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When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in c

When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.

nsyne 6mo ago
I personally dislike placing a heavy emphasis on exams. Assignments/projects have been consistently the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of the courses I've taken so far in university. It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI.
- gpm 6mo ago
  Also way more susceptible to cheating in traditional non-AI ways. And your mark ends up depending a lot on how much time you have to invest independent of how good you are at the course material. Assignments and projects are great for learning, but suck for evaluation.
  - lokar 6mo ago
    I really appreciated classes where there was rapidly demising returns to time spent :) Another example, lit classes where the grade is based on time limited, open book exams, hand written in "blue books" Read the book, pay attention in class, spend 90 min writing an essay, and you are done.
  - jason_zig 6mo ago
    is evaluation that important? ultimately if you can't do the work you're only cheating yourself in the long run...
    - jmye 6mo ago
      Yes. I care that the work I've done and what I've learned is actually good and correct. Vibes-based learning/anything is valueless.
    - musicale 6mo ago
      That is the traditional view, the view of those who want to improve their own knowledge and abilities, and presumably the view of those who would like to consider the degree to be a meaningful credential. However I suspect that there are many who 1) are more concerned about the short term outcome, 2) consider the degree/diploma to be little more than a meal ticket or arbitrary gatekeeping without any connection to learning, 3) view the work as a pointless barrier to being handed said diploma, and/or 4) don't see the value of human learning in a world where jobs are done by AI and AI systems routinely outperform humans on complex tasks.
      - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
        I'm curious about the objective competence of recent graduates compared to previous cohorts, not just in tech but in basic literacy and numeracy. A lot of Gen Z are ferociously anti-AI, but for tribal and emotional reasons, not because of a nuanced understanding - which is ironic, because the nuanced reasons for being wary of AI are much stronger than the usual talking points about "stealing art". Being tribal and emotional is going to make Gen Z easier to replace, because nuanced strategic insight is less common and more useful.
    - II2II 6mo ago
      Part of the purpose for evaluation is to provide feedback. I'm not going to claim that the form of feedback is great, but it does offer motivation to improve. The other thing that feedback feeds into is credentials. I realize that some people are dismissive of this aspect of the degree, but it is important to pursue further studies or secure a job. While you can argue that these people are only cheating themselves, and some of them are cheating themselves, a great many will continue to cheat as they advance in academia or the workforce. In other words, they are cheating others out of opportunities.
    - 6mo ago
- syntaxing 6mo ago
  I went to college as a MechE so unsure if compsci was different. But overall, all the “fun” projects were labs. We have three semesters of hell and all 3 semesters had 2-3 labs, and we write 20 pages or so for EACH lab a week (usually a team of 2-3).
- fma 6mo ago
  Then I suppose we can go back to having computer labs that can only access white listed domains and other study materials. Students code there to ensure no cheating.
  - zdragnar 6mo ago
    The labs I was in weren't connected to the Internet at all, only a local intranet. Though, they were all running pre-oracle solaris if memory serves, so I'm probably dating myself a bit.
  - nradov 6mo ago
    Will the students have to go through security screening for personal devices?
- kcexn 6mo ago
  The problem with exams is that everyone has a bad experience with a poorly written one. Well-written exams will have questions that test students at different levels of understanding across the whole curriculum. So a student who only understands the basics should be able to answer most of the easy questions and students who have a deeper understanding can answer the harder ones. Well-written exams should feel pretty fair and leave students feeling like the result they got is proportional to the effort they put into studying the material (or at least how well they personally felt they understood the material).
  - nullsanity 6mo ago
    You're forgetting the a large percentage of the student body simply does not care to judge the material fairly. Any difficult exam where they receive a low grade is perceived as unfair and complained about online. Professors that test fairly are reviewed harshly online. Universities that prioritize education over graduation receive poor reviews. Top universities specifically coddle and push their students making it nearly impossible to fail.
  - CSSer 6mo ago
    Exams almost filtered me out of this industry before I even got started. I later went on to be a lead developer! I went to a rural high school with a poor math curriculum. I understood the concepts, but I was slow. When I got to undergrad, my first calc professor gave us a 60 question test with 50 minutes of allotted time. He told us if we couldn't do the problems fast enough we weren't cut out for the work and it would be better if we quit now. I've never felt more inadequate in my life. It's one of my only Ws.
    - hawaiianbrah 6mo ago
      What does W mean? Withdraw?
      - CSSer 6mo ago
