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.
Using a special computer works too. I do my exams with our institution's Computer-Based Testing Facility, a bank of computers with fixed software and firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site.
As a result, I've been able to challenge students to solve interactive software security challenges on the midterm and final with automatic grading - something that would have been impossible with pen and paper.
Scalability is really the major challenge. We're rolling out more CBTF rooms and rolling out access to other departments due to demand, but it's definitely more resource-intensive than pen-and-paper. One possibility is to treat CBTFs as computer labs when not actively administering exams (or maybe even vice-versa), something we're looking into doing.
Writing by hand is very painful for some people. I always dreaded blue book exams for this reason, and ended up not writing as much as I wanted because I could not stand the hand pain. Or I got incredibly sloppy so that I could write as fast as possible and get it over with.
I've got kind of messed up hands, but not enough that you'd look at me and say "that guy should get special treatment". From the comments here, there are others like me who similarly hated hand-written tests due to the physical pain of hand writing.
Right? For all the money paid by modern students is it unreasonable to expect some expert human interaction? The cost explosion has been centered outside the classroom, elsewhere in the org, so can't play that card.
You should see how little many of the people providing that expert human interaction are paid. My wife is a professor (in the humanities) with 2 decades of experience and degrees from excellent schools, gets top reviews from students as well and she barely earns enough to live on. If I weren't in tech we would be financially destitute. She already works 60 hours a week with just the courses, prep, grading and meetings she has... any more and she would probably just keel over and faint.
the existence of scantron and the laziness of teachers have turned nearly all assessments into multiple choice which is a terrible type of question. Now we have the technology to have better more signal-heavy types of questions to also be graded automatically. seems like a good thing.
Unless you do a test type exam, Handwriting gets worse when you are out of time or the space is limited. It also adds a lot of stress because ink can be stuck on the pen or the pen can roll out of the table or be lost.
People perfectly smart, but with cryptic handwriting will have much worse results for the same exam on pen and paper vs with a keyboard.
The machines are connected via Ethernet (reliability!) but our exams are hosted on Internet sites like PrairieLearn and Canvas. Those are a lot easier to work with than, say, having to load exams onto a machine accessible on a private LAN.
Yes, said machine could have both the LAN connectivity and WAN access, and we could set up the whole exam website on it, but we would lose out on the flexibility to let profs choose the platform that works best for them.
I'm sure you're exaggerating, but the exam process in a CBTF is pretty lightweight. Students arrive, drop off their bags and phone etc., check in (swipe an ID card, get their picture matched), log into the computer and the exam website. When the exam starts, they refresh the site and do the exam; we've got proctors in the room as usual to watch for any conventional cheating (using a phone, consulting a friend).
If you find that onerous, I guess a paper exam would probably also feel pretty depressing to you.
TBH - for me, it’s an opportunity to do a different kind of exam, with a level of interactivity and realism that isn’t possible with paper exams. It is possible but much more annoying to run such exams in a BYOD setting: for example, the lack of consistency between people’s machines, and the risk of device failures, are just two reasons why BYOD is hard even before you get into the cheating aspects.
> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written.
Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor.
Let people at least type their essay with the standard features of a word processor as usable as MS Word 2000 or better.
I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.
It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"), but it limits what kinds of problems you can reasonably put on the exam. You'll definitely lean a bit more into theoretical stuff than practicals. Which is fine for some courses, I think a bit less interesting in other courses.
Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example
Having said all that... "we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet, go type up all your stuff in this VM we have set up" feels fine if you don't like this constraint IMO
GP is talking about every test being done on a computer presumably to avoid handwriting. Handwriting isn’t the usual “get with the times, grandpa” situation. It’s been proven again and again that writing by hand develops the brain and helps store that new knowledge better. It would be a disservice to the students to only use typing. Or TikTok shorts, or whatever is the tech of the day.
Exams shouldn’t probably be used for learning new information and typing is a lot more efficient and allows editing and revising so there are advantages to that.
> or whatever is the tech of the day.
Rote memorisation has been the standard technique probably for way longer that anything else so I’m not sure that every innovation is inherently inferior to what we had before
Handwriting is still “new information” by the time you are in university? How do you feel about reading when text to speech and LLM summarization are so advanced now?
No wonder some people are so easy to replace with an LLM.
>It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"),
this would also end up valorizing particular ways of thinking or developing, so those whose development methodology is more exploratory until you get a certain point where you get an overarching view of how everything should interact and then go into a quicker iterative mode would be penalized.
I guess it's ok it does this, some things after all must be valorized whatever is chosen, although I've known many people who are quite good using this way of working who would then be downgraded.
Meanwhile I had to do VHDL to design a chip and then write code for it in paper, and get the actual solution the software that was meant to run in my imaginary processor to work, detailing both the code and what we thought our code was doing. Teacher and TAs would later make it run in a Xilinx to grade and make themselves available at a few hours if you wanted to discuss your grade/solution with them at a later time with the thing actually running in a board.
We had 3 hours to make the test. The papers the teacher delivered had differences between them (I think it was four different versions of the test?). The Teacher didn’t stay in the class also, you had to deliver the test to them later in their office.
If you're doing a good job, you have to do that anyway, or at least have enough of a spidey sense for broken code to know when to investigate and add an extra test case.
Something like 30% of the time at $WORK, interviewers report the candidate as having solved the problem when a closer inspection reveals UB, memory corruption, and other bullshit. The test cases pass, and I think that's part of the problem. You can't tune out and avoid deeply understanding the submission.
I'm fine with paper tests as a tradeoff, but in the real world where I am paid to program, I am a strong advocate of advanced type checkers/compilers and other static code analysis tools because they can keep all the code "in their head." They can keep far, far more code "in their head" than even the most gifted programming savants. Literally as I type out a mistake, the type checker alerts me to it.
So in some theoretical hiring example, if I have to choose between two candidates: one which is really good at keeping the code in the head and the other who is less good at that, but who is very skilled at using programming tools like advanced type systems or formal verification tools, then I'd prefer the latter.
Of course in practice, I would of course take a student that I knew had passed their paper test with their own knowledge over a student that likely ran their digital test through an LLM.
I would imagine every professor (or assistant) who graded any programming exam I wrote was doing just that and further expect them to let some things slide as long as the general direction was correct.
This would be HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) not OCR and HTR is a lot harder than OCR especially for modern scripts (i.e. student's scrawls). And at every error the reviewer now needs to check if it was due to an error in the code or due to a bad HTR somewhere in the code.
I'd say compared to just typing the code on a disconnected computer: Not worth it.
Yes. That's exactly what college is. If you don't have the resources to effectively individually evaluate a student's output, you shouldn't hold a graded class.
Then let me spell it out for you, since you seem to be unaware:
There are many, many colleges that have no grad students. Period. They are undergraduate colleges.
Expecting any college or university to just be able to scale up the amount of manpower required to grade their classes/exams by a large multiple is absurdly unrealistic. I assure you that most existing colleges do have plenty of resources to effectively evaluate individual students' outputs, if they don't have to assume that anything submitted digitally is written by LLMs.
That new requirement is a massive change to how they operate, and it's incredibly rude and short-sighted to be dismissive and contemptuous of institutions that have trouble adjusting to it.
These colleges certainly have English, Philosophy, Art, and History classes, all of which require papers to be submitted and the exams consist of essay questions.
That Computer Science is somehow a privileged subject where the exam grading must be automated is elitism of the highest degree.
I graduated from a not so incredible university and we had multiple such rooms. Teaching assistants and some tutors helped supervising the exams and it wasn't easy to cheat without getting caught.
Contestant computers boot a Linux image that contains all the interpreters/compilers and documentation for the supported languages, some editors/IDEs(vim, Jetbrains, Eclipse, etc) and a web browser.
Network access is limited to the judging system only.
My experience in Europe is that most universities can support this.
Jfc, this is a solved problem at the community college near me. All of the computers in the testing room are thin clients that effectively remote into a vm, and you get checked with a metal detector before going into the room with the computers.
If you can escape the vm on the fly and manage to use an llm to cheat, you deserve that A.
IME, that kind of nitpicky grading mostly happens when the exam was designed too easy and does not depend on the medium.
> Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example
Which you really need to do anyway because code that is broken due to a brainfart and code that is broken because of a fundamental misunderstanding should not receive the same grade.
I'm quite a bit older than you, old enough that I remember learning to touch type in elementary school on Apple IIe and IIgs desktop computers. It's not reasonable these days to expect people to hand write a 4, 6, 8 page length essay on paper and pen with a finite time limit in a classroom. Being able to edit and revise things in a word processor type interface is an essential part of writing an academic paper.
Additionally expecting whoever is reading the paper to comprehend everyone's (likely very sloppy, in this era) handwriting is an exercise in frustration for the person who would be evaluating the papers.
Not that tests/exams can't be given on paper, ever (multiple choice still works), but for something where people are expected to provide multiple pages of coherently written essay output, I would struggle to do it by hand. And I'm old enough that we did do a lot purely on paper when I was in school.
My child's high school is doing the same thing: all exams are now handwritten on paper in a supervised room. Phones and smartwatches are always banned during the school day, but laptops are banned during exams. This is standard at state-funded high schools in Australia.
There will likely be a period where those who went through high school with computers struggle with hand writing stuff, but the next generation will have done it all their lives.
If you did it before then, barring physical limitations which have occurred since then, you would struggle for a short while and then you would be fine. I also did coursework purely on paper, got out of practice, and then once my kids were in school got back into the habit of handwriting. I can even write cursive again. Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist. There's a reason it was invented. :)
Being left-handed I've done left-handed cursive for far more than 5 months. I pushed myself to also try and learn to write right-handed. In a left-to-right writing style, its more than just slanting the letters slightly the other way. In the end, the right-hander is overall dragging the pen across the page while the lefty is overall pushing the pen across the page.
I have never been able to handwrite well and my family suspects I have dysgraphia. I can write, but slowly and unreadably. But I can type over 160 wpm. Typing for me is strictly superior, probably by an order of magnitude.
I think you're missing the point. This is a physical limitation. People don't write as much as they used to. I used to be able to write for hours, taking notes, writing papers, etc... Now, I try to take notes during a meeting and my hand cramps. And as a bonus, my handwriting never was great, but now it's illegible for me.
Yes, we all "could" re-learn this skill, but how many people will? If you asked me to type a paper on a locked-down computer, I could easily. If you asked me to write a 2000 word paper by hand in an hour, I doubt it would happen.
If we expect students to take in-person tests on paper, then you should also do the rest of the classwork on paper. I am completely in the camp that we learn more when we write something. The physical act is part of the learning process. But you can't expect students to write an in-depth exam without having the practice of doing it often.
From what I recall, doing handwritten CS exams in 2004, you aren't writing long essays. Long form was the course work. The exam was short form answers and it did not stress my writing hand. The one with most writing was the natural language exam (an extinct subject I should think) and I felt more time worry over having to flip back and forth between pages to cross reference than time spent writing.
> It's not reasonable these days to expect people to hand write a 4, 6, 8 page length essay on paper and pen with a finite time limit in a classroom.
Say what? Writing by hand is not only useful to write. It helps practice fine motor control. Something you need in many places in life, and most people have no practice of other than by writing.
I've sat exams a few years after university (for a tentative career change) and I can tell you I'd forgotten how genuinely tiring writing so much by hand was. I've made sure to write more regularly since, just in case I change from software engineering to something that requires more handwriting.
Well, how many times in that 9 years have you written on paper for 2 hours straight? Even as a kid who did it regularly, it sucked.
Doing it now I really don't think I could deliver my intellectual best while worrying about if anyone can read my handwriting and whether I'm gonna cramp up by the end of the exam.
Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.
Well to be fair humans had to suffer through all kinds of miserable practices over those years. Modern style of writing as we understand it didn’t really develop until the 800s or so (if not way later).
So it’s like saying that clay tablets worked just fine for 1000+ years why would we switch to papyrus? Or who needs character for vowels? Or spaces between words, it’s not like anyone reads texts silently?
