of is it of? Idk, perhaps I should ask Chat ;)), but it is about as useful as a spell-check detector.
It's a Large Language Model, you should just is like that, it is not a Large Fact Model. But if you're a teacher you should be a good bullshit detector, right?
If I'm every checking some student's report, you may get this feedback: For god's sake, check the language with ChatGPT, but for God's sake check the fact in some other way.
My kids’ school added a new weapons scanner as kids walk in the door. It’s powered by “AI.” They trust the AI quite a bit.
However, the AI identifies the school issued Lenovo laptops as weapons. So every kid was flagged. Rather than stopping using such a stupid tool, they just have the kids remove their laptops before going through the scanner.
I expect not smart enough people are buying “AI” products and trusting them to do the things they want them to do, but don’t work.
That's kinda nuts how adult people learned to trust some random algorithms in a year or two. They don't know how it works, they cannot explain it, they don't care, it just works. It's magic. If it says you cheated, you cheated. You cannot do anything about it.
I want to emphasize, that this isn't really about trusting magic, it's about people nonchalantly doing ridiculous stuff nowdays and that they aren't held accountable for that, apparently. For example, there were times back at school when I was "accused" of cheating, because it was the only time when I liked the homework at some class and took it seriously, and it was kinda insulting to hear that there's absolutely no way I did it, but I still got my mark, because it doesn't matter what she thinks if she cannot prove it, so please just sign it and fuck off, it's the last time I'm doing my homework at your class anyway.
On the contrary, if this article to be believed, these teachers don't have to prove anything, the fact that a coin flipped heads is considered enough of a proof. And everyone supposedly treats it as if it's ok. "Well, they have this system at school, what can we do!" It's crazy.
My daughter was accused of turning in an essay written by AI because the school software at her online school said so. Her mom watched her write the essay. I thought it was common knowledge that it was impossible to tell whether text was generated by AI. Evidently, the software vendors are either ignorant or are lying, and school administrators are believing them.
One of my kid's teachers sent out a warning to students that all essays would be checked with AI detection software and the repercussions one would face if caught. A classmate did an AI check on the teacher's warning and it came back positive for having been AI-generated.
For a human who deals with student work or reads job applications spotting AI generated work quickly becomes trivially easy. Text seems to use the same general framework (although words are swapped around) also we see what I call 'word of the week' where whichever 'AI' engine seems to get hung up on a particular English word which is often an unusual one and uses it at every opportunity. It isn't long before you realise that the adage that this is just autocomplete on steroids is true.
However programming a computer to do this isn't easy. In a previous job I had dealing with plagiarism detectors and soon realised how garbage they were (and also how easily fooled they are - but that is another story). The staff soon realised what garbage these tools are so if a student accused of plagiarism decided to argue back then the accusation would be quietly dropped.
I couldn't cheat in high school because we couldn't use our phones during class. Not for worksheets nor quizzes and especially not exams whether they be multiple choice, oral, or essays.
Yet the top threads here act like we need a whole refactor of schooling, many people suggesting we rely on viva voce exams and proctored exams. What exactly do you think that's solving over a simple classroom scantron test where the teacher ensures people aren't on their phones?
If AI detection cannot be 100% accurate, I do not believe it is an appropriate solution for judging the futures of millions of students and young people. Time to move on. Either from the tech or from the essay format.
In either case, we need to change our standards around mastery of subject matter.
Seems like the easy fix here is move all evaluation in-class. Are schools really that reliant on internet/computer based assignments? Actually, this could be a great opportunity to dial back unnecessary and wasteful edu-tech creep.
In my observation something paradox happens when teachers use LLM-Detectors to fail their students on dubious detection probabilities.
The teacher accuses the student of using the LLM to perform the task they are assigned. This entails not properly understanding the assignment and presenting an accomplishment which has not been achieved by the student themselves.
On the other hand the teacher using an LLM tool also do not understand the reasoning of the decision and present often present them as their own judgement. A judgement that has not truly been felled by the teacher because they do not use the tool for understanding but for deferring their responsibilities.
In doing so the teacher is engaging in the same act of (self-)deception they are accusing the student of: presenting an achievement not truly reached through their own understanding, even if the situation necessitates it (non-deferrable learning vs. non-deferrable decision).
