7 ms·

A lot of the purposes in education for which the use of AI would be considered "cheating" involve writing assignments of one sort or another, so I don't know wh

A lot of the purposes in education for which the use of AI would be considered "cheating" involve writing assignments of one sort or another, so I don't know why most of these education scenarios don't simply redirect the incentive. For example, in an English class with a lot of essay-writing assignments, the assignments could simply be worth 0% of the final mark. There would still be deadlines as usual, and they would be marked as usual, but the students would be free to do them or not as they pleased. The catch would be that the *proctored, for-credit* exams would demand that they write similar essays, which would then be graded based on the knowledge/skills the students would have been expected to gain if they'd done the assignments. Advantages: - No more issues with cheating. - Students get to manage (or learn to manage) their own time and priorities, as is expected of adults, without being whipped as much with the cane of class grades. - The advanced students who can already write clearly, concisely and convincingly (or whatever the objectives are of the writing exercises) don't have to waste time with unneeded assignments. - If students skip the assignments, learn to write on their own time using ChatGPT and friends, and can demonstrate their skills in exam conditions, then it's a win-win. This all requires that whoever is in charge of the class have clear and testable learning goals in mind -- which, alas, they all-too-often do not.

siddboots 1y ago
This would mean moving to 100% weighted exams, and there's good reasons why there has been a general trend away from that over recent decades. For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others, independent of their preparedness and knowledge of the material. Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.
- gwerbret 1y ago
  Fair point, but the solution I propose would only apply to those parts of the assessment involving solo writing assignments -- so excluding class participation, group assignments, etc. (Which is not to say that students can't use AI to cheat on these, but they have other solutions.)
- renewiltord 1y ago
  I mean, the real answer is that the other students were cheating on their assignments. It's that simple. We keep making up excuses for all of this shit. Some people don't "test well". Turns out those people don't know shit. Let's get real here. I know why these nonsensical memes keep propagating but dear god. People will just believe anything these days, including that gas stoves cause asthma or whatever other bullshit is being peddled.
  - kylebenzle 1y ago
    [dead]
  - too_pricey 1y ago
    This isn't true. I'm one of those people who tested remarkably well, and back in college would do fine on exams despite frantically copying all of my own (non-comp Sci) assignments. Better than my peers who knew more and helped me cram. Test anxiety is real.
    - lupusreal 1y ago
      I was a great test taker, I used to make a sort of game out finishing tests in half the time as almost everybody else and acing it at the same time. I also never crammed, never attended pre-test study groups, and sometimes made a show of drinking beers right before the test just to annoy the people cramming in the last minute. But I'm not particularly brilliant, in fact I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I have undiagnosed ADHD. My test taking performance trick, which I freely told everybody to their annoyance, was very simple. I knew the material! Read the assigned texts, do the optional homework, pay attention in class. If you know the material you don't have to try to cram it into your brain in the last half hour before the test. If you know the material you don't have to try to reason it out from first principles during the test. You just go in, fill out the easy answers straight away, go back and do a second pass for the tricky questions, and that's it. If you have to sit there wracking your brain for 30 minutes on a single problem it's because you already fucked up with how you approached the course weeks ago. Again, I'm not special for this. There were a handful of other students who were as fast as me. We'd sit in the hall waiting for our friends, look at each other and say "you knew all this stuff too, huh?" "yeah of course"
- jonahx 1y ago
  > Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions. This is thing. If this choice is between: 1. A gameable system that will be gamed by most students. 2. An ungameable system that will unfairly punish those bad under pressure and time constraints. There isn't really a choice at all. One option would be a school-provided proctoring system, allowing teachers to outsource the actual test-taking times. It could be done outside of class time, at the student's convenience, and they could have 3-4 hours if they chose.
  - croes 1y ago
    > An ungameable system that will unfairly punish those bad under pressure and time constraints. Given modern communication technology it’s still gameable
    - jonahx 1y ago
      With a proctored in-person exam, we're talking about the difference between gaming the SAT, say, and gaming a take home English essay. And rates of cheating of "well under 1%" vs "well over 50%". Even if we allow for less rigorous proctoring standards, we're still probably talking about "2-3%" vs "well over 50%".
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others Learning to perform under pressure is the main purpose of attending college.
- thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
