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Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

• nephihaha 4mo ago
  Time for hand written essays again. That way, at least if they do use AI, they will have had to process some of the content a bit more.
• fhn 4mo ago
  the professor has all the power in the classroom. If you don't want cheating, define better conditions for the exam. You allowed a take-home exam which means students are able to use any and all resources.
  • carljungslabtek 4mo ago
    The thought of a closed book take home exam really made me laugh. They also mentioned Princeton hasn’t had professors in the room for exams since the 1890s… They just have a code of honor and rely on other students to report cheaters?? Ivy league is such a scam, in so many different ways.
    • jimbooonooo 4mo ago
      how is expecting integrity a scam?
  • rsfern 4mo ago
    > You allowed a take-home exam which means students are able to use any and all resources. It was a closed-book exam. The professor shouldn’t have to hold students’ hands for them to act with integrity, they are all adults. In this particular class, the professor made the final exam in-person, and didn’t count the take-home midterm because the score distribution wasn’t consistent between the two exams. I think that’s a reasonable approach, but it’s kind of sad that it was necessary
    • revolvingthrow 4mo ago
      When the highest offices of the land are packed to the gills with liars and grifters and anyone with a brain can observe there’s no downside to such behavior, "just be honest" rings rather hollow
      • rsfern 4mo ago
        Maybe I have too optimistic a mindset, but “just be honest” in academia isn’t about being a rule-follower, it’s about not short-changing yourself by coasting though on autopilot instead of learning to think and solve problems for yourself. Whether that really matters if your goal is to climb the social ladder and have power and influence, I don’t know.
        • profmonocle 4mo ago
          Replace "climb the social ladder and have power and influence" with "be able to afford a home, have kids, and go on vacation occasionally." It's become very difficult to have even a middle class lifestyle without a college degree. Obviously a huge percentage of people there don't want to be.
      • bigstrat2003 4mo ago
        Not really. I'm not responsible for how others behave; I'm responsible for how I behave. I don't like the rampant immoral behavior in society any more than you, but I still hold myself to a higher standard of behavior and others should too.
      • vlod 4mo ago
        This comment irked me. Yes others do it. I've noticed more and more that people lie to me and I call them out immediately (aggressively, as if they've just spat in my face) and they just don't care. Does "my word is my bond" not have meaning any more?
• hackermailman 4mo ago
  They're going to have change everything so use of an AI assistant doesn't matter because once they graduate they're just going to continue using it anyway. If it's a math for finance course then some kind of model building for the midterm and being marked on the quality of the model or something. If AI becomes so good that it always chooses the best fitting model and requires no numerical optimization then they will have to change the courses to be more like UChicago where it's primarily undergrad directed research but AI assisted.
  • danny_codes 4mo ago
    Why teach kids how to read, they can just take a picture of whatever text they want and have AI say it aloud.
  • hgoel 4mo ago
    The challenge I think is that students then struggle because they used AI throughout the semester and didn't actually learn. The proper response would be to be strict and fail students that don't perform to a satisfactory level, but this messes with the funding incentives. You can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. Maybe a student's sincerity should play a larger role in the admission process, maybe with a sharp expense curve such that students judged to be more sincere have to pay less tuition. It is an inherently subjective evaluation though. Edit: I completely misread your comment. Asking students to build a model is not a finance class anymore.
    • hackermailman 4mo ago
      It's a welfare economics theory course that requires many frameworks with measures where you are maximizing some graphical representation. It also requires assumptions to work and can be visualized in a model where you can see what happens when one of the assumptions doesn't hold. For example the old and new Berkeley model to study rent control effect on market prices
      • hgoel 4mo ago
        I should've been clearer, I meant AI model. If you're referring to financial models, then yeah, that can be a reasonable direction.
• danny_codes 4mo ago
  Damn that's crazy. Guess the take home test is dead now. I never understood this behavior from undergrads though, you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?
  • thereitgoes456 4mo ago
    Because it's an important aid to getting to a high-paying job in the US, not just a means to learn. One need only look at the resume filtering process, a once manual bias that has now been codified into algorithmic bias with AI. A degree from a good school boosts your chances immensely, and other facets such as coursework don't matter much. If you have ever seen someone filter applicant resumes, you will understand instantly. There are too many, you have to filter them somehow and the allure is irresistible.
    • DANmode 4mo ago
      If any hiring managers are reading this: make your directions super specific, or require a cover letter.
  • stackskipton 4mo ago
    >you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother? Because you are viewing the motivation of college wrong for most people. For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities. Ergo, they are just doing whatever required to get said piece of paper with least amount of effort. Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.
    • onemoresoop 4mo ago
      Sadly this is true. Another take is that if you don’t use AI but everybody outperforms you on exams using AI at some point you’re forced into it as well.
    • bmitc 4mo ago
• pants2 4mo ago
  When you're a student in a competitive program at a top university, graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same. Especially when jobs for new grads are harder to come by and there's more pressure to also go above and beyond with internships and side projects during your time in school. There's no way to compete without cheating.
  • mariusor 4mo ago
    > you have little choice I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.
    • bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      Yep. You always have a choice. If cheating is wrong, it does not become acceptable just because everyone else is doing it.
      • gedy 4mo ago
        Agreed, but it feels like a Pyrrhic victory to not cheat, then get lower scores than the cheaters.
        • dgellow 4mo ago
          Are those exams a contest? Like, they will only take the best N percentiles? Because if not, you’re competing only against yourself and should ignore others’ grades
          • em-bee 4mo ago
            if they are graded on a curve then they are competing against each other.
          • 1270018080 4mo ago
            > Are those exams a contest? Yes
• michaelfm1211 4mo ago
  The problem isn't AI, it's that you gave a take-home exam expected no one to cheat.
  • dgellow 4mo ago
    AI enables a completely different level of cheating than any prior method. It’s more accessible, better at cheating, faster
    • xp84 4mo ago
      For real. Sneaking peeks at the textbook is "good" cheating, in that you're still doing a form of learning. Having LLM write your paper is just a waste of everyone's time.
• throwawaypath 4mo ago
  Administration needs to eschew "technology" and demand analog solutions: hand written exams in proctored rooms, no devices out in the classroom, no take home work, etc.
  • FloorEgg 4mo ago
    Ensuring integrity definitely requires in person proctored exam centers. It does not require hand written exams. Hand written exams are either very labor intensive to grade or are confined to multiple choice, so either inflationary to cost of education or inauthentic / inaccurate representation of most knowledge and skills. The best answer, which enables authentic meaningful high integrity assessment that is also unit cost efficient is to have testing center facilities with institution supplied devices and well trained proctors. This way instructors can assess students in ways that are relevant and authentic to the subject matter while ensuring the assessments are accurate, consistent, fair and actually reflect the students abilities.