I'm much older. I've always been able to type faster than I can write by hand. Forcing me to handwrite an answer slows me down -- and produces something that's much harder to read.
I’m 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?
I'm 60+. I'd be more concerned about the student's physical ability to write for several hours continuously. Writer's cramp used to be a problem, and that was when we were used to hand-writing everything. Legibility is also a consideration: I have to hand-write a lot(keyboards would not be socially acceptable for some of my work), and even with decades of practice and a hand that I designed for legibility, sometimes I have difficulty reading my own writing.
We have to notice that high stakes exams on paper worked for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, and high stakes exams on personal laptops have been tried for approximately six years and worked for none of them. With that framing, I don’t think the burden of proof is on the side saying that kids can take exams on paper?
They have, but antiquity is not necessarily a good argument. I attended a university which required examinees to wear a black suit, white bow tie, bands, and a gown. I don't recommend it.
But this is missing the point. The issue is not that people in general can't write by hand for hours, but that these particular people may have difficulty.
> We have to notice that high stakes exams on paper worked for hundreds, possibly thousands of years
Define “worked” there are reasons we have abandoned quite a few archaic practices which turned to be highly ineffective in hindsight (and often quite misery inducing). I’m not implying that handwriting is one of them just that it’s a terrible argument.
> burden of proof is on the side saying that kids
Smacking children who fail to give a correct answer with a stick worker for thousands of years as well..
I have absolutely no concern over a 20 yr old's ability to weather the rigors of manipulating a 7 gram pencil. It's not like we're talking about getting them to spend a week on a roofing crew or swap their gaming mouse for a set of post hole diggers here. If someone needs an accommodation then that should absolutely be made available.
Nothing to do with weight. It's a cramp in the muscles of the hand from holding the pen and making fine movements for hours. I'm guessing you are from a generation after keyboard use became common, so you haven't encountered it.
I'm all for handwritten tests, but it's more complicated than that. If you're actually writing for 2hr+ and haven't studied appropriate technique or bought some sort of crutch like a pencil holder then the repetitive motion will absolutely cause cramps for a fraction of the class regardless of being 20ish and healthy, and they might not find that out until they're forced to write for 2hr. The muscles manipulating a pencil (with poor technique) are much smaller than those manipulating a post hole digger, so that comparison isn't fair.
Not in my experience, nobody complained of that during my studies. 74 exams over 5 years ca. 2h long, also 2h long lectures, often without pause, back-to-back with another such lecture (but max 2 in a row)
A good exam also has breaks between writing because you need them to think about what you are going to write. An exam that is just about writing down words as fast as you can is going to suck whether that's handwritten or with a keyboard.
You should definitely take speed into consideration. If your're writing an essay, being able to type it out and still have both the opportunity and time to edit it is great. If you're writing it on paper, you likely have neither. What comes to you first is what's submitted.
When I was in grade school the common practice was to use the back page of the exam booklet to do a quick outline (assuming there was no other scrap paper available) and just cross it out when you were done with it. Being able to organize your thoughts and maintain a clear direction in writing 500-1000 words seems like an important thing to test for.
And that's exactly the point! By making sure the student can't edit the entire text once its written, you force him to think about the essay's structure and force him to plan much more before writing :)
Absolutely! That's why they are students: you learn to walk before you learn to run. Students should be forced to plan their texts and practice getting better at that. Whenever they leave school, they'll be able to write even better texts than the essays.
Honestly, school essays, as a text genre, suck to read. They are not meant to be enjoyable, beautiful texts! Instead, they are meant to help gauge the student's ability at text planning, the quality of their text project, their grammatical knowledge, and orthography.
I must say I'd be open to seeing schools attempting other models, though, and measuring the results thereafter to see in practice what happens when students type their essays instead. In terms of text projects and planning, that could be interesting and train different skills.
If the goal is to assess the ability of the student to produce a professional product, then why prevent them from using AI in the first place? The vast majority of professionals have access to AI nowadays?
Most curricula should probably feature both forms of assessment, demonstrating your knowledge of the basics in a closed book assessment and your ability to produce high quality final products using all resources available to you in take home assignments.
It's not JUST about output, it's also about learning. The output is a way to measure the learning, it's not important of itself except as a reflection of the student's mastery of the curriculum.
You're thinking of the output as the goal rather than as the means to an end.
No, I’m not? As I said, you should assess whether people know the basics (I.e. are they learning) by testing without AI tools available. However, I believe you need to learn how to employ AI tools, just as you need to learn how to use a word processor. And the best way to do that is through experience.
If you’re suggesting that the test favors those capable of arranging their thoughts and words before putting pen to paper then.... I’m not sure there’s a problem
Sure but given any length of time, which does tend to be finitely allocated for a test (if for no other reason than the prof or proctor does have other places to be eventually), having to hand write is slower and harder to revise, which means it's harder to get that full, understanding-demonstrating essay, done and polished.
What? Suppose you want to fix the opening of your essay. Best case it's pencil and you can erase some, but worst case you have a longer sentence you want to put in there so you can't do it without scribbling all over and making a mess of the page. Word processors let you edit. How is this controversial?
> why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?
Okay, so from first principles:
1. Time is finite, we will all perish
2. Unless you are doing open book, needs to be supervised (proctored / or prof/TA is there)
3. That person is paid for a shift
4. That shift must end
5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.
> 5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.
I think you're missing some logic in there somewhere. If a student fills in as many pages as they can, each with the number 1 written on it as large as possible, was this a good conclusion? The quantity of writing is not a good metric.
EDIT: to give a closer to reality example, an essay that's 4 times longer than a competing essay does not make it better.
Not sure why you're getting so hyperbolic. The point isn't to write as much as possible, it's to be able to get all of your points across. I'm not talking about where the "answer" is 10 words long, I was thinking of a general essay. Longer isn't better, however, half an essay may be pretty useless to get a good grade, and if you can write twice as fast, you have a much less chance of running out of time, for any quantity of "time" without having to allocate hours, wasting more proctor time and making exams harder to schedule. Because like someone else said, they don't impose a time limit to screw the slowest-writing students, they do it for practicality (my above comment was trying to explain that).
It’s fine to erase or use scratch paper on an essay test.
You don’t write the test to fill the 60 minute slot. You time it so students are able to finish early if they’re really good. Slow ones need the whole time but can still do well if they understand the material being tested.
Well, to some extent, yes. Of course the literal number of works you can write per minute is not, but:
- someone with a good understanding will often come to a concise, clear answer while someone struggling will produce a convoluted paragraph.
- the way to get to the result will vary depending on your understanding (e.g., are you blindly applying some method or understanding what's going on). For instance, "hey, this is a vector field, I don't need to evaluate this complex integral, I just need to compute the difference between the start and endpoint of the curve!". Both answers will be correct, but one denotes a much better actual understanding (and will take way less time).
I literally explained this above. No one is trying to rush the students or punish the slowest writers. It's because time is finite and having tests sized so that it's impossible for the slowest test-taker to even feel rushed means that the test time period needs to be much longer. That means higher costs for paying the proctor and makes them much harder to schedule since you need enough very long non-overlapping test periods that every standard class scheduling slot has a corresponding exam period (and think of midterms -- those often have to fit in a standard class period, or else if someone takes longer, that might blow through another class).
I meant to say they usually aren’t a rush for non-ace students, just a full hour. You have to work diligently, though. Competitive tests excepted, obviously.
Re "hand writing is harder to revise", I never had an issue with erasing words or parts of the text and using asterisks, end footnotes, the margins and whatever free space available (with arrows or not) to do revisions in written exams. Nobody complained and afaik it was fairly standard to do where I studied, as long as your exam itself was actually legible. Granted, I refer to math-related exams not essays on literature or philosophy where form may have mattered more. On the other hand, I cannot imagine writing any math during an exam on a computer.
I would often do a bullet point summary/outline of my answer on the paper. That would have arrows and insertions and crossed-out stuff everywhere -- it was usually a mess.
But then I'd use that to write the actual text answer, and consequently, it was mostly clean. I'd still have to cross stuff out or add a phrase between the lines every so often, but once the basic structure was done, that was mostly unnecessary.
And if I was ever pressed for time, I'd usually get part marks for the outline anyway. Depending on the subject, I'd sometimes race through the questions doing just the outlines, and then come back to write the full text as a complete second pass.
To be fair, this wasn't creative writing. I think it'd be harder when the expression is the content.
That's a strawman. I said bottlenecking testing by requiring hand writing is stupid. Put another way - you're meant to be using the test to be thinking and re-thinking the problem and articulating approaches and solutions, not use your time, effort and energy on managing quill and paper.
It's not a strawman. If the test is designed so that you have spend most of the time thinking about your answer then even doubling the writing time has not significant impact.
>The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.
Testing for understanding requires the fastest WPM possible. Regardless of the method used, students don't all write at the same speed. To minimize the influence of this variance, they need to use the fastest writing technique possible. If a fast writer spends 30 minutes writing in a two hour test, and a slow writer needs a full hour, the fast writer gets 50% more thinking time. But if you double both their writing speeds, the fast writer's advantage drops to 17%.
The faster the writing technique people are allowed to use, the better your test can identify poor understanding.
If you can't concentrate while people are working on computers near you, I don't think you'll do well in any workplace that is based around knowledge work.
This is why I prefer working alone at night and am massively more productive. In any case, what's being tested in an exam setting is one's understanding of the course material, not whether they are a good fit for your idea of a normal workplace.
Playing devil's advocate: one reason I'm good at typing on computers is that I learned on typewriters, which need much more force for each key press, especially the little fingers. Someone who learned on computer keyboards won't have trained the muscles on their fingers as much, and will have a hard time pressing the outer keys strongly enough (and if you press the keys too lightly, the mechanism won't hit the ink ribbon with enough force to transfer the ink to the paper).
Electric typewriters were pretty widespread by the 60-70s or so it’s just that they don’t have quite as much “retro” appeal these days ( eg like cassettes vs vinyl)
I saw plenty of mechanical typewriters by the 80s/90s, when I learned typing at school. A relative of mine also taught a typewriter course, with several different mechanical typewriter models. Everyone I know who had a typewriter had a mechanical one. I don't think I've ever seen an electric typewriter in person; I've only read about them in the Internet. They don't seem to have been that widespread to me.
Typewriters are an expensive and niche item these days, due to no longer being manufactured, and the good ones being collected by weird nerds. Sort of like buying a 40-year-old vinyl turntable that is in good and usable condition.
If I build you a custom device that receives questions from a central computer and lets the user plug in whatever keyboard they want via bluetooth or usb to only type and answer the questions (ability to edit the text and submit when ready). The central computer can receive all the questions submitted to any of these devices connected to it via wifi or cloud. How much would pay per device? Would you pay for a subscription?
I think this can already be implemented through a fairly mundane thin client approach, such as Dell/Wyse type thin clients, citrix stuff, or an ordinary x86-64 desktop PC setup with an absolute barebones OS that connects a graphical desktop session to something centralized over a LAN.
You mean on mechanical typewriters? It would be hard to learn to press keys slowly and avoid rollover unless using single finger typing: key travel was a long way on old typewriters.
> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary.
I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical.
It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.
I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.
That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here
Well sure, but if you force feed anything clumsily you can ruin it. We had a nice teacher, and took our sweet time in first grade learning to write the alphabet in first grade. Then it was done. IMO it wasn't "additional material", or material at all, it was part of the fundamental skill set with which to interact with the material. And there wasn't a thought in my mind that it could be any other way, of course you learn to read and write when you go to school.
If you mandate force feeding at scale, then yes, some instructors will do so clumsily -- this is virtually guaranteed, although it is true that some topics are more prone to this than others.
But I think you misinterpreted my comment -- I am not advocating for doing away with schooling or testing understanding in school in general, which is entirely my fault as my post was a bit unclear. But I agree with you that one should learn to read and write in school!