        Yes. You can do it a set number of times, opting to either retake the course for a better grade or simply not take it again. Either way it shows on your transcript.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI. They were more prone to cheating before AI, too. Cheating has always existed at some level, but from talking to my couple of friends who teach undergrad level courses the attitudes of students toward cheating have been changing even before AI was everywhere. They would complain about cohorts coming through where cheating was obvious and rampant, combined with administrations who started going soft on cheating because they didn’t want to lose (paying) students. AI has taken it further, with students justifying it not as cheating but as using tools at their disposal. I was talking to my friend about this last week and he was frustrated that several of his students had submitted papers that had all the signs of ChatGPT output, so he asked them simple questions about their papers. Most of them “couldn’t remember” what they wrote about. It’s strange to me because when I went to college getting caught cheating was a big problem that resulted in students getting put on probationary watch and being legitimately scared of the consequences. Now at many schools cheating is routine and students push the boundaries of what they can get their classes to accept because they have no fear of any punishment. YMMV depending on the institution
  - jimbokun 6mo ago
    I wonder if the companies hiring students from those universities have come to understand there’s no guarantee they learned any of the material.
    - nradov 6mo ago
      The dirty secret in HR is that performance in most regular jobs doesn't really depend on having learned anything in college. Companies only require a college degree to filter the candidate pool down to a manageable level. Line managers know they'll have to train entry level hires on almost everything. IBM used to hire software developers based on aptitude test scores regardless of formal education, then put them through an extensive internal training program. It worked fine.
      - LtWorf 6mo ago
        Most companies expect people to be productive sooner rather than later, and not every job is completely trivial.
- Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
  I also think assignments and projects work best, but only for the percentage of students that are self-motivated, curious, interested, etc. Unfortunately a lot aren't, they feel like they have to be there or these courses are the only path for them to get a good job. And unfortunately they end up in the workforce, too. You'll often see teams with one good developer and a lot of hangers-on.
ghighi7878 6mo ago
Writing programs by hand is something I had to do too. Compete waste of time
BobbyTables2 6mo ago
Today just teachers walking around during an exam instead of browsing on their phone would do wonders…
- Izkata 6mo ago
  Half related: reminds me of my physics teacher's test of how observant we were. The extra credit question on the test was "what is your teacher's favorite color?", which she had so far given no indication of. But while watching us she was walking all over the room in every possible direction, because the answer was on a piece of paper taped to her back.
  - yurishimo 6mo ago
    Sounds like something Restivo would do.
  - rz2k 6mo ago
    My dad had a class in medical school where the professor dipped his finger in a beaker, talked about mechanisms for sugar in diabetic patients’ urine, and then proceeded to stick his finger in his mouth. He had all of the students do the same, who noted that the sugar was apparent. He concluded the class by talking about the importance of observing patients, and pointed out that he had tasted a different finger than the one he had put in the beaker.
- lupire 6mo ago
  My AI assistant is configured to monitor the face-side camera feed and switch windows when someone standing enters the frame.
SamHenryCliff 6mo ago
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stingraycharles 6mo ago
Yeah exactly, I remember having to write Java and C++ by hand in college in the early 2000s. It was also a good test how well you knew the syntax.
- nradov 6mo ago
  Syntax seems like a stupid thing to test in university level courses. That's trade school stuff. And I don't mean that as a criticism of trade schools, they just have a different focus.
  - tehjoker 6mo ago
    Knowledge is built on foundations. Knowing syntax in one language is necessary to be able to do anything practical, which interacts with theory. You build valuable schema of the world by iterative theory and practice.
    - nradov 6mo ago
      Nah. Syntax is trivial and irrelevant for teaching CS theory.
      - robryan 6mo ago
        Would you say the same thing for teaching math or music?
      - icelancer 6mo ago
        Lambda calculus?!
      - eudamoniac 6mo ago
        Do you think spelling is trivial and irrelevant in a foreign language class?
        bawolff 6mo ago
        That's a poor comparison given they said CS theory. I could easily imagine a CS theory course that doesn't involve any programming language at all.
zoom6628 6mo ago
When I did tertiary studies in programming there wasn't AI but we did our programming exams in pencil and paper. The "beneficial" prep we had and I had since high school was using punch cards. And 24h turnaround time for compiles. That really makes you think. And you learn how to desk check even thousand line programs. Intense focus, structuring for readability (to catch typos) and simplicity (catch logic errors) helped enormously. Was not unusual to change hundred lines of code and submit knowing that it wouldn't compile but will throw up the other errors I couldn't find. Our exams would give us 4-6 attempts for clean compile AND correct output. The only space where I experience same challenge now (40+ yrs later) is embedded code. Desktops and web stuff have LSPs and dynamic reloads and interpreted code (not a thing for me when learning) with instant feedback. Lots of skills from those old days that have been lost/ignored in the pretence of productivity.
- malux85 6mo ago
  Yeah i really valued learning to code when I didn't have the internet available, if taught me patience and deep thinking, problem decomposition and organic (brain) execution
  - synack 6mo ago
    I learned HTML/CSS from a book on a computer with no internet access. Seemed reasonable at the time but in hindsight was absolutely ridiculous.
    - brunoarueira 6mo ago
      Similar to me, I learnt some html tags through a book which was sold at newsstand, once I was at my cousin's house using her computer without internet access, then I wrote a simple html page with the Win 95 cloud wallpaper as background image. My cousin was terrified how I did that!
  - phatfish 6mo ago
