5 ms·

Instead of failing them on this assignment, why not make them do an oral presentation and grade this assignment on that, if there is doubt?\ Failing them compl

by mc32 3y ago

Instead of failing them on this assignment, why not make them do an oral presentation and grade this assignment on that, if there is doubt?\ Failing them completely seems a bit heavy-handed and unfair. Surely some did leverage ChatGPT, but likely not all did so.

tpxl 3y ago
Because this is a bad teacher not interested in doing their job.
- exabrial 3y ago
  Were expectations set ahead of time? (don't cheat?) If so, he's actually the best kind of teacher: allowing them to experience the real world but with soft consequences.
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    The real world where someone in power claims everyone they are responsible for educating is cheating in the 11th hour, provides no evidence and refuses to pass them even though they paid thousands of dollars?
    - kevviiinn 3y ago
      The situation would probably be better without the paying thousands of dollars part
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Why does the expectation of not cheating matter when the claim that they cheated is itself in doubt? As far as we know, the students are being punished for the teacher's incompetence, not the consequences of their cheating.
  - brickteacup 3y ago
    Yes, the real world, where a professor decides an entire class cheated because ChatGPT said so (lol. lmao even). I guess it is a good introduction to dealing with capricious idiots
jimbob45 3y ago
Been saying this for a while. There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative.
- BoiledCabbage 3y ago
  Then why don't you list them instead of keeping them secret?
  - jimbob45 3y ago
    I'm not keeping them secret at all. We've had discussion about this before. It seems that the best strategy is to set the weight of HW as very small (~10%) with exams weighted heavily but make it clear that exam problems are loosely pulled from HW. Even if you're remote-only, you can ensure all exams are required to be proctored at an approved facility.
- NotOscarWilde 3y ago
  Speaking as an (assistant) professor in theoretical CS, I see there are many bad approaches in the original post and mentioned in this discussion, but I strongly disagree with: > There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative. I can attest to the following problems to good homework creation, from my own experiences playing with ChatGPT and teaching: 1. If you want to give a very illustrative yet easy theoretical exercise in algorithm design, one that computer scientists have solved over and over in the last few decades and which furthers your understanding, there are very likely solutions online and ChatGPT will give you the solution with very high probability. 2. If you create your own dataset and want the students to implement some algorithm and create a simple plot/discussion from the results, it will be very hard to distinguish a "student solved it on their own, but they did not invest too much time into it" submissions from ChatGPT submissions produced by a couple of queries. 3. Switching to oral presentations is hard to scale (as others attest) and also does not resolve much, because some students are perfectly okay with being handed a solution from somewhere (colleague, ChatGPT), not understanding it very well, and yet presenting it. Failing these students likely leads to overly difficult classes. 4. In-classroom exams without a computer work best, but they also do not scale very well (a lot of prep/correction needs to go into them) and some students with bad anxiety management skills, which includes me as a former student, dislike them passionately. --- As you can see, this topic is quite critical for my profession. The ugly truth is that university professors have only a very limited time allocated in their busy workweeks for teaching, and hence they have to take many shortcuts, including suboptimal homework sheets and limited innovation year-over-year. I also do not allocate as much time for philosophy of teaching/improving teaching skills as I would have liked. If anyone here has novel ideas how to actually implement "a class that can't be cheated with AI", specifically university CS classes, I am all ears.
andai 3y ago
This might not be feasible depending on the size of the class. I had classes with 100-200 students. Most problems with education are simply due to scale. The most notable one being Bloom's finding that private tutoring produced 2 standard deviations better results than classroom education. We can kind of approximate that now with GPT :) One tutor per child!
- michaelt 3y ago
  > This might not be feasible depending on the size of the class. I had classes with 100-200 students. American colleges regularly collect $10,000+ in fees per student, so I'm not sure why a 20 minute oral exam would be infeasible?
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    You're asking for ~2000 minutes to examine a class of 100. That means either having many more TAs than most classes have or making examination periods way longer than they are. Then, even with all that you aren't really making any real improvement, as the skills involved in an oral exam are not necessarily relevant to those which need to be tested, thus making the exam at best similar in uselessness to a written exam and at worst, actively harmful in testing performance.
    - revelio 3y ago
      So 33 hours of work, or a bit less than a week by one person then? Why is this thread full of academics claiming that apparently normal workloads of the sort everyone takes on, or trivial solutions of the sort high school teachers manage, is somehow impossible for them? They do realize they're accepting money in return for a commitment to do teaching activities, right?
      - dotnet00 3y ago
        An entire week of nothing but oral presentations, and you really can't see how that's completely unrealistic? Do you think the only things professors (or students for that matter) have to do is go to lectures and listen to oral exams?
cheeze 3y ago
He graded the papers a day before graduation. No time for a presentation.
wudangmonk 3y ago
When I was in school we would get these long 'research' assignments that required gathering sources and give citations rarely as they consumed a lot of time so it was reserved for the important projects that made up a considerable part of your grade. I helped my nephew in High School, not college for a few months last year and I was so sick and tired of constantly getting so many of these assignments every single god damn week. I just couldn't understand the point of it, you were given so little time since it seemed like every week several classes wanted one of these on top of the regular homework and sometimes there would be two of them on the same week from the same class so of course the quality would be low and I just do not see the point of this type of assignment if its not given the proper amount of time it requires. I hated everything about it and when chatgpt came along I saw it as a blessing hoping that now that there was something that could do this the teachers would stop relying on them so much.