OP used the phrasing "force them", which I read as a stronger statement than "it'll be on the exam", and more "there will be an exam or entire course on this topic that must be passed or else". My point, more or less, was that there are many other more fundamental topics we already do this with other than cursive, and that adding another has a steep cost with uncertain payoff that is heavily dependent on the implementation.
There was an enormous volume of material that I never understood in high school because at the time I either didn't care or other things seemed more important -- my mom was dying, for starters.
But just having exposure to that material planted it in my mind and, in many cases, I revisited those topics later as an adult and learned them properly.
To be clear, I am not advocating for doing away with testing or schooling altogether. I am only pushing back on the idea that a 16 year old who doesn't care about cursive or calculus or Chaucer or whatever today won't ever care about those topics unless we mandate he pass an exam or course on it.
More broadly, my point is that there is a cost to "forcing them" as the grandparent advocates with regard to learning cursive. The moment you "force them" you also guarantee that some people won't graduate because of that extra requirement. There are other ways to enrich people's lives without force feeding, e.g., mention it and devote a question on an exam to it.
i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written.
and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged.
i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.
I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s.
These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.
It's been clearly shown to be beneficial for some people. I too happen to be one of them.
For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.
I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?
I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.
Same here, apparently it’s a major ADHD thing. I can take notes or I can pay attention and try to understand, but I can’t do both, you have to pick one (a calculus teacher in high school was very insistent that constant note taking for her rapid-fire example-heaving lectures was required, so… yeah I didn’t have a clue WTF we’d even been covering after each of those classes, though I’d have lots of notes!)
Are you sure this is a permanent fact about you and not something that would change if it became habitual?
I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.
Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22
I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.
But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.
Not disagreeing with your opinion, just answering your question:
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
Couldn't you make the argument that training the hands for more lifting and tiny movements has better long-term payoffs as that is also beneficial to many other tasks?
What's really important is handwriting itself. Block letters are honestly fine.
Writing in a good cursive (like the Spencerian script) is a bit faster and much easier on your hands, as you don't have to lift the pen as often. But that matters only when you need to write pages and pages of text.
My native language is Russian, and in Russian schools cursive was mandatory. Writing in block letters was seen as a sign of illiteracy.
I started learning English as a foreign language, and we didn't bother with cursive. So I kept writing in block letters for quite a while. I then started learning German, and our teacher taught us German cursive handwriting. I'm now using it for English as well :)
> Writing in block letters was seen as a sign of illiteracy
How interesting. I've always thought the cyrillic block letters look beautiful, whereas the cursive variant not so much. I learnt some russian and I've never bothered writing cursive because of this perception. Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!
Cyrillic block letters are mostly the same as Latin letters :)
> Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!
There's a HUGE difference between learning Russian as a native and as a foreign language. Especially if you can write! Russian spelling rules are quite opaque.
People will absolutely be impressed by your writing.
My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.
So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?
If everything is just extremes, then acknowledge that the other extreme then is everybody sitting on their ass watching "Ow! My balls!", clad in advertisements. And given the choice between those two worlds, yes, everybody should have the dexterity of a surgeon.
It's a matter of spending 200 to 300 hours of practice on it.
Learning cursive (and other skills) in school is about trying to make sure opportunities for professions are not excluded.
While cursive is not a foundational skill (compare math and reading), it is a way to train fine motor control.
And it's not only the dental surgeons, but also dental hygienists... and doctors and surgeons (anyone who uses a scalpel). One could also look at various craftsmen such as jewelers and watchmakers.
Learning cursive is a way to make sure that we don't exclude people at an early age from professions that they might want to go into.
Developing fine motor control for cursive is actually improving cerebellar function. It turns out that the cerebellum is a general "organ" for fine control and synchronization of neural function across the brain. It is implicated in:
* Reading and responding to other people's emotions.
* Emotional regulation.
* Generalized sequencing.
* Musical ability.
* Counting.
* Following patterns.
While you may see it as a waste, you may very well have benefited in significant ways from learning it at a young age.
One kid in my school didn't write cursive, but wrote block letters so beautifully, it looked near printed. And he was probably faster than most. He also played the piano since young age and is a professional pianist now, so yeah :)
So I would totally put it on the same level, theoretically. That is, you can write block letters with just as much skill and care as you can cursive, I think. Just like you can write cursive by just doing squiggly lines (as doctors write prescriptions).
I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.
Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.
I'm neither fully left handed or fully right handed. I mostly write with my left hand, but it has never been clean, despite doing all of my school work for 18 years with either pencil or pen and paper.
I wish I could have a just spent "an afternoon" to magically make either my printing or cursive better, but it basically stalled out early on and never improved despite years of practice.
What's the benefit of a HNSW KNN search over brute forcing it? Speed, with minimal loss of accuracy.
Cursive vs printing (I'm guessing that's what you mean by "standard writing") is exactly the same, provided you can actually write in cursive. If you weren't taught in school, then sucks to be you, I guess? Modern pedagogy has a lot to answer for :(
I was taught cursive in elementary school along with everyone else. It was always slower than normal block letters for me. I always kind of resented having to learn it.
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
(Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)
When each word is a smooth continuous line I can write faster and with less effort. The short up and down motions of printed letters tires out my hand.
No. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.
Where are you thinking? Everyone I know who speaks a language written with Latin characters doesn't use cursive. I know very little about other character sets - I believe nearly all Arabic is cursive for instance - but this has been my experience across countries.
As a specific example, all of my friends in Germany - whether born there, in Eastern Europe, or whatever - use print letters, not cursive.
In 2nd grade I was assured by my teachers that all adults wrote cursive and you had to relearn the alphabet again. Then in 3rd grade the teachers all said they couldn't read anyone's handwriting and to print everything.
In high school the most difficult part of the SAT was the honor pledge that you didn't cheat that you had to write in cursive. Nobody writes cursive.
When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.
Talking about programming-related courses, I can see the point of testing on a computer where one can run and debug actual code (that's how I had my programming courses) but I am not sure I get the advantage or writing code or pseudocode on a "basic word processor".
Moreover, for math or math-heavy courses (assuming most people with degrees here have STEM degrees, and many with at least some math) I cannot imagine how to comfortably write math in a word processor. Or use latex and not spend half the time troubleshooting latex, esp without internet access. So for some kind of courses at least, imo pen and paper for a timed in-person exam is the only way.
Otherwise def doable, but knowing how some universities function, I think the main problem would be getting the agreement and initiative to set such a computer room up. Getting some kind of consensus between professors that this is how (some) exams should be held and including it in the Holy Curriculum. Getting bureaucrats understand what it is about eg why you need these wired connections when the uni has a campus-wide wifi. Getting IT security agree with using old computers with lubuntu instead of their bloated enterprise windows "secure" OS. And if they are not connected to the internet how will they get security updates? How do we conform to whatever IT security rules are in place?
Writing on paper is much simpler, everybody can understand it and has been standard for decades at least. It can start tomorrow and be used in the interim while waiting approval for such a computer setup.
> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor.
Exams that only require paper, tables, and chairs can be done anywhere, and require minimal setup/set down, transport, or power, and no tech support.
Even a setup with cheap Raspberry Pi's? And Vim. (built-in bonus points for students being able to save and exit). Was just reading about LEAP[0][1] that thought you may find interesting if you have not yet seen it.
Separately, wanted to say I enjoyed your essay and appreciate how you think about improvement with a focus on the practical usefulness for the student.
TL;DR: I especially think the concept of Interview-Based Grading would be the way to go.
A couple progressive Whiteboard interviews for CS a semester, power point for Business etc. If they use AI to prepare, create material or learn/improve from then they are gaining the skills that will be required in real-world work. If they choose to not learn the material (or understand/check AI output) it would show during the back and forth with a panel of professors (dunno if you guys like working together though); built-in load sharing with a wider range of questions.
I guess with issues you mentioned the whole system needs overhauled for it to work. Adjusted for different courses -- and I dunno how practical this is but -- but why not let kids do more guided self-learning, keep office/lab hours for individual help. Fewer lectures due to self study with repurposed time for live evaluations. Eliminating non essential courses a student takes for a major/minor would also lessen the collective workload of professors (fewer student, but ones that want to be there).
That learning & evaluation set-up would be my dream college -- I would have pursued
completely different life in that setup. I wanted to learn and engage, not prove I can regurgitate rote-memory notes that are handed out while my employment required me to grasp changing context and modify the code while not unwittingly automating the deletion of production dbs.
Physics 107 at U of I in the 80’s had all quizzes on the PLATO system. Please for the love of mercy do not not go back to inflexible systems for exams and quizzes.
With all the work around AI sandboxes, microVMs, browser sandboxes, device attestation, secure boot etc. I feel like we should be able to construct a proper software sandbox that works on most PCs and guarantees that e.g nothing outside of the word processor runs now. Like the OS would need to guarantee that nothing outside some narrow well-defined qemu VM runs for some time an the VM takes care of the rest.
There's no such thing as "filtering" in academics. You don't get to kick out the students who didn't do well on the multiple choice and only proceed with the ones who scored highly.
I had classes in school that had multiple-choice quizzes every couple of weeks. It helped students figure out if they knew the material just covered and it helped the prof know how well he did teaching. They acted as checkpoints.
The mid-term and final exams were not multiple choice (at least not entirely).
WTF. OK, clearly you're contributing to the problem too. Yes, there is such a thing as passing and failing, regardless what your ideology has brainwashed you to believe.
My dad is an English professor and wrote his first manuscript turned book on a typewriter much to his editor’s dismay in the late 1990s. He used to compel me to type my Christmas wishlist / letter to Santa on it as well perhaps with the added benefit of reducing its length.
Computers good enough to run libreoffice writer or the equivalent and print to a networked laser are thrown in the ewaste trash all the time, the cost really would be in the labor and somewhat custom software setup. Could also reuse old flat panel displays that have been decommissioned from office use.
I (as part of a small team) run the IT side of exams for a UK University and as well as the many exams intended to be taken entirely with computers, we also deliberately have an exam that's always marked as "Available to take" regardless of where on campus you are and what machine you're using, that exam just launches a stripped down Microsoft Word, with no way to start other software or access your own data.
So instead of reading the instruction book and writing either in the book or on separate provided paper, you read the book and type your answers in Word, when you're done either your work is printed or these days often it's automatically sent to the markers electronically.
There's a spectrum of people using this, going from the profoundly blind who couldn't have attempted an actual hand written exam through to people who have dyslexia or similar problems and would be able to write but it might be very difficult to mark. It also becomes a "last ditch fallback" for a number of scenarios where plans went wrong or something was forgotten and so that's why it's always available - we do run exams specifically planned to be in Word, but those have distinct IDs so that you know you're taking the exam "HIST1234/C4 History of Clowns and Clowning. Essay on prepared topic" or whatever, as well as "Multiple choice" style exams, and a large number of exams which involve using computer tooling, e.g. R, Stats packages, programming.
Accommodations for those who have problems with writing has been a thing for a long time.
It's fascinating to see all the people here who are arguing that it is impossible to do what we did all the time in my step-daughter's childhood, my childhood, my parents' childhoods, my grandparents' childhoods, etc.
> Accommodations for those who have problems with writing has been a thing for a long time.
What is practical changes over time. Insistence that "We always did X => That's enough" makes no sense in a universe where the only constant is change itself.
In 1926 it's not really practical to even have a global voice conversation, even world leaders must travel in person to properly negotiate or send trusted negotiators. By 1976 you can just pick up a phone and call from say Birmingham in England to Birmingham in Alabama, because why not. By 2026 you don't even think about which Birmingham the other party is in, they're both on the Network so you can talk to them, who cares?
At my child's high school, phones are "off and away all day", and the punishment for being caught with a phone in your pocket (or hands) is pretty severe.
During an exam, it's an instant zero mark, on top of the after-school detention (the punishments escalate to suspension and expulsion for repeat offenses).
The same method that any test given in the last 150 years has done to prevent people from using cheat sheets or similar, by having roaming proctors in the room? Or policies like certain models of HP or TI graphing calculator only allowed on the table, for the sort of test that requires one...
