8 ms·

I wonder if this is going to level the playing field a bit. People who cheated in school had a bit of an advantage, but with these advances, it forces teachers

• deleted 4y ago
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• VeninVidiaVicii 4y ago
  Yeah, same for my prokaryotic molecular biology class. The questions were 100 percent theoretical, and you were even allowed to take the test at home. After the first one, it made sense why — the questions are totally ungooglable, and working with anyone else would’ve immediately polluted my mind and been obvious.
  • the_third_wave 4y ago
    > the questions are totally ungooglable If you remember one of the questions it would be interesting to know what the current crop of LLM chat bots return in answer. If you know the correct answer to the question it would be especially interesting to know whether the prose the things return has any semblance of truth to it.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      It's not that interesting yet. AltmanAI isn't claiming yet that GPT can solve unique problems.
  • 3pt14159 4y ago
    Well, the issue with take home tests isn't the Googling per-se, it's the hiring out of the work. My preference for university exams was a simple, single page cheatsheet that you had to make yourself. You could write the finicky stuff that is hard to remember on it, but you couldn't fast-learn the material like you could from a book. Though I do remember writing out little programs for the weirder stuff like required coverage over concrete reinforcement bars. Which felt a bit like cheating at the time.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      Next step is to go wheel of fortune style, and provide a standard cheat sheet with the finicky formulas, and then let the students at their own supplementary cheat sheet
• carapace 4y ago
  Do you realize you're describing a problem that shouldn't exist? People cheat on tests because they are there for reasons other than to learn. If AI can "level the playing field" then we need to change the game?
  • suddenclarity 4y ago
    What do you propose? I read your comment as we shouldn't verify knowledge and just let doctors go yolo on their patients, which I assume isn't what you intended.
    • carapace 4y ago
      Not to be coy, my point is that education is one thing, and contests to see who gets the cherry positions in society are another, and when you combine them you get cheating. Which, of course, undermines the "verify knowledge" function of the tests in the first place, eh? In my domain (computer programming) I know enough and have enough experience that I can gauge the skill and knowledge of my peers (and they mine.) That is how I get jobs. I go in and talk to the other programmers, and I can demonstrate that I'm "the real deal". In re: "just [letting] doctors go yolo on their patients" I don't want to get into a long thing here, but I will mention that a strong argument could be made that the current system is not very good at getting positive outcomes. What I mean is, doctors and hospitals kill a lot of people. In other words, the existing systems to train and employ doctors are far from perfect. (Not to put too fine a point on it, the way to find good doctors is to ask other doctors whom they would let doctor them, ya feel me?) - - - - edit: I realized I didn't answer your question. What I propose is that we throw out the whole obviously-broken academic system. I propose that people go to colleges and schools to learn, at any age, at any time, and they don't get grades or degrees or anything. You get to be a doctor or architect or whatever by demonstrating to other people who know that you too know, rather than "earning" a proxy (degree or whatever) that can be faked. If human life were simple enough that it could be covered by a system of tests and grades we wouldn't have these huge brains on the ends of our spines, eh?
      • suddenclarity 4y ago
• pmarreck 4y ago
  > I once had a teacher who gave us open book, open note, etc... for chemistry. The trick was, you had ~60 minutes to do it. If you didn't practice, you'd never finish the test in time. I hated tests like this... because I was a lazy kid who coasted through school and didn't understand why "simply understanding the material" was insufficient. In college (Cornell) the chaos continued, I got poor grades in calc because despite getting all the bonus questions right (which tested your understanding of the material), I couldn't finish the actual test in time because I hadn't done the problem-set homework (these problem sets took 6 hours to do btw... coming from a high school that only started challenging me towards the end, I was completely ill-equipped to handle that level of self-discipline). Of course, in the working world, it turns out that persistence/commitment/self-discipline is the real payoff. I had to learn that the hard way later on.
  • knicholes 4y ago
    Yeah, I failed calculus three times because I was working two jobs to support a failing business, and I just had no time to do the assignments. Finally I found a class that graded only on the tests and got my A.
