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I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind
by math_dandy 1y ago
I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams.
Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge cash cow, and fattening it up is a very high priority. In-person, pen-and-paper assessment threatens their revenue growth model. Anyways, if we have seven sections of Calculus I, and one of these sections is offered online/remote, then none of the seven are allowed any in person assessment. For “fairness”. Seriously.
- joe_the_user 1y agoYeah, the thing AI cheating is it seems inherent not in teaching but what mechanical, bureaucratic, for-profit teaching and universities have become.
- valiant55 1y agoCapitalism and the constant thirst for growth is killing society. Since when did universities care almost solely about renevnue and growth?
- thatguy0900 1y agoWith the us government now going after their funding they may have to start caring even more
- DrillShopper 1y ago> Since when did universities care almost solely about renevnue and growth? Since endowments got huge.
- wwweston 1y agoThat’s a magnifier but it shouldn’t be the cause; for that you need a shift in management culture from optimizing for academic missions to optimizing for careers/influence of management and trustees.
- Jensson 1y agoLarge endowments causes that unless you have very strict rules around it like the Nobel prize endowment. You can see how every large charity starts to focus on growing larger rather than its mission, Mozilla is a good example of that.
- wwweston 1y agoI see a correlation in some orgs, but can you explain the mechanics? I think I’ve also seen cases where the original mission continues to be the primary compass, so maybe the mechanics of the failure mode are what I don’t have a clear picture of yet.
- dehrmann 1y agoCould you explain this more? At first glace, a large endowment should either free you from worrying about revenue or move your focus to managing an endowment with a school as a side hustle.
- Jensson 1y ago> a large endowment should either free you A large endowment attracts greedy people who then want to make it larger, that is true regardless where you go.
- DrillShopper 1y agoA large endowment requires more management, so you bring in a finance department to manage it. With what metric are those employees going to be evaluated, given that there is always going to be someone who will want the stability of a government job? It's not going to be "just maintain, don't worry". It's going to be "who can get us the most ROI?".
- thomastjeffery 1y agoWhen it was generally accepted by our society that the goal of all work is victory, not success. Capitalism frames everything as a competition, even when collaboration is obviously superior. Copyright makes this an explicit rule.
- paulorlando 1y agoBusiness models rule us all. Have you tested what kind of pushback you'll receive if you happen to flout the remote rule?
- math_dandy 1y agoCentralization and IT-ification has made flouting difficult. There’s one common course site on the institution’s learning management system for all sections where assignments are distributed and collected via upload dropbox, where grades are tabulated and communicated. So far, it’s still possible to opt out of this coordinated model, and I have been. But I suspect the ability to opt out will soon come under attack (the pretext will be ‘uniformity == fairness’). I never used to be an academic freedom maximalists who viewed the notion in the widest sense, but I’m beginning to see my error.
- paulorlando 1y agoSorry to hear this. And thanks for sharing this warning to other educators. I hope you find a way through.
- jofla_net 1y agoThank you for not giving in. The slide downhill is so ravenous and will consume so much of our future until the wise intervene.
- aaplok 1y ago> Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. Those I ask are unanimously horrified that this is the choice they are given. They are devastated that the degree for which they are working hard is becoming worthless yet they all assert they don't want exams back. Many of them are neurodivergent who do miserably in exam conditions and in contrast excel in open tasks that allow them to explore, so my sample is biased but still. They don't have a solution. As the main victims they are just frustrated by the situation, and at the "solutions" thrown at it by folks who aren't personally affected.
- math_dandy 1y agoWe have an Accessible Testing Center that will administer and proctor exams under very flexible conditions (more time, breaks, quiet/privacy, …) to help students with various forms of neurodivergence. They’re very good and offer a valuable service without placing any significant additional burden on the instructor. Seems to work well, but I don’t have first hand knowledge about how these forms of accommodations are viewed by the neurodivergent student community. They certainly don’t address the problem of allowing « explorer » students to demonstrate their abilities.
- aaplok 1y agoYes I think the issue is as much that open tasks make learning interesting and meaningful in a way that exams hardly can do. This is the core of the issue really. If we are in the business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument. However since our business is also assessing, proctoring is the best if not only trustworthy approach and exams are cheap in time, effort and money to do that. My take is that we should just (properly) assess students at the end of their degree. Spend time (say, a full day) with them but do it only once in the degree (at the end), so you can properly evaluate their skills. Make it hard so that the ones who graduate all deserve it. Then the rest of their time at university should be about learning what they will need.
- const_cast 1y agoExams aren't for learning, they're for measuring. Projects and lecture are for learning. The problem with this "end of university exam" structure is that you have the same problems as before but now that exam is weighted like 10,000% that of a normal exam.
- sien 1y agoIn Australia Universities that have remote study have places where people can do proctored exams in large cities. The course is done remotely but the exam, which is often 50%+ of the final grade, is done in a place that has proctored exams as a service. Can't this be done in the US as well ?