I have had a couple exams in university where it was explicitly allowed to bring a (handwritten) A4 cheat sheet. Depends what you are testing though - understanding or memorization.
Lots of ways to disable USB ports in bios and at the operating system level, additionally have a proctor watching to be sure everyone is in a word processor. Heck, ewaste grade computers can run a basic word processor, fill all USB ports except the mouse and keyboard with epoxy. Mount the computer in such a way the rear ports are inaccessible without it being very obvious what someone is doing and fill just the front ports (if they exist) with epoxy. Lots of ways to go about it.
These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive
Pretty sure that augmented reality glasses, and things in the category of the meta glasses with built-in camera are already banned in most academic test environments, by a blanket policy prohibiting the use of any camera in the room.
Right, they're easy to detect today, that's not going to last long. The whole point is to prevent cheating, well, cheats aren't going to follow the rules. Written tests/in person tests aren't a complete answer to this.
If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection.
If we get to the point where even that doesn’t work then we’ll be at the point where a camera in the room with an AI analyzing eye movements should be able to detect it. And no matter how advanced they get they’ll still need to radiate heat, so a thermal camera should work. If that fails, industrial CT scanners are getting cheaper and cheaper.
Heck if it gets too bad there’s always mm wave body scanners and a set of cheap glasses kept at school.
About 95% joking, but in that case, have everyone lock their phones in a tiny locker shelf thing and wand everyone with a nonlinear junction detector. If we get to the point in technology and battery capability where camera glasses are compact enough to be indistinguishable from ordinary metal eyeglass frames, we'll probably also have really good low cost portable tech to detect any on-body electronics (vs the flesh and clothing and metal accessories like belt buckles on a human body).
> If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection.
We had a 'fix' for this back when they checked your TI83.
It's a 2 line basic program to display "MEMORY CLEAR" the exact same way as if somebody had spent the time to find the actual memory clear function in the settings.
When I started university, it did indeed have a dedicated building that was essentially a computer lab specifically for testing. In theory, cheating was prevented by having people walk around the lab watching the students. Toward the end, I did have a couple exams that needed the absolutely batshit insane malware installed on a personal device, but I think if I were to do it again today, I could still demand to use the testing center instead. It still exists.
I would bet good money, statistically, that forcing hand written tests with pen and paper is much more likely to disadvantage students with a medically documented physical disability than you are to encounter someone who can't type at all on a standard 101 key qwerty layout keyboard.
At my university, students with verified disabilities are allowed to use a university-provided laptop (properly locked-down, with allowed tools such as screen readers). But these are special cases. Computers for everyone would be costly and impractical given exams are punctual but all roughly over the same week or so.
I'm currently getting my Bachelor's in Computer Science, while in-person is absolutely necessary, it doesn't necessarily need to be hand-written. We now have the exam questions printed out, and we respond on the online exam platform, just like we would before. It is explicitly stated that no aids, including AI, are permitted. There's usually the prof and at least one more TA walking around the room, if anyone is seen with something other than the exam platform open they fail the exam.
Some profs also started requiring special software for doing the exams, which works fine but is pretty annoying to use since it requires Windows, but that application basically hijacks the OS, making it impossible to navigate to any different webpage/ application.
In 2024, we had some coding exams, and AI was explicitly NOT forbidden, which lead to them making the exam more difficult (because with AI, you can solve it so much more quickly, so gotta make it harder), which was really annoying, because it made it practically impossible to solve it yourself because of the time crunch. I hope they realized how wrong that was.
In 2024, we had some coding exams, and AI was explicitly NOT forbidden, which lead to them making the exam more difficult (because with AI, you can solve it so much more quickly, so gotta make it harder), which was really annoying, because it made it practically impossible to solve it yourself because of the time crunch. I hope they realized how wrong that was.
There should be at least one class, probably more, that work exactly like that.
That’s where the industry is moving. Yes, get the fundamentals too, but don’t omit teaching what graduates will actually be doing out of some misplaced sense of purity.
I don't really see the value in testing something like this in the exam format. We have a lot of programming projects we do, where software engineering is the primary focus, and there I think is space to give an introduction on how to use AI for software engineering, what to avoid, current best practices.
But the class I was talking about in my earlier comment was specifically on the fundamentals of programming (how to write a for loop, how to write and call functions... all that sorta stuff). If you need AI to complete this, why even get the degree. Maybe in 10-20 years we'll think differently about this, but as it stands right now, I think someone holding a degree in computer science should absolutely know the fundamentals of computer programming.
I think this isn't quite the right example - a pocket calculator does not need you to verify its output. It is better to be able to calculate, but if you can't seems much less a issue then using a AI without being able to do whatever you asked of it
(So I fully agree with your point, but I think your example is not strong enough)
Yes, that’s where we are today. Colleges definitely can’t avoid fundamentals right now. But at the same time, they should be skating ahead of the puck. Once the calculator has been invented—-even when it’s rare and awkward—-they begin easing off the slide rule reps.
Thanks for the very interesting write up, I am teaching management studies programming Python (people who want to be quants, dana analysts, etc.) and I am struggling with the same problem - how the hell do grading to make it reliable.
LLMs has become good enough so whatever homework task I give, it can be solved easily by any LLM (and, in fact, this becomes unfair to those who are not able to pay for good model). I was asking to add comments & interpretation of results, this slightly helped, but LLMs are increasingly good in all this as well.
So, quite seriously, I am considering some on paper tests & quizes, because what else can be done?
Making people aware about importance of writing code is indeed a good hint to convince, at least part of the people to do this. Another thing is: they will leave university one day, they will search for employment and the employer might be much more hostile towards cheating during job interview and can easily make cheating with AI impossible... Question is, will it still matter?
As a student, I have no issue doing oral exams or written exams without notes. I mean I'm there to learn and out of curiosity so I like that challenge...
I truly don't understand how people can sign up for a degree and then have to cheat? Must feel torturous to endure a class you're not even interested in.
For many people and in many places, having a degree is a differentiator that increases someone's chance of being able to earn money. Not everyone is studying because they're interested, but rather because if they don't, their opportunities will be reduced, possibly significantly.
When I was a student (and a student TA), what I heard or saw was that students were in CS for money, or their parents forced them to study it. Both of these things created some sort of extrinsic motivation that leads to cheating. In some cases (eg. in my high school) I heard parents would threaten to beat their children if they did not do well in their classes. So maybe that pressure continues in college. And for some, they just want an easy 6 figure job and are willing to take shortcuts. Students I know (some honest, some not) have mentioned they cheat on CS interviews or lie on their resume.
Additionally, I heard that multitides of parents would threaten to withhold tuition if their child failed a class. since the university is not well off, they acquiesce and make classes easier for students who aren't interested.
I wonder if messages like "there's no such thing as gifted children"[1], create a situation where if a student struggles to keep up with their peers, they might conclude that their peers have unfair advantages.
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/.
Fruit of labor? Good students of science produce novel science..as in testable ideas without precedent.. a thing llms struggle with, as they at best can interpolate and mash up previous ideas
Many good students don't produce such artifacts. That's one of the big problems in academia -- a smart person with good ideas can inadvertently pursue a less promising path and not produce ground-breaking research, so how do you tease that apart from somebody scamming the system? The current approach is to measure unrelated bullshit like citation metrics. I'd hate to see those sorts of perverse incentives pushed down into the student body as well.
Or maybe you can be smart but have no ideas in quantity and quality, thus you rig the systems in your favour to not be dethroned by those who can. But that would show by number of innovations per yearafter a systemic shakeup like a war.
It shows up easily at a macro level of you look at total "innovations" for a society (and have a good way to measure that -- currently still in an "I know it when I see it" stage). It won't usually show up in individual researchers. A few will absolutely be insanely productive with real innovations, but unless you're proposing only hiring that small cast of individuals then you're back to the problem of distinguishing good scientific ideas and methods which just didn't pan out from other forms of actual laziness and fraud given that in both cases you see no meaningful output from the researcher in question.
Speed is an asset, and I think it's an underrated one. Timed assessments are, in part, a speed challenge; students who understand the material more thoroughly can apply it faster and more accurately, giving them more time to complete the exam and to review it.
Yes, students can raise their score by cramming, but won't be as fast or as fluent as a student who has learned and internalized the material over the term.
I agree and would like to move towards a customized computer setup like you mention. A friend at Berkeley manages a similar setup. Unfortunately Montana State is too small to have set one up yet.
I agree that that is probably the lowest stake solution. Alternatively there are solutions like the safe exam browser which locks down the device quite well during the exam session.
—- Disclosure:
I run a small start up which offers teachers a platform to create and conduct digital exams and interfaces with the safe exam browser precisely because cheating is the number one complaint teachers I have spoken to have when it comes to digital exams.
Yup! That’s true and I wish it was different! In Germany there are quite a few schools which hand out locked down iPads to their students, with the expectation that they are used for school purposes and not for private usage or schools that have fixed installation school computers which can be used in exam settings.
I think most teachers have adapted pretty well. I'm really surprised to find teachers that haven't reckoned with possibility of AI cheating in 2026.
In person writing, etc. But also for anything take home students have to verbally discuss their work in some fashion. Seems to mostly work. Students still us ChatGPT as a search engine, which seems fine.
(Source: married to a professor. And my son is in high school)
All my stem exams were hand written, it's how it should be. The best part is coming out with everyone else already disheveled and then grabbing a drink (or many) after the last one is over. That's some solidarity drinking right there.
It's news to me that they weren't already. My exams were all in person and on paper in the early 2020s, and even my physics homework was a "do it on engineering paper and drop it in a mail slot" affair. The professors would forbid computers and phones during lectures and would stop to shame anyone who thought they were being sneaky.
Computer Science classes were all on paper for exams, and low level ones did the old "here's a Javadoc, write some code with a pencil."
The only online exams I had were for 100 level electives.
It’s an old (and outdated IMO) tradition at some Ivy Leagues, as the article notes.
It may have worked in the era when students had a little more fear of repercussions and a little more sense that cheating on a test would only cause them problems when courses got harder later.
Now it seems there is little interest in dealing with cheating, as evidenced by how hard it was for this professor to even get attention to the matter within his department. Students also don’t believe cheating will cause them future harm because they assume they can cheat everything up through graduation the same way.
When the rug gets pulled and they have to demonstrate their knowledge in person without ChatGPT, the cheaters collapse. I fear that we’re delaying this reckoning so deep into academic careers now that by the time these students encounter the point where they can’t cheat their way to completion of a course they’re in for a world of hurt, if they continue at all. We really should be coming down hard on cheating earlier and more often.
It's an old enough tradition that there are jokes that rely on you knowing the tradition.
My favorite: professor known for being VERY strict tells class repeatedly in weeks leading up to exam, "You will have exactly two hours to finish your exam, and no more. I will not accept exam booklets turned in even one minute past the two hour mark: they will score a zero. Be warned."
Exam day comes, and all but one student are in their seats with the blue exam booklet in front of them when the professor says "Begin." He arches an eyebrow at the empty desk, but says nothing.
Fifteen minutes later, the tardy student rushes in. "Family emergency," he says, "sorry." The professor tells him "You have one hour forty-five minutes." Student says nothing, but opens his book and starts writing furiously.
The two hour mark comes up, and everyone except the tardy student turns in their booklets and leaves the room. The professor reminds him "Time's up," but he just keeps writing in the booklet.
At the 2:12 mark, one hour fifty-seven minutes after he ran into the exam room, the student closes his blue book and walks up to the desk where the other books are stacked up in a messy pile. The professor is reclining in his chair with his feet up on the desk. "Nope," he says, "you're late. I won't accept your exam booklet, and you're going to get a zero on the final exam."
"That's not fair," said the student, "I had to drive my mother to the hospital. I shouldn't be punished for that. I took no more time than anyone else."
"Nope, you knew the rules," says the professor.
"Don't you know who I am?" says the student, raising his voice.
"Nope, don't know, don't care," says the professor.