  "Can they do this under pressure?" might in fact be a good question to test for and train for. A lot of real-life activity after graduation will involve some pressure. But we could do what I'll call a "monastic exam". You've got a week, not an hour, but it's in a little monastery and you don't have your phone or other unapproved tools.
  - MengerSponge 1y ago
    Oh I'd love to be able to assign Walden exams.
  - singron 1y ago
    One of my freshman professors accidentally did nearly that. The final exam was 3 hours. This was normal at my school although many students finish in 1-2 house. After realizing nobody was close to finishing after 2 hours and he had greatly underestimated the difficulty, he expanded the time limit to 6 hours! I will say it's not practical to have exams that long. In this case, the dorm required me to move out immediately after the exam and my parents were waiting to pick me up, so I decided to leave after 4 hours to avoid unnecessary panic or having to drive overnight. In hindsight, the professor probably would have let me make a phone call, but that didn't occur to me at the time.
superfrank 1y ago
A lot of students, even at the college level, don't think that far ahead and make bad decisions because of short term thinking. Look at any list of advice for new college students and almost every one of them includes "go to class". Simply attending class is way easier than homework and yet, when there's no short term consequences for not doing it, plenty of students will just not do it. Cheating is another great example. Cheating in college is rampant because kids don't want to do the work they're assigned. I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. They're already choosing to ignore the long term benefits of homework even when there are short term consequences, so I don't see how removing those short term consequences will make things better. If you tell kids there are no immediate consequences for not doing homework, many of them just won't do it and they will fail because they haven't learned anything. Maybe you're okay with that. Honestly, I'm not actually trying to convince you that it's a bad idea. I just think if your proposal is based on the idea that kids will choose to something boring that they don't have to do in the short term because it benefits them in the long term you're overestimating a lot of kids (and adults for that matter).
- raincole 1y ago
  > I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it. Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating. The big issue of exam-only approach is that a one-hour exam is not enough to evaluate a student's performance, unless your educational goal is just to make students memorize stuff by rote. I'd consider a 3-hour open-book exam bare minimal. But if every class does that it'll be too exhausting.
  - wombatpm 1y ago
    Do Universities no longer do that? All of my finals were 3hrs. There was a special schedule during finals week with 3 slots per day. The time of your final exam was based on when the first lecture session of a class took place. Really sucked to get an 8-11 AM slot when your classes never started before 11. Fun prank: set all of the clocks in your dorm neighbor’s room to different wrong times. Guy across the hall knew we were messing with him, trusted his watch - which had the correct time, but wrong alarm time. Realized he had a problem when he had hot water in the shower and no one was around. He was only 45 min late to the exam. Good times.
msgodel 1y ago
I had to do these for a couple college classes (The original OpenAI GPTs were just released around when I graduated, I remember reading about them and then avoiding pytorch because the wheels were a pain to build.) You have to get a special blue book with a couple blank pages and then write an essay with the prompt that's given at exam time. Then you turn in the book at the end of the exam. I think it's a great idea and was surprised more classes didn't work that way but I guess it's like you say: grading written assignments like this is a lot of work.
LTL_FTC 1y ago
This exactly how one of my English professors structured his class. The students would have to do the research beforehand and come in on test day with their works cited page completed. The actual paper would be written by hand during class time. You were only allowed the blank green book and a couple of pages of notes with direct quotes to incorporate into your paper. He wasn’t worried about llms, they were not around, but plagiarism. It worked well.
croes 1y ago
So one bad day can ruin your marks. It’s also a disadvantage for people with test anxiety.
- ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
  It's impossible to design a system which is perfect for everyone. People with attention disorders might feel the opposite and will do better with the pressure of a test.
  - croes 1y ago
    That’s why the current system has both.
- eddd-ddde 1y ago
  You can have multiple tests throughout the term to bring down variance. Personally I love tests, and I think everyone can learn how to perform well.
anilgulecha 1y ago
> the assignments could simply be worth 0% [..] that the proctored, for-credit exams would demand that they write similar essays. We run university programs at my company, and arrived at this bit of insight as well. That said, some of your points are incorrect or incomplete: - You can't build systems assuming responsible individuals. These systems are guaranteed to fail. Instead, assume individuals are mould-able, and build a system which nurtures discipline towards goals. This works. - There are still issues with cheating, but it's more of an older way of thinking, that we developed methods to reset. - Advanced students need to be given more challenging assignments - quantum of assignments should be the same no matter the capability of students. This solution was unworkable until GenAI came about. Looked from a pure individual skill-building perspective your ideas are alluring, but if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%), then one understands why physical cohort-led education system can work. Happy to chat with anyone who'd like to delve deeper on this.