    That is great for core principles. But languages and development environments have since assumed everyone has access to then internet. Meaning more "stuff" is the solution to problems (massive standard libraries or community created ones) rather that elegent language solutions. The internet enabled all the complexity we have today. LLMs will have a similar effect, but instead of engineers actually having to understand the system (even in it's complexity) they will just be querying the oracle to build things or solve problems. When the oracle can't help (or maybe refuses to) is when it gets interesting.
cyberax 6mo ago
Bonus point: even if you use AI to prepare the submission, copying it down by hand will at least force you to _read_ it.
- Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
  Some people spend ages writing a cheat sheet with the intent of cheating on the test but realise that because they wrote it down and / or tried to summarise it they actually learned the materials.
  - cyberax 6mo ago
    Oh yeah. That was me during my philosophy class. My cheat sheet had an index before I was finished.
phatskat 6mo ago
My networking final in high school was probably my favorite test taking experience - there was a small written portion on eg subnets, but the bulk of our grade was setting up a physical network, testing it, and leaving the room. Our teacher sabotaged three parts of our network - could be hardware, router misconfiguration, etc. when we came in we had iirc 20-ish minutes to diagnose and fix it. The best was when she barely unscrewed one of this big DIN connectors so at quick glance it looked fine, but wasn’t fully connected.
- onionisafruit 6mo ago
  That does sound like fun, but it would probably be even more fun. to be the instructor giving this test.
- thunfischtoast 6mo ago
  > The best was when she barely unscrewed one of this big DIN connectors so at quick glance it looked fine, but wasn’t fully connected. That's evil haha. It's the case where you unplug and plug again everything, changing seemingly nothing, but then it works
- altmanaltman 6mo ago
  Sounds more like a gameshow than education, like IT version of Hogwarts
  - Y-bar 6mo ago
    I agree. But it hinges a lot of how it is graded. If it is mostly a ”show your work”/”show your reasoning” kind of grading where your width and depth of attempts are more important than success then it seems OK.
  - bitwize 6mo ago
    "For Miss Granger's ingenuity and resourcefulness, finding and patching a zero-day vulnerability in the router firmware... I award fifty points to Gryffindor."
  - ryandrake 6mo ago
alanmercer 6mo ago
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Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
Yeah none of the problems with AI in education are new; some schools (or news articles) are just panicking because they gave their students laptops (and/or made them a mandatory part) and now the genie is out of the bottle. But there were already heaps of problems with tech in education before AI. My CS projects were often pretty free-form so in theory I could've just used AI - today, anyway. But a big part of the grade was a face to face interview where you actually had to talk about the code you wrote. Anyone lifting along with other people who didn't actually do any work would fall through then.
jillesvangurp 6mo ago
That was common when I studied computer science in the nineties as well. Hand written exams mostly. Writing papers is a useful skill to have. And many students aren't very good at that. I taught some classes during my Ph. D. and supervised some students with their master thesis and PhD thesis work. Many students get their degrees without that really getting addressed. At least Computer science degrees in the Netherlands just spend very little time on writing skills. You get students with high school levels of English and Dutch and that's it. I learned to write properly only when I started my Ph. D. My supervisor made me do it right before he allowed me to submit papers for publication. AI might actually be good for education long term. It will result in a more personalized approach, which I think is good. There are plenty of ways to test students that are more engaging and interesting for both teachers and students than some of the old ways. You can't fake knowledge when you do a verbal test. Or test people with a good old written exam. And of course for teachers, you can automate a lot of the verification work. This can be a lot of work.
Al-Khwarizmi 6mo ago
In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person. Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like that in the rest of the EU at all, and it was perfectly possible to comply with Bologna without doing them) and partly to copy the US/UK ways. And one of the pillars of that reform was continuous assessment, and evaluating coursework. As a consequence of this, first of all working class students were royally screwed. Because suddenly it wasn't OK to just organize yourself to prepare the exam, you had to attend lots of sessions to earn points, which put students who work at a disadvantage. And second, passing by cheating became possible, even before LLMs. People tend to forget that before everyone got access to ChatGPT, some people had access to experts (family members, or even paying someone to do the work). Now that this kind of cheating has been democratized and everyone can do it instead of just the most privileged with access to experts or money to pay them, people act all outraged. Although pretty much nothing is being done, except for using snake oil detectors, or sometimes increasing difficulty of assignments to make them LLM-proof (with which you screw the students who actually want to learn without LLMs). They spent years indoctrinating us (professors) in training courses on how the old exam-based ways were wrong (the "Napoleonic" model, they called it... none of them seems to entertain the thought that maybe if it had been working essentially unchanged since Napoleon it wasn't that bad, and you need solid reasons to change it beyond "this is old so let's change") and the new ways were the bee's knees. Like in the Milgram experiment, it's difficult for people to back down and acknowledge that they have been wrong, even when the solution is obvious.
- cataphract 6mo ago