• nitwit005 4mo ago
  These articles consistently fail to acknowledge students were cheating in large numbers prior to these AI tools being available. It was certainly not difficult to cheat at a "closed book" take home exam before.
  • dgellow 4mo ago
    Different magnitude of cheating altogether
    • nitwit005 4mo ago
      I was in a class where around 12% of the class got caught directly copying a journal assignment. I'm sure more went undetected. AI has made it easier, but it's in the same magnitude. Edit: typo
    • Diogenesian 4mo ago
      Hmm I think one part every commenter is missing is that students have grown way more mercenary and cynical over the last 20 years. I was shocked in grad school that: a) I got bullied into sharing my math homework so people could copy it, just like high school and college... but this was math grad school! b) In 2011 I TAed a 4000-level course where the instructor left the solutions to the homework online (he wrote the book). I estimate 95% of students copied the solutions. It was only 5% of the grade and they paid for it on the exams. Still. Kind of stunning to see at U Waterloo - it was a continuous optimization course and most of them wanted to work in finance, yikes.
      • zer00eyz 4mo ago
        We're talking about Brown students here. Im going to guess that it is a safe bet that the 50 cheaters are all legacy enrollments. 1/2 of the graduating class is there for the education, the other half is there because the parents are keeping up the network.
        • anonbruno 4mo ago
• djoldman 4mo ago
  > This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). These news articles are just tiresome at this point. Obviously folks cheated previously, obviously it's easier now, obviously the answer has been to not have take homes all along.
• JimsonYang 4mo ago
  As of now chatgpt subsidies its consumer subscription-I wonder if cheating on exams will be still promiment once students are forced to pay $30 a month Since students are notorious for being cheap
  • jfim 4mo ago
    $30/month is likely a rounding error in the budget of students at the schools mentioned in the article.
  • Bombthecat 4mo ago
    Yes Still cheaper then being jobless or without the bachelor
  • Yossarrian22 4mo ago
    In comparison to textbooks or tuition even a $1000 a month could be palatable
  • HDBaseT 4mo ago
    Students may be notorious for being cheap (rightfully so, given the financial situation they are placed in) although when a single textbook cost $200 and you need 3 different ones every term, a $30/m subscription that effectively is a magic textbook that writes for you is worth its weight in gold.
• cherryteastain 4mo ago
  His research is in Game Theory. He should have realized that, in a situation where all competitors are (possibly) using LLMs, the game theoretic optimal choice is to use LLMs.
  • goldenarm 4mo ago
    That depends on the reward function. Should society reward credentials or skill?
    • r_lee 4mo ago
      "Should" is one thing, reality is another
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • sokoloff 4mo ago
      Ideally a mix of skill and will. Earned credentials are a marker that you once demonstrated some sufficient combination of both.
    • bagels 4mo ago
      Society rewards credentials and skill. So both are but one is easier to get with cheating.
    • janalsncm 4mo ago
      Students aren’t optimizing for what is best for society. They are optimizing for themselves, which almost always means getting a job. The credential is a prerequisite but skills are a differentiator. Problem is, not all skills are equal. Amazon isn’t going to ask you about your opinions on The Illiad, they are going to check if you can write an efficient algorithm to rob houses or merge sorted linked lists.
      • Blahah 4mo ago
        The system design questions are (at least): 1. What is this education intended to optimise for? 2. What are the various participants (including students) optimising for? 3. What aligns 1 and 2?
• userbinator 4mo ago
  take-home, closed-book type What an oxymoron. I agree with the others here that AI isn't the problem.
  • BeetleB 4mo ago
    I've had such exams. It was the honor system. The idea is that a typical exam is too short to evaluate the student's knowledge and a belief that fast students shouldn't have an advantage.
    • raverbashing 4mo ago
      There's a way. But if your professor is confident AI won't help you too much then it's a very hard test
    • Ekaros 4mo ago
      I really don't see how it would cost too much to pay TAs some more proctor hours.
      • BeetleB 4mo ago
        A lot of challenging problems are not solved in one go. You work on it, don't get too far, and then you get more ideas later at night while cooking dinner. Don't get me wrong - I'm sure people cheated even in my day. But this is the spirit - they're trying to give problems as challenging as they would for homework - and a lot of those classes have very challenging homework problems.
    • llbbdd 4mo ago
      Fast students are smarter. Why avoid grading on that? EDIT: Rate limited so: "smarter" here means how well the student will perform in a career in their chosen field. Fast + accurate is the ideal.
      • mlloyd 4mo ago
        Are they? Or do they just have superior recall? Or maybe lack test-taking anxiety? Or write or type quicker or...? Lots of reasons a slow student can be just as smart or smarter than a fast one.
• recursivedoubts 4mo ago
  In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. I have written an article on how I have adjusted my classes to the situation: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/ https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/ Ironically, I think the AI era may make university degrees a better signal of the intellectual abilities of students due to the presence of pre-computer infrastructure like large lecture halls, industrial-scale copiers, etc.
  • gchallen 4mo ago
    There are limits to what you can assess on timed assessments, and there are students whose performance on such assessments is not a good signal of their intellectual ability. In addition, at many institutions such tests are given infrequently and can be worth a significant component of a student's overall grade, increasing both student stress levels and the tendency for such assessments to measure short term knowledge students have obtained by cramming, not more meaningful longer-term knowledge gains. I see you're giving quizzes every three weeks, which is better than twice a semester, but still not what I would consider an ideal cadence. In my course weekly computer-based quizzes comprise 70% of a student's grade, but that's supported by a significant institutional investment in high-frequency computer-based testing: https://cbtf.illinois.edu/ https://cbtf.illinois.edu/.
    • sourcecodeplz 4mo ago
      so let say you give the students a pop-quiz. is that not acceptable anymore because some students don't do well when surprised?
      • mlloyd 4mo ago
        Acceptable is different from being an accurate assessment of knowledge. The question is what is the teacher attempting to measure?
        • jyounker 4mo ago
          Pop quizzes verify that you're up-to-date with the current lecture material.
• gchallen 4mo ago
  > He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League I'd like a citation for this being the "biggest known scandal" in the "entire Ivy League". Frequently such situations are kept somewhat quiet, for a variety of reasons. But fifty students is not a large number in courses that can enroll hundreds or up to a thousand students.
  • tropdrop 4mo ago
    Ivy League classes usually aren't as large as their state school counterparts. At most you might get around a hundred students in a large lecture course; this is rare by design. You can crunch the numbers on this to verify for yourself – most of these have a population of 6000 undergrads or so. 1/6 of all of the undergraduates need to take a single course for your "up to a thousand" to be true. I agree that a citation would be nice, but the number of students is indeed large for Ivy League courses (as per the article, in this econ course, he had 86 students for a class that usually only has 30).