- dagw 1y ago
  if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%) As someone with a 96+% 'failure' rate on Udemy/Coursera I honestly don't see the relevance of this statistic. Most people going to University are there primarily because they want/need the degree. That piece of paper is really valuable, perhaps even more so than the knowledge gained. The piece of 'paper' offered by Coursera/Udemy etc. has basically zero value, so the people taking those courses are doing it almost exclusively for the knowledge they offer. Once you've learned what you wanted to learn from the course there is very little incentive to go the extra mile and go for the 'completion'.
  - anilgulecha 1y ago
    The piece of paper is valuable because it represents a sustained effort of learning over an extended period of time. I understand how from an individual's pov what you said makes sense. Similarly I hope you understand why from the system's perspective: it's the effort that's mandated and not just the proficiency. Employers and others (higher education orgs, etc) care a lot about sustained effort, alongside proficiency. Only proficiency-focused systems (like Udemy/Coursera/Youtube) are not respected as credentials, since they do not showcase this.
bradley13 1y ago
That's pretty much how I teach my programming classes. Assignments are worth zero, or sometimes very little. The difference I notice with AI is that the bell curve is nearly inverted. You have the good students, who use AI to support their learning. You have the students who let AI do their assignments, and then fail miserably on the exam. And there is hardly anyone left in the middle.
- eythian 1y ago
  In my (limited) experience, programming classes, especially intro level, often end up with a binomial-ish distribution anyway. I was casually assisting some research on why this is when I was helping teach labs and such so was interested. I'm sure more research happened after I wasn't doing that any more, but I remember the best way of removing this at the time was catchup classes. A lot of intro programming builds directly on previous lessons, much more so than, e.g., maths. If you missed how variables work (off sick, just didn't get it, whatever), you're still stuck when it comes to functions and anything else following and then you're going to fail - it was quite predictable. We studied other university courses and nothing came close to the pattern we were seeing, except "computing for chemistry" or something, which was basically the same sort of course just in a different department. So we added explicit catch-up classes a few days after a topic was covered so if you missed it, you could get quite personal help on getting back up to speed. This really shifted the distribution to the right, then the people who failed were either those who just didn't care, or those under more extreme circumstances where this couldn't help (or those who just could not learn programming for love nor money but that was rare ime.)
  - tomsmeding 1y ago
    > often end up with a binomial-ish distribution anyway I think you meant "bimodal", not "binomial". They mean roughly opposite things here. :)
    - eythian 1y ago
      You are right! Bimodal indeed, thanks
android521 1y ago
writing classs should probably be transformed into prompting class lol. Train students to prompt with clarity and be able to prompt AI to write high quality essays
- bigfishrunning 1y ago
  And then have AI summarize those high quality essays for grading! It's like the inverse of compression! In all seriousness, I don't see the value in this at all. Why would I want to know a statistically likely essay? Wouldn't I rather know what the student thinks?
hnlmorg 1y ago
It used to be like that, and I'm old enough to remember why they changed: not every student handles exam stress well. And it has nothing to do with their competency in that subject matter. For example, in the UK, it was shown that biasing course results towards exam marks caused woman to perform worse than men. But when results included assignments, women generally performed better. This is obviously a generalisation but it is one of the reasons why so many courses now take assignments into account for their final grade.
- eythian 1y ago
  In my undergrad, a few decades ago, it was typically the case that assignments and exams both were a part of your final score. Often it was something like 40% exam/60% assignments, but this could change. However what you mention about different people being better in different circumstances reminds of what our maths courses typically did, it was called "plussage" IIRC. Basically, the scores were calculated, and you got the best score from a 40% exam/60% assignment weighting or a 60%/40% (or something, the exact values are lost to time.) So if you were bad at exams but had done the work through the semester, you got a boost. Or if you were bad at deadlines but had still studied, you weren't (too) penalised.
i_am_proteus 1y ago
I give university courses in United States. Many of us have certainly down-weighted homework substantially. However, when some colleagues tried homework as 0% for introductory courses, most students omitted the homework, then failed the exams. Modern students seem to require explicit incentive to work, otherwise the usual: scrolling upon flat screen devices, hedonism, and so forth. In this case, who has failed: the student, or the professor?
- adornKey 1y ago
