Comment on College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT

HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• AeroLemming@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  When I was in school, exams were taken on proctored devices that were locked down by the IT team to the point where you couldn’t even close the test software to look at something else. That’s not any less secure than having to hand-write your answers, and while it may have been expensive, I can’t imagine it being more expensive than missing out on automatic organization and/or grading for certain kinds of tests in the long run.

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  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So, we’re working on a study for online Vs in person.

    We’ve noticed that stiict time limits alone tend to shift grades. A locked down browser sounds great, but anyone can search using their phone, so proctoring is a must (but also time consuming to check) if you want to get the intended effect.

    As for online grading, it’s a mixed bag. With a very strict rubric, gradescope can save a lot of time, but otherwise it takes a lot longer. MCQs and single number answers can be auto-matked, but they’re awful at assessing ability and should be avoided. Overall, grading online costs more than it saves, and tends to give much more rigid feedback to students.

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    • AeroLemming@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Thanks for the thoughtful response. Followup: if all students are facing the same direction, couldn’t you just set up a camera behind and above them to see if they’re hiding a phone behind the monitor? Hiding it under their desk can happen with or without a computer. If students are told that you’re doing that, even if you only watch the camera feed during the test and don’t pay that much attention, the evidence of them cheating being on a recording to be checked at any time would be a very powerful deterrent.

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      • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You could indeed go for such a setup, however, in a room with 50+ students it becomes very hard to angle a camera with a clear view on all of them, their computer screens, and under their desks. It’s easier just to walk around the room to invigilate. However, I might have a read up on this as it might be an option for students with exam anxiety (I realise we look scary walking around the exam room!).

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• Phoebe@feddit.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Sorry but it was never about OUR abilility in the firts place.

  In my country exams are old, outdated and often way to hard. In my country all classes are outdated and way to hard. It often feels that we are stucked in the middle of the 20th century.

  You have no change when you have a disability. When you have kids, parents to take care of. Or hell: you have to work, cause you can’t effort university otherwise.

  So i can totaly understand why students feel the need to use AI to survive that torture. I don’t feel sorry for an outdated university system.

  When it is about OUR abilility, then create a System that is for students and their needs.

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  • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you can use AI to do the homework for you, we can use AI to do the job instead of you

    For the love of god, think beyond yourself for one damn minute

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    • jarfil@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Precisely. Homework and tests that can be solved by an AI, are useless, nobody will hire you to do any of it when they can just plug in an AI.

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• kromem@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is AI going to go away?

  In the real world, will those students be working from a textbook, or from a browser with some form of AI accessible in a few years?

  What exactly is being measured and evaluated? Or has the world changed, and existing infrastructure is struggling to cling to the status quo?

  Were those years of students being forced to learn cursive in the age of the computer a useful application of their time? Or math classes where a calculator wasn’t allowed?

  I can hardly think just how useful a programming class where you need to write it on a blank page of paper with a pen and no linters might be, then.

  Maybe the focus on where and how knowledge is applied needs to be revisited in light of a changing landscape.

  For example, how much more practically useful might test questions be that provide a hallucinated wrong answer from ChatGPT and then task the students to identify what was wrong? Or provide them a cross discipline question that expects ChatGPT usage yet would remain challenging because of the scope or nuance?

  I get that it’s difficult to adjust to something that’s changed everything in the field within months.

  But it’s quite likely a fair bit of how education has been done for the past 20 years in the digital age (itself a gradual transition to the Internet existing) needs major reworking to adapt to changes rather than simply oppose them, putting academia in a bubble further and further detached from real world feasibility.

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  • SkiDude@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you’re going to take a class to learn how to do X, but never actually learn how to do X because you’re letting a machine do all the work, why even take the class?

    In the real world, even if you’re using all the newest, cutting edge stuff, you still need to understand the concepts behind what you’re doing. You still have to know what to put into the tool and that what you get out is something that works.

    If the tool, AI, whatever, is smart enough to accomplish the task without you actually knowing anything, what the hell are you useful for?

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    • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      why even take the class?

      To have a piece of paper to get a job.

      For CS this is nothing new we have been dealing with graduates who can’t program, and self-taught geniuses, since before the AI boom so paper credentials just aren’t as important.

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      • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You don’t need a piece of paper to get a decent job. People go to college to get into fields they personally care about. If all you care about is money, go work sales.

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    • prosp3kt@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      But that’s actually most of the works we have nowadays. IA is replacing repetitive works such as magazine writers or script writers

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  • orangeboats@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    As an anecdotal though, I once saw someone simply forwarding (ie. copy and pasting) their exam questions to ChatGPT. His answers are just ChatGPT responses, but paraphrased to make it look less GPT-ish.

    In this case, the only skill that is tested… is English paraphrasing.

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  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’ll field this because it does raise some good points:

    It all boils down to how much you trust what is essentially matrix multiplication, trained on the internet, with some very arbitrarily chosen initial conditions. Early on when AI started cropping up in the news, I tested the validity of answers given:

    1. For topics aimed at 10–18 year olds, it does pretty well. It’s answers are generic, and it makes mistakes every now and then.