    • gchallen 4mo ago
      Harvard's larger courses enroll over 500 students. These are also introductory courses where you're most likely to see large cheating instances.
  • blazers777 4mo ago
    by far, the biggest, most insane cheating scandal in the ivy league is the Replication Crisis by the professors.
• tty456 4mo ago
  "take home, closed book" This is a trap. I understand they've done this in the past, but profs are paranoid now. I don't believe he's 100% correct on each incident of fraud and he's going to ruin students [academic] lives because of it.
  • lokar 4mo ago
    They did it to themselves. They probably even enrolled in the class because they thought they could cheat.
  • xp84 4mo ago
    lol okay. Why else do you, after acing a midterm, then not even come to the final once it's been announced that you can't use your previous cheating method?
• ungreased0675 4mo ago
  > “…if we want to preserve the future of higher education” He understands the stakes here. If a university degree becomes useless, then what?
• jackphilson 4mo ago
  It's the old game that he's trying to preserve. It's time to move on to the new game. When the landscape shifts beneath you, its very low probability that the existing structures on the landscape are a good fit for the new landscape, and the structures on the new landscape must be rethought from first principles.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
    He did move to a new game, which is what confirmed they'd been cheating. Pretty funny - cheating so bad that even a blind man can see it.
• neilv 4mo ago
  I'm saddened and concerned by these allegations of a deficit of integrity. I was very fortunate to attend Brown University for grad school, and consider it a great place. Why would many people who were also fortunate to attend there not honor that opportunity?
• beloch 4mo ago
  "This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” ... "But it also hurts him that the one time in 34 years that he decided to offer a take-home exam, for highly justified reasons, the response was wide-scale fraud." ----------------- Not to in any way defend or condone academic misconduct, the fact that this was his teaching-career-first take-home exam is probably relevant. Take home exams can be fiendish. I remember having one in grad school where we were given a very insufficient 36 hours to complete it, and many people just didn't sleep. That was from a prof who knew what he was doing. This guy may have accidentally made his exam absolutely sadistic. Couple this with the fact that students often have other exams they need to be studying for in the same time window. The pressure can be immense. The temptation to use AI to help is going to be hard for many to resist unless the penalties are severe and strictly enforced. AI cheating is probably going to be a problem going forward in all situations, but open-book, take-home tests are going to bring it out more strongly than other test formats.
  • steve_taylor 4mo ago
    It was closed-book. Take-home, closed-book seems like an oxymoron anyway. A lot of the cheating students would have concluded that other students are going to cheat and get a much better result, so they might as well do the same. The fault lies squarely with the professor.
• xp84 4mo ago
  This may be a hot take, but: The problem is that kids, even (or especially?) in the elite schools, are treating college as a box to tick. At the Ivies, for many students, it's nothing more than the requisite means to get their ticket punched so they can become/remain part of the elite class. This has been the conventional wisdom for half a century. Now, this paragraph doesn't apply to an economics class like his, which is actually a useful degree, but many students will never use what they learn in college in a professional capacity, so it barely even matters if some (maybe even most?) students cheat because outside of the useful degrees, it's mainly a sorting hat to determine who works at Starbucks to pay back student loans, while rolling their eyes because of their 'valuable degree,' and who works there unironically, to pay their bills. What needs to happen though is that students at all levels need to either believe that they need to learn what they're choosing to take courses in, or even better, actually innately want to learn it to satisfy their own interest. Either will do. If you have neither intention toward the material, of course you'll cheat your way through it. No student who actually wants to learn would waste their time and money taking a class only to not learn, and cheat their way through it.
• BinRoo 4mo ago
  > In the AI era... Back in my day, you could also just Google the problems and find the solutions. What mitigated cheating at UVA was the honor code and each professor's faith and trust in our integrity. That culture was enough to not cheat. Imo, the fix should be to work on culture. Cheating should always be a tempting choice, so that the student may challenge their integrity, which is a muscle that can atrophy.
  • willis936 4mo ago
    Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life. The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement. If you want the honor system back then you need to offer more stable safety nets. It's not "kids these days", it's the natural result of the systems adults have made.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • nerdsniper 4mo ago
      > Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life. Yes it was. This was the pitch for as long as Google has existed. The only relevant change from the early days of Google is that now you also need to go to a T20 school and GPA inflation has gone completely insane.
    • nekusar 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • npstr 4mo ago
        Seems easy to counter all of this. I study at a German remote university, and they require, next to the front camera, a second camera to record the screen + hands and arms of the student while taking exams, and before the exam starts a complete video of the room, below desk areas, ears, etc. I don't see an angle how to reliably cheat in such conditions, and have seen nothing mentioned by any other student. So I would say it's up to the university if they want to allow fraud like that...they could easily stop it.
• WalterBright 4mo ago
  Juxtapose the mass fraud on exams with the greater difficulty of finding a job after graduation.
• bkallus 4mo ago
  I have seen it firsthand in the CS department here at Dartmouth. It is bad. We're currently designing a new intro systems curriculum, and we're thinking of it as an adversarial problem. That is, we're designing the course to ensure that a student optimizing for the best grade per unit work still meets our learning objectives. That means, as everyone else is saying, paper exams, but also 1-on-1 interviews to check that students understand each assignment they turn in. These interviews feature both factual questions ("You're using this macro from that library. What does it do?", "Please describe what this function does and how it works.") and conceptual questions ("Why is this code structured this way instead of $whatever?", "How else did you try solving this?", etc.) This doesn't stop students from generating code, but at least they have to understand that code in detail. This is not as good as writing the code yourself, but how much worse is it? For math classes, this gap is gigantic. Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own. For programming classes, I think (without evidence) that the gap is somewhat smaller. My experience from the past is that when this kind of evaluation is made clear up front, the students know what to expect and either do fine or drop the class in the first week. If you start with take-home exams and then spring paper exams on them halfway through the course, then half the class is cheating and won't be able to recover, as we read in the article. In general, our students are somewhat motivated by an abstract desire to learn, but are much more motivated by grades. If there exists a straightforward path through your course that leads to a good grade without doing much work, most students will take it. (Our undergrads' course review website is literally called "Layup List." They are actually this shameless.) It's our job as instructors to ensure that all paths leading to a good grade either require learning the material or are more difficult to pull off than just learning the material. It's best not to blame the students. They are good at optimizing metrics; that's how they ended up here in the first place. We just need to better align the evaluation metrics with the outcomes that we're looking for.