The use of LLM-detection in this way thus mirrors the very problem it seeks to address.
The challenging thing is, cheating students also say they're being falsely accused. Tough times in academia right now. Cheating became free, simple, and ubiquitous overnight. Cheating services built on top of ChatGPT advertise to college students; Chrome extensions exist that just solve your homework for you.
Rather than flagging it as AI why don’t we flag if it’s good or not?
I work with people in their 30s That cannot write their way out of a hat. Who cares if the work is AI assisted or not. Most AI writing is super dry, formulaic and bad. The student doesn’t recognize this the give them a poor mark for having terrible style.
The LLMs de-value the viability of homework, and assignments consisting of at-home busywork. As an alternative, teachers will have to put more emphasis on proctored exams.
I say good riddance, that's exactly how it should be. At-home busywork is a scourge on especially K-12 students. Yet, every teacher has been loading their students up with homework, because that's their idea of what a "good teacher" is supposed to do.
The faster technology overcomes this problem, the better.
This is not something that reveals how bad AI is or how dumb administration is. It's revealing how fundamentally dumb our educational system is. It's incredibly easy to subvert. And kids don't find value in it.
Helping kids find value in education is the only important concern here and adding an AI checker doesn't help with that.
[+] [-] skhunted|1 year ago|reply
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. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.
But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.
K-12 needs to be changed as well.
[+] [-] lumost|1 year ago|reply
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 (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.
In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.
[+] [-] bonoboTP|1 year ago|reply
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 their class.
The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Fail 3 times and you're exmatriculated.
This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe.
The US will continue down on the path you describe because it's in the interest of colleges to keep well-paying students around. It's a service. You buy a degree, you are a customer.
[+] [-] zahlman|1 year ago|reply
In university I can recall a computer graphics course where literally everyone got 100+% on problem sets (there were bonus questions of course) and the median score on the midterm was below 50%. Leading up to the exam I remember the prof leading an exam prep session, opening the floor to questions, and getting a sincere request from one of the students to please go over the whole concept of "matrices" again.
This was a 400 level course, BTW. At one of the highest-rated universities in Canada. (I was taking it as an elective from a different program from the default, so I can't speak to the precise prerequisites to get there.)
This was over 20 years ago, BTW. I'm sure it's only gotten somehow even worse.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|1 year ago|reply
Long term I see education going this route, rather than preventing students from using AI tools, update course curriculum so that AI tools don't give such an advantage.
[+] [-] RomanPushkin|1 year ago|reply
The same for job interviews. I did a lot of technical interviews in the past as interviewer (hundreds) for Software Engineer positions (and still help companies to hire sometimes, as independent interviewer).
There is insane amount of cheating. I'd say at least 30% in normal companies are cheaters, and 50% and more in FAANG. I can prove it, in private groups, and forums people share tech assignments. And very large number of these people use some kind of assistance while interviewing.
It's interesting to see how sometimes questions that are intentionally sophisticated are getting solved in a few minutes the best way they can be solved. I see this over and over.
[+] [-] Jcampuzano2|1 year ago|reply
I was in high school when kids started getting cell phones with internet access and basically as soon as that happened it opened up rampant cheating even among the best of students. I can only imagine it being much worse nowadays than even 15 years ago when I was in high school.
[+] [-] FloorEgg|1 year ago|reply
Some of their stuff works really well, and they have prof customers who love it. The CEO went on a tour to visit their biggest customers in person and several of them said they couldn't imagine going back.
Unfortunately as a whole the industry is not interested in it, aside from a few small niches and department heads who are both open minded and actually care about the integrity of the education. There have even been cases where profs want it and the dean or admin in charge of academic integrity vetoes its adoption. I've been privy to some calls I can only characterize as corrupt.
There is something deeply broken about higher Ed, the economics, the culture of the students, the culture of the faculty, the leadership... This isn't an AI problem it's a society problem.
When the students genuinely want to learn something and they are there for the knowledge, not the credit, cheating isn't a problem.
[+] [-] simsla|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thesuitonym|1 year ago|reply
This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work. Once you get past that level students have already formed bad habits and so still only do what it takes to pass. I don't know how to fix it, I don't know if it CAN be fixed.