    2. For 1st–3rd year degree, it really starts to make dangerous errors, but it’s a good tool to summarise materials from textbooks.

    3. Masters+, it spews (very convincing) bollocks most of the time.

    Recognising the mistakes in (1) requires checking it against the course notes, something most students manage. Recognising the mistakes in (2) is often something a stronger student can manage, but not a weaker one. As for (3), you are going to need to be an expert to recognise the mistakes (it literally misinterpreted my own work at me at one point).

    The irony is, education in its current format is already working with AI, it’s teaching people how to correct the errors given. Theming assessment around an AI is a great idea, until you have to create one (the very fact it is moving fast means that everything you teach about it ends up out of date by the time a student needs it for work).

    However, I do agree that education as a whole needs overhauling. How to do this: maybe fund it a bit better so we’re able to hire folks to help develop better courses - at the moment every “great course” you’ve ever taken was paid for in blood (i.e. 50 hour weeks teaching/marking/prepping/meeting arbitrary research requirement).

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    • ArmokGoB@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      (1) seems to be a legitimate problem. (2) is just filtering the stronger students from the weaker ones with extra steps. (3) isn’t an issue unless a professor teaching graduate classes can’t tell BS from truth in their own field. If that’s the case, I’d call the professor’s lack of knowledge a larger issue than the student’s.

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      • jarfil@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You may not know this, but “Masters” is about uncovering knowledge nobody had before, not even the professor. That’s where peer reviews and shit like LK-99 happen.

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    • zephyreks@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      On the other hand, what if the problem is simply one that’s no longer important for most people? Isn’t technological advancement supposed to introduce abstraction that people can develop on?

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      • average650@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The point is the students can’t get to the higher level concepts if they’re just regurgitating from what chatgpt says.

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      • MBM@lemmings.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        If you never learn how to do the basics without ChatGPT, it’s a big jump to figure out the advanced topics where ChatGPT no longer helps you

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  • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Textbooks, like on physical paper, are never going to just go away. They offer way tok many advantages over even reading digital books.

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  • AeroLemming@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I get what you’re saying. I think that programming tests on paper are ridiculous too and that testing people’s ability to write flawless code without a linter is not meaningful in the modern era. AI is a bit different for two reasons.

    1. It’s not reliable. If someone uses AI too heavily, they’re going to be entirely unable to work if their AI of choice spits out the wrong answer or goes offline, both of which happen a LOT. Someone needs to be able to create and verify their own code.

    2. When you write an essay about a topic, it’s not about showing that you can produce an essay about that topic, it’s about showing that you have a well-rounded and decent understanding of the topic and therefore can likely apply it in real-world situations (which are harder to test for). AI provides no value in real-world applications of many subjects you may find yourself writing about.

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• mrspaz@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I recently finished my degree, and exam-heavy courses were the bane of my existence. I could sit down with the homework, work out every problem completely with everything documented, and then sit to an exam and suddenly it’s “what’s a fluid? What’s energy? Is this a pencil?”

  The worst example was a course with three exams worth 30% of the grade, attendance 5% and homework 5%. I had to take the course twice; 100% on HW each time, but barely scraped by with a 70.4% after exams on the second attempt. Courses like that took years off my life in stress. :(

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  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you don’t mind me asking - what kind of degree was it, and what format were the exams?

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• Spike@feddit.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We have no way to determine if you did the work, or if an AI did, and if called into a court to certify your expertise we could not do so beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Could you ever though, when giving them work they had to do not in your physical presence? People had their friends, parents or ghostwriters do the work for them all the time. You should know that.

  This is not an AI problem, AI “just” made it far more widespread and easier to access.

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  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “Sometimes” would be my answer. I caught students who colluded during online exams, and even managed to spot students pasting directly from an online search. Those were painful conversations, but I offered them resits and they were all honest and passed with some extra classes.

    With AI, detection is impossible at the moment.

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• Smacks@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Graduated a year ago, just before this AI craze was a thing.

  I feel there’s a social shift when it comes to education these days. It’s mostly: “do 500 - 1,000 word essay to get 1.5% of your grade”. The education doesn’t matter anymore, the grades do; if you pick something up along the way, great! But it isn’t that much of a priority.

  I think it partially comes from colleges squeezing students of their funds, and indifferent professors who just assign busywork for the sake of it. There are a lot of uncaring professors that just throw tons of work at students, turning them back to the textbook whenever they ask questions.

  However, I don’t doubt a good chunk of students use AI on their work to just get it out of the way. That really sucks and I feel bad for the professors that actually care and put effort into their classes. But, I also feel the majority does it in response to the monotonous grind that a lot of other professors give them.

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• garibaldi_biscuit@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Student here - How does that cursive longhand thing go again?

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  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “Avoid at all costs because we hate marking it even more than you hate writing it”?

    An in person exam can be done in a locked down IT lab, and this leads to a better marking experience, and I suspect a better exam experience!

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