  In my experience (about 2 decades ago) in a group of 20-30 students only 2 or 3 are able and willing to do homework. Most students just find someone else and copy from them. The real learning happens when preparing for a big exam. And to pass an exam students have to prepare for the exam. Homework will only help there if it is similar to the exam. One time I had to evaluate a written exam where the professor had set up a trap. There was a question that looked like a standard question from homework, but if you used the standard-techniques from the course your calculations didn't work - it was a nasty special case. Most people that started with that question just burned 30 minutes without getting anywhere... a lot of students failed, but at least they learned something about life... And Oral exams are different. Giving a quick well prepared answer and being able to solve difficult tasks over a few days are completely different skills. Students there prepare for the professor. There are transcripts of previous oral exams. And professors change over the years - the final tough question of an excellent student will a few years later become a starting question. People that didn't know that game and didn't have access to any transcripts were in serious trouble... None of the Homework would have helped in the oral exam.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    "In my experience (about 2 decades ago) in a group of 20-30 students only 2 or 3 are able and willing to do homework. Most students just find someone else and copy from them. The real learning happens when preparing for a big exam. And to pass an exam students have to prepare for the exam. Homework will only help there if it is similar to the exam." That's not learning really. I can confidently say that because I was the one who unfortunately regressed to this during the uni, and the same story with my peers. One simply can't prepare to the multiple exams sufficiently in a few weeks time (or less). So the only path left is hysterical rote memorization of as much material as possible to squeeze in at a passing grade, and then immediately forget all of the materials in a few months time. Burst of "learning" twice a year for a short time doesn't translate into real learning. And that's for some simple courses during first few years. Specialist courses later in the program sometimes are impossible to rush "learn". When I tried to pull this off for Probability Theory course, I've failed spectacularly to get even lowest passing mark at first try. And others failed the same way.
PontifexMinimus 1y ago
This is a very sensible proposal, however it falls flat when considering that many students who have paid for a university "education" feel entitled to a degree at the end of it, regardless of how much effort they've put in and whether they have learned enough skills to justify one.
- thfuran 1y ago
  I don’t see the issue with those people not getting what they want.
  - PontifexMinimus 1y ago
    Nor do I, but the university administration might see things differently to us.
II2II 1y ago
A couple of points here: - People need to learn how to write. The quality of student writing was one of the biggest criticisms of students when I was in university, and that was 30 years ago. Writing will only improve with practice and someone to evaluate it. Very few people will be able to learn how to write properly by reading about it, and even fewer people will even realize that you can learn how to write by reading the work of other people (which is important for learning about style in a particular field). For most students, even well meaning ones, no grade means no work done. - A certain segment of the student population will find ways to cheat anyhow. All you have done is raised the bar so that, hopefully, fewer people will cheat. Quite frankly, I don't know how helpful that is if the "top" of the class moves on since the top of the class tends to be defined by their GPA. - Test anxiety is a real thing. Different people go to school for different reasons, not all of which lead to high pressure careers. Do we really want to limit who can effectively access an education because of that? There is no easy solution to this problem. Likely the best solution would be to remove traditional assignments and exams from the loop altogether and having students work directly with their instructors. Yet this has it's own set of problems (it assumes both parties are honest, it is difficult to ensure consistency in the delivery of curriculum, etc.).
Yizahi 1y ago
This is an example of a very limited social darwinism. Basically the idea is to remove a lot of enforcement and rules in some activity, or maybe even all, and then "free market" will regulate itself, with "deserving" students managing to manage themselves, and "undeserving" ones lets behind. But the point of the university is not only teach English grammar and math operations, but also to work in teams, manage yourself, etc. The social stuff. And I suspect a significant number of students benefit from it. And I also suspect that by doing this at scale, the whole society benefits on average. Removing all control and only checking the knowledge during the exam would lead to a lot of students never catching up. It is likely that it will also lead to the top students being more and more lax and eventually also falling behind. The whole idea hinges on the base motivation - why do we need primary/secondary etc. education at all? To produce a dozen elite self motivated geniuses per year per country? Then your proposal would work perfectly. Or maybe motivation is different?..
rtkwe 1y ago
I hated all my proctored essays for the simple reason there's no ability to research things so it feels like the only arguments you can present are rhetorical or using made up statistics.
avgDev 1y ago
Due to my ADHD, I would try to learn 12-72 hours before the exams. I would fail quickly, hopefully someone could help me recognize why.