    • Tade0 4y ago
      I failed it twice: first because I got too cocky when the previous semester ended without incident. Second was due to the fact that I already had a part time job. On the third attempt I had a different lecturer - an old guy who favoured attendance over anything else and gave the same problems each year. I knew most of the material already, so I got 80% out of that. I learned nothing from that experience though and went on to fail 22 courses over the seven years I spent in college.
      • knicholes 4y ago
        Holy cow, that's a lot of dedication and endurance! What kept you going despite the unusually high amount of failures?
        • 4y ago
• Swizec 4y ago
  My high school physics professor gave us a choice: You can bring hand-written notes to a tougher exam, or no notes to an easier exam. I forget what we chose, but it opened my eyes to the difference between memorizing formulae and understanding how to use ‘em. I now have (I think) a solid grasp of basic physics. Our chemistry professor had the opposite approach – memorize all the things and test that. I still don’t understand chemistry. In college every professor encouraged bringing notes, textbooks, anything you need. The exam is there to test your understanding, not whether you can memorize a bunch of trivia. The toughest exam I ever had was for the compilers class – 4 hours open internet do whatever you want as long as your compiler passes my unit tests. 2 questions: Add feature A and feature B to the compiler you built at tutorials this semester. Absolutely no way you could cheat on that.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    That's awful. Same grade for memorizing trivia like a bad imitation of a reference book, as for learning and applying the concepts?
    • Swizec 4y ago
      Oh no the whole class would get the same exam. But he gave us the option, collectively
• fnord77 4y ago
  oral exams seem like the only way
• jonahx 4y ago
  There is a deeper problem. Yes, we can find creative in-class test methods immune to cheaters and GPTs. But if the skill you are testing has been commodified, the deeper problem is to justify learning it at all. Once you have the calculator, learning long division hardly matters. Most adults have forgotten the algorithm. We're making the skill of writing, and much else, into a calculator. But we don't know yet what the implications will be... the skill is writing is bound up with thinking and culture in ways long division is not.
  • chii 4y ago
    > Once you have the calculator, learning long division hardly matters. Most adults have forgotten the algorithm. Long division does have applications in some areas of maths, like polynomial division and factoring. If you didnt know long division, you would surely not be able to learn about polynomial factoring. Knowledge is knowledge, and it does not expire.
    • Der_Einzige 4y ago
      Cool, my calculator with built in CAS can do polynomial division and factoring for me.
  • NineStarPoint 4y ago
    In learning and practicing division, you gain an intuition about how numbers are composed. This is an intuition that is useful when you’re trying to figure out if you should pay for that 50 dollar item, or if 6 payments of 10 dollars is a reasonable deal. While you could always bring out your calculator every time you make a decision, most people don’t and rely primarily on quick intuition instead. This is more important than ever in the world of chat GPT. When you’re dealing with something that can quickly generate something that sounds convincing regardless of truth value, you need that quick intuition to keep up. So the question is, if you’re a chemistry major, how do you gain that intuition? It’s possible that generating lots of data from GPT and just checking it for truth value more painstakingly before handing it in is sufficient to eventually learn. But it’s also possible that you do need to personally learn the fundamentals by working through problems if you want to eventually gain the intuitions a chemistry major needs to have. While a deeper problem exists in the commodification…it’s hard to say how much that deeper problem affects the ideal way to teach people to be skilled in a subject.
• Balgair 4y ago
  I'll add my story to the list here: One Intro to Physics (for majors and engineering) professor was the toughest and reveled in it. The class, in general, was a weeder class, so we all knew going in that it was meant to be overly hard. The final though. My lord. It was hard, yes, but he put a little extra bit of psychological torture into it: It was a 'choose your grade' final. In that, he had written four separate final exams. One was a D, one was a C, one was a B, and one was an A. You had to choose which final to take, and that would be the grade you got for the exam, providing that you passed that test. If you didn't pass you got an F. You could only choose one exam to take, no trying to finish the D quickly and then move up to a B. I think only one person had the chutzpah to take the A level test. Everyone else struggled along with the Bs and Cs. Which, I unfortunately have to remember, were very difficult themselves.