  I think the only defense of the new model is that it forces students to learn throughout the semester, rather than just before the exam. Which is easier and more effectively engages long term memory (like doing more rounds of spaced repetition). I definitely could tell the difference, though most of the time I just studied full 4-7 days before the exam.
wouldbecouldbe 6mo ago
I remember those 6 page essays i wrote by hand at high school. Poor teachers trying to decipher my writing
andai 6mo ago
An old friend told me she'd hand in her assignments on paper, and would receive the computers output the following week. Apparently you learn to double check your work!
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
My local college used to have a test center you would physically go into. Now they no longer let teachers send their students there (idk if its just for programming or what) for whatever reason. I know they've wanted to cut down on wasted paper for years. If my college is doing this, I cannot imagine how many others are also impeding on their entire goal: education.
burnto 6mo ago
I’m guessing we’re similar vintage. My CS classes were like this as well. The only exception is that when I got into grad level classes we did have some big programming projects. But most of that programming happened on sparc stations, and it was actually just easier and more productive to sit at the machine in person with its nice big (at the time) display with all the other folks doing programming projects. Those machines had the standard dev toolchains provisioned that weren’t easy (at the time) to do on a dorm room Mac or windows computer. I really think a lot of the ways we can reduce reliance on AI for thinking is to just set up systems where it’s not an inviting or rewarding option.
- asimpletune 6mo ago
  Same. Coding by hand was really, really hard at first, I remember. Then one day it just clicked and it was like I could think so clearly in my head, without making mistakes, and write code that would have compiled by hand during an exam. We would just practice and work for it. I don't want to be polemic, but I really miss those days.
  - burnto 6mo ago
    Yeah writing out code by hand made me slow down and think more. One thing I recall is that the grading policy made it very clear that minor syntax issues were inconsequential in handwritten answers. And more advanced classes only wanted pseudocode. Which are exactly the right priorities.
bitwize 6mo ago
When I was in university we had the "Honor System"—no proctors, but you had to sign a statement on every exam and assignment that you did not cheat. And if you did cheat, one of your fellow students could report you to the Honor Board. Basically using the prisoners' dilemma to enforce honesty. And the Honor Board were always threatening to bring proctors back if cheating continued. But yeah, everything was hand-written. On sheets of paper with pencil. I even had to write x86 assembly out by hand for my CPU architecture class. Of course, laptops were available back then but not cellphones and certainly not LLMs, so cheating by electronic means probably presents a stickier wicket now than it did back then.
- Eisenstein 6mo ago
  The prisoner's dilemma requires that both people are facing the same consequences and are promised leniency if they give up the other person. I'm struggling to figure out how this conforms to a person giving up a cheater to the honor board. What am I missing?
j45 6mo ago
Profs could now scan / ocr / grade it with AI though. I'm sure they had some kind of submit your code as assignment and using testing as a way to grade the assignments.
eikenberry 6mo ago
You mean an AI proof grading system. Grades have very little to do with actual learning and are there solely for signalling. It would be better if Universities shifted their focus to learning and eliminated grades/exams all together. They should seek to stop trying to be the gatekeepers for white collar work and instead focus on learning and research.
pokstad 6mo ago
Not only that, the tabletification of education has actually been shown (via standardized testing) to make our kids dumber. This is the first time a new generation has scored worse than their parents. Technology has its place, we need to pick and choose where.
amarant 6mo ago
>even programming exams were hand written Which strikes me as a terrible way to teach and test programming skills. If you're teaching to program without so much as syntax highlighting, you're not preparing your students for anything that even remotely resembles the industry they aspire to work in. Honestly, these days universities should probably find a way to incorporate AI into their teaching, rather than fight it. Anything else is betting that AI will not stick around, which strikes me as a hopelessly naïve bet. Especially for software development. I don't pretend to have all the answers, I don't know how to teach systems thinking in a appropriate way either. But I'm pretty sure typewriters isn't it, unless your students are hoping to get hired by Ada Lovelace, it's just not going to be relevant.
- halJordan 6mo ago
  > remotely like the industry they'll work in Education isn't any churning out a cog fitted to a bigger gear. A college education should not be preparing you for intellij or familiarizing you with va code. It should be teaching foundational skills with the discipline. And I just don't understand how you look at the amazing things we've accomplished since ww2 and say "the education system that taught this fucking sucks"
  - amarant 6mo ago
    What I don't understand is how you can look at all the progress we've made since ww2 and decide we don't have to update our education to keep it relevant, and argue in favour of teaching tech that's been obsolete for 80 years. Students today aren't studying to repeat the progress made since the forties, that's been done by their grandparents, they're looking to drive the next 40 years of innovation, and if that involves typewriters I'll eat my hat
    - Balooga 6mo ago
      That way of teaching got us to the moon, created transistors, produced the internet, smartphones, quantum computers, the very AI that everyone is talking about, vaccines, sent probes into space, cured diseases, fed millions, jumbo jets, basically every single thing that society has come to depend on.
casey2 6mo ago
Seems like anybody could just study 6 hours a day for the last month before the final, last 2 weeks before the mid term and use AI for everything else.