  • Paracompact 4mo ago
    > Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own. Unrelated, but once you get to a more mature level, say grad school and above, I can say this is not always the case! Just like it's easier sometimes to Roll Your Own Damn X in programming, so too are some expositions of proof so dense (necessarily or unnecessarily so) that it is a less taxing affair to simply figure it out yourself, or at least figure out 90% of it, consulting a suggestive sentence or two in the proof in order to get at that last 10%. Maybe this observation of mine is not so unrelated after all. I don't regret many of the times that I've thrown up my hands at the rococo explanations or solutions given to me by LLMs and simply did my own work. The Socratic method with AI is sometimes more effort than it's worth.
• WalterBright 4mo ago
  When I visited Yale recently, a professor who taught comp sci complained to me that most of his students were using AI to do the work. I asked him if he knew which students wanted to learn. He said yes. I suggested he teach to them, and to heck with the cheaters.
• haunter 4mo ago
  I'm from Hungary and the majority of the exams here are oral one-on-one interviews (depends on the course of course but still). I've never ever had take home exams and or even quiz like tests were very uncommon.
• yiyingzhang 4mo ago
  As a university professor, I honestly don't understand the point of grading. Who will look at and care about grades? Likely company HR. But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Also, grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.
  • shepherdjerred 4mo ago
    I think the point is that your college/university want the earned credential to mean something. Presumably you need some way to gauge the quality of your graduates
  • siva7 4mo ago
    It saddens me to see how creativity seems to "peak" at "let's go back to how we did it in 20th century" instead of asking the better questions like you did.
    • AlexandrB 4mo ago
      The flip side of this is "Chesterton's Fence"[1]. It's easy to propose "better" solutions, but grading has evolved to be what it is over the past 100+ years. Any novel solution will have different (and not necessarily better) second, third, or fourth order effects. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
    • thin_carapace 4mo ago
      it saddens me to see people testing parachutes on others instead of giving them functional existing parachute designs
  • catlikesshrimp 4mo ago
    During my undergraduate university, the best scores had priority when choosing the limited slot numbers, including the time slots and sometimes which professor we were to attend. e.g. I would pick Calculus MWF mornings, group two because professor XxXx was in charge; lower grade students who polled agaisnt me would be bumped to a different group, or to a different time slot, or not making it to the lowest grade cut
• aneesh 4mo ago
  This is not surprising. While cheating has always been around, it seems to be more prevalent now with high pressure and easy access. I’ve talked to a bunch of teachers and school leaders, and see three main ways schools are handling AI use in assessments: 1. Punish it: Detect AI use on homework and take home exams; treat it as cheating. 2. Prevent it: Move to live assessments – oral or offline – that are hard to cheat on. 3. Embrace it: Assess the process, not the output. The second one seems to be the only real answer for foundational subjects. And the third one can also work for more creative or project-based work.
• Meekro 4mo ago
  Nobody would hire a chess coach and then use Stockfish to cheat on the problems. Whatever the students are paying for here, it certainly isn't an education.
  • foxglacier 4mo ago
    Of course not. Education is free on the internet. University provides motivation and credentials. The motivation part is important because most people can't stick to such rigorous education for so long without some external force. Universities need to enforce rules against cheating as part of the motivation service they're providing.
  • blazers777 4mo ago
    It depends. If you hired a chess coach, and they hired an opening coach for you just for openings, and that coach had you write a weekly 12 page report about why d4 was popular, and include a section about the methodology you used, you could both care about your chess education, and decide to cheat and have ai write that opening paper for you every week.
• francisofascii 4mo ago
  Assessment should probably a mix of all of the various forms: handwritten blue book, verbal, multiple choice, and AI assisted essay. It really depends on what is being asssesed.
• Barrin92 4mo ago
  All these over-complicated "solutions" are incredibly funny. At my uni in Germany education worked in a very straight forward way. There is no graded homework (you're in a university not an elementary school), at the end of the semester there's a three hour exam, on pen and paper (our CS profs deducted a point per syntax error btw so mind your parentheses) and if you don't do any homework or don't show up that's on you because you're an adult, but good luck making it through the test. Of course 70% or so usually crashed out in particular in Calculus and I suspect given that US education is paid for daycare that's exactly the thing that can't happen which is why they're never fixing it
• jdshaffer 4mo ago
  I've been trying to figure out how to avoid AI fraud in my classes, like many others. While not perfect, I've written down my thoughts and attempts in the hope it might help someone else: https://web.hedc.shizuoka.ac.jp/msg-from-center/creating-meaningful-homework-assignments-in-the-age-of-ai-and-llms/ https://web.hedc.shizuoka.ac.jp/msg-from-center/creating-mea... Edit: Didn't realize the original URL was paywalled. Sorry. This newer URL is open. Apologies.
  • randunel 4mo ago
    Nice way to paywall a comment on HN.
    • jdshaffer 4mo ago
      Is it paywalled? I honestly didn't realize that. Sorry. I'll edit the comment and change to an open URL and paste the two main ideas here: FORCED SKILL-BUILDING GOALS Where my original purpose of giving homework assignments was to help students build their skills through active engagement, I can no longer trust that all my students will have done it by hand. But I still want my students to feel the need to improve their skills. So, I start by considering which skills I think are most important for that class (writing, for example) and build a forced need for my students to improve that skill. For example, in my writing-focused classes, I now give students in-class hand-written exams. I let them know about the essay-based tests (mid-term and final) on the first day of class and encourage them to practice their writing each week, in-class and at home, thus giving them a very clear reason to practice — to get a good grade. Additionally, I take away the need to get a “good grade” on written homework by giving them full points if the homework is turned in on time, regardless of contents or mistakes. Thus, with the need to practice their writing skills for exams and no need to worry about making a good grade on homework assignments, students are encouraged to try the homework themselves — they cannot fail and they can only benefit by doing it themselves. In fact, using an LLM to complete an assignment will likely hurt them as other students who improved their skills will do better on the exams. Homework once again can be used as a tool for them to improve their abilities through engagement, not just a pointless activity that an LLM can do to help them “get a good grade”. FORCED LLM FRICTION Another method I have found for encouraging students to complete assignments on their own is to purposely create friction to using an LLM. I try to plan assignments that it would be MORE work to use an LLM than to simply do it themselves. Humans being what we are, we often will choose the path of least resistance, especially if a grade is on the line! For example, in one of my classes, I have students write a short story for homework (of about 250 words) about a picture I show them in class. Spelling and grammar mistakes are OK, they are guaranteed to get full marks if they turn it in on time, but the story has to be written BY HAND. To use an LLM, a student would first have to write a lengthy prompt describing the picture in detail and explain the type of output they need (a lot of work), and then they would still have to rewrite the entire story by hand (forcing them to focus on reading, spelling, and handwriting anyway). Thus, by introducing forced friction to using an LLM, especially where there is no danger (no friction) of getting a bad score because of mistakes, encourages students to take the easier path — just do it themselves. The same idea also applies to shorter listening assignments. As long as the homework receives full marks for turning it in on time (low friction against the fear of poor ability) and the exams including a listening element (clear purpose for trying), the hassle of downloading the audio, sending it to an AI to transcribe it, then upload pictures of the homework questions just isn’t worth it. It’s just easier and more beneficial for students to do it themselves.