siddboots 1y ago

This would mean moving to 100% weighted exams, and there's good reasons why there has been a general trend away from that over recent decades. For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others, independent of their preparedness and knowledge of the material. Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.

gwerbret 1y ago
Fair point, but the solution I propose would only apply to those parts of the assessment involving solo writing assignments -- so excluding class participation, group assignments, etc. (Which is not to say that students can't use AI to cheat on these, but they have other solutions.)
renewiltord 1y ago
I mean, the real answer is that the other students were cheating on their assignments. It's that simple. We keep making up excuses for all of this shit. Some people don't "test well". Turns out those people don't know shit. Let's get real here. I know why these nonsensical memes keep propagating but dear god. People will just believe anything these days, including that gas stoves cause asthma or whatever other bullshit is being peddled.
- kylebenzle 1y ago
  [dead]
- too_pricey 1y ago
  This isn't true. I'm one of those people who tested remarkably well, and back in college would do fine on exams despite frantically copying all of my own (non-comp Sci) assignments. Better than my peers who knew more and helped me cram. Test anxiety is real.
  - lupusreal 1y ago
    I was a great test taker, I used to make a sort of game out finishing tests in half the time as almost everybody else and acing it at the same time. I also never crammed, never attended pre-test study groups, and sometimes made a show of drinking beers right before the test just to annoy the people cramming in the last minute. But I'm not particularly brilliant, in fact I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I have undiagnosed ADHD. My test taking performance trick, which I freely told everybody to their annoyance, was very simple. I knew the material! Read the assigned texts, do the optional homework, pay attention in class. If you know the material you don't have to try to cram it into your brain in the last half hour before the test. If you know the material you don't have to try to reason it out from first principles during the test. You just go in, fill out the easy answers straight away, go back and do a second pass for the tricky questions, and that's it. If you have to sit there wracking your brain for 30 minutes on a single problem it's because you already fucked up with how you approached the course weeks ago. Again, I'm not special for this. There were a handful of other students who were as fast as me. We'd sit in the hall waiting for our friends, look at each other and say "you knew all this stuff too, huh?" "yeah of course"
jonahx 1y ago
> Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions. This is thing. If this choice is between: 1. A gameable system that will be gamed by most students. 2. An ungameable system that will unfairly punish those bad under pressure and time constraints. There isn't really a choice at all. One option would be a school-provided proctoring system, allowing teachers to outsource the actual test-taking times. It could be done outside of class time, at the student's convenience, and they could have 3-4 hours if they chose.
- croes 1y ago
  > An ungameable system that will unfairly punish those bad under pressure and time constraints. Given modern communication technology it’s still gameable
  - jonahx 1y ago
    With a proctored in-person exam, we're talking about the difference between gaming the SAT, say, and gaming a take home English essay. And rates of cheating of "well under 1%" vs "well over 50%". Even if we allow for less rigorous proctoring standards, we're still probably talking about "2-3%" vs "well over 50%".
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others Learning to perform under pressure is the main purpose of attending college.
thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
"Can they do this under pressure?" might in fact be a good question to test for and train for. A lot of real-life activity after graduation will involve some pressure. But we could do what I'll call a "monastic exam". You've got a week, not an hour, but it's in a little monastery and you don't have your phone or other unapproved tools.
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  Oh I'd love to be able to assign Walden exams.
- singron 1y ago
  One of my freshman professors accidentally did nearly that. The final exam was 3 hours. This was normal at my school although many students finish in 1-2 house. After realizing nobody was close to finishing after 2 hours and he had greatly underestimated the difficulty, he expanded the time limit to 6 hours! I will say it's not practical to have exams that long. In this case, the dorm required me to move out immediately after the exam and my parents were waiting to pick me up, so I decided to leave after 4 hours to avoid unnecessary panic or having to drive overnight. In hindsight, the professor probably would have let me make a phone call, but that didn't occur to me at the time.

