4 ms·

An essay written under examination conditions is fine. We don’t need new assessment techniques. We have known how to asses that a student and that student alone

by dambi0 2y ago

An essay written under examination conditions is fine. We don’t need new assessment techniques. We have known how to asses that a student and that student alone for centuries.

moffkalast 2y ago
Yeah we always did that in high school for essays that were actually graded, otherwise there's always the option of having someone else write it for you, human or now machine. The only thing that's changed is the convenience of it. The problem is more with teachers lazily slapping an essay on a topic as a goto homework to eat even more of the already limited students' time with busywork.
- tonypace 2y ago
  The lazy essay assignment is 100% real. However, the driving force there is not the teacher, but parental complaints causing ass-covering administrative mandates. "Why wasn't there any homework on topic X before the exam?" "We apologize so much for that, Mrs Keen. First, we will change Precious's grade, but from now on..."
VBprogrammer 2y ago
My ability to write an essay under exam conditions is...poor. Thankfully there were less than a handful of essays I had to write as part of my undergraduate CS degree and I only remember one under exam conditions. I think it's probably more concerning that spitting out the most generic mathematically formulaic bullshit on a subject is likely to get a decent mark. In that case what are we actually testing for?
- thechao 2y ago
  Conformance.
  - bigfudge 2y ago
    Amusingly, willingness and capacity to conform to a system you are paying $30k a year for is a pretty good proxy for general intelligence. So maybe it's not that bad?!
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      It depends on what we think education is for. If the goal is to teach students, it's not so great. If the goal is to signal future employers the intelligence of the student, Maybe that's ok. But maybe the future employers should be paying the tuition instead of the student.
      - bigfudge 2y ago
        Sorry - it was tongue in cheek, but reflecting what university seems to be for these days rather than what it should be for.
jenscow 2y ago
In most cases that only tests a students memory and handwriting ability, while under pressure in a limited time. Can't perform any research, compare conflicting sources, or self-reflection.
- dambi0 2y ago
  That depends on the questions. There are also open book exams. A viva is a type of exam so I don’t see they are incompatible with assessing research
  - lupire 2y ago
    Not every class is STEM. Are you writing a 4000 word research paper sitting in class?
    - lizknope 2y ago
      A few of my high school teachers in the early 1990's made our final paper into a big project. It was not just "turn in the paper at the end" but turn in your topic with a paragraph describing it. Then make an outline, then bibliography of the sources we were using. During the process we had to use 3x5 index cards with various points, arguments, facts, and the specific pages in the books listed in our bibliography. We did this because this was later used to make footnotes in our paper. By structuring the project this way and having each milestone count as 5-10% of the overall grade it made it much harder to cheat and also taught us how to organize a research paper. I suppose you could ask ChatGPT to do the entire paper and then work backwards picking out facts and making the outline etc.
    - hombre_fatal 2y ago
      No, but we had to write essays in class during exams. There's a good question about the future and utility of long at-home research paper projects in school, but it's not a cornerstone of education. In 9th grade I procrastinated the semestral paper so much that I bought an essay online that explored unexpected gay themes in Ray Bradbury's corpus of work. I was so lazy I didn't even read it first, only skimmed it, and then back to Runescape. So it's not like this is a new problem due to LLMs, and I think take-home semester projects are all quite bad for these reasons that predate LLMs. (It turned out to be such a phenomenally audacious essay that my teacher started fascinated email correspondence with me about it and I was forced to not only study the essay but also read the quoted parts of his work. Ugh, backfire.)

by dambi0 2y ago

An essay written under examination conditions is fine. We don’t need new assessment techniques. We have known how to asses that a student and that student alone for centuries.

moffkalast 2y ago

Yeah we always did that in high school for essays that were actually graded, otherwise there's always the option of having someone else write it for you, human or now machine. The only thing that's changed is the convenience of it. The problem is more with teachers lazily slapping an essay on a topic as a goto homework to eat even more of the already limited students' time with busywork.

tonypace 2y ago
The lazy essay assignment is 100% real. However, the driving force there is not the teacher, but parental complaints causing ass-covering administrative mandates. "Why wasn't there any homework on topic X before the exam?" "We apologize so much for that, Mrs Keen. First, we will change Precious's grade, but from now on..."

VBprogrammer 2y ago

My ability to write an essay under exam conditions is...poor. Thankfully there were less than a handful of essays I had to write as part of my undergraduate CS degree and I only remember one under exam conditions. I think it's probably more concerning that spitting out the most generic mathematically formulaic bullshit on a subject is likely to get a decent mark. In that case what are we actually testing for?

thechao 2y ago
Conformance.
- bigfudge 2y ago
  Amusingly, willingness and capacity to conform to a system you are paying $30k a year for is a pretty good proxy for general intelligence. So maybe it's not that bad?!
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    It depends on what we think education is for. If the goal is to teach students, it's not so great. If the goal is to signal future employers the intelligence of the student, Maybe that's ok. But maybe the future employers should be paying the tuition instead of the student.
    - bigfudge 2y ago
      Sorry - it was tongue in cheek, but reflecting what university seems to be for these days rather than what it should be for.

jenscow 2y ago

In most cases that only tests a students memory and handwriting ability, while under pressure in a limited time. Can't perform any research, compare conflicting sources, or self-reflection.

dambi0 2y ago
That depends on the questions. There are also open book exams. A viva is a type of exam so I don’t see they are incompatible with assessing research
- lupire 2y ago
  Not every class is STEM. Are you writing a 4000 word research paper sitting in class?
  - lizknope 2y ago
    A few of my high school teachers in the early 1990's made our final paper into a big project. It was not just "turn in the paper at the end" but turn in your topic with a paragraph describing it. Then make an outline, then bibliography of the sources we were using. During the process we had to use 3x5 index cards with various points, arguments, facts, and the specific pages in the books listed in our bibliography. We did this because this was later used to make footnotes in our paper. By structuring the project this way and having each milestone count as 5-10% of the overall grade it made it much harder to cheat and also taught us how to organize a research paper. I suppose you could ask ChatGPT to do the entire paper and then work backwards picking out facts and making the outline etc.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    No, but we had to write essays in class during exams. There's a good question about the future and utility of long at-home research paper projects in school, but it's not a cornerstone of education. In 9th grade I procrastinated the semestral paper so much that I bought an essay online that explored unexpected gay themes in Ray Bradbury's corpus of work. I was so lazy I didn't even read it first, only skimmed it, and then back to Runescape. So it's not like this is a new problem due to LLMs, and I think take-home semester projects are all quite bad for these reasons that predate LLMs. (It turned out to be such a phenomenally audacious essay that my teacher started fascinated email correspondence with me about it and I was forced to not only study the essay but also read the quoted parts of his work. Ugh, backfire.)