nsyne 6mo ago

I personally dislike placing a heavy emphasis on exams. Assignments/projects have been consistently the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of the courses I've taken so far in university. It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI.

gpm 6mo ago
Also way more susceptible to cheating in traditional non-AI ways. And your mark ends up depending a lot on how much time you have to invest independent of how good you are at the course material. Assignments and projects are great for learning, but suck for evaluation.
- lokar 6mo ago
  I really appreciated classes where there was rapidly demising returns to time spent :) Another example, lit classes where the grade is based on time limited, open book exams, hand written in "blue books" Read the book, pay attention in class, spend 90 min writing an essay, and you are done.
- jason_zig 6mo ago
  is evaluation that important? ultimately if you can't do the work you're only cheating yourself in the long run...
  - jmye 6mo ago
    Yes. I care that the work I've done and what I've learned is actually good and correct. Vibes-based learning/anything is valueless.
  - musicale 6mo ago
    That is the traditional view, the view of those who want to improve their own knowledge and abilities, and presumably the view of those who would like to consider the degree to be a meaningful credential. However I suspect that there are many who 1) are more concerned about the short term outcome, 2) consider the degree/diploma to be little more than a meal ticket or arbitrary gatekeeping without any connection to learning, 3) view the work as a pointless barrier to being handed said diploma, and/or 4) don't see the value of human learning in a world where jobs are done by AI and AI systems routinely outperform humans on complex tasks.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
      I'm curious about the objective competence of recent graduates compared to previous cohorts, not just in tech but in basic literacy and numeracy. A lot of Gen Z are ferociously anti-AI, but for tribal and emotional reasons, not because of a nuanced understanding - which is ironic, because the nuanced reasons for being wary of AI are much stronger than the usual talking points about "stealing art". Being tribal and emotional is going to make Gen Z easier to replace, because nuanced strategic insight is less common and more useful.
  - II2II 6mo ago
    Part of the purpose for evaluation is to provide feedback. I'm not going to claim that the form of feedback is great, but it does offer motivation to improve. The other thing that feedback feeds into is credentials. I realize that some people are dismissive of this aspect of the degree, but it is important to pursue further studies or secure a job. While you can argue that these people are only cheating themselves, and some of them are cheating themselves, a great many will continue to cheat as they advance in academia or the workforce. In other words, they are cheating others out of opportunities.
  - 6mo ago
syntaxing 6mo ago
I went to college as a MechE so unsure if compsci was different. But overall, all the “fun” projects were labs. We have three semesters of hell and all 3 semesters had 2-3 labs, and we write 20 pages or so for EACH lab a week (usually a team of 2-3).
fma 6mo ago
Then I suppose we can go back to having computer labs that can only access white listed domains and other study materials. Students code there to ensure no cheating.
- zdragnar 6mo ago
  The labs I was in weren't connected to the Internet at all, only a local intranet. Though, they were all running pre-oracle solaris if memory serves, so I'm probably dating myself a bit.
- nradov 6mo ago
  Will the students have to go through security screening for personal devices?
kcexn 6mo ago
The problem with exams is that everyone has a bad experience with a poorly written one. Well-written exams will have questions that test students at different levels of understanding across the whole curriculum. So a student who only understands the basics should be able to answer most of the easy questions and students who have a deeper understanding can answer the harder ones. Well-written exams should feel pretty fair and leave students feeling like the result they got is proportional to the effort they put into studying the material (or at least how well they personally felt they understood the material).
- nullsanity 6mo ago
  You're forgetting the a large percentage of the student body simply does not care to judge the material fairly. Any difficult exam where they receive a low grade is perceived as unfair and complained about online. Professors that test fairly are reviewed harshly online. Universities that prioritize education over graduation receive poor reviews. Top universities specifically coddle and push their students making it nearly impossible to fail.
- CSSer 6mo ago
  Exams almost filtered me out of this industry before I even got started. I later went on to be a lead developer! I went to a rural high school with a poor math curriculum. I understood the concepts, but I was slow. When I got to undergrad, my first calc professor gave us a 60 question test with 50 minutes of allotted time. He told us if we couldn't do the problems fast enough we weren't cut out for the work and it would be better if we quit now. I've never felt more inadequate in my life. It's one of my only Ws.
  - hawaiianbrah 6mo ago
    What does W mean? Withdraw?
    - CSSer 6mo ago
      Yes. You can do it a set number of times, opting to either retake the course for a better grade or simply not take it again. Either way it shows on your transcript.
Aurornis 6mo ago
> It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI. They were more prone to cheating before AI, too. Cheating has always existed at some level, but from talking to my couple of friends who teach undergrad level courses the attitudes of students toward cheating have been changing even before AI was everywhere. They would complain about cohorts coming through where cheating was obvious and rampant, combined with administrations who started going soft on cheating because they didn’t want to lose (paying) students. AI has taken it further, with students justifying it not as cheating but as using tools at their disposal. I was talking to my friend about this last week and he was frustrated that several of his students had submitted papers that had all the signs of ChatGPT output, so he asked them simple questions about their papers. Most of them “couldn’t remember” what they wrote about. It’s strange to me because when I went to college getting caught cheating was a big problem that resulted in students getting put on probationary watch and being legitimately scared of the consequences. Now at many schools cheating is routine and students push the boundaries of what they can get their classes to accept because they have no fear of any punishment. YMMV depending on the institution
- jimbokun 6mo ago
  I wonder if the companies hiring students from those universities have come to understand there’s no guarantee they learned any of the material.
  - nradov 6mo ago
    The dirty secret in HR is that performance in most regular jobs doesn't really depend on having learned anything in college. Companies only require a college degree to filter the candidate pool down to a manageable level. Line managers know they'll have to train entry level hires on almost everything. IBM used to hire software developers based on aptitude test scores regardless of formal education, then put them through an extensive internal training program. It worked fine.
    - LtWorf 6mo ago
      Most companies expect people to be productive sooner rather than later, and not every job is completely trivial.
Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
I also think assignments and projects work best, but only for the percentage of students that are self-motivated, curious, interested, etc. Unfortunately a lot aren't, they feel like they have to be there or these courses are the only path for them to get a good job. And unfortunately they end up in the workforce, too. You'll often see teams with one good developer and a lot of hangers-on.

