Comment on Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

• Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I would argue that in person exams with no resources to do research goes against how the world works for most white collar workers.

  Few are unable to research on the internet to verify information, or at least look at say a man page for coding or look up past stuff on stackoverflow, if they are working through a problem.

  Standardized testing is just not as useful as-is. I do great at it and can typically pass exams without really studying the material, but others are not so lucky.

  I’ve met people who can flunk exams but talk about the problems, go into how they would fix it, and work through a problem to implementation and testing in the real world.

  Oh, and LLMs are the new typewriter, for better or worse. It’s unlikely we are going to have a future where they are not readily available. We already have models that run locally and do not transmit data anywhere, and AI customized to your own data that is not shared is already a service provided by Microsoft.

  Education needs to evolve with technology. It’s always been 5-10 years behind the curve.

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  • blarghly@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Those are all very nice ideas, and we’ll see if they pan out in the future. But universities need ways to stop (or, fine, reduce) cheating that can be implemented right now. A class in English literature and composition should test how well you can read and interpret the source material to then express something about it in your own words in a coherent way. This is a useful life skill to have, and students should learn to do it without AI assistance. Giving them a pen and paper and a quiet room to work in has been a good enough method of assessment for at least the last 50 years which is reasonably cost effective.

    Yes, there are problems with standardized testing. Yes, you can cheat on a paper test. But the way to improve the evaluation process is to first establish a stable baseline, and then try new things that might work better to see if they actually work better. Not to throw out everything we knew before and haphazardly try every random idea that pops into someone’s head in a panic.

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    • Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Lol, english classes have always been the biggest joke of college for me. All you do is write an outline, pull some bullshit quotes to back up your argument from the source to satisfy MLA, and write enough to satisfy the word requirement. It’s all bullshit. it’s all opinion. Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

      If you really want to make people learn how to write professionally without computer assistance like spellcheck or LLMs, give them a fucking typewriter. It’s how I learned to type as a kid in the 90s. At least the typing skill is transferable and you get a great understanding of why applications like Word function the way they function.

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      • blarghly@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

        Okay - I’m sorry your nerd muscles were so weak you couldn’t even hold a pencil.

        But regardless of your personal shortcomings, these classes exist because they teach useful things, and if we want to tell others who did and did not learn those useful things in this class, we need a way to test that knowledge.

        Now, it seems like your point of view is that all the knowledge and experience of a university education is useless anyway. This is a point of view I have some sympathy towards, but on the whole I don’t think it is right. However, if you do, then why the fuck arent you filthy rich yet? If you know so well what people need to know to be successful and well educated for the next 30 years, and you think you know how they should learn, and you know how you can evaluate their abilities after receiving an education - then why aren’t you doing that and raking in the billions of dollars that go into university education right now?

        So go do that. Tell me when you make your first million. But until then, I’m gonna assume that the foundational western liberal education has value, seeing as it has persisted for quite a while. LLMs on the other hand, may very well turn out to be a fad of the summer.

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