[+] [-] sealeck|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] polishdude20|1 year ago|reply
K-12 specifically has it bad. Wake up 7am get to school for 8/9 fill your day with classes you don't have much interest in while also figuring out how to be a social human with other kids and all the stress that entails. Then we require them to go home and continue to do more schoolwork.
Of course they're gonna cheat. They're overworked and overstressed as it is.
[+] [-] mlsu|1 year ago|reply
When I tell people that I never cheated, ever, in any class, through my entire degree, I get mostly surprise. You never? Not once?
But I paid for it, I think. Because it was not easy finding a first position out of school -- I certainly got filtered by GPA. It actually enrages me. What is the point of a degree? What exactly is the point of this thing, if most of the signal is false? Why did I work so hard?
Not even to mention -- many of my classmates (about 1 in 5, one in 6 or so?) were granted "accommodations" which granted them twice as much time to take their exams. There are online services: pay $80, get a letter certifying your ADHD, that you can give the school to get these accommodations. It's completely ridiculous.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] musicale|1 year ago|reply
This is kind of astonishing to me, because for most of my math and engineering courses cheating on take home work would not have improved my final grade (much less helped me learn the material, which is kind of the point I thought, and often necessary for subsequent courses.)
It seems common for math (and related) courses to grade almost entirely based on in-person, in-class exams. In some courses problem sets are optional (though they can be turned in for evaluation) but are recommended for understanding and practice.
Exams can go poorly, so perhaps having more of them (e.g. frequent quizzes) can help to compensate for having a bad day. Also exams can include basic problems, ones that are very similar to problem sets or worked problems from lectures, etc.
> If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.
That sounds like an improvement over the current situation?
[+] [-] busyant|1 year ago|reply
I completely agree, but the entire higher ed system is moving to on-line instruction.
Basically, if the University of <xyz> follows your suggestion, all of the competing institutions will eat their lunch by offering on-line courses with the "convenience" of on-line assessments" and the University of <xyz> will lose enrollment.
:-(
[+] [-] golergka|1 year ago|reply
For me a proper exam is when you get a topic, spend 30 minutes in a classroom preparing, and then sit down with an examiner to tell him about this topic and answer all the follow-up questions.
We don't do multi-option tests at software interviews, and for a good reason. Why do them in a uni?
[+] [-] johnhuth76|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] skissane|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tqi|1 year ago|reply
Can you blame students for optimizing for grades rather than "learning"? My first two years of undergrad, the smallest professor-led lecture course I took had at least 200 students (the largest was an econ 101 course that literally had 700 kids in it). We had smaller discussion sections as well, but those were led by TAs who were often only a couple years older than me. It was abundantly clear that my professors couldn't care less about me, let alone whether I "learned" anything from them. The classes were merely a box they were obligated to check. Is it so hard to understand why students would act accordingly?
[+] [-] atum47|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jessekv|1 year ago|reply
I'd like to point out this has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating happens at all levels of academic performance.
I have not been in university for a while, but I do remember that it was rare that I did my best work for any individual class.
For me it was more of a "satisficing" challenge, and I had to make hard choices about which classes I would not get A's in.
I'm sure some professors might have interpreted my performance in their class as indicative of my overall abilities. I'm fine with that. I learned as much as I could, I maxed out my course load, and I don't regret it at all.
[+] [-] hungariantoast|1 year ago|reply
If all my math professors had done this, I never would have earned my computer science degree or my minor in mathematics.
I have an immensely difficult time memorizing formulas and doing math by hand. I absolutely need to be able to prepare notes ahead of time, and reference them, to be able to complete a math test on paper. Even then, I'm a very slow in-person test-taker, and would often run out of time. I've honestly come around to the idea that maybe I have some sort of learning disability, but I never gave that idea much thought in college. So, I didn't qualify for extra time, or any other test-taking accommodations. I was just out-of-luck when time was up on a test.
The only reason I was able to earn my degree is because I was able to take almost all of my math classes online, and reference my notes during tests. (COVID was actually a huge help for this.)
And by "notes", I don't just mean formulas or solutions to example problems that I had recorded. I also mean any of the dozens of algorithms I programmed to help automate complex parts of larger problems.
