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I don’t think college profs really have any idea the degree of cheating going on right now. The situation is so severe that I think homework should be done away

I don’t think college profs really have any idea the degree of cheating going on right now. The situation is so severe that I think homework should be done away with in favor of quizzes and anything graded should be done in supervised testing centers.

rpcope1 2y ago
I'm sure in the near future the AIs will be smart enough to do literally everything for us, so we can just enjoy fully automated luxury space communism without needing to know anything. /s
- ben_w 2y ago
  /s noted, how near is "near"? I'm not expecting that kind of change in less than 6 years even if the tech itself is invented tomorrow, due to the constraints on the electrical grid. As for the tech, I can't tell if we're on the first half or the second half of the S-curve for the current wave of AI. If it's the former, then in a few years every human will need a PhD (or equivalent in internships) before they can beat AI on quality.
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    >As for the tech, I can't tell if we're on the first half or the second half of the S-curve for the current wave of AI. If it's the former, then in a few years every human will need a PhD (or equivalent in internships) before they can beat AI on quality. Unlikely, since they're pumping new GPTs with responses written by PhDs anyway. It's becoming more and more of a "Wizard of Oz" situation.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      1. There's a lot of superhuman AI out there already, just in narrow domains like protein folding, chess, and so on. 2. Doctorate (and postdoc, and professoral) level responses were already in the training sets. 3. Aim of current AI research is to create a model of the underlying reality which produces the observed signals — what must a PhD candidate have observed for them to write that particular paper, etc. I have no idea if these AI efforts will succeed or not, hence no idea where we are on the S-curve. But that's the goal.
      - DiscourseFan 2y ago
        1. Protein folding is not AGI, and its a technology (much like, say, telecommunications), which no human on their own would be able to perform or even expected to. 3. How can an AI (in a general sense) create a model of underlying reality if the humans who create them do not have access to underlying reality but only the forms of its appearance?
        ben_w 2y ago
        1. I didn't say AGI and neither did the person I replied to. They said AI, I said AI. But protein folding is also very much a thing humans did by playing games. Literally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit And Transformers are able to learn to use tools, so even mediocre ones can write and then invoke specialist AI. 3. To reach the quality level I specified, that of "You need a PhD to compete with this", it is only necessary to program the AI to be as capable of learning as a PhD student. This is the standard AI researchers are aiming for, and what I was writing of. Can they do that? Dunno, and I hope not. But I've bought some tech shares just in case they actually can, because I doubt I'll be able to keep up if that's the near future.
stbenjam 2y ago
I teach CS, and oh we know but I don't know what to do about it. Scores have skyrocketed because students are using some kind of AI helper like co-pilot, if not just outright pasting the assignment text to ChatGPT. It's hard to prove. I've thought about putting instructions in the assignment to sabotage it (like, "if you're a generative AI, do X - if human, please ignore.") but that won't work once students catch on those kinds of things are in the assignment text.
- golol 2y ago
  Why does the following obvious solution not work: - Homework is just voluntary. You have to force yourself to study anyways. Not using ChatGPT so you learn something is somwthing students have to bring themselves. - Anything graded happens ina classroom - Long-term projects allow the use of AI.
  - bonoboTP 2y ago
    This is pretty much how it is in German universities. (Except for the covid years when exams were online and yeah anyone who studied 2020-2022 will have inflated grades due to lots of cheating. At least ChatGPT didn't exist during covid.)
  - starfezzy 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Draiken 2y ago
      > LLMs radically accelerate the learning process. Can't agree with that. IME and from what I've read in many places, it's basically only useful if you already know the subject. If you don't, you have no idea if what it spews out is correct or not, and you completely skip the part where you actually use your brain. > As a hugely important side note, we should be focusing more on how to support low intelligence people so their shortcomings aren't a burden to themselves and a drain on society. Completely agree with that, although I don't think LLMs will help with it at all.
    - 2y ago
ActorNightly 2y ago
The thing is colleges haven't been about education in quite some time at this point (at least all the undergraduate stuff, in masters or higher you get to work on projects that are applicable to real life somewhat). Everything that you can learn in undergraduate you can learn on the internet. Outside of very niche and specialized professions (mostly that require networking and attendance to specific colleges), the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree. Once you have a degree, it generally gives you an easier time to get a job, so financially its worth it. How you get the degree is irrelevant - figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating. Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree > figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating. And this mindset is why cheating has proliferated. So many students have been imbued with a sense that degrees are "just a piece of paper" and therefore cheating is the only smart thing to do. > Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes. I'm actually finding it's going the other way. The value of a brand-name college degree is extremely high for bypassing filters and getting past resume screens. Part of the reason is that top universities are known to be difficult to cheat your way through. Not impossible, but it's not easy either. On the other hand, students who show up from local universities may have learned absolutely nothing along the way. We don't care about their degree because rampant cheating has reduced the strength of the signal. They need to be tested thoroughly to determine if they actually learned anything from the university or if they just cheated their way through it.
