4 ms·

> Ask an examiner from 20 years ago the risk of allowing people to take exams in their own home. They would have said 'cheating', even with no concept of AI. A

by Aurornis 11mo ago

> Ask an examiner from 20 years ago the risk of allowing people to take exams in their own home. They would have said 'cheating', even with no concept of AI. AI has taken it to the next level. Previously, with many exams you would still have to know how to identify the concepts and related keywords in a word problem to even know what words to look for in the index of the books on hand before you could get to the right page to start cheating. Some of the certification exams I had to take back in the day even came with their own little reference manual that everyone got and was free to use to look up concepts and equations like you would in the real world. The book wasn’t helpful if you didn’t know how to recognize the way to solve the problem and look it up, though. AI changes that. Now you don’t need to know anything at all. You don’t even need to parse the question or even speak the same language. Copy the problem into ChatGPT with a prompt attached. Copy the answer into the solution box. Anecdotally, the rise of ChatGPT has also normalized the concept of cheating among students. The common thinking is that everyone is using ChatGPT, therefore you’ll be left behind if you don’t cheat.

riffraff 11mo ago
Or you could just have someone who could pass the exam in the same room as you. LLMs make this way easier but you can pay someone who gives private lessons in any subject and they can easily take an exam for you.
- cauch 11mo ago
  It is indeed the same. But in practice, having another human cheating for you was often unpractical: people don't usually like helping cheater, and simply trying to find an accomplice may get you in trouble. Because of that, it is relatively inefficient and therefore not a real problem and not a real impact on the final quality of the evaluation. LLM is indeed just the same, except that finding an accomplice is now easy and without risk.
  - skeptic_ai 11mo ago
    So before just the rich and connected could cheat, now everyone can cheat and is bad. Funny no?
    - jamespo 11mo ago
      No, because allowing remote online exams is a relatively new thing
    - paganel 11mo ago
      The rich and connected adjacent to accounting and willing to cheat would have most probably already worked somewhere else money-related and making an order of magnitude more money.
    - cauch 11mo ago
      "Everyone can cheat" is not making the poor equal to the rich, not at all. The rich gets 2 things: they can pay for stuffs and they can get away for stuffs just because they are rich. The fact that no one is paying does not mean that magically the poor can get away for stuffs. The things they can get away with includes, for example, the fact that they don't get fired when they don't know their job. The poor still gets fired, the fact that they can now cheat more easily just mean they are shooting themselves in the foot.
prox 11mo ago
The common thinking of often a mental pattern of that intersects somewhere between laziness and comfort. Is this the sort of thinking of “everyone needs to be able to do calculus in their heads with calculators around” or “you still need to write in the age of computers/printers” or something different?
- SecretDreams 11mo ago
  > Is this the sort of thinking of “everyone needs to be able to do calculus in their heads with calculators around” or “you still need to write in the age of computers/printers” or something different? I can't tell - are you suggesting these aren't good practices/traits to be learning when people are still in the "fundamentals of education/learning" stages of their lives? I did all my basic differential and integral calculus studying by mind only. I don't do it that way in my career day to day now - nor could I without some serious practice. But the efforts I took in learning this way in undergrad made me a much stronger student and made me much more comfortable leveraging calculus in more application driven fields of study.
  - prox 11mo ago
    Well yeah my suggestion is do you need to get the skills when the skills can be do for you? As a lot of popular thought goes as per the parent comment.
- tekla 11mo ago
  I have never been in a calculus class where a calculator would be anything other than a paperweight
  - cherryteastain 11mo ago
    There are calculators with CAS programs that can symbolically differentiate and integrate expressions or even solve certain classes of ODEs/PDEs
    - why-o-why 11mo ago
londons_explore 11mo ago
> The common thinking is that everyone is using ChatGPT, therefore you’ll be left behind if you don’t cheat. So true. I am aware of classes where everyone who didn't use AI cheated. The simple reality is that if AI makes better answers than a student, and exam scores are normalized, then students who don't use it will fail as soon as a decent proportion of students do use it.
- dns_snek 11mo ago
  > and exam scores are normalized This never should've been done to begin with. Education isn't supposed to be a competition.
  - corndoge 11mo ago
    I think the intent is to calibrate for instruction quality
    - cherryteastain 11mo ago
      When I was grading labs as a TA, the intent was communicated to me rather as "per university teaching guidelines we mustn't have too many students get the top grade but we also mustn't have too many students fail"
      - throw-the-towel 11mo ago
        Reminds me of "stack ranking" in performance reviews.
        kelseyfrog 11mo ago
        The purpose of normalized grades is to habituate future workers to this so that by the time they find it in the real world they don't resist. It's part of reproducing the labor-captial relationship.
michaelt 11mo ago
> AI has taken it to the next level. Previously, with many exams you would still have to know how to identify the concepts and related keywords in a word problem to even know what words to look for in the index of the books on hand before you could get to the right page to start cheating. Online exam cheating was easier than that. 20 years ago, for online quizzes cheaters given would simply get the three guys in their frat who took the class last year to sit nearby and act as human ChatGPT. The solution was simple - limit easy-to-cheat means of assessment like online quizzes to 10% of the final grade, with 90% of the grade dictated by in-person exams and equally hard to cheat options.
- Gibbon1 11mo ago
  My mom always made a couple different exams to hand out so you couldn't just copy answers. A lot of my professors had a rule if you aced the final you got an A in the class. I think that was also done to not reward cheating. Having to take the bar is probably another one like that. Cheat all you want in law school if you can't pass the bar too bad.
hi_hi 11mo ago
> AI changes that. Now you don’t need to know anything at all. This is democratisation. Is the cheating the problem, or is the system the problem? If it's so easy to cheat that a person with no previous knowledge or experience can appear to be very knowledgable and/or experienced by typing a few words into a computer, I would probably suggest the system, and all the gatekeeping and profit extraction that has gone into that system over the years, is the problem.