"Good!" says the student. He slides his exam book into the middle of the messy stack, straightens it up neatly, and before the professor has gotten his feet off the desk, walks briskly out into the hallway.
I like to think he was amused by the student's audacity and decided that yes, he was being unfair in this particular case. I know not everyone would be so fair-minded, but I like to think that this guy would be.
Guess it depends how big the university class is. If it's less than 30 students I can see him remembering their face and knowing which person in the list it might be, if there are 50/70/over 100 students enrolled, good luck. It's not like there's a picture of each student's face on the exam booklet or anything.
> as evidenced by how hard it was for this professor to even get attention to the matter within his department
This is the crux of it. The incentives don't support cracking down on AI cheating much. At least in the short term, for individual department administrators. Overall it will likely hurt the universities collectively to hand out degrees like candy this way, but grade inflation was already a problem and universities treat students like paying customers and they also want good statistics, fend off possible discrimination accusations etc.
So it's really not just about AI, the AI is simply exposing this underlying misaligned incentive. Professors complain about it all the time. It was similar during covid and cheating in online exams and that was solidly before ChatGPT.
IMO many CS classes should be lab based already, except the theory heavy ones. I still wonder why MIT needs to test students of OS courses on paper when the labs cover a lot of the ground. If I can do well in the labs I wouldn’t bother to memorize stuffs for the exams.
Mine were like this is 2005. The math classes also didn't allow calculators, engineering classes did, but not graphing ones that could store information.
Writing code like that just seems like such a poor test of actual ability. More like just a rote memorization test. On the other hand I can't think of a better way to do it fairly now. I think it speaks to the obsolescence of the educational model more than anything.
I remember having 7 day take home open book open internet exams in my math classes in college. We were also expected to typeset all our answers.
Those exams probably took the median student 30 hours and had a median score of 50% including partial credit.
Sad to think current students will never get that experience, because a chatbot could write something good enough to get a 50% in 10 minutes, for many of those classes.
True… but, we’re in a transitional stage still. Eventually, if these models are really going to be such a big deal, then the workflows of real mathematicians will probably involve using them very effectively. Eventually the generation that grew up using the things will become professors, and they’ll be good enough at using the things to ask a question that’s still hard with an LLM.
Well, either that will happen, or the pace of advancement will increase faster than humans can adapt. That’s the singularity, right? I don’t think we’re that close to it.
Yeah, many of my physics exams were take-home open-book. One that I particularly remember: "Here's your exam. There's one problem. It's due when you come back from spring break."
I graduated forever ago, but I still have bad dreams about this type of homework. That and the "oh no, I somehow forgot to go to this class all semester and now I have to take the final exam!"
I graduated from the University of Washington about 8 years ago. Even then we had to write our code on paper for exams. Every missed semi colon was marked. This isn’t a new practice and I’m surprised more colleges haven’t already been doing this regardless of AI.
Italian university graduates are going to shine in this world. They face oral and written exams held in person, where it is very easy and perfectly normal to fail. This culture is completely alien to Anglo academia, which needs to find other solutions. And given the comments below/above, they are really not ready yet.
I did my masters in the UK and PhD in Germany. The difference in quality graduates (in engineering) is staggering. The first two semesters are more challenging than the 4 years Meng.
All my university (Oxford, UK) exams were in-person and had written. I had 6 exams over 6 days in 2012, in which my entire undergraduate degree was examined.
It's not easy, but I think that method is just as good (or bad) now as it was then.
Same with job interviews. Right now Hr insists on us doing them over zoom so we get this absurd result that we eliminate candidates that perform too well to be true, at the risk of eliminating a genuine excellent candidate. You have to look a bit messy!
it will be interesting to see if any new formats emerge. if ai kills the take home, what can replace it for similar "let's see how far you can go if you have resources available" style examinations?
maybe we'll see specialty chatbots that give the equivalent of oral examinations and/or are willing to provide reference material but not make suggestions, connections, solutions or generate prose on behalf of the user?
I was in college during COVID and in upper level classes we typically had take home exams with a few days or a week to do it that were open book and open internet. Think challenging proofs that had to be typeset in LaTeX or a series of short responses that weren't expected to be as polished as our 10+ page term paper.
I went to a liberal arts college that prided itself on small class sizes and the honor code, and where professors typically had a good enough read on every student that they could tell when work wasn't your own or you'd collaborated with classmates. Our in person exams were not proctored except by your peers, the professors would sit outside the room. My understanding is that this sort of arrangement has been common at liberal arts colleges and similar universities for a long time - I know UVA has long prided itself on unproctored exams.
There's been a massive culture shift in the US where cheating is more and more accepted, beyond just the AI stuff, over the last few decades, and these sorts of peer based honor codes are no longer sustainable.
Students do exams at home with an answer key. It isn’t possible to get a mark lower than 80, as this is emotionally damaging. If you require assistance a professor will do the exam for you.
Back in my day we’d sit down ‘t muddy corpse pit having questions screamed at us by ‘t dragon who were also ‘t drill instructor. Get one wrong, and that was that, fricassé.
> Wouldn't a one-on-one interview be a better way to establish a broad evaluation of competency.
1) Possibly, depending on the material, but most classes aren't looking for a "broad evaluation of competency", they're looking for the specific material taught. It'd make more sense as a graduation requirement: the equivalent of a dissertation but for undergraduate work.
2) Even in small classes (e.g. 20-30 students) that wouldn't scale, let alone the massive courses earlier in a curriculum or that are shared by many degrees (e.g. hundreds of students).
Maybe not everything needs to "scale"? You're asking each student to spend well over 100 hours in lectures and study for each class. Surely you can find 20 or 30 minutes per student for evaluation.
Please by all means direct more funding at universities, hire several times as many professors, and have them each teach half as many classes with a fraction of the students. The result would absolutely be an improvement.
(That said, any kind of subjective assessment has its own pile of hazards compared to objective assessments.)
A problem with not scaling here is that just adding multiple examiners means that now there will be differences in how students are being graded depending on which examiner they get.
Being hand written would be silly theatre that excludes perfectly capable people (like me) who cannot sustain writing more than a few minutes.
Edit: I think we’re actually all agreeing. That a typed exam as an option is perfectly cromulent. I’m just saying the idea that it must be written is silly.
I don't want to dismiss your limitation, but it's better to create an acommodation for your particular case than to prevent the system from being implemented for everybody else.
Yeah, that’s the way it worked in undergrad for me. People would have hand written exams and the ones that had essay portions I’d do under more careful scrutiny in a different location using their hardware.
We have a testing center set up for people who require accommodations, another piece of legacy functionality I never expected to use back when I gave my tests online.
I don't think it's theatre, in the sense that it is effective for the advertised purpose (preempting AI-based cheating). But it seems to me like there are also plenty of ways to make reasonable accommodations for people who can't do a pen-and-paper exam, such as an offline computer.
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.
The problem isn't the AI - it's the assessments. It used to be that shipping a large, well-researched essay with multiple citations was proof of work. Now it's proof of prompting, not learning or effort.
If you want to test for memorization, you need a live test to do so.
If you want to test for comprehension and understanding, require sessions with a tutoring AI and grade the level of comprehension exhibited.
And then please, please test for prompting with challenging assignments that would usually be beyond a student's skills and make sure they know how to drive the machines to do valued work.
I totally agree that there is utility in memorization and comprehension. I also know that by the time students graduate, AI will be the job and if they can't pair successfully with agentic workflows they will not be much use in the work force for many roles.
of you could require presentations with a Q&A section at the end.
they can use the AI all the want to help their workflow to develop teh content, but the better engage with the material enough that they can field some questions at the end.
the main downsides are:
- takes a long time to administer
- the Q&A section leads to unstandardized grading, but i think that's fine. just away from scores on precise 0-100 scale and just score in a couple coarse buckets (superb, acceptable, fail, etc)
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.
I was in high school from 1986-1989, and my experience began with TI-99/4A in grade school, a VIC-20 at home, and then a C=64 (high school offered a Commodore-based lab as well.)
Dad indulged me with many peripherals, including an Epson dot-matrix tractor-feed printer that printed 132cps! Among its features were configurable fonts and point-size. I discovered that this device could be set up for extremely small fonts that remained legible.
So, for Spanish and other classes, I decided to go into the "cheat sheet" production business. I worked out how to print a sheet full of little 2x2" sheets that contained Spanish vocab, or the study answers for our next quiz or whatever, and I used them myself, and then I began to sell them!!
And the most ironic thing happened, when I discovered that I never needed the cheat sheets: having created them by typing them in, repeatedly, correcting errors and checking against our textbooks, I had internalized, memorized and learned all the answers as any ethical student would!
I got caught, once or twice, and disciplined for distributing those cheat sheets, and I definitely did not continue cheating in classes, because I'm not that kind of guy, but the process was a revelation to me, and ever since the 1980s I have relied on hand-written notes to reinforce my memory of those words and facts that flow from ears, to mind, to hand muscles, to pen, and onto ye olde fashioned paper.
Now can we see a reason that "writing 100 times on the chalkboard" may have been an edifying exercise, beyond its punishment value?
I was a teacher assistant circa 2023.
I required every student to submit the assignments typed digitally, since grading a single handwritten one would take as much time as 5 typed.
I saw a single fully AI generated assignment and it was laughable and an easy zero.
I wonder how I would do it now.
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.
There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.
> The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion.
Historically, the penalty for cheating at Dartmouth was a 9-month suspension for a first offense (no matter how small, in theory), and permanent "separation from the college" for a second offense. Back in the 90s, there were multiple incidents where this wasn't properly applied to the CS department because the academic committees in charge of punishment were bad at evaluating plagiarism of source code.
Dartmouth certainly should blame the students. Their policy is historically clear on that point. It is the responsibility of professors to use their syllabus to clearly define "cheating" for a particular course, and it is the responsibility of the students not to cheat. The only case where this should be even slightly complicated is if the professor hasn't been sufficiently about what constitutes cheating (and there was one major historic scandal related to this).
I certainly agree that any degree which allows rampant cheating will quickly become a joke to employers.
Employers past a certain scale are not really using degrees as anything other than a low pass filter, and the people judging how qualified hires were in practice are not the ones deciding the minimum requirements, so there's no avenue for feedback on that point.
Our whole education system is setup as a skinner box for grades. People finding tricks for better grades are massively rewarded. Study methods are optimised for recall within a month. And educators are accountable only to the measured outcomes.
Very little of the designed system of education is aimed at teaching. Most of it is aimed at measuring and certifying. Treating students as adversarial grade maximisers will likely teach a lot of them they are expected to grade maximise adversarially.
Yes, unfortunately that is exactly how most education systems are designed. A lot of it is also historical baggage (at least in the European school tradition), where states were faced with the issue of educating the masses, which required a lot of standardization and thus also grades. Although nowadays, educational science has long established the detrimental effects of grades, they are still very widespread. Grades are institutionalized nowadays; you have generations of students who excelled in this Skinner box and became teachers themselves, thus perpetuating the grade box.
Fortunately, there are a few alternatives, schools without grades, that don't focus on short-term recall but long-term understanding, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and self-actualization, like the Ecole d'Humanité in the Swiss Alps: https://ecole.ch/
You said it well and my brain automatically rephrased your comment while I was reading it:
Our whole everything is setup as a skinner box for mulah. People finding tricks for more mulah are massively rewarded. Efforts are optimized for ROI within a fraction of a second. And management are accountable only to the measured outcomes.
The issue is that education is the only way to get a well paying job. This means that students aren’t there to study the subject, they are there to get to a job.
When further education wasn’t mandatory, things like the honor code made sense.
There are schools with severe penalties for cheating (Army/Navy, Haverford, Davidson), but most aren't set up for that. Professors didn't self-select to be prosecutors, and we didn't spend decades becoming world experts to then become cops.
Love the sinner, hate the sin. If you let yourself start blaming students, you open a pretty corrosive path of moral judgement. Students are clever, and they're making choices informed by what they see in the world. Don't blame them for being unwilling to fail a class that cost a down payment on a house. Don't blame them for seeing powerful people get away with cheating and trying to do the same.