• rayiner 4mo ago
  Instead of denouncing them, the professors should expel every single one of these students. These people cannot be allowed into the economy. (And don’t “what about” me about dishonestly already existing in the economy. I know it does. But it’s like littering—you’re not justified in adding another piece even if the ground is already dirty.)
• tmsh 4mo ago
  let people use as much ai as possible. encourage it. and as an educator, you have to learn to leverage it oneself or not (depending on the subject). and be better at using it than students if it does make one 'better'. if ai doesn't help, then it won't help. if it does help, then you should use it. the metric is your output of whatever is being tested. writing an essay well and clearly understanding the material. solving a pset. whatever. if you give access all the time for that, and then you test on a hard problem that could be done with or without ai, then it's fair. e.g. "clearly explain these four sentences of Y." obviously ai researching loosely and blathering isn't useful. won't be high signal / dense and correct and worthy of an 'a'. but someone who can harness ai and someone who knows the material well in the end will be rewarded the same by society. what you are testing is correctness and information density in a response. so you have to start now in accepting the reality that those who use ai to get there should be rewarded just the same as those who don't. the burden is on educators to be as good as they can with ai if it is relevant or not if it is not relevant (and schools to fund them and ai companies to fund them if they have excess capital and are humanitarian). and note the hard part even for us engineers at tech companies is in the correctness. it is very hard. but the sooner we start teaching how to do things correctly with ai, the more prepared the next generations will be.
• adamnemecek 4mo ago
  > He thinks the time has come for an in-depth debate so the technology does not signal the end of higher education I hope it does.
• jongjong 4mo ago
  He is fighting a losing battle. That's why nobody in the administration cared. Academic integrity already doesn't exist anymore. As Nassim Taleb would say; there are plenty of highly educated idiots with PhDs. Even the idea that MIT is somehow better than some other universities is itself a fiction. People are conflating financial success with academic ability. The former is mostly the result of social connections which are formed within the academic institutions and have very little to do with actual capabilities. Universities should just sell degrees for a high price without requiring the students to attend. If they're rich enough, their skills aren't going to matter anyway; they'll succeed in their careers regardless so the university will still look good. 'Academic integrity' will be intact. Especially true for business, economic degrees or other humanities.
• trashface 4mo ago
  Seems like these youths are doing exactly what their future employers will expect them to.
• billsmithaustin 4mo ago
  A similar thing happened in a first-year CS class at Purdue this year: https://thecheatsheet.substack.com/p/432-cheating-at-purdue-university https://thecheatsheet.substack.com/p/432-cheating-at-purdue-....
  • theamk 4mo ago
    I was nodding along until that part: > Turkstra said he’ll still use the AI detection tool going forward. That's crazy! AI detection tools are notably unreliable, and even if they had only 1% false positive rate (I am sure it's actually much higher) that'd still be multiple innocent people failing the class for no reason. Imagine enrolling in the class, and the professor says: "oh, and btw I am going to randomly pick three students and accuse them of cheating". Would you want to stay in this class I think the future is going to be proctored exams on paper or on locked-down devices. If there will be projects, they should be accompanied by secondary evidence, like interviews about them.
• zabzonk 4mo ago
  While I am in no way a supporter of AI cheating, or whatever we want to call it, I can tell you from experience that there is nothing more tedious or soul destroying than invigilating a written multi-hour exam. It put me off teaching in higher education. IMHO to solve many problems we should go with Ivan Illich's ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society and make education about education, not testing and certification.
  • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > make education about education, not testing and certification We tried this. The whole grades-are-racist nonsense movement (in part a reaction to NCLB). It doesn’t work. Learning requires confronting difficulty and evaluation, even if you’re learning alone. If you want to see what attempting to learn without tests looks like, see people who think they’ve taught themselves a topic by chatting with AI. Nine times out of ten they think they know something but can’t solve actual problems on their own.
    • zabzonk 4mo ago
      I have learned a lot about computer programming from reading books and from more experienced programmers. This is what Illich was talking about - give people an allowance and let them spend it as they will, for example on books and mentors, or indeed on classic universities. > The whole grades-are-racist nonsense. Wow, swerve off topic. I never mentioned anything like that and I do not want to.
      • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        > have learned a lot about computer programming from reading books and from more experienced programmers I like learning from textbooks and others. I would say self testing myself is the difference between reading nonfiction and trying to learn something. > never mentioned anything like that and I do not want to It’s the rhetoric that was used to push back against examination in California and New York. Explicitly. The rhetoric was new, but it was essentially Illich’s ideas. The result was kids in wealthy districts with tutors or with educated parents who valued learning for its own purpose (and had the time and skill to convey that to their kids) did well while those in poorer districts got left behind because absent measurement you have no accountability.
• linzhangrun 4mo ago
  AI has drastically reduced the cost and concealment for cheating, even in offline exams. A single person can easily do that using glasses with a micro-camera & rice-sized earbuds, and almost impossible to be caught.
  • theamk 4mo ago
    Not really, bluetooth/wifi detectors are absolutely a thing, and emissions from camera in glasses are easily detectable by the right equipment. This equipment is not very common today, but if the smart glasses become popular, then universities (or proctoring centers) will get it. And if they don't become common, then some fraction of cheating is acceptable, as long it's not too high. After all, one could do micro-camera + earbuds even before AI, with human conspirator.
    • linzhangrun 4mo ago
      At least for now, these only exist in a very few number of high level national exams (at least in China). The proctoring level in university is basically like a decoration in front of these. Another point is that finding and using a capable human accomplice costs much more, with much more risk than asking AI.
  • Ekaros 4mo ago
    Only solution for that is permanent record. No "youthful indiscretion". You have taken cheating devices to test. You are permanently and for life out. All your past degrees are invalidated on the spot. There is central sex offender style registry. You are required to inform about your status in every future interaction.
    • subarctic 4mo ago
      Wow that sounds really dystopic... hope your joking
• JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  Yawn. When a university starts expelling students for cheating, I’ll pay attention. I suspect donors, politicians and employers will, too.
• whatever1 4mo ago
  We don’t allow calculators in elementary school when we teach and test students for multiplication and division. We don’t allow for dictionary when we test for vocabulary.
• zdc1 4mo ago
  One of the hardest and best exams I had to do in university was my behavioural finance midterm exam: the format was that I had to sit down with the professor and have a five minute discussion on a topic of my choosing. It was surprisingly tough, and the process of verbalising what you know about a topic doesn't give you much room to hide. Accurate and high-quality exams are a solved problem. The issue is that universities aren't necessarily judged on teaching quality and opt for examination methods that scale well.