- fn-mote 1y agoVariations in this system are in active use in the US as well. Do you feel it is effective? It seems to me that there is a massive asymmetry in the war here: proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat. I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the cheating that occurs.
- baby_souffle 1y ago> I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the cheating that occurs. It'll depend a lot on who/where/how is doing the screening and what tools (if any) are permitted. Remember that bogus program for TI8{3,4} series calculators that would clear the screen and print "MEMORY CLEAR"? If the proctor was just looking for that string and not actually jumping through the hoops to _actually_ clear the memory then it was trivial to keep notes / solvers ... etc on the calculator.
- MrDarcy 1y agoWas I at university in a small window in time when a TI-89 and TI-92 was allowed? In the years since, I’ve only ever heard mention of older models, not newer ones which makes me wonder if this is a special case and situation where technology is frozen in time intentionally to foster learning.
- jmb99 1y agoI wasn’t allowed anything more complex than a Casio FX-300ES. Even my 991ES wasn’t allowed, let alone something like a TI83/4. This (from what I’ve heard) is pretty standard in Canadian universities for calc 1-3, linear algebra, discrete, etc.
- EGreg 1y agoSo just have test centers, and flip the classroom.
- math_dandy 1y agoI think this is a good approach.
- cebert 1y agoThanks for sharing this anecdote. It’s easy to forget the revenue / business side of education and that universities are in a hard spot here.
- coderatlarge 1y agois it ok for students to submit images of hand-written solutions remotely? seriously it reminds me of my high school days when a teacher told me i shouldn’t type up my essays because then they couldn’t be sure i actually wrote them. maybe we will find our way back to live oral exams before long…
- dehrmann 1y agoI attended Purdue. Since I graduated, it launched its "Purdue Global" online education. Rankings don't suggest it's happened yet, but I'm worried it will cheapen the brand and devalue my degree.
- nsagent 1y agoI remember sitting with the faculty in charge of offering online courses when I visited as an alum back in 2014. They seemed to look at it as a cash cow in their presentation. They were eager to be at the forefront of online CS degrees at the time.
- BrenBarn 1y agoI see that pressure as well. I find that a lot of the problems we have with AI are in fact AI exposing problems in other aspects of our society. In this case, one problem is that the people who do the teaching and know what needs to be learned are the faculty, but the decisions about how to teach are made by administrators. And another problem is that colleges are treating "make money" as a goal. These problems existed before AI, but AI is exacerbating them (and there are many, many more such cases). I think things are going to have to get a lot worse before they get better. If we're lucky, things will get so bad that we finally fix some shaky foundations that our society has been trying to ignore for decades (or even centuries). If we're not lucky, things will still get that bad but we won't fix them.
- Brybry 1y agoInstructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree. So they know what students should be taught but I don't know that they necessarily know how any better than the administrators. I've always found it weird that you need teaching certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but not to teach calculus to adults.
- Super_Jambo 1y agoOnce you're an adult some of the best lessons come from having bad teachers.
- iwanttocomment 1y agoAdult here! No.
- vacuity 1y agoAdult here; there are lessons everywhere, but people learn very differently.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoJust watch out for who is certifying how things should be taught. It’s honestly one reason education is so bad and so slow to change. Edit: and why perfectly capable professionals can’t be teachers without years of certification
- doug_durham 1y agoHand written essays are inherently ableist. I would be at a massive disadvantage. I grew up during the 60's, but handwriting was alway slow and error prone for me. As soon as I could use a word processor I blossomed. It's probably not as bad for mathematical derivations. I still do those by hand since they are more like drawing than expression.
- baq 1y ago> Hand written essays are inherently ableist. yes. > I would be at a massive disadvantage. yes. ...but. how would you propose to filter out able cheaters instead? there's also in person one on one verbal exam, but economics and logistics of that are insanely unfavorable (see also - job interviews.)
- jedimastert 1y agoHandwriting essays doesn't filter out cheaters though? It didn't even filter out cheaters before ChatGPT, before it was just a person writing the essay for you that you would copy
- AllegedAlec 1y ago> Hand written essays are inherently ableist So is testing; people who don't have the skills don't do well. Hell, the entire concept of education is ableist towards learning impaired kids. Let's do away with it entirely.
- lionkor 1y agoWould you hire someone as a writer who is completely illiterate? Of course that's an extreme edge case, but at some point equality stops and the ability to do the work is actually important.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y agoMost people would be happy to hire a writer with no consideration of how good their handwriting was.
- remarkEon 1y agoIn my undergraduate experience, the location of which shall remain nameless, we had amble access to technology but the professors were fairly hostile to it and insisted on pencil and paper for all technical classes. There were some English or History classes here and there that allowed a laptop for writing essays during an "exam" that was a 3 hour experience with the professor walking around the whole time. Anyway, when I was younger I thought the pencil and paper thing to be silly. Why would we eschew brand new technology that can make us faster! And now that I'm an adult, I'm so thankful they did that. I have such a firm grasp of the underlying theory and the math precisely because I had to write it down, on my own, from memory. I see what these kids do today and they have been so woefully failed. Teachers and professors: you can say "no". Your students will thank you in the future.