superfrank 1y ago

A lot of students, even at the college level, don't think that far ahead and make bad decisions because of short term thinking. Look at any list of advice for new college students and almost every one of them includes "go to class". Simply attending class is way easier than homework and yet, when there's no short term consequences for not doing it, plenty of students will just not do it. Cheating is another great example. Cheating in college is rampant because kids don't want to do the work they're assigned. I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. They're already choosing to ignore the long term benefits of homework even when there are short term consequences, so I don't see how removing those short term consequences will make things better. If you tell kids there are no immediate consequences for not doing homework, many of them just won't do it and they will fail because they haven't learned anything. Maybe you're okay with that. Honestly, I'm not actually trying to convince you that it's a bad idea. I just think if your proposal is based on the idea that kids will choose to something boring that they don't have to do in the short term because it benefits them in the long term you're overestimating a lot of kids (and adults for that matter).

raincole 1y ago
> I don't understand the logic behind the idea that if you tell all the kids currently using ChatGPT to write their essays, "Hey, you don't actually have to write that essay at all" that you think they will somehow choose to write it anyway. I unironically believe if you tell all the kids they don't have to write the essay at all, much more will choose to write it. Kids cheat not just because they're lazy. Cheating makes people feel smart. The fact you can get credits by doing very little while others work their asses off is rewarding and self-validating. The big issue of exam-only approach is that a one-hour exam is not enough to evaluate a student's performance, unless your educational goal is just to make students memorize stuff by rote. I'd consider a 3-hour open-book exam bare minimal. But if every class does that it'll be too exhausting.
- wombatpm 1y ago
  Do Universities no longer do that? All of my finals were 3hrs. There was a special schedule during finals week with 3 slots per day. The time of your final exam was based on when the first lecture session of a class took place. Really sucked to get an 8-11 AM slot when your classes never started before 11. Fun prank: set all of the clocks in your dorm neighbor’s room to different wrong times. Guy across the hall knew we were messing with him, trusted his watch - which had the correct time, but wrong alarm time. Realized he had a problem when he had hot water in the shower and no one was around. He was only 45 min late to the exam. Good times.

msgodel 1y ago

I had to do these for a couple college classes (The original OpenAI GPTs were just released around when I graduated, I remember reading about them and then avoiding pytorch because the wheels were a pain to build.) You have to get a special blue book with a couple blank pages and then write an essay with the prompt that's given at exam time. Then you turn in the book at the end of the exam. I think it's a great idea and was surprised more classes didn't work that way but I guess it's like you say: grading written assignments like this is a lot of work.

LTL_FTC 1y ago

This exactly how one of my English professors structured his class. The students would have to do the research beforehand and come in on test day with their works cited page completed. The actual paper would be written by hand during class time. You were only allowed the blank green book and a couple of pages of notes with direct quotes to incorporate into your paper. He wasn’t worried about llms, they were not around, but plagiarism. It worked well.

croes 1y ago

So one bad day can ruin your marks. It’s also a disadvantage for people with test anxiety.

ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
It's impossible to design a system which is perfect for everyone. People with attention disorders might feel the opposite and will do better with the pressure of a test.
- croes 1y ago
  That’s why the current system has both.
eddd-ddde 1y ago
You can have multiple tests throughout the term to bring down variance. Personally I love tests, and I think everyone can learn how to perform well.

anilgulecha 1y ago

> the assignments could simply be worth 0% [..] that the proctored, for-credit exams would demand that they write similar essays. We run university programs at my company, and arrived at this bit of insight as well. That said, some of your points are incorrect or incomplete: - You can't build systems assuming responsible individuals. These systems are guaranteed to fail. Instead, assume individuals are mould-able, and build a system which nurtures discipline towards goals. This works. - There are still issues with cheating, but it's more of an older way of thinking, that we developed methods to reset. - Advanced students need to be given more challenging assignments - quantum of assignments should be the same no matter the capability of students. This solution was unworkable until GenAI came about. Looked from a pure individual skill-building perspective your ideas are alluring, but if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%), then one understands why physical cohort-led education system can work. Happy to chat with anyone who'd like to delve deeper on this.