• fourseventy 4mo ago
  "Take home closed book" exam is asking for mass cheating. It was probably happening way before AI too. AI is just an excuse now.
• adithyassekhar 4mo ago
  I’m no longer in college still, The day I longer have to worry about putting a meal on my table, I’ll treat college as this fantasy “thirst for knowledge” thing as some of the commenters here suggest. Till then, it’s just a meal ticket.
• Balgair 4mo ago
  It seems that the Oxbridge model is really going to be the only workable one here in the future. Small groups of about 8 total, lead by a proctor, meeting regularly. The social pressures to not cheat in such small groups keep it honest. The obvious problem with that is it is terribly expensive. You need Masters or Doctoral level people for long periods alone with students and you need to trust that these proctors won't be some form of -ist towards the students and also that their grades will be fair. It is by design not something that scales. But it seems that is where the path lies at this point. Essentially, the aristocracy gets education again and the plebs get to fight/cheat it out amongst each other and paying to do nothing in the end. Damn it
• tim-tday 4mo ago
  Law schools are entirely essay driven. They’ve had armored word processors for testing for at least twenty years. I’m sure those companies would license a version for the rest of campus (most universities have a law school already so they have a contract they can simply extend to the whole campus) I seem to recall they submit the exam via usb drive. now they may have a closed exam mode where they can finish the exam without network and the. Submit over the network. Of course this type of exam must be conducted in person or else the examinee could simply use a phone and type the ai provided answer. Also is the professor living under a rock? Everyone is going to use AI if they can. So if you want them to not, asking them nicely isn’t going to cut it.
• scoofy 4mo ago
  I remember getting to college just being stunned at how many people weren’t there to learn. I wasn’t a perfect student, but I was there to become smarter.
• hazard 4mo ago
  After being in the workforce for decades, this whole issue is just so incomprehensible to me. I went an ungrad school that was top-5 in engineering. But my experience - and in the experience of other people I've talked to - formal undergrad education was, and always has been, a farce. At best, you learn through working on projects that are meaningful to you and learn "how to be an adult" (and later, you learn how to manage the enormous financial debt you acquired). But more typically, it's pure credentialism - no one cares what your grades were, only what school you graduated from. The amount of actual learning that goes on from classes is minimal, but somehow we can't shift the overton window away from this silly game of grades that don't measure anything meaningful. After graduating, I've was asked about my grades exactly twice in my life -- once when I applied to a master's program, and at one job interview (the company had a policy of asking about GPA for anyone who graduated less than 10 years ago). I'm pro-education but anti-school, and all this nonsense makes me this way even more.
• hresvelgr 4mo ago
  I think the irony here is that LLMs are the ultimate tool for auto-didacts and people who love to learn independently, bar none. Using them to cheat is such a profound waste to me. I've beeen able to accelerate my learning thanks to LLMs, and it saddens me that the potential for this kind of personal enrichment is lost on most.
  • Balgair 4mo ago
    Brown's PLME program is famous for getting you into med school. And med schools are quite focused on grades. Same goes for Law Schools, which, again, Brown is an outlier for JDs. Look, the professor here is right. But he's living in a different time. The students are under the gun here and are responding to their incentives. The prof's gripe should not be with the students but with the AMA or the Bar associations, ultimately. Essentially, the system is sick, the kids and prof are caught in the middle of it. Don't fight each other, fight the power.
• aabajian 4mo ago
  The last take-home test I did was for EE364a: Convex Optimization. It was a 24 hour test, and I had a cold. I booked a hotel room as my apartment didn't have air conditioning. It was brutal. I got most of the programming questions correct, but only a few of the proofs. The average of the class on this test (and most every other assignment) was 80%+. I got an A- overall in that class. Perhaps this class isn't too hard for Stanford students, but I have to wonder about cheating when the averages on nearly every single assignment is that high. One clue was office-hours: Whenever I dropped by office hours, there was always a line (didn't matter the class). I quickly learned that TAs would often drop a hint that would make particularly hard problems easy to complete. It provided an unfair advantage to students who could attend office hours. It also reminds me of the huge scam of cheating on the USMLE amongst Nepali medical students: https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/113627 https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/113627 I've met many wonderful international medical graduates. Many have shockingly high USMLE scores. It is true that there's no time limit on their preparation (U.S. students have under 2 years to prepare during medical school, international students may wait years after graduation before taking the exam). Before that scandal, I never would've thought someone could cheat on the USMLE. Prometric test centers are crazy locked-down. But that's not how they did it. They did the long-game. Prior test takers would remember a handful of questions and just add them to a secret database. After many years, that database contained nearly every question on the exam. Test takers would work extremely hard - memorizing every single question. The reward of a U.S. residency is life-changing, I get why cheating was(is?) so rampant.
  • sixtram 4mo ago
    Is it really cheating if you work hard and memorize all the questions? That's basically learning.
    • argee 4mo ago
      Almost sounds like a bunch of people crowdsourced a better textbook than was otherwise available to them. If your database is truly "secret" how are people going to add to it or benefit from it?
    • 4mo ago
• tailscaler2026 4mo ago
  Paying tuition only to cheat on your exams is wild. Why even bother with the degree? Lying on your resumes seems a whole lot faster.
• laszlojamf 4mo ago
  I had a couple of courses that had open-book exams, where you could bring _any_ material you wanted. Any books, notes, equipment, really anything you wanted. The exam was still hard, because it focused on defining problems. Knowing what question to ask. This is still the hardest problem, even with LLMs. My guess is that most teachers don't like open-book exams, because they are hard to make. But maybe LLMs could help with this too. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle anymore, and restrictions are only going to be effective for dumb cheaters. You have to create exams which make the smart cheaters do actual work.
• haritha-j 4mo ago
  One thing I would say from the student perspective is, when you know for a fact that your fellow students are using LLMs, and you feel like you can do it honestly and earn a B, or use LLMs and get an A, it msut be a tough decision. Grades are often adjusted on a bell curve and honest students are disadvantaged when others cheat. In my undergrad I was leading in nearly all of my classes for 7/8 semesters, but the final semester had online exams due to covid, and I was suddenly a barely above average student in the last semester.
  • theturtlemoves 4mo ago
    > Grades are often adjusted on a bell curve and honest students are disadvantaged when others cheat. It depends per country. Here we use a grading system that isn't relative to how other students perform. You basically get a percentage score on how many questions you got right. Perfect score is 100. 55 and up is pass, below that is fail. But still, teachers can make exams easier or harder depending on last year's scores, so there's that. In short, nobody will hone your mind for you, it's up to you to want to.