ghighi7878 6mo ago

Writing programs by hand is something I had to do too. Compete waste of time

BobbyTables2 6mo ago

Today just teachers walking around during an exam instead of browsing on their phone would do wonders…

Izkata 6mo ago
Half related: reminds me of my physics teacher's test of how observant we were. The extra credit question on the test was "what is your teacher's favorite color?", which she had so far given no indication of. But while watching us she was walking all over the room in every possible direction, because the answer was on a piece of paper taped to her back.
- yurishimo 6mo ago
  Sounds like something Restivo would do.
- rz2k 6mo ago
  My dad had a class in medical school where the professor dipped his finger in a beaker, talked about mechanisms for sugar in diabetic patients’ urine, and then proceeded to stick his finger in his mouth. He had all of the students do the same, who noted that the sugar was apparent. He concluded the class by talking about the importance of observing patients, and pointed out that he had tasted a different finger than the one he had put in the beaker.
lupire 6mo ago
My AI assistant is configured to monitor the face-side camera feed and switch windows when someone standing enters the frame.

SamHenryCliff 6mo ago

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stingraycharles 6mo ago

Yeah exactly, I remember having to write Java and C++ by hand in college in the early 2000s. It was also a good test how well you knew the syntax.

nradov 6mo ago
Syntax seems like a stupid thing to test in university level courses. That's trade school stuff. And I don't mean that as a criticism of trade schools, they just have a different focus.
- tehjoker 6mo ago
  Knowledge is built on foundations. Knowing syntax in one language is necessary to be able to do anything practical, which interacts with theory. You build valuable schema of the world by iterative theory and practice.
  - nradov 6mo ago
    Nah. Syntax is trivial and irrelevant for teaching CS theory.
    - robryan 6mo ago
      Would you say the same thing for teaching math or music?
    - icelancer 6mo ago
      Lambda calculus?!
    - eudamoniac 6mo ago
      Do you think spelling is trivial and irrelevant in a foreign language class?
      - bawolff 6mo ago
        That's a poor comparison given they said CS theory. I could easily imagine a CS theory course that doesn't involve any programming language at all.

zoom6628 6mo ago

When I did tertiary studies in programming there wasn't AI but we did our programming exams in pencil and paper. The "beneficial" prep we had and I had since high school was using punch cards. And 24h turnaround time for compiles. That really makes you think. And you learn how to desk check even thousand line programs. Intense focus, structuring for readability (to catch typos) and simplicity (catch logic errors) helped enormously. Was not unusual to change hundred lines of code and submit knowing that it wouldn't compile but will throw up the other errors I couldn't find. Our exams would give us 4-6 attempts for clean compile AND correct output. The only space where I experience same challenge now (40+ yrs later) is embedded code. Desktops and web stuff have LSPs and dynamic reloads and interpreted code (not a thing for me when learning) with instant feedback. Lots of skills from those old days that have been lost/ignored in the pretence of productivity.

malux85 6mo ago
Yeah i really valued learning to code when I didn't have the internet available, if taught me patience and deep thinking, problem decomposition and organic (brain) execution
- synack 6mo ago
  I learned HTML/CSS from a book on a computer with no internet access. Seemed reasonable at the time but in hindsight was absolutely ridiculous.
  - brunoarueira 6mo ago
    Similar to me, I learnt some html tags through a book which was sold at newsstand, once I was at my cousin's house using her computer without internet access, then I wrote a simple html page with the Win 95 cloud wallpaper as background image. My cousin was terrified how I did that!
- phatfish 6mo ago
  That is great for core principles. But languages and development environments have since assumed everyone has access to then internet. Meaning more "stuff" is the solution to problems (massive standard libraries or community created ones) rather that elegent language solutions. The internet enabled all the complexity we have today. LLMs will have a similar effect, but instead of engineers actually having to understand the system (even in it's complexity) they will just be querying the oracle to build things or solve problems. When the oracle can't help (or maybe refuses to) is when it gets interesting.

cyberax 6mo ago

Bonus point: even if you use AI to prepare the submission, copying it down by hand will at least force you to _read_ it.

Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
Some people spend ages writing a cheat sheet with the intent of cheating on the test but realise that because they wrote it down and / or tried to summarise it they actually learned the materials.
- cyberax 6mo ago
  Oh yeah. That was me during my philosophy class. My cheat sheet had an index before I was finished.

phatskat 6mo ago

My networking final in high school was probably my favorite test taking experience - there was a small written portion on eg subnets, but the bulk of our grade was setting up a physical network, testing it, and leaving the room. Our teacher sabotaged three parts of our network - could be hardware, router misconfiguration, etc. when we came in we had iirc 20-ish minutes to diagnose and fix it. The best was when she barely unscrewed one of this big DIN connectors so at quick glance it looked fine, but wasn’t fully connected.

onionisafruit 6mo ago
That does sound like fun, but it would probably be even more fun. to be the instructor giving this test.
thunfischtoast 6mo ago
> The best was when she barely unscrewed one of this big DIN connectors so at quick glance it looked fine, but wasn’t fully connected. That's evil haha. It's the case where you unplug and plug again everything, changing seemingly nothing, but then it works
altmanaltman 6mo ago
Sounds more like a gameshow than education, like IT version of Hogwarts
- Y-bar 6mo ago
  I agree. But it hinges a lot of how it is graded. If it is mostly a ”show your work”/”show your reasoning” kind of grading where your width and depth of attempts are more important than success then it seems OK.
- bitwize 6mo ago
  "For Miss Granger's ingenuity and resourcefulness, finding and patching a zero-day vulnerability in the router firmware... I award fifty points to Gryffindor."
- ryandrake 6mo ago

alanmercer 6mo ago

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Cthulhu_ 6mo ago

Yeah none of the problems with AI in education are new; some schools (or news articles) are just panicking because they gave their students laptops (and/or made them a mandatory part) and now the genie is out of the bottle. But there were already heaps of problems with tech in education before AI. My CS projects were often pretty free-form so in theory I could've just used AI - today, anyway. But a big part of the grade was a face to face interview where you actually had to talk about the code you wrote. Anyone lifting along with other people who didn't actually do any work would fall through then.

jillesvangurp 6mo ago

That was common when I studied computer science in the nineties as well. Hand written exams mostly. Writing papers is a useful skill to have. And many students aren't very good at that. I taught some classes during my Ph. D. and supervised some students with their master thesis and PhD thesis work. Many students get their degrees without that really getting addressed. At least Computer science degrees in the Netherlands just spend very little time on writing skills. You get students with high school levels of English and Dutch and that's it. I learned to write properly only when I started my Ph. D. My supervisor made me do it right before he allowed me to submit papers for publication. AI might actually be good for education long term. It will result in a more personalized approach, which I think is good. There are plenty of ways to test students that are more engaging and interesting for both teachers and students than some of the old ways. You can't fake knowledge when you do a verbal test. Or test people with a good old written exam. And of course for teachers, you can automate a lot of the verification work. This can be a lot of work.

Al-Khwarizmi 6mo ago

In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person. Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like that in the rest of the EU at all, and it was perfectly possible to comply with Bologna without doing them) and partly to copy the US/UK ways. And one of the pillars of that reform was continuous assessment, and evaluating coursework. As a consequence of this, first of all working class students were royally screwed. Because suddenly it wasn't OK to just organize yourself to prepare the exam, you had to attend lots of sessions to earn points, which put students who work at a disadvantage. And second, passing by cheating became possible, even before LLMs. People tend to forget that before everyone got access to ChatGPT, some people had access to experts (family members, or even paying someone to do the work). Now that this kind of cheating has been democratized and everyone can do it instead of just the most privileged with access to experts or money to pay them, people act all outraged. Although pretty much nothing is being done, except for using snake oil detectors, or sometimes increasing difficulty of assignments to make them LLM-proof (with which you screw the students who actually want to learn without LLMs). They spent years indoctrinating us (professors) in training courses on how the old exam-based ways were wrong (the "Napoleonic" model, they called it... none of them seems to entertain the thought that maybe if it had been working essentially unchanged since Napoleon it wasn't that bad, and you need solid reasons to change it beyond "this is old so let's change") and the new ways were the bee's knees. Like in the Milgram experiment, it's difficult for people to back down and acknowledge that they have been wrong, even when the solution is obvious.

cataphract 6mo ago
I think the only defense of the new model is that it forces students to learn throughout the semester, rather than just before the exam. Which is easier and more effectively engages long term memory (like doing more rounds of spaced repetition). I definitely could tell the difference, though most of the time I just studied full 4-7 days before the exam.