Kallus is right: qualitative assessment is an adversarial problem. Build the assessment correctly, and all of those previous points become moot. By clearly establishing and enforcing the rules you make it more fair to boot.
Totally agree. The moral decay in higher education has a lot to do with it deciding to trade its integrity around cheating by students and professors in exchange for tuition cheques and grant money.
Yes. Best not blame the technology that was specifically built to pass up automatically generated text for human work, or companies that profit from students using it, or government that won't introduce measures that would at least make it possible to comprehensively ban it on campuses.
I doubt it. The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions like law. Everywhere else it is just collaboration or learning or simply something nobody cares about.
I would say that tech largely rewards the behaviours people in academia call cheating.
when you cheat on your partner you hurt them by betraying their trust. when you score from offside you can steal a win from the other team thats playing fair. if you lie about your company financials you steal from the government or your creditors.
cheating in schools is nothing like that. there is no direct harm to anyone, financial or emotional. the only real thing is if enough students do it thats bad for the schools reputation and others will treat degrees coming from there as more suspicious.
thats a very abstract and indirect harm, and it depends on employers caring about what school you came from more than a basic "reputable or total scam". to be fair thats pretty common in some industries (it shouldnt be) but i dont think the average student will get worse job offers because some of their classmates cheated.
By cheating you gain a certificate that says you can do things which you cannot. The difference between cheating in university and forging a degree is the time it takes.
When going to a doctor, you wouldn't want them to have cheated for their exams during training. You expect them to be well equipped to practice medicine and to ensure you get correct diagnoses and care. When hiring a programmer or software engineer, you should expect them to be able to provide you a proper, well architected application given the requirements.
The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion.
Universities need to stay ahead of how people actually work. Framing the use of AI as 'cheating' gives a university a reputation that it isn't keeping up with industry, which has a wildly negative impact on admissions. You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.
That's an amusing analogy, but it's conflating university as a purely academic pursuit (learn these things in order to know the things) with university as vocational training (learn these things so you can get a job.) As people have to pay for their degree through loans now, people see it as a means to get the career they want. It's not learning any more. It's training.
So, to continue the analogy, a degree is the equivalent of a forklift truck license, and people do want to drive their forklift truck to the gym. Because they're paying to be able to do that.
If you use AI to complete all your assignments and exams, then getting a degree is less like getting a forklift truck licence (which indicates you've learned some useful skill that few people have) and more like getting a Waymo account (showing that you're competent enough to enter your credit card details and destination into a mobile app).
Undergraduate degrees are not vocational in any of the leading universities in any field. They are sometimes a prerequisite to vocational training, but aren't one in and of themselves.
There's a pretty good reason for that - the base assumption is that training in fundamentals, methods and ways of thinking is something you won't get anywhere else.
> You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.
You totally can, though. In the real world if I can't remember something, I might look it up in a textbook. Closed-book tests have historically been a totally accepted practice, though, and getting caught bringing notecards with textbook info secretly into a closed-book test would absolutely bring about disciplinary action.
One problem here is that students that use AI to outsource thinking become people who cannot think. These people are not likely to be very useful to employers or even society. We have to figure out how to allow AI to outsource drudgery but not the thinking itself. It should be a better and better bicycle for the mind not a replacement for the brain.
> 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.
Understanding 90-95% of someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own ;)
It's hard to verify that you understand someone else's work at 100%, but it's reasonable for an expert to tell once they've built it themselves, right?
> 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.
As an alumnus of Dartmouth College's CS program, I am sad to hear that my alma mater has sunken so low. Look, I know that the Committee on Students was historically bad at handling CS plagiarism cases back in the 90s (compared to ones in the humanities). But Dartmouth's historic solution to this sort of pernicious "optimization" was to reduce the expected value of cheating by imposing extreme negative consequences on anyone they caught, with a 3-term suspension and a permanent transcript notification for a first offense.
Allowing widespread cheating and LLM regurgitation will destroy a school's reputation with graduate schools and employers, and rightfully so.
You reminded me of my Univ. Math's class (on integrals). The test was basically get one integral equation randomly and solve it in the blackboard only with the teacher present.
Because you didnt know which type of integral you will.get, we had to learn to solve all of them. We made.hundreds of exercises with a small group of close friends (the teacher gave us a book that's infamous in Mexico from an author Schaumm).
> This doesn't stop students from generating code, but at least they have to understand that code in detail.
I mean even before AI this should get tested, as people could just copy code from SO or other websites, from books, or from their classmates.
I've done a few projects where the other students didn't really do much (in hindsight this was probably because I was excited and productive instead of helping and delegating work, which was selfish of me), but they were caught out in 1:1 interviews.
People optimizing for grades is so sad. I got a BS in CS and no one has ever asked about my grades. I tried to optimize for learning and it turns out that pays off really well once you hit the real world.
If you want to be a MD or a JD, then you must optimize for grades. The entrance into post secondary education requires it to be so.
Seeing as the article was about Brown and their PLME program is famous for med school acceptance, then I think we should expect that the culture there is more about grades than a generic undergrad university's culture. Which, yeah, is also very grade focused.
Do you mean very well? Lots of proof out there that it works; Fin, Sierra and others already operate on a value based pricing model where they only get paid if the AI actually resolves issues.
A lot of restaurants in Korea and elsewhere have replaced human cashiers with touch screen kiosks. You’re given a number, someone calls it out when your drink’s ready.
For the places I went to it worked just fine. Did you have a bad experience?
The voice thing didn't work well enough, in Dutch at least. I've done an in-between. We instructed an AI as the client. Then as the teacher, I'd represent the client and would type. Students would form project groups, and each group would get 15-30 minutes to ask questions from the "client".
> 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).
> 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!
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.
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.
After retiring at 65 from a university teaching and research science career (all pre-AI), I went back to teaching, but this time teaching high school science, mostly AP STEM courses at an A-ranked public high school. The cheating/AI problem is now a crisis greater than COVID. My experience: very few students in advanced and AP classes do not cheat — largely for the reasons given above — and it takes enormous resourcefulness on the teacher's part to design coursework and examinations in which cheating through AI is not an issue. Many teachers I know have all but given up — the cost and effort required to circumvent cheating are simply too great given the already sky-high demands on teachers' time and energy. And school administrations are little help, due to thoughtless and enthusiastic reliance on software at every level. In some ways they are part of the problem. I don't know what the situation is in schools outside the US. But here it had become an arms race.
Personally I believe AI has made exams and high stakes testing unworkable. Even before AI I would argue teaching to the test made high stakes testing unworkable. How grades are assigned IMO will be more like how employees are evaluated in the workplace: some metrics, some oral exams, some peer feedback, but mostly on what they produced.
Yes, oral exams, content created in plain sight, project-based activities, all of these can provide a true appraisal of student understanding. But these approaches, although highly rewarding for both student and teacher, are extremely time-consuming. They also run counter to the priorities of the district, which are forever and always: student achievement on standardized tests accomplished with minimal teaching personnel. The only ones benefiting here are the corporations providing and grading the tests. To a large extent it is a sham. More importantly, IRL science is not a multiple choice test. As you state above, whether you work in industry or academia, your value is what you can produce (usually by plain hard work), what problems you can solve, your imagination, creativity, what you can create yourself or with a group. But from what I've seen thus far: AI has little place in education.
My daughter just finished her Grade 11 finals in Canada. They were done on locked down school Chromebooks, which should be enough to prevent cheating by all but the most dedicated.
On my kids chrome books, the actual AI chatbot websites are blocked, but the kids just ask follow up questions to the AI response in a normal google search.
Google itself is a pretty good cheat mechanism, and was so even before they added AI. Not much of a lock down if you can Google something in a Geography exam. I'll have to ask my kids.
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
> These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.
Has that changed since I was in school? After I got my degree, not a single person or entity in the workforce ever asked for my grades. They just wanted to see the degree.
Ivy League kids tend to not be facing some extreme economic precarity. In fact a decent number of them likely have enough family wealth to not need to work a day in their lives. The others are unlikely to face too much trouble over a few Bs at Brown.
Yes they are, that's what 'graded on a curve' means. It's common in the US to give students a percentile or Z-score or T-score rather than the raw score for the examination. This was a source of massive frustration to me when I first encountered because I had no way of self-reviewing my exam performance to guess which questions I might have gotten wrong.
I did not go to an Ivy League but many of my classes at an alright school were graded on a curve and so C was average, B/D was one standard deviation above/below, and A/F was two.
> graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same
You always have a choice. The right move, in this case, is to raise a stink to administration, donors and politicians. Hell, use AI to do it. Schools refusing to punish teaching is a problem that’s leaking into business and politics.
I wonder if for certain fields, like finance, that itself would be a positive signal for the corporation that actually would prefer workers with quite flexible ethics and mores who are focused on "the bottom line"..
In his generation, only cheating cyclists could stay in teams. He was the one who created the situation, but in fact, cyclists had two choices - stop being cyclist or cheat.
Note the quantity that actually got caught and with enough evidence. Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Looking at it systematically there's no way all of the top finishers were not taking drugs (how else could they compete with the world's best who were? The advantage isn't small.) And it had clearly been going on for many years before Armstrong entered the event for the first time.
I really don't care for Armstrong's yellow banded hypocrisy but blaming him for the "cheat or don't bother competing" reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
But I'm sure that's all in the past and it's not like that now. Just as was said when Armstrong won 6 times while correctly stating he was the most tested athlete on the planet.
Wrapping it up and tying all that to Armstrong, as has been done, stinks. He was clearly a bit player in that extensive fraud. Six titles with no meaningful positive drug test as the most tested athlete on the planet.
He was literal ring leader and innovator of doping. He was also openly forcing others into doping. That is not controversial statement, but result of subsequent reports.
> Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Yes, he was doping for years before being caught. He found novel ways how to do it.
> reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
No it does not. It just guves credit to where it is due. But we also have track record of Lance scapegoating others.
Bernard Thévenet won in 1975 and has said he was using steroids. Armstrong was 4 years old at the time. We don't know about all the drug cheating at the TdF, just what we do know is damning in ways we can't pin on the vile Armstrong. Do continue to loathe him as much as you like. He's earned that.
Ulrich, Riis, Fignon, Zoetelmelk, we haven't caught them all nor tried 1% as hard as those who got Armstrong did.
Look through the list and try and claim with a straight face that Armstrong was first, led the charge or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
I don't care at all about Armstrong. The sport is clean now despite an ugly past. Just as it was when Armstrong won all those tours. Can I interest you in this bridge at a good price?
Who gets off scot free with the "It was all Armstrong" line.
If Armstrong stayed retired he probably would have gotten away with it, kept lying forcefully and be a secular saint by now. The TdF didn't catch him.
I did not said Armstrong was the first cyclist to dope. I said he made a real innovation in the world of doping. There were computers in 1975, but can you agree with me that several people brought in innovations between then and now? It is the same thing.
Doping existed prior Armstrong, Armstrong revolutionized it and led worsening of the doping situation. His teammates were bullied by him personally to dope. That includes testimonies of people who left for that reason.
> or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
Yes, plenty of them actually wanted to and Americans were acting butthurt. There were regular accusations of French just being jealous, like it is an international offense to suspect and American sportsman could cheat.
Look down that list of winners and the list of top finishers for two decades prior to Armstrong and the amount of doping among them that we actually found about and seriously try to make the case that Armstrong is the reason for "cheat or don't bother showing up."
This is bullshit and basically this kind of justification is part of the moral and ethical rot of most institutions in the US now. You do have a choice, you just want to pretend you don't to get away with it. Besides, no one outside of a few stuffy finance/quant shops ever even asked what my GPA was in college, they don't care.
Technically, that has been the case. You are either in an economically booming area, or an economically declining area. Even for those in the booming areas, the kids have to compete with a much wider pool of talent to be able to buy land for themselves to stay there.
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.
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.
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?