The vast majority of the math classes I took, regardless of whether they were online or in-person, did not use multiple-choice answers, and we always had to show our work for credit. So I couldn't just "automate all the things!", or use AI. I did actually have to learn it and demonstrate how to solve the problems. My issue was that I struggled to learn the material the way the university demanded, or in their timeframe.
So as an otherwise successful student and capable programmer, who would have struggled immensely and been negatively affected mentally, professionally, and financially, had they been forced to work through math courses the way you prescribe, I'm asking you: please reconsider.
Please reconsider how important memorization should be to pass a math class, how strongly you might equate "memorized" to "learned", and what critical thinking and problem-solving could look like in a world where technology is encouraged as part of learning, not shunned.
[+] [-] dehrmann|1 year ago|reply
When I was in college, this was every math class. You could cheat all you want on the 20% of your grade that came from homework, but the remaining 80% was from 3-4 in-class, proctored exams.
[+] [-] STEPHREYMI|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moomin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] IncreasePosts|1 year ago|reply
Can you blame them? If they do the necessary work to learn, but do poorly on an exam for some reason, will you still give them a passing grade?
[+] [-] com2kid|1 year ago|reply
Just one generation ago this was the norm. The only differences between how exams were given in my math classes were what size of note paper was allowed.
In general students hated the few classes that tried to use online platforms for grading, the sites sucked so much that students preferred pen and paper.
Also, it is a math class! The only thing that is needed is arguably a calculator, a pencil, and some paper. What the hell kind of technology are students using in class?
> The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.
Colleges used to all have tech requirements, the big debate was to allow calculators with CAS or not.
> If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.
What the heck are students doing in college then? I was paying good $$$ to go to college, I was there because I wanted to learn. Why the hell would I pay thousands of dollars to go to class and then not learn anything in the class, that would be a huge waste of my time!
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[+] [-] rincebrain|1 year ago|reply
The problem is the lack of learning the material. You don't, IMO, directly care how they produced the answer, you care about it only as a proxy for them learning the material well enough to solve the problem.
And making people do them in person with no technology is unrealistic - not because it can't be done, but because at that point, it's not a reflection of how you'd use it outside of that classroom, and people are going to call it pointless, and IMO they'd be right. You would be correct that anyone who met that bar would have likely learned the material, but you'd also have excluded people who would have met the bar of "can use the material to the degree of familiarity needed going forward".
I think a reasonable compromise would be to let students collaborate on the exams in the classroom, without external access - while I realize some people learn better on their own in some subjects, as long as everyone contributes some portion of the work, and they go back and forth on agreeing what the right answers are, then you're going to make forward progress, even if that ruins the exam process as anything other than a class-wide metric. You could subdivide it, but then that gets riskier as there's a higher chance that the subset of people doesn't know enough to make progress. Maybe a hint system for groups, since the goal here is learning, not just grading their knowledge going in?
Not that there's not some need for metrics, but in terms of trying to check in on where students are every so often, I think you need to leverage how people often end up learning things "in the wild" - from a combination of wild searching and talking to other people, and then feedback on whether they decided you could build an airplane out of applesauce or something closer to accurate.
[+] [-] lwhi|1 year ago|reply
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 having 'calculators' in our pockets 24/7 now.
We need to accept that the world has changed; I only hope that we get to decide how society responds to that change together .. rather than have it forced upon us.
[+] [-] mrweasel|1 year ago|reply
Now this would effectively kill off the current AI powered solution, because they have no way of explaining, or even understanding, why a paper may be plagiarized or not, but I'm okay with that.
[+] [-] teekert|1 year ago|reply
So, now I use ChatGPT to check my English. I just write what I want to write than ask it to make my text more "More concise, business-like and not so American" (yeah the thing is by default as ultra enthusiastic as an American waiter). And 9 out of 10 times it says what I want to say but better than I wrote myself, and in much less words and better English.
I don't think it took less time to write my report, but it is much much better than I could have made alone.
AI detector may go off (or it goes on? of is it of? Idk, perhaps I should ask Chat ;)), but it is about as useful as a spell-check detector.
It's a Large Language Model, you should just is like that, it is not a Large Fact Model. But if you're a teacher you should be a good bullshit detector, right?