riffraff 11mo ago

Or you could just have someone who could pass the exam in the same room as you. LLMs make this way easier but you can pay someone who gives private lessons in any subject and they can easily take an exam for you.

cauch 11mo ago
It is indeed the same. But in practice, having another human cheating for you was often unpractical: people don't usually like helping cheater, and simply trying to find an accomplice may get you in trouble. Because of that, it is relatively inefficient and therefore not a real problem and not a real impact on the final quality of the evaluation. LLM is indeed just the same, except that finding an accomplice is now easy and without risk.
- skeptic_ai 11mo ago
  So before just the rich and connected could cheat, now everyone can cheat and is bad. Funny no?
  - jamespo 11mo ago
    No, because allowing remote online exams is a relatively new thing
  - paganel 11mo ago
    The rich and connected adjacent to accounting and willing to cheat would have most probably already worked somewhere else money-related and making an order of magnitude more money.
  - cauch 11mo ago
    "Everyone can cheat" is not making the poor equal to the rich, not at all. The rich gets 2 things: they can pay for stuffs and they can get away for stuffs just because they are rich. The fact that no one is paying does not mean that magically the poor can get away for stuffs. The things they can get away with includes, for example, the fact that they don't get fired when they don't know their job. The poor still gets fired, the fact that they can now cheat more easily just mean they are shooting themselves in the foot.

prox 11mo ago

The common thinking of often a mental pattern of that intersects somewhere between laziness and comfort. Is this the sort of thinking of “everyone needs to be able to do calculus in their heads with calculators around” or “you still need to write in the age of computers/printers” or something different?

SecretDreams 11mo ago
> Is this the sort of thinking of “everyone needs to be able to do calculus in their heads with calculators around” or “you still need to write in the age of computers/printers” or something different? I can't tell - are you suggesting these aren't good practices/traits to be learning when people are still in the "fundamentals of education/learning" stages of their lives? I did all my basic differential and integral calculus studying by mind only. I don't do it that way in my career day to day now - nor could I without some serious practice. But the efforts I took in learning this way in undergrad made me a much stronger student and made me much more comfortable leveraging calculus in more application driven fields of study.
- prox 11mo ago
  Well yeah my suggestion is do you need to get the skills when the skills can be do for you? As a lot of popular thought goes as per the parent comment.
tekla 11mo ago
I have never been in a calculus class where a calculator would be anything other than a paperweight
- cherryteastain 11mo ago
  There are calculators with CAS programs that can symbolically differentiate and integrate expressions or even solve certain classes of ODEs/PDEs
  - why-o-why 11mo ago

londons_explore 11mo ago

> The common thinking is that everyone is using ChatGPT, therefore you’ll be left behind if you don’t cheat. So true. I am aware of classes where everyone who didn't use AI cheated. The simple reality is that if AI makes better answers than a student, and exam scores are normalized, then students who don't use it will fail as soon as a decent proportion of students do use it.

dns_snek 11mo ago
> and exam scores are normalized This never should've been done to begin with. Education isn't supposed to be a competition.
- corndoge 11mo ago
  I think the intent is to calibrate for instruction quality
  - cherryteastain 11mo ago
    When I was grading labs as a TA, the intent was communicated to me rather as "per university teaching guidelines we mustn't have too many students get the top grade but we also mustn't have too many students fail"
    - throw-the-towel 11mo ago
      Reminds me of "stack ranking" in performance reviews.
      - kelseyfrog 11mo ago
        The purpose of normalized grades is to habituate future workers to this so that by the time they find it in the real world they don't resist. It's part of reproducing the labor-captial relationship.

michaelt 11mo ago

> AI has taken it to the next level. Previously, with many exams you would still have to know how to identify the concepts and related keywords in a word problem to even know what words to look for in the index of the books on hand before you could get to the right page to start cheating. Online exam cheating was easier than that. 20 years ago, for online quizzes cheaters given would simply get the three guys in their frat who took the class last year to sit nearby and act as human ChatGPT. The solution was simple - limit easy-to-cheat means of assessment like online quizzes to 10% of the final grade, with 90% of the grade dictated by in-person exams and equally hard to cheat options.

Gibbon1 11mo ago
My mom always made a couple different exams to hand out so you couldn't just copy answers. A lot of my professors had a rule if you aced the final you got an A in the class. I think that was also done to not reward cheating. Having to take the bar is probably another one like that. Cheat all you want in law school if you can't pass the bar too bad.

hi_hi 11mo ago

> AI changes that. Now you don’t need to know anything at all. This is democratisation. Is the cheating the problem, or is the system the problem? If it's so easy to cheat that a person with no previous knowledge or experience can appear to be very knowledgable and/or experienced by typing a few words into a computer, I would probably suggest the system, and all the gatekeeping and profit extraction that has gone into that system over the years, is the problem.