Sure if the field of study is about memorization, you did learn.
I'm not sure that exists though. There are challenges where that is indeed the entire "field", e.g. Pi digits competition, but otherwise for most if not all fields, it is about having enough knowledge to answer questions that have no yet encountered. They might be variations of questions you know but they are not verbatim the same.
Ideally learning about a field should even lead you to be able to consider, warranting you would have the resources to do so (e.g. time, experimental setup, etc), actual unanswered questions from the field.
So no, IMHO in most cases memorization is not learning.
I never understood the concept of "learning questions from previous years is cheating". Like, does the entire field of study answer hundred questions and that's it? Or is the professor just too lazy to invent new questions each year?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fundamental issue is that for almost all students, college is really job training in academic clothing. Universities will never admit this, and some professors delude themselves into believing it’s not true. But it’s the only explanation for why students would take enormous loans rather than simply get jobs.
But why else would you have a bunch of students join a class and cheat? Something like 22 out of the 27 perfect midterm students didn’t show up to the final? Obviously these people are not in it for the joy of learning.
So the answers to your questions are 1) learning 2) job-worthiness 3) measurements of 1 which accurately and plausibly reflect 2.
If a course does not plausibly reflect job readiness, or students’ grades do not reflect competence in the subject then the course must be fixed.
> They are optimizing for themselves, which almost always means getting a job.
Instead they should optimize for keeping a job.
Since you mention Amazon, I work there as a senior software engineer (almost 10 years of tenure) and the quality of interns has massively degraded since LLMs are available. The result is that where the majority of interns used to receive return offers, now the vast majority doesn't.
Similarly, a lot of new grads get kicked out quickly, before the end of the trial period, because they suck. A lot more than in the past.
That is funny, because job hopping has been the recommended advice on this forum for 2 decades, especially job hopping away from Amazon to greener pastures.
I think you're missing the fact that everyone knows. He just got reliable data from a natural experiment, which makes the chancellor can't just look away any longer.
People for sure have always cheated in these take home exams. This has to have been to protect rich kids with parents who give money to the university. It's insane to learn how many fancy universities have garbage blatantly unmeritocratic evaluation systems like this
That is true, and it was always a bad idea. But hey, economics. If economists should be aware of anything, it's that university financing in large parts of the world have perverse incentives.
Game Theory seems sort of useless in the real world because people are not rational players, and the real challenge is in getting an accurate model of their behavior. The honor system would work probably fine in a tiny close-knit liberal arts college, while it would obviously wouldn't in a place where the degree itself is the target.
Aside from evolutionary biology, cancer research, embryonic development, economics, internet routing, spectrum auctions, counter-terrorism, kidney exchanges, generative AI, and preventing nuclear apocalypse...What HAS game theory done for us?!
Game theory seemed kind of useful when the US was negotiating nuclear weapons control with the Soviets. It allowed successful negotiations in an extremely low trust situation.
Also, your own example is an application of game theory; you've basically stated a 'prisoner's dilemma' problem. You state that in a high trust society, most people will choose cooperation, while in a low trust society, most people will defect.
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.
How long is too short? Each exam in my BSc Applied Physics final (1977, Exeter Uni.) was three hours and we had similar exams in each of the preceding years to weed out those who weren't keeping up. I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helped the weaker students get through the Quantum Mechanics exam.
In addition I had to defend the report (120 pages of typescript and charts) of my final year project to my supervisor and another senior academic. And it was clear that they had actually read it.
All those exams were open note; anything in your own hand or a copy of a lecture handout was permitted. Again the weaker students would not have been helped by more time because they hadn't understood that you have to have enough familiarity with your notes to be able find the right information. Some brought in 50 litre rucksacks stuffed with ring binders and the noise of them furiously leafing through was enough for the invigilators to warn them to make less noise or risk being ejected.
In Norway it is typical that an exam of similar standard allows five hours.
I sat one exam at uni (in person, invigilated) for History and Philosophy of Science, which had no time-limit. You could take as long as you needed, whether that was one hour, five hours or all day.
Pretty much everyone still took three hours. But you felt so much calmer, knowing you weren't racing against the clock.
All of my exams were three hours as well. I don’t think there’s a single instance where more time would have helped me. If I didn’t immediately know the answer to a question, I’d just move on, then revisit. When you don’t know the material/answer, more time won’t help. But you do have to know how to take a test and manage your time.
3 hours for us as well. When you start doing graduate level work, a problem could easily last over an hour. And many people will have false starts before they figure it out.
It's not a problem with homework assignments as they have multiple days to finish.
So the professor has to decide between poor data with high variance, or good data with lower variance.
> I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helped the weaker students get through the Quantum Mechanics exam.
Funny you mention that. When I did my (undergrad) QM II exam, I likely got the highest score, and I'm sure my score was below 40%.
The problem is that the professor has little clue on who can and can't solve the problems. Everyone doing poorly on a tightly constrained problem is mostly noise.
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.
Assuming this is true (others have already addressed a few of the many reasons it might not be), wouldn't that imply that practically all existing tests are already flawed? If you want to grade on time, every exam should be graded with a formula taking both the time and the correctness into account. A binary "fast enough" vs "not fast enough" is about as useful as a pass/fail class grade.
The exams that felt like the fairest reflections of my own knowledge were proctored in-person, closed book, and time unlimited. Of course, being time unlimited works better for quantitative/engineering exams. I haven't put much thought into more qualitative/liberal arts type exams.
In my experience, it was common to test speed - my favorite was solving 100 arithmetic problems in, I think it was 3 minutes? Perhaps shorter. The point was that it was basically impossible to solve them all, so it evaluated both your speed and your self-assessment: if you move too quickly, you'll make errors. If you spend too much time second-guessing yourself, you won't get enough problems finished.
It always struck me as an ingenious way to get a feel for a new group of students, since it's quick to administer and equally quick to grade, while revealing quite a lot of information.
Certainly we hold speed to some regard, since a lot of academic accommodations involve granting extra time. If we aren't testing on speed, then surely we should give that to anyone that asks?
> "smarter" here means how well the student will perform in a career in their chosen field. Fast + accurate is the ideal.
Still dubious.
Also, I don't know where you work, but in most of my jobs, career growth is not limited by speed with which you do the work. It's one factor among, say, 10. Most of the people who got ahead were not the fastest.
They're not trying to gauge who is the fastest. Or even the smartest. Just those who have the skills. In the real world, you'll rarely (as in, never) have to solve those same problems with the same speed you will in the exam.
In a lot (all?) of the jobs I worked, taking a day to solve a Medium level Leetcode problem was quite OK.
Those are all proxies for "is smarter". They have better memories, perform better under pressure, etc. Universities are meant to prepare students for the real world where these things matter.
Arguably someone who is faster is more likely to just be recalling memorized things faster, while someone who's slower may have a deeper understanding but needs time to actually think it through.
Memorization is already hacking the rules of the game that's supposed to be gauging understanding. An ideal test is resistant to rote memorization as well as outright cheating.
See my other comment. I want my doctor/plumber/etc to be able to recall faster, type faster, work better under pressure. If you're better at those things you should get better grades and be paid more.
The final exam was not take-home, which is where the massive discrepancy showed up.
I do agree that the idea of giving take-home exams and expecting students not to cheat has long since passed its prime. There may have been a time when it was reasonable to expect most students to behave honestly, but that does not hold at all in today’s climate. Especially post-COVID, for whatever combination of reasons, students just don’t seem to care at all about anything other than min-maxing their effort to grade ratio.
Which leads to a lot of outcomes like this one where students start using ChatGPT early, think it will continue forever, and then get completely crushed when they encounter the first assignment where they can’t cheat.
I can't say what the reality looks like today, but when I was in college 25 years ago (Harvey Mudd), closed-book take-home exams were pretty common (often with a specific time limit: maybe 3/5/8 hours), and I would have been shocked and aghast at the thought of anyone cheating. We took our Honor Code deeply seriously. (I've given my own students take-home open-book exams with "no outside resources" rules regularly in the past, but I've pretty much concluded that isn't viable anymore. But then, we don't have a formal Honor Code here.)
One particularly striking example was a timed, closed-book math exam where the exam paper just listed four problem numbers from the book. We were expected to open the book, copy down those problems without looking at anything else, and then put the book away. Honestly, that one felt like just asking for trouble and now that I'm a professor myself I think that the prof was unreasonably lazy, but it certainly captured the spirit of the thing. (Technically, that wasn't a Harvey Mudd professor but rather a professor at the adjacent graduate university. Maybe that had something to do with it.)
The other day some sucker told me, "don't throw that trash over there it's littering" and I told that sucker "there's no way anyone could enforce it" lol.
Some people get up in their jimmies about this but if they don't want me doing something they should make it impossible to do it
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.
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.
Your employer (the university) sells a credential (diploma and transcript) that your customer (the student) uses to help them get a job.
You are not doing it for free. Grading is part of what UC gets for the $250k+ they pay a professor in salary and benefits.
HR departments will use whatever signals exist. If smart people tend to have college degrees, they'll use that as a filter. If smart people tend to have gone to a certain set if universities, they'll use that list as a filter. If colleges hand out transcripts with grades, and smart people tend to have better grades, they'll ask for transcripts.
HR departments didn't invent grades or transcripts.
I agree with your final sentence. The signal in grades (and even graduation) has been greatly diminished (even at brand name universities).
Wow. Do you care at all about the reputation of your university?
I worked briefly in post-secondary CS education a long time ago, before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today, and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job.
Also, grades have long been inflated
Then stop inflating them. This is also what standardised testing is good for --- but no surprise, so many are against it because it would just show how terrible they actually are.
I know someone who went to Reed College, which has semi-famously not suffered from grade inflation[1]. They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.
Interestingly, at Reed, there is a low emphasis (or even anti-emphasis) on grades — a student has to go out of their way to obtain them. Instead, emphasis is on written feedback and discussion, to understand one's performance on assignments.
All this to say: de-emphasizing grades in school is not necessarily a bad thing, and does not necessarily harm the reputation of the university. It can be a sign of good priorities (eg: learning, rather than numbers-gaming).
> They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.
That's odd, I would expect any employer for whom the class of degree mattered to know the reputation of the university. For instance second from Oxford is probably going to be as desirable as a first from Oxford Brooks (formerly Oxford Poly).
Everyone knows Oxford, but the are many thousands of universities, most of which are not known to most employers. I am not an employer, but I work in higher education and see transcripts of transferring and exchange students, and many (probably most) come with some kind of guide on how to interpret the grades, because there are a huge variety of ways of assigning them and defining them (e.g. at some universities a D is a fail, and at some a D is a pass - to know which you're looking at, you need a guide!).
> before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today
with this:
> and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job
Weren't universities supposed to be exactly the kind of place where unorthodox ideas could be freely said out loud? To fire an educator for saying the wrong opinion about education doesn't make your university sound like the great place you suggest it was.
Education reform, including changing or ending grading, should totally be the kind of thing that people can safely discuss.
Good idea! Nothing bad could possibly come from advocating for centralization of academic assessment! Let's give more authority to a handful of private publishers who adapt their curricula to the whims of Texas!
It's not just because "it would just show how terrible they actually are"
Grading is to provide your students with a goal, one that isn't so high-minded as "the goal is education". The human mind uses a "reward system", within a feedback cycle. If you want to do away with that, just because it's what you prefer, then you're ignoring the reality of being human.
grades are important as feedback and to make sure students who learned nothing in a class fail and have to retake it instead of making trouble in more advanced classes. but they should never be a permanent record employers can demand.
the best way to do that would be making it school policy to issue transcripts with any grades you want any time after you finish your degree. set it up so theres no difference between one you got at graduation and years later. even if you never request one the fact that its possible makes it so treating everyone from that school equally is the only rational option.
but for that to work all the schools in a state would have to use the system so employers cant be like "you graduated XY university? thats the one that lets you fake grades right?" and treat you like you got a 1.0 GPA. we need to get the government involved.
or if you want a less radical/more realistic solution let people retake classes after they graduate to retroactively get better grades. the point is some number on a piece of paper you get in your early 20s shouldnt be visible and affect the rest of your life.