If I'm every checking some student's report, you may get this feedback: For god's sake, check the language with ChatGPT, but for God's sake check the fact in some other way.
[+] [-] prepend|1 year ago|reply
However, the AI identifies the school issued Lenovo laptops as weapons. So every kid was flagged. Rather than stopping using such a stupid tool, they just have the kids remove their laptops before going through the scanner.
I expect not smart enough people are buying “AI” products and trusting them to do the things they want them to do, but don’t work.
[+] [-] krick|1 year ago|reply
I want to emphasize, that this isn't really about trusting magic, it's about people nonchalantly doing ridiculous stuff nowdays and that they aren't held accountable for that, apparently. For example, there were times back at school when I was "accused" of cheating, because it was the only time when I liked the homework at some class and took it seriously, and it was kinda insulting to hear that there's absolutely no way I did it, but I still got my mark, because it doesn't matter what she thinks if she cannot prove it, so please just sign it and fuck off, it's the last time I'm doing my homework at your class anyway.
On the contrary, if this article to be believed, these teachers don't have to prove anything, the fact that a coin flipped heads is considered enough of a proof. And everyone supposedly treats it as if it's ok. "Well, they have this system at school, what can we do!" It's crazy.
[+] [-] jmugan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeyinternews|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] greatartiste|1 year ago|reply
However programming a computer to do this isn't easy. In a previous job I had dealing with plagiarism detectors and soon realised how garbage they were (and also how easily fooled they are - but that is another story). The staff soon realised what garbage these tools are so if a student accused of plagiarism decided to argue back then the accusation would be quietly dropped.
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|1 year ago|reply
I couldn't cheat in high school because we couldn't use our phones during class. Not for worksheets nor quizzes and especially not exams whether they be multiple choice, oral, or essays.
Yet the top threads here act like we need a whole refactor of schooling, many people suggesting we rely on viva voce exams and proctored exams. What exactly do you think that's solving over a simple classroom scantron test where the teacher ensures people aren't on their phones?
[+] [-] fuzzy_biscuit|1 year ago|reply
In either case, we need to change our standards around mastery of subject matter.
[+] [-] gradus_ad|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] eulenteufel|1 year ago|reply
The teacher accuses the student of using the LLM to perform the task they are assigned. This entails not properly understanding the assignment and presenting an accomplishment which has not been achieved by the student themselves.
On the other hand the teacher using an LLM tool also do not understand the reasoning of the decision and present often present them as their own judgement. A judgement that has not truly been felled by the teacher because they do not use the tool for understanding but for deferring their responsibilities.
In doing so the teacher is engaging in the same act of (self-)deception they are accusing the student of: presenting an achievement not truly reached through their own understanding, even if the situation necessitates it (non-deferrable learning vs. non-deferrable decision).
The use of LLM-detection in this way thus mirrors the very problem it seeks to address.
[+] [-] nitwit005|1 year ago|reply
Don't know why these companies are spending so much developing this technology, when their customers clearly aren't checking how well it works.
[+] [-] k__|1 year ago|reply
Plagiarism detectors kinda work, but you can always use one to locate plagiarized sections and fix them yourself.
I have a plagiarism rate under 5%, usually coming from the use of well known phrases.
An AI usually has over 10%.
Obviously that doesn't help in an academic context when people mark their citations.
The perplexity checks don't work, as humans seem to vary highly in that regard. Some of my own text has less perplexity as a comparable AI text.
[+] [-] lelandfe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moandcompany|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] flappyeagle|1 year ago|reply
I work with people in their 30s That cannot write their way out of a hat. Who cares if the work is AI assisted or not. Most AI writing is super dry, formulaic and bad. The student doesn’t recognize this the give them a poor mark for having terrible style.
[+] [-] Akranazon|1 year ago|reply
I say good riddance, that's exactly how it should be. At-home busywork is a scourge on especially K-12 students. Yet, every teacher has been loading their students up with homework, because that's their idea of what a "good teacher" is supposed to do.
The faster technology overcomes this problem, the better.
[+] [-] from-nibly|1 year ago|reply
Helping kids find value in education is the only important concern here and adding an AI checker doesn't help with that.