    • tgv 4mo ago
      Grading curves have become really common practice. Can't let the poor students fail just because they didn't study. The dean doesn't like that and your career neither. So you only let a fixed percentage fail. It's sad.
  • dbspin 4mo ago
    Grading on a curve is utterly irrational, unfair and cruel. I'm sorry you have to put up with such a system.
  • LoganDark 4mo ago
    The sad thing is that it shouldn't even be immoral to use an LLM to help teach you the material, only to use the LLM as a substitute for your own skills.
  • j-bos 4mo ago
    Yeah corruption begets corruption. Who knew. But seriously this is a real problem that university and school provide a "safe" version of, see the same dynamics in any blatantly corrupt country for how hard it is to follow the law when everyone else expects you to grease pockets and or lie to officials with a wink. Oxidation in steel structures is informative of where these things go and how to address them.
• PunchyHamster 4mo ago
  As long as university is symbol of status and requirement for "good" job, cheating will continue as the education is not what it is valued for, just the paper you get at the end
• anonli 4mo ago
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• TrackerFF 4mo ago
  I think one obvious challenge when it comes to Ivy League, and other prestigious schools, is that they attract very ambitious students - likely over average intelligent, too. If you're the type that applies (and is accepted) to those schools, you are likely very informed on careers out there. So you also know what is at stake. Good grades, or at least above a certain cut-off point, will open doors to prestigious jobs, as well as further studies. Finance, Law, Tech, you name it. For these students, the stakes are high - and more akin to professional sports and draft season. I'm not saying this as an excuse to their cheating, but rather what the reality is for them. Again, not only is your competition smart and hardworking to begin with, but this sort of cheating is basically equivalent to academic and intellectual PEDs. You could be studying English at Brown, with the intent to land a job at some management consulting firm or bulge bracket investment bank (1 out of 4 students at Brown end up in finance and consulting). Work that is miles away from your major, and where you're being provided the necessary training when you join the firms. It is stupid, but understandable. And if you know others are doing it, it really only impacts you negatively if you don't. When so many of your opportunities come down to a two decimal number, people start taking risks.
• ExoticPearTree 4mo ago
  I get why AI might be detrimental to the students especially in competing fields or classes, but they have a high chance to fail in life because they can't rely on ChatGPT or other AIs their entire lives and be successful. But being upset that people use available technology to solve problems is quite an exaggeration and makes the guy close to being a luddite. He can just say "Hey, we do exams on paper and in class next time" and be done with it if he does not like technology.
• cycomanic 4mo ago
  > When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own Is anyone surprised that the academics are essentially being left on their own about is? University management has become increasingly disconnected from the academics doing the work on the ground at least during the last 20 years that I've been in academia. Covid was really an eye-opener in this respect, at our university academics were told with very short notice to make all lectures remote. There was essentially zero support from central management, there was not even budget to buy headsets or cameras and academics were expected to use their research funds. At the end of the pandemic academics were thanked with two years of 0 and 1% salary increase, due to a tough economic situation. During the same time the president received a 8% raise. The tough economic situation was entirely due to mismanagement, i.e. the university had invested pension funds into fixed interest investments which did not keep up with pension growth (during a time when stock markets were going from strength to strength).
  • le-mark 4mo ago
    > At the end of the pandemic academics were thanked with two years of 0 and 1% salary increase, due to a tough economic situation. During the same time the president received a 8% raise. Let us know when they institute stack ranking and 10% mandatory cuts every spring. Then academia will have been fully corporatized!
  • ZiiS 4mo ago
    Are you asking for the president to make a snap decision undermining the authority of the Academic Code Committee? How to teach and test students who have to start work under the current AI frenzy let alone who will still be working alongside whatever it becomes in forty years is an extreammly under-researched and unanswerable question. Even an interim answer will require the full consideration of the faculty and beyond; a good leader facilitates that not replaces it. Yes the should probably _some_ discipline for students who broke the rules written in a past and very different world; but I certainly would not want to hire any who didn't challenge them.
• MMDrame 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• protocolture 4mo ago
  >He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam Running all your students exams through an AI checker is one of those Temptations of AI I am sure.
• nacozarina 4mo ago
  in time, student tests will consist entirely of in-class written essays to avoid AI usage, which professors will then grade primarily with AI tools to handle the workload. this will be deemed ‘fair’.
  • bonzini 4mo ago
    Interestingly, here in Italy a substantial part of grades in Italian classes is exactly in-class written essays.
• CurbStomper 4mo ago
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• sombragris 4mo ago
  I was born in 1970. My teenage years were in the 1980s, in coincidence with the emergence of the home computer. I had a Timex-Sinclair 1000, then a C64, then a C128. One of my main forces that drove myself to learn computers was (besides games) the ability to produce text that was clearly written and readable, thanks to word processors and printers, because my handwriting was abysmal, and I got tired very quickly while writing by hand. In the computer, instead, I got to type exactly what I wanted, I could edit and correct my spelling and grammar mistakes, and then produce very readable and clean output. A win in my book. Now, I require of students to submit written assignments done by hand. That way, I can at least be certain that there's some learning involved, even if they resort to AI to produce the relevant written part, because evidence points out that writing by hand reinforces learning. I read that other professors resorted to requiring manual typewriters, which I also hate with a passion. That is, AI is negating decades of enablement achieved by technology. Honestly, between these circumstances and the fact that we are "enjoying" (?) brave new prices for RAM and SSDs, I'm finding AI increasingly harder to like.
  • sdevonoes 4mo ago
    > I'm finding AI increasingly harder to like. That summarises pretty well the whole situation. AI is cool and all, but not worth it considering all the disadvantages
    • red-iron-pine 4mo ago
      but we can put data centers in space bro
      • Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
        The only problem that solves is SpaceX's cash flow / maintaining its demand for launches, and said demand is needed to justify developing mass production technology / processes for rockets.
        • entropicdrifter 4mo ago
• tatsuya-tamaya 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• intended 4mo ago
  Another amazing benefit of AI, the increased expense of training and teaching. I’ve studied in classes of 40 to 50 students to one teacher. The challenge of grading students at that ratio, means you need automation. It also reduces the kind of teaching possible. You really can’t provide one on one attention when you have multiple classes of 40+ students to teach.
• sebastianconcpt 4mo ago
  Not sure if I'm alone in the feeling that we are going to desire AI more than like it.
• paulluuk 4mo ago
  > This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” I have no doubt that AI was used for this, but I am shocked that this is even a thing. Before AI, any rich or connected student (which I assume is essentially all ivy league students) could just get someone to take the test for them?