- jimnotgym 1y agoI'm not a teacher, but I came here to say the same thing. Pen and paper.
- thih9 1y agoHigher ups say yes to remote learning and no to remote work. Interesting to see this side by side like this.
- RHSeeger 1y agoRemote learning also opens up a lot of opportunities to people that would not otherwise be able to take advantage of them. So it's not _just_ the cash cow that benefits from it.
- seethishat 1y agoSome US universities do this remotely via proctoring software. They require pencil and paper to be used with a laptop that has a camera. Some do mirror scans, room scans, hand scans, etc. The Georgia Tech OMS CS program used to do this for the math proofs course and algorithms (leet code). It was effective and scalable. However, the proctoring seems overly Orwellian, but I can understand the need due to cheating as well as maintaining high standards for accreditation.
- thomastjeffery 1y ago> seems overly Orwellian Wow. Maybe we should consider the possibility that this isn't a good idea? Just a bit? No? Just ignore how obviously comparable this is to the most famous dystopian fiction in literary history? Just wow. If you're willing to do that, I don't know what to tell you.
- aerhardt 1y agoI have a Software Engineering degree from Harvard Extension and I had to take quite a few exams in physically proctored environments. I could very easily manage in Madrid and London. It is not too hard for either the institution or the student. I am now doing an Online MSc in CompSci at Georgia Tech. The online evaluation and proctoring is fine. I’ve taken one rather math-heavy course (Simulation) and it worked. I see the program however is struggling with the online evaluation of certain subjects (like Graduate Algorithms). I see your point that a professor might prefer to have physical evaluation processes. I personally wouldn’t begrudge the institution as long as they gave me options for proctoring (at my own expense even) or the course selection was large enough to pick alternatives.
- mountainb 1y agoProfessional proctored testing centers exist in many locations around the world now. It's not that complicated to have a couple people at the front, a method for physically screening test-takers, providing lockers for personal possessions, providing computers for test administration, and protocols for checking multiple points of identity for each test taker. This hybrid model is vastly preferable to "true" remote test taking in which they try to do remote proctoring to the student's home using a camera and other tools.
- aerhardt 1y agoThat’s what I did at HES and it was fine. Reasonable and not particularly stressful.
- Balgair 1y agoI think you've identified the main issue here: LLMs aren't destroying the University or the essay. LLMs are destroying the cheap University or essay. Cheap can mean a lot of things, like money or time or distance. But, if Universities want to maintain a standard, then they are going to have to work for it again. No more 300+ person freshman lectures (where everyone cheated anyways). No more take-home zoom exams. No more professors checked out. No more grad students doing the real teaching. I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows you and if you've done the work. And I know, that is not a cheap way to churn out degrees.
- nothercastle 1y agoAll degrees are basically the same though and of 95% of the value is signaling nobody really cares about the education part
- username223 1y agoBelieve it or not, 300-person freshman lectures can be done well. They just need a talented instructor who's willing to put in the prep, and good TAs leading sections. And if the university fosters the right culture, the students mostly won't cheat. But yeah, if the professor is clearly checked out and only interested in his research, and the students are being told that the only purpose of their education is to get a piece of paper to show to potential employers, you'll get a cynical death-spiral. (I've been on both sides of this, though back when copy-pasting from Wikipedia was the way to cheat.)
- mathgeek 1y ago> though back when copy-pasting from Wikipedia was the way to cheat Back when I was teaching part time, I had a lot of fun looking at the confused looks on my students' faces when I said "you cannot use Wikipedia, but you'll find a lot of useful links at the bottom of any article there..."
- tgv 1y ago10 is a small number. There's a middle ground. When I studied, we had lectures for all students, and a similar amount of time in "work groups," as they were called. That resembled secondary education: one teacher, around 30 students, but those classes were mainly focused on applying the newly acquired knowledge, making exercises, asking questions, checking homework, etc. Later, I taught such classes for programming 101, and it was perfectly doable. Work group teachers were also responsible for reviewing their students' tests. But that commercially oriented boards are ruining education, that's a given. That they would stoop to this level is a bit surprising.
- storus 1y agoStanford requires pen & paper exams for their remote students; the students first need to nominate an exam monitor (a person) who in turn receives and prints the assignments, meets the student at an agreed upon place, the monitor gives them the printed exams and leaves, then collects the exam after allotted time, scans it and sends it back to Stanford.
- amelius 1y agoCan't we use AI to monitor the students?
- tangjurine 1y agowhy not pay for students to take the pen and paper exams at some proctored location, perhaps independent of the university.