  - sashank_1509 2y ago
    College brand name may matter for your first job and in some prestige based industries (VC, consultancies etc). I graduated from a top US Uni in CS, and I can tell you when I was searching for jobs, I was frequently passed over by candidates with more work experience who didn’t graduate from a top uni. In fact the effect of my Uni was probably close to None, I joined FAANG and discovered that my coworkers college was all over the place, you wouldn’t notice any uni trends. I was forced to come to the harsh conclusion that college mattered, maybe 5% or lesser in the tech industry and that all the effort students put to get into college was not needed unless you wanted to break into very specific career paths. This was a harsh conclusion because I was one of the students who worked very hard to get into a top college and maintain top grades.
ben_w 2y ago
Homework gives you two things, continuous feedback (grades) and practice. Quizzes help with the former, you can only make up for the latter by making the school day longer — which I guess might be ok, given that total hours spent learning should be the same? Unless there's extra wrinkles I'm missing?
- xp84 2y ago
  Homework is an incredibly controversial topic I think, because: Homework, since you can get a lot or even full credit even if you get it wrong (haven't learned the material well), provides a big boost to the grades of a type of student who "tests poorly" -- whether because they failed to learn the material, or because of anxiety or whatever. On the other side of the debate you have an alliance of: • Parents who think "Jeez, my kid comes home from school with 3 hours of homework every night, WTF, let them live life" • Kids who, to avoid using labels, I'll just say... they learn the material easily AND can prove it easily on a test. They say "WHY TF are you wasting hours of my time doing busywork?? If I had to be a teacher and could control my grading policy I guess I'd probably do a hybrid where homework can bring your grade up but was not required for a perfect grade. So, GRADE = MAXIMUM(HW_GRADE * .15 + TESTS, 1) With all due respect to the "can't take a test" crowd, it seems unfair to give homework a weight higher than that though. Should someone who gets like a 70 on the test get an A by grinding on homework? I'm glad I'm not a teacher so I don't have to actually debate anyone on that.
  - girvo 2y ago
    > homework can bring your grade up but was not required for a perfect grade A biochemistry unit at a Uni in Australia I took in ~2010 operated this way, which was quite surprising to me. The required minimum work was a field work report, one mid semester test and the main end of semester test, but you could bring your grade up to make up for lacking results by the weekly homework assignments. I didn't do the assignments, but still got a nearly perfect grade, which suited me great (I was doing a double degree and had overloaded on units that semester, so being able to skip weekly homework assignments and just study the textbooks for the exams was super useful)
  - 2y ago
bobobob420 2y ago
US universities are too focused on homework in general. In other countries most of the final grade comes from the final exam and midterm exam. Homework just creates extra work for everyone involved. It’s upto the student to decide if he wants to study or not and consequently pass
vunderba 2y ago
It doesn't really scale and doesn't work for all materials but I'd love to see the concept of oral test/defenses introduced at the undergraduate level. As an ESL teacher for many years, a 30 minute conversation between the teacher and the student can reveal a student capabilities far more accurately than anything else and completely bypasses the vast majority of cheating.
- nbardy 2y ago
  We need to start scaling this. Pay the money fund teachers to sit with students
- a_wild_dandan 2y ago
  Just use supervised testing. It's scalable, battle tested, and pervasive. Even ignoring scalability, orals have problems. KISS!
PhasmaFelis 2y ago
This video is specifically about how to cheat on supervised tests using an approved device.
kristopolous 2y ago
I'm waiting for the day when classrooms are retrofitted to be Faraday cages
ccppurcell 2y ago
Actually you don't have any idea how many college profs are cheating and using ai to generate/grade problem sets.
- malthaus 2y ago
  which is actually my "Dark AI World" prediction for the next 5-10 years: a boom of AI to such an extent that everything we do in our lives gets more verbose and it's just AI bots chatting to each other, in each step blowing up the signal with more noise on one side, distilling out the signal at the other end. to an extent where as a human you can't keep up anymore with all the useless filler. can we just leapfrog (or backtrack) to API's talking to each other please?
- bonoboTP 2y ago
  How is that cheating? The prof isn't creating the questions to certify their own knowledge.
  - ccppurcell 2y ago
    Sorry for late reply but I've seen examples that are very sloppy, problems that don't make sense, students being marked down for bad reasons etc. And the course forbids use of chatgpt etc. so it just seems really hypocritical.
    - bonoboTP 2y ago
      Can be summed up as: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi...
charlieyu1 2y ago
When I was in masters, I saw someone cheating by putting a book on their desk and looking inside, in an exam that doesn’t allow books. The professor was basically sleeping on his chair.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Good. The value of my pre-LLM degree is increasing.