dagw 1y ago
if one looks at completion rates of any online courses (Udemy/Coursera - under 4%) As someone with a 96+% 'failure' rate on Udemy/Coursera I honestly don't see the relevance of this statistic. Most people going to University are there primarily because they want/need the degree. That piece of paper is really valuable, perhaps even more so than the knowledge gained. The piece of 'paper' offered by Coursera/Udemy etc. has basically zero value, so the people taking those courses are doing it almost exclusively for the knowledge they offer. Once you've learned what you wanted to learn from the course there is very little incentive to go the extra mile and go for the 'completion'.
- anilgulecha 1y ago
  The piece of paper is valuable because it represents a sustained effort of learning over an extended period of time. I understand how from an individual's pov what you said makes sense. Similarly I hope you understand why from the system's perspective: it's the effort that's mandated and not just the proficiency. Employers and others (higher education orgs, etc) care a lot about sustained effort, alongside proficiency. Only proficiency-focused systems (like Udemy/Coursera/Youtube) are not respected as credentials, since they do not showcase this.

bradley13 1y ago

That's pretty much how I teach my programming classes. Assignments are worth zero, or sometimes very little. The difference I notice with AI is that the bell curve is nearly inverted. You have the good students, who use AI to support their learning. You have the students who let AI do their assignments, and then fail miserably on the exam. And there is hardly anyone left in the middle.

eythian 1y ago
In my (limited) experience, programming classes, especially intro level, often end up with a binomial-ish distribution anyway. I was casually assisting some research on why this is when I was helping teach labs and such so was interested. I'm sure more research happened after I wasn't doing that any more, but I remember the best way of removing this at the time was catchup classes. A lot of intro programming builds directly on previous lessons, much more so than, e.g., maths. If you missed how variables work (off sick, just didn't get it, whatever), you're still stuck when it comes to functions and anything else following and then you're going to fail - it was quite predictable. We studied other university courses and nothing came close to the pattern we were seeing, except "computing for chemistry" or something, which was basically the same sort of course just in a different department. So we added explicit catch-up classes a few days after a topic was covered so if you missed it, you could get quite personal help on getting back up to speed. This really shifted the distribution to the right, then the people who failed were either those who just didn't care, or those under more extreme circumstances where this couldn't help (or those who just could not learn programming for love nor money but that was rare ime.)
- tomsmeding 1y ago
  > often end up with a binomial-ish distribution anyway I think you meant "bimodal", not "binomial". They mean roughly opposite things here. :)
  - eythian 1y ago
    You are right! Bimodal indeed, thanks

android521 1y ago

writing classs should probably be transformed into prompting class lol. Train students to prompt with clarity and be able to prompt AI to write high quality essays

bigfishrunning 1y ago
And then have AI summarize those high quality essays for grading! It's like the inverse of compression! In all seriousness, I don't see the value in this at all. Why would I want to know a statistically likely essay? Wouldn't I rather know what the student thinks?

hnlmorg 1y ago

It used to be like that, and I'm old enough to remember why they changed: not every student handles exam stress well. And it has nothing to do with their competency in that subject matter. For example, in the UK, it was shown that biasing course results towards exam marks caused woman to perform worse than men. But when results included assignments, women generally performed better. This is obviously a generalisation but it is one of the reasons why so many courses now take assignments into account for their final grade.

eythian 1y ago
In my undergrad, a few decades ago, it was typically the case that assignments and exams both were a part of your final score. Often it was something like 40% exam/60% assignments, but this could change. However what you mention about different people being better in different circumstances reminds of what our maths courses typically did, it was called "plussage" IIRC. Basically, the scores were calculated, and you got the best score from a 40% exam/60% assignment weighting or a 60%/40% (or something, the exact values are lost to time.) So if you were bad at exams but had done the work through the semester, you got a boost. Or if you were bad at deadlines but had still studied, you weren't (too) penalised.

i_am_proteus 1y ago

I give university courses in United States. Many of us have certainly down-weighted homework substantially. However, when some colleagues tried homework as 0% for introductory courses, most students omitted the homework, then failed the exams. Modern students seem to require explicit incentive to work, otherwise the usual: scrolling upon flat screen devices, hedonism, and so forth. In this case, who has failed: the student, or the professor?