wouldbecouldbe 6mo ago

I remember those 6 page essays i wrote by hand at high school. Poor teachers trying to decipher my writing

andai 6mo ago

An old friend told me she'd hand in her assignments on paper, and would receive the computers output the following week. Apparently you learn to double check your work!

giancarlostoro 6mo ago

My local college used to have a test center you would physically go into. Now they no longer let teachers send their students there (idk if its just for programming or what) for whatever reason. I know they've wanted to cut down on wasted paper for years. If my college is doing this, I cannot imagine how many others are also impeding on their entire goal: education.

burnto 6mo ago

I’m guessing we’re similar vintage. My CS classes were like this as well. The only exception is that when I got into grad level classes we did have some big programming projects. But most of that programming happened on sparc stations, and it was actually just easier and more productive to sit at the machine in person with its nice big (at the time) display with all the other folks doing programming projects. Those machines had the standard dev toolchains provisioned that weren’t easy (at the time) to do on a dorm room Mac or windows computer. I really think a lot of the ways we can reduce reliance on AI for thinking is to just set up systems where it’s not an inviting or rewarding option.

asimpletune 6mo ago
Same. Coding by hand was really, really hard at first, I remember. Then one day it just clicked and it was like I could think so clearly in my head, without making mistakes, and write code that would have compiled by hand during an exam. We would just practice and work for it. I don't want to be polemic, but I really miss those days.
- burnto 6mo ago
  Yeah writing out code by hand made me slow down and think more. One thing I recall is that the grading policy made it very clear that minor syntax issues were inconsequential in handwritten answers. And more advanced classes only wanted pseudocode. Which are exactly the right priorities.

bitwize 6mo ago

When I was in university we had the "Honor System"—no proctors, but you had to sign a statement on every exam and assignment that you did not cheat. And if you did cheat, one of your fellow students could report you to the Honor Board. Basically using the prisoners' dilemma to enforce honesty. And the Honor Board were always threatening to bring proctors back if cheating continued. But yeah, everything was hand-written. On sheets of paper with pencil. I even had to write x86 assembly out by hand for my CPU architecture class. Of course, laptops were available back then but not cellphones and certainly not LLMs, so cheating by electronic means probably presents a stickier wicket now than it did back then.

Eisenstein 6mo ago
The prisoner's dilemma requires that both people are facing the same consequences and are promised leniency if they give up the other person. I'm struggling to figure out how this conforms to a person giving up a cheater to the honor board. What am I missing?

j45 6mo ago

Profs could now scan / ocr / grade it with AI though. I'm sure they had some kind of submit your code as assignment and using testing as a way to grade the assignments.

eikenberry 6mo ago

You mean an AI proof grading system. Grades have very little to do with actual learning and are there solely for signalling. It would be better if Universities shifted their focus to learning and eliminated grades/exams all together. They should seek to stop trying to be the gatekeepers for white collar work and instead focus on learning and research.

pokstad 6mo ago

Not only that, the tabletification of education has actually been shown (via standardized testing) to make our kids dumber. This is the first time a new generation has scored worse than their parents. Technology has its place, we need to pick and choose where.

amarant 6mo ago

>even programming exams were hand written Which strikes me as a terrible way to teach and test programming skills. If you're teaching to program without so much as syntax highlighting, you're not preparing your students for anything that even remotely resembles the industry they aspire to work in. Honestly, these days universities should probably find a way to incorporate AI into their teaching, rather than fight it. Anything else is betting that AI will not stick around, which strikes me as a hopelessly naïve bet. Especially for software development. I don't pretend to have all the answers, I don't know how to teach systems thinking in a appropriate way either. But I'm pretty sure typewriters isn't it, unless your students are hoping to get hired by Ada Lovelace, it's just not going to be relevant.

halJordan 6mo ago
> remotely like the industry they'll work in Education isn't any churning out a cog fitted to a bigger gear. A college education should not be preparing you for intellij or familiarizing you with va code. It should be teaching foundational skills with the discipline. And I just don't understand how you look at the amazing things we've accomplished since ww2 and say "the education system that taught this fucking sucks"
- amarant 6mo ago
  What I don't understand is how you can look at all the progress we've made since ww2 and decide we don't have to update our education to keep it relevant, and argue in favour of teaching tech that's been obsolete for 80 years. Students today aren't studying to repeat the progress made since the forties, that's been done by their grandparents, they're looking to drive the next 40 years of innovation, and if that involves typewriters I'll eat my hat
  - Balooga 6mo ago
    That way of teaching got us to the moon, created transistors, produced the internet, smartphones, quantum computers, the very AI that everyone is talking about, vaccines, sent probes into space, cured diseases, fed millions, jumbo jets, basically every single thing that society has come to depend on.

casey2 6mo ago

Seems like anybody could just study 6 hours a day for the last month before the final, last 2 weeks before the mid term and use AI for everything else.