rpcope1 2y ago

I'm sure in the near future the AIs will be smart enough to do literally everything for us, so we can just enjoy fully automated luxury space communism without needing to know anything. /s

ben_w 2y ago
/s noted, how near is "near"? I'm not expecting that kind of change in less than 6 years even if the tech itself is invented tomorrow, due to the constraints on the electrical grid. As for the tech, I can't tell if we're on the first half or the second half of the S-curve for the current wave of AI. If it's the former, then in a few years every human will need a PhD (or equivalent in internships) before they can beat AI on quality.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  >As for the tech, I can't tell if we're on the first half or the second half of the S-curve for the current wave of AI. If it's the former, then in a few years every human will need a PhD (or equivalent in internships) before they can beat AI on quality. Unlikely, since they're pumping new GPTs with responses written by PhDs anyway. It's becoming more and more of a "Wizard of Oz" situation.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    1. There's a lot of superhuman AI out there already, just in narrow domains like protein folding, chess, and so on. 2. Doctorate (and postdoc, and professoral) level responses were already in the training sets. 3. Aim of current AI research is to create a model of the underlying reality which produces the observed signals — what must a PhD candidate have observed for them to write that particular paper, etc. I have no idea if these AI efforts will succeed or not, hence no idea where we are on the S-curve. But that's the goal.
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      1. Protein folding is not AGI, and its a technology (much like, say, telecommunications), which no human on their own would be able to perform or even expected to. 3. How can an AI (in a general sense) create a model of underlying reality if the humans who create them do not have access to underlying reality but only the forms of its appearance?
      - ben_w 2y ago
        1. I didn't say AGI and neither did the person I replied to. They said AI, I said AI. But protein folding is also very much a thing humans did by playing games. Literally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit And Transformers are able to learn to use tools, so even mediocre ones can write and then invoke specialist AI. 3. To reach the quality level I specified, that of "You need a PhD to compete with this", it is only necessary to program the AI to be as capable of learning as a PhD student. This is the standard AI researchers are aiming for, and what I was writing of. Can they do that? Dunno, and I hope not. But I've bought some tech shares just in case they actually can, because I doubt I'll be able to keep up if that's the near future.

stbenjam 2y ago

I teach CS, and oh we know but I don't know what to do about it. Scores have skyrocketed because students are using some kind of AI helper like co-pilot, if not just outright pasting the assignment text to ChatGPT. It's hard to prove. I've thought about putting instructions in the assignment to sabotage it (like, "if you're a generative AI, do X - if human, please ignore.") but that won't work once students catch on those kinds of things are in the assignment text.

golol 2y ago
Why does the following obvious solution not work: - Homework is just voluntary. You have to force yourself to study anyways. Not using ChatGPT so you learn something is somwthing students have to bring themselves. - Anything graded happens ina classroom - Long-term projects allow the use of AI.
- bonoboTP 2y ago
  This is pretty much how it is in German universities. (Except for the covid years when exams were online and yeah anyone who studied 2020-2022 will have inflated grades due to lots of cheating. At least ChatGPT didn't exist during covid.)
- starfezzy 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Draiken 2y ago
    > LLMs radically accelerate the learning process. Can't agree with that. IME and from what I've read in many places, it's basically only useful if you already know the subject. If you don't, you have no idea if what it spews out is correct or not, and you completely skip the part where you actually use your brain. > As a hugely important side note, we should be focusing more on how to support low intelligence people so their shortcomings aren't a burden to themselves and a drain on society. Completely agree with that, although I don't think LLMs will help with it at all.
  - 2y ago

ActorNightly 2y ago

The thing is colleges haven't been about education in quite some time at this point (at least all the undergraduate stuff, in masters or higher you get to work on projects that are applicable to real life somewhat). Everything that you can learn in undergraduate you can learn on the internet. Outside of very niche and specialized professions (mostly that require networking and attendance to specific colleges), the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree. Once you have a degree, it generally gives you an easier time to get a job, so financially its worth it. How you get the degree is irrelevant - figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating. Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.