adornKey 1y ago
In my experience (about 2 decades ago) in a group of 20-30 students only 2 or 3 are able and willing to do homework. Most students just find someone else and copy from them. The real learning happens when preparing for a big exam. And to pass an exam students have to prepare for the exam. Homework will only help there if it is similar to the exam. One time I had to evaluate a written exam where the professor had set up a trap. There was a question that looked like a standard question from homework, but if you used the standard-techniques from the course your calculations didn't work - it was a nasty special case. Most people that started with that question just burned 30 minutes without getting anywhere... a lot of students failed, but at least they learned something about life... And Oral exams are different. Giving a quick well prepared answer and being able to solve difficult tasks over a few days are completely different skills. Students there prepare for the professor. There are transcripts of previous oral exams. And professors change over the years - the final tough question of an excellent student will a few years later become a starting question. People that didn't know that game and didn't have access to any transcripts were in serious trouble... None of the Homework would have helped in the oral exam.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  "In my experience (about 2 decades ago) in a group of 20-30 students only 2 or 3 are able and willing to do homework. Most students just find someone else and copy from them. The real learning happens when preparing for a big exam. And to pass an exam students have to prepare for the exam. Homework will only help there if it is similar to the exam." That's not learning really. I can confidently say that because I was the one who unfortunately regressed to this during the uni, and the same story with my peers. One simply can't prepare to the multiple exams sufficiently in a few weeks time (or less). So the only path left is hysterical rote memorization of as much material as possible to squeeze in at a passing grade, and then immediately forget all of the materials in a few months time. Burst of "learning" twice a year for a short time doesn't translate into real learning. And that's for some simple courses during first few years. Specialist courses later in the program sometimes are impossible to rush "learn". When I tried to pull this off for Probability Theory course, I've failed spectacularly to get even lowest passing mark at first try. And others failed the same way.

PontifexMinimus 1y ago

This is a very sensible proposal, however it falls flat when considering that many students who have paid for a university "education" feel entitled to a degree at the end of it, regardless of how much effort they've put in and whether they have learned enough skills to justify one.

thfuran 1y ago
I don’t see the issue with those people not getting what they want.
- PontifexMinimus 1y ago
  Nor do I, but the university administration might see things differently to us.

II2II 1y ago

A couple of points here: - People need to learn how to write. The quality of student writing was one of the biggest criticisms of students when I was in university, and that was 30 years ago. Writing will only improve with practice and someone to evaluate it. Very few people will be able to learn how to write properly by reading about it, and even fewer people will even realize that you can learn how to write by reading the work of other people (which is important for learning about style in a particular field). For most students, even well meaning ones, no grade means no work done. - A certain segment of the student population will find ways to cheat anyhow. All you have done is raised the bar so that, hopefully, fewer people will cheat. Quite frankly, I don't know how helpful that is if the "top" of the class moves on since the top of the class tends to be defined by their GPA. - Test anxiety is a real thing. Different people go to school for different reasons, not all of which lead to high pressure careers. Do we really want to limit who can effectively access an education because of that? There is no easy solution to this problem. Likely the best solution would be to remove traditional assignments and exams from the loop altogether and having students work directly with their instructors. Yet this has it's own set of problems (it assumes both parties are honest, it is difficult to ensure consistency in the delivery of curriculum, etc.).

Yizahi 1y ago

This is an example of a very limited social darwinism. Basically the idea is to remove a lot of enforcement and rules in some activity, or maybe even all, and then "free market" will regulate itself, with "deserving" students managing to manage themselves, and "undeserving" ones lets behind. But the point of the university is not only teach English grammar and math operations, but also to work in teams, manage yourself, etc. The social stuff. And I suspect a significant number of students benefit from it. And I also suspect that by doing this at scale, the whole society benefits on average. Removing all control and only checking the knowledge during the exam would lead to a lot of students never catching up. It is likely that it will also lead to the top students being more and more lax and eventually also falling behind. The whole idea hinges on the base motivation - why do we need primary/secondary etc. education at all? To produce a dozen elite self motivated geniuses per year per country? Then your proposal would work perfectly. Or maybe motivation is different?..

rtkwe 1y ago

I hated all my proctored essays for the simple reason there's no ability to research things so it feels like the only arguments you can present are rhetorical or using made up statistics.

avgDev 1y ago

Due to my ADHD, I would try to learn 12-72 hours before the exams. I would fail quickly, hopefully someone could help me recognize why.