by mc32 3y ago

tpxl 3y ago

Because this is a bad teacher not interested in doing their job.

exabrial 3y ago
Were expectations set ahead of time? (don't cheat?) If so, he's actually the best kind of teacher: allowing them to experience the real world but with soft consequences.
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  The real world where someone in power claims everyone they are responsible for educating is cheating in the 11th hour, provides no evidence and refuses to pass them even though they paid thousands of dollars?
  - kevviiinn 3y ago
    The situation would probably be better without the paying thousands of dollars part
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Why does the expectation of not cheating matter when the claim that they cheated is itself in doubt? As far as we know, the students are being punished for the teacher's incompetence, not the consequences of their cheating.
- brickteacup 3y ago
  Yes, the real world, where a professor decides an entire class cheated because ChatGPT said so (lol. lmao even). I guess it is a good introduction to dealing with capricious idiots

jimbob45 3y ago

Been saying this for a while. There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative.

BoiledCabbage 3y ago
Then why don't you list them instead of keeping them secret?
- jimbob45 3y ago
  I'm not keeping them secret at all. We've had discussion about this before. It seems that the best strategy is to set the weight of HW as very small (~10%) with exams weighted heavily but make it clear that exam problems are loosely pulled from HW. Even if you're remote-only, you can ensure all exams are required to be proctored at an approved facility.
NotOscarWilde 3y ago
Speaking as an (assistant) professor in theoretical CS, I see there are many bad approaches in the original post and mentioned in this discussion, but I strongly disagree with: > There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative. I can attest to the following problems to good homework creation, from my own experiences playing with ChatGPT and teaching: 1. If you want to give a very illustrative yet easy theoretical exercise in algorithm design, one that computer scientists have solved over and over in the last few decades and which furthers your understanding, there are very likely solutions online and ChatGPT will give you the solution with very high probability. 2. If you create your own dataset and want the students to implement some algorithm and create a simple plot/discussion from the results, it will be very hard to distinguish a "student solved it on their own, but they did not invest too much time into it" submissions from ChatGPT submissions produced by a couple of queries. 3. Switching to oral presentations is hard to scale (as others attest) and also does not resolve much, because some students are perfectly okay with being handed a solution from somewhere (colleague, ChatGPT), not understanding it very well, and yet presenting it. Failing these students likely leads to overly difficult classes. 4. In-classroom exams without a computer work best, but they also do not scale very well (a lot of prep/correction needs to go into them) and some students with bad anxiety management skills, which includes me as a former student, dislike them passionately. --- As you can see, this topic is quite critical for my profession. The ugly truth is that university professors have only a very limited time allocated in their busy workweeks for teaching, and hence they have to take many shortcuts, including suboptimal homework sheets and limited innovation year-over-year. I also do not allocate as much time for philosophy of teaching/improving teaching skills as I would have liked. If anyone here has novel ideas how to actually implement "a class that can't be cheated with AI", specifically university CS classes, I am all ears.

andai 3y ago

This might not be feasible depending on the size of the class. I had classes with 100-200 students. Most problems with education are simply due to scale. The most notable one being Bloom's finding that private tutoring produced 2 standard deviations better results than classroom education. We can kind of approximate that now with GPT :) One tutor per child!

michaelt 3y ago
> This might not be feasible depending on the size of the class. I had classes with 100-200 students. American colleges regularly collect $10,000+ in fees per student, so I'm not sure why a 20 minute oral exam would be infeasible?
- dotnet00 3y ago
  You're asking for ~2000 minutes to examine a class of 100. That means either having many more TAs than most classes have or making examination periods way longer than they are. Then, even with all that you aren't really making any real improvement, as the skills involved in an oral exam are not necessarily relevant to those which need to be tested, thus making the exam at best similar in uselessness to a written exam and at worst, actively harmful in testing performance.
  - revelio 3y ago
    So 33 hours of work, or a bit less than a week by one person then? Why is this thread full of academics claiming that apparently normal workloads of the sort everyone takes on, or trivial solutions of the sort high school teachers manage, is somehow impossible for them? They do realize they're accepting money in return for a commitment to do teaching activities, right?
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      An entire week of nothing but oral presentations, and you really can't see how that's completely unrealistic? Do you think the only things professors (or students for that matter) have to do is go to lectures and listen to oral exams?

cheeze 3y ago

He graded the papers a day before graduation. No time for a presentation.

wudangmonk 3y ago

When I was in school we would get these long 'research' assignments that required gathering sources and give citations rarely as they consumed a lot of time so it was reserved for the important projects that made up a considerable part of your grade. I helped my nephew in High School, not college for a few months last year and I was so sick and tired of constantly getting so many of these assignments every single god damn week. I just couldn't understand the point of it, you were given so little time since it seemed like every week several classes wanted one of these on top of the regular homework and sometimes there would be two of them on the same week from the same class so of course the quality would be low and I just do not see the point of this type of assignment if its not given the proper amount of time it requires. I hated everything about it and when chatgpt came along I saw it as a blessing hoping that now that there was something that could do this the teachers would stop relying on them so much.