• lordfrito 4mo ago
  The number of people here defending AI cheating as an alternative/clever form of "learning" is eye-opening. Also the people saying it's not the students fault they cheated, it's the systems fault. All I know is I wouldn't want one of these cheaters performing open heart surgery on me, designing the airplane I'm flying in, or managing my financial affairs. Or marrying my daughter. I would have thought the defense of cheating to be a much more marginal position.
• ralferoo 4mo ago
  https://archive.is/6r2Qc https://archive.is/6r2Qc
• farceSpherule 4mo ago
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• synergy20 4mo ago
  there are quite a few companies are developing 'proctoring' system to defeat the cheat so you can take self-exam in realtime and everything will be recorded and anything suspicious will be reported, that should be a must-have these days unless something better come out? or current products are not doing their jobs well?
• jhbadger 4mo ago
  Even before AI, take home exams were a bad idea. In theory students were supposed to promise to work alone and not share work but in practice many people, especially those taking the class with friends, worked together.
  • hasteg 4mo ago
    When I was studying my CS degree (2018-2022) it was actually encouraged to work together outside of classes with fellow students. We had a CS discord run by the school (or maybe volunteers from the school? I dunno) with diff channels for different classes. I also worked a ton on studying with my friend who was in a lot of the same classes as me. I think that was insanely helpful, especially for a lot of the theory heavy classes it was great to have someone to bounce ideas off.
    • jhbadger 4mo ago
      I'm not against students working together -- as you note in some classes it is encouraged and often group projects are assigned. But this is different from the idea of a "take home exam" where students are supposed to work alone on the honor system, which is naive at best from the professor.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• Royce-CMR 4mo ago
  I was home schooled - so my perspective of education is at best, unique. I finished a dual major undergrad at 18, got an MBA at 21. Based on my own experiences and those of people I’ve watched, I have three points. Sample size of 1 and all that; but it’s a lowkey passion topic for me. - The argument that AI is “the next calculator” and education testing and overall methods need to adapt, is true. - The distance between learning concepts to passing memorization tests(or worse, non-reality test specific logic) has grown significantly in my lifetime, and the AI education problems are really a mix of the cascade impacts of this issue + the AI impacts on conventional education measures. - The problem with students who use AI to get past (often arbitrary) difficult courses or testing scenarios may look like one problem compensating aka solving for another (and I love AI for it!) but the parallel problem of AI (and our education system baseline) enabling students to normalize non-cognitive drone like approaches to any problem is super problematic. The last point is an admittedly recent eye opening moment for me. Working with younger students recently, they are shocked at anything less than a fully clearly defined problem (education system training) and anytime thinking is required, they go to AI (which is fine!) and they can’t think beyond the AI output (which is super not fine!) The latter has been astonishing for myself and coworkers and really has us reconsidering our young talent programs.
  • tedd4u 4mo ago
    I've heard students react this way to seeing problems on exams that are not strictly of the types taught in class or in previously-assigned homework. "It's not fair! The teacher never showed us how to do problems like that!" This kind of thing was expected and assumed when I was in secondary school, that there would be combining of some concepts from the unit into a single problem. Very worried that there's both a cultural change supported by AI tools that will lead to the outsourcing of thought to the AI rather than outsourcing drudgery.
    • subarctic 4mo ago
      I kind of agree with that perspective, if you're testing them on something in the exam, why isn't the course material teaching it to them? After all you're paying a lot of money for tuition. I went to a good university where the assignments were hard, but as long as you did them the final exam ended up being easy without having to study for them because you already learned everything. But i also did a semester abroad at a German university and i found there was a different philosophy there where the assignments don't teach you much, and everyone skips class and then studies really hard for the final exam which is often 100% of your grade
• tpoacher 4mo ago
  Most people here seem to thank that the only realistic alternative for submitting code / written reports in the age of AI is handwritten invigilated exams. So just mentioning my own anecdata here; I've had reasonable success converting a "code + written report" assignment into a "code + structured video report", where the code is assessed "exclusively" through the video report, and where the student needs to demonstrate ownership and understanding of the code, explain and defend design decisions, etc. Yes, in principle it is possible for the student to generate a "script" and narrate it during the video presentation, but this is fairly easy to detect, and in general, given enough flexibility / subjectivity in the marking scheme, you can always downmark such students on the basis that their presentation demonstrated lack of understanding and ownership of the codebase, without having to go into too much specifics. Obviously one implication of the above is that you no longer care if their code was "manually" written vs AI "assisted"; only if they have a good grasp / ownership of it, and can defend the broader architecture and design decisions. But I feel that this is realistic in the age of AI, since this is largely what will be expected from their future employers too.
• buzzcut_ 4mo ago
  I took an EE course last year that had a pretty effective way to assess, in my opinion. Exams are definitely in person. Homework is not graded, except that once a week, one problem would be randomly selected from the homework for an in class quiz. The numbers would be changed up. From my perspective, you didn't really have a choice but to be able to solve all of the problems on the homework unless you wanted to gamble failing that week's quiz. The answer key and AI are always available, but the learning got to happen on my terms. It was a good balance. And grading for the professor was relatively light since it was only one problem per student.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  "The course, which he has been teaching for years, is not an easy one: it typically attracts few students, but very good ones. He has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100. The people who corrected the exams warned him about several irregularities. "Some answers contained unusual passages that coincided with results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT," he says. Serrano did not void the midterm exam, but warned students that the final one, which counted for 50% of the final grade, would be held in-person. He also said that if the grade distribution was not similar to the midterm, only the final exam would be taken into account. The average score dropped to 48 out of 100. Of the 89 students who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up, 22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam."
• liendolucas 4mo ago
  I cannot think of a more harmful widespread technology than AI. I would be truly ashamed to assist a top notch course only to turn to a computer for answers. I would prefer to fail forever and learn the hard way before doing some cheap copy/pasta.
• meerita 4mo ago
  I’m not really convinced by the article’s claims. Maybe the students cheated, maybe they didn’t. But the article does not seem to provide actual proof that they used AI. It mostly presents circumstantial evidence: unusually high scores, similar answers, and a later drop in performance on an in-person exam.
• subarctic 4mo ago
  Synopsis: professor decides to do a take-home exam because there was a shooting at the university and he wanted to make it easier for students. And a bunch of students cheated with ai
• smugma 4mo ago
  “This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class" "Of the 89 students who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up" 59+27=86 Maybe the article was written with AI that doesn't check its math.
• defytonofficial 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• mlazos 4mo ago
  In the 2010s all of my exams were still hand written and I went to Brown.. has everything really been computerized that much? I think the tricky part here is essays, but maybe they should be replaced with an oral exam + essays? A lot of the humanities and classics courses I took were pretty small. Overall I don’t think these problems are that hard, I just don’t know if the incentives of universities align with fixing them. If their reputation is all that it’s for, grades don’t really matter as long as the $$$ is coming in.