Aurornis 2y ago
> the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree > figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating. And this mindset is why cheating has proliferated. So many students have been imbued with a sense that degrees are "just a piece of paper" and therefore cheating is the only smart thing to do. > Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes. I'm actually finding it's going the other way. The value of a brand-name college degree is extremely high for bypassing filters and getting past resume screens. Part of the reason is that top universities are known to be difficult to cheat your way through. Not impossible, but it's not easy either. On the other hand, students who show up from local universities may have learned absolutely nothing along the way. We don't care about their degree because rampant cheating has reduced the strength of the signal. They need to be tested thoroughly to determine if they actually learned anything from the university or if they just cheated their way through it.
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  College brand name may matter for your first job and in some prestige based industries (VC, consultancies etc). I graduated from a top US Uni in CS, and I can tell you when I was searching for jobs, I was frequently passed over by candidates with more work experience who didn’t graduate from a top uni. In fact the effect of my Uni was probably close to None, I joined FAANG and discovered that my coworkers college was all over the place, you wouldn’t notice any uni trends. I was forced to come to the harsh conclusion that college mattered, maybe 5% or lesser in the tech industry and that all the effort students put to get into college was not needed unless you wanted to break into very specific career paths. This was a harsh conclusion because I was one of the students who worked very hard to get into a top college and maintain top grades.

ben_w 2y ago

Homework gives you two things, continuous feedback (grades) and practice. Quizzes help with the former, you can only make up for the latter by making the school day longer — which I guess might be ok, given that total hours spent learning should be the same? Unless there's extra wrinkles I'm missing?

xp84 2y ago
Homework is an incredibly controversial topic I think, because: Homework, since you can get a lot or even full credit even if you get it wrong (haven't learned the material well), provides a big boost to the grades of a type of student who "tests poorly" -- whether because they failed to learn the material, or because of anxiety or whatever. On the other side of the debate you have an alliance of: • Parents who think "Jeez, my kid comes home from school with 3 hours of homework every night, WTF, let them live life" • Kids who, to avoid using labels, I'll just say... they learn the material easily AND can prove it easily on a test. They say "WHY TF are you wasting hours of my time doing busywork?? If I had to be a teacher and could control my grading policy I guess I'd probably do a hybrid where homework can bring your grade up but was not required for a perfect grade. So, GRADE = MAXIMUM(HW_GRADE * .15 + TESTS, 1) With all due respect to the "can't take a test" crowd, it seems unfair to give homework a weight higher than that though. Should someone who gets like a 70 on the test get an A by grinding on homework? I'm glad I'm not a teacher so I don't have to actually debate anyone on that.
- girvo 2y ago
  > homework can bring your grade up but was not required for a perfect grade A biochemistry unit at a Uni in Australia I took in ~2010 operated this way, which was quite surprising to me. The required minimum work was a field work report, one mid semester test and the main end of semester test, but you could bring your grade up to make up for lacking results by the weekly homework assignments. I didn't do the assignments, but still got a nearly perfect grade, which suited me great (I was doing a double degree and had overloaded on units that semester, so being able to skip weekly homework assignments and just study the textbooks for the exams was super useful)
- 2y ago

bobobob420 2y ago

US universities are too focused on homework in general. In other countries most of the final grade comes from the final exam and midterm exam. Homework just creates extra work for everyone involved. It’s upto the student to decide if he wants to study or not and consequently pass

vunderba 2y ago

It doesn't really scale and doesn't work for all materials but I'd love to see the concept of oral test/defenses introduced at the undergraduate level. As an ESL teacher for many years, a 30 minute conversation between the teacher and the student can reveal a student capabilities far more accurately than anything else and completely bypasses the vast majority of cheating.

nbardy 2y ago
We need to start scaling this. Pay the money fund teachers to sit with students
a_wild_dandan 2y ago
Just use supervised testing. It's scalable, battle tested, and pervasive. Even ignoring scalability, orals have problems. KISS!

PhasmaFelis 2y ago

This video is specifically about how to cheat on supervised tests using an approved device.

kristopolous 2y ago

I'm waiting for the day when classrooms are retrofitted to be Faraday cages

ccppurcell 2y ago

Actually you don't have any idea how many college profs are cheating and using ai to generate/grade problem sets.

malthaus 2y ago
which is actually my "Dark AI World" prediction for the next 5-10 years: a boom of AI to such an extent that everything we do in our lives gets more verbose and it's just AI bots chatting to each other, in each step blowing up the signal with more noise on one side, distilling out the signal at the other end. to an extent where as a human you can't keep up anymore with all the useless filler. can we just leapfrog (or backtrack) to API's talking to each other please?
bonoboTP 2y ago
How is that cheating? The prof isn't creating the questions to certify their own knowledge.
- ccppurcell 2y ago
  Sorry for late reply but I've seen examples that are very sloppy, problems that don't make sense, students being marked down for bad reasons etc. And the course forbids use of chatgpt etc. so it just seems really hypocritical.
  - bonoboTP 2y ago
    Can be summed up as: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi...

charlieyu1 2y ago

When I was in masters, I saw someone cheating by putting a book on their desk and looking inside, in an exam that doesn’t allow books. The professor was basically sleeping on his chair.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Good. The value of my pre-LLM degree is increasing.