Unfortunately, most students today just want to find the easiest way to get a good grade. The percentage of students truly want to learn is very low. For the most, they'd prefer instructors who feed them with exam problems. This is very sad, but true.
Another issue is with the curriculum and course structure, which should long been updated. But that's another rabbit hole on its own, especially in public universities with a big hierarchy of system. The sad truth is professors have no passion in teaching outdated curriculum, and students have no desire to learn.
Indeed, and it also gives students a way to budget their time between the demands of multiple classes. I studied enough for each course to put me in good enough stead for the exams, then moved on to the next course. I got it right most of the time.
During my bachelor I remember getting a distinction for an assignment that I put a shit ton of effort into and being elated. And then finding out that my tutor had taken it to the board trying to make the case for a high distinction, and narrowly failing, but it then being archived as an example of the output that the class wanted anyway.
That bowled me over when I was young and still sort of working out effort/reward sort of stuff. I had put a lot of work into a lot of subjects where I wasnt very naturally talented and got a lot of mediocre results, but seeing that if I put the effort in continually I could make stuff thats worthy of recognition was amazing.
Meanwhile, my (now) wife was completing a diploma subject at the same institution and they were handing out pass/fail only. You could see a lot of people really confused about that. The quality of work that fit into "pass" ran a very large gamut.
If I'm studying something, it's nice to get an external assessment of how well I'm doing, so i don't fall victim to over-confidence or imposter syndrome. When you're dealing with new material it's hard to be truly objective about your own project level.
You should know full well you need some method of determining if a student is competent enough to move on to the next class in whatever sequence. Perhaps universities are slacking on this front, but at a minimum a student who doesn't understand the basics of Calc I should not go take Calc II
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.
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.
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
Let's play this out further. How about high school, should there be grades there? Tests at all levels also typically involve a grade / metric -- are those included too?
At least where I live, universities used to run entrance exams. They didn't care about high school grades, or even if you'd ever been to high school: if you passed the entrance exam, you could enroll.
At the end in very large cohort standardised testing. And by very large I mean at least hundreds if not thousands of test takers. At that point you have enough test takers to stack rank them in properly done test. And it smooths things over the years. This is the least bad way of evaluating large number of students.
In class room stack ranking is just meaningless. Either student passes demonstrating various levels of knowledge or not.
To play devil's advocate, evaluations and scoring should probably be used at the systemic or team level rather than stack ranking individual employees... I mean students. Improve the educational system rather than blame the individuals.
>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.
Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.
CS enrollment is declining, but not demand. Everyone is citing the numbers from UC Berkeley showing a 26% percent decline in enrollment. What they fail to mention is that the CS department reduced their admit slots by 25% because the TAs negotiated an $80/hr rate, and they can't afford as many, so they can't open as many classes.
But the number of students applying for CS is actually up slightly.
Grades ideally should measure the understanding a student has of the subjects presented, and their ability to execute on that understanding. Regardless of other incentives, that alone warrants them.
Are you suggesting a pass/fail method, or something else?
I would argue the barrier to cheating has become lower just by virtue of how easy it is to do it now. You open an app and type your question. Rue if different from Brit where you had to basically have either a skill in cheating to find and adapt the right resources or you would have to have money to pay someone to do it for you. AI as the great equaliser I suppose.
In Serrano's class and other introductory classes like it, cheating has been widespread before AI and after. The truth is that the social stigma around cheating has gone away (perhaps this is only a post-remote-schooling phenomena) so cheating is trivial. All you have to do is go text a friend in the class (most people will have many friends in any large intro class they're taking).
A time when a take-home, closed-book test, relying on the honesty and integrity of the students, was viable seems completely unrealistic now. I assume there were always some who cheated, but I can imagine that it was sufficiently socially unacceptable that many didn't.
Not quite true. As a student who had many friends in Serrano's class in question among others at Brown, I'm be quite doubtful that AI has led to an increase in this particular class. The truth is that (at least post-covid) cheating is very widespread on take-home exams. If you are taking an introductory class such as Serrano's, you will have many friends in the class and cheating is so widely accepted that there is little to no stigma to doing it and so many people do. The primary limiting factor on whether a student cheats is not access or ease but desire.
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.
I would not agree with this from my own experience. The truth is the culture, at least at Brown in the 2020s, has little stigma around cheating in big classes. Unclear how different this is in the past, but a friend and I often joke that the student body is very good at reward hacking. If there's a reward, people will find a way to get it! That's across grades (people will cheat), housing (a huge % people will competitively apply for specialty housing or accommodations to beat the lottery), and a whole lot of other things. I don't think this is correlated with legacy, athletics, ect. but an artifact of the current culture unfortunately.
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.
The whole discussion consistently fails to acknowledge that, in a day where we have a Supreme Court Justice who cannot define "woman", education devolves into anarchy.
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.
> 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.
The decline of actual consequences for cheating has played a big role.
When I was in college, people who got caught cheating found themselves in a world of trouble. Repeat offenders faced severe consequences like failing courses, which could delay their graduation date if it was a critical-path course. This has a real dollar amount attached to it because you start working later.
Now it seems universities avoid addressing cheating problems at all costs. The professor in this article complains about how hard it was to draw attention to the cheating problem, with no response within his own department.
Students know this. As cheating gains critical mass and you see that nothing bad is happening to the cheaters, you start feeling like you're at risk of falling behind if you aren't cheating. The cheaters are getting higher grades (100% for many in this case) and they get to go out partying while you're still working through the material. You're really screwed if grades are distributed on a curve.
So temptation spreads. Anecdotally, I've seen a few young people lie to themselves and think that they're just going to use ChatGPT to check their answers and learn from it, but they don't realize how superficial it is to have ChatGPT fix your problem and then skim the correct answer. They put less effort into checking their work because they know they have a button to push to check it for them. When they get put into a situation where they can't rely on that button, it all falls apart
At UVA many years ago, one of my roommates was one of the unfortunate 20 or so annually expelled -- the only outcome of being convicted of breaking the "no cheating, stealing, or lying" honor code. It didn't take repeat offenses, expulsion was a first offense consequence.
Interestingly, it seems like you weren't joking about the decline:
> Finally in the spring of 2022, a sanction reform referendum succeeded with more than 80% of the vote, changing the penalty for an Honor violation from expulsion to a two semester suspension. [1]
> When I was in college, people who got caught cheating found themselves in a world of trouble. Repeat offenders faced severe consequences like failing courses, which could delay their graduation date
We had a very real threat of rustication. People still cheated. I think culture does play a big role. Of course, there need to be consequences too.
That’s a different debate, and imo, the lack of a severe curve makes it safer for students to resist temptations to cheat. Severe curves ratchet up structural pressures for students to cheat, due to a prisoners’ dilemma effect in a zero-sum competitive environment. When there is a severe curve and students are able to cheat, acting with integrity becomes a failing strategy.
I agree with the sentiment, however I think the erosion of the honor system is inevitable given the rising cost of college. Somewhere in the last 20 years college became a luxury good, and with it a natural sense of entitlement from their customers.
Couple that with increased awareness that classroom instruction (delivered by tenured research facility who seem annoyed at the idea of teaching) often has little relevance to workplace skills, I think kids have correctly surmised that the smart thing to do is say fuck the code and focus on checking boxes.
"Fixing" the culture includes a much much broader context than just what an individual professor preaches about to a set of students. It includes the entire intergenerational contract, earning the trust of students as well, getting their buy-in. There's a lot of cynicism and distrust against it all and a lot of disengagement because they just don't buy into it anymore with sincerity. It's not simply about scolding them a bit more and telling them that actually cheating is bad, mkay.
One place to start is to question seriously who actually needs a university degree and why, how this credentialism has been stealing years of productivity from young people. Though at least the deal was that in exchange you could expect some middle class job, even if gated behind a totally unrelated bachelor degree. But then this deal also got soured.
The culture comes from the role of the institution and the degree. The fact is that the primary role of the degree is as a gatekeeper to high paying job opportunities, regardless of what anyone idealistically thinks it should be.
This creates some problems. Let's say that you go to university and major in X to get a job in Y. So you assume that the companies are requiring you to get the degree to prove that you are competent in X which is necessary to do job Y. But when you get to university you realize that most of your classes required to get a degree in X actually have nothing to do with X. Furthermore you also notice that students who just cram for the test and have no functional knowledge of X are still getting As and graduating.
Then you get a summer internship in a job doing Y. You notice that learning to do job Y really has nothing to do with what you learned about X in school. You notice that your mangers an the company who are really good at job Y (and all majored in X) have basically forgotten everything they know about X and know much less about it than you, but are excellent at job Y. You finish your internship and now know that you are perfectly capable of doing job Y. But, of course you can't get job Y yet because you don't have your degree in X. You have to go back to school and learn more about X before anyone will hire you even though you already know more about X than the people who do job Y and who you can see really don't need knowledge in X to do the job.
So you are being forced to get a degree in X to get job Y, but job Y doesn't really require knowledge of X. And on top of that, a degree in X doesn't even really mean you have any functional knowledge of X! Everybody just learns Y on the job anyway!
So now you have an exam in X, so you decide fuck it, why would I spend time on this? This whole system is retarded, I'm just going to use ChatGPT.
This was basically my experience in college. I never cheated, both because it was harder before LLMs and because I didn't really need to study much to get As, but I find it hard to fault people who do. I really struggle to see how integrity plays into this system. The system itself has no integrity, so having integrity inside it almost seems like being a sucker. If you want to change the culture to promote integrity, the education and the degree have to mean something besides an arbitrary bureaucratic gatekeeping device.
The world is getting more competitive. Integrity goes out the window when cheating in a test can mean meaningful better life outcomes and when you believe everyone else will be too.
The thing about the community of trust—of which all stewards—is that camaraderie, respect, identifying with the community, and integrity will keep the majority of students from cheating. And if that isn’t enough, the “single sanction” was historically a sufficient danger to raise the stakes immensely.
However, some students will cheat, and for that reason, I am very much against curves. If you learn the material and demonstrate that you have, you should get the A. But it’s more work for professors to calibrate their curriculums, and there seems to be no real accountability for the inverse of learning objectives—teaching objectives—so curves are likely here to stay.
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.
> 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.
> Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life.
Assuming the person you're talking to is still alive, this isn't true.
> The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement.
This isn't true either; if your student body consists of only those people, you don't need any system at all. There is no point in even notionally punishing students who don't want anything from you.
Even in the old times, including at medieval universities, most students weren't simply hobbyist curious gentlemen who studied it for idyllic leasure reasons, but people studied things to then get various jobs, teaching, administrative and clerical or legal work, etc.
if someone shows that kind of dedication to engineering, and make no mistake, this is engineering, I would certainly hire them at least as an apprentice.
one can settle into a doctor or lawyer career some time later. one can't learn to think out of the box on a whim.
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.
Second stationary camera recording the screen meaning you just need to replace the screen with the virtual screen in the footage you send as the secondary camera feed, easy for a static camera because it’s an affine transform with fixed parameters. If you don’t wave your arms in a way where they overlap the screen region then it’s ridiculously easy, otherwise don’t forget to release the ‘cheating on’ foot pedal before doing that.
I think we're headed into a world where remote degrees have little value for this reason. Universities which have remote or take-home exams won't be far behind.
Which sadly only makes it more of a rich kids' game, because the name-brand universities become the only ones that can be trusted. You see an out-of-state university that isn't a household name on someone's resume and you can't tell if it's one where students are monitored or if it's just a place where people pay a lot of money to transfer questions and results back and forth from ChatGPT.
I think we're also going to see a lot of people crash out of college halfway through when they start their academic career cheating, then get hit with a dose of reality when they encounter classes that require in-person, monitored work. If this happens 2-3 years into college, the student isn't going to quickly catch up. They're going to crash out.
I don't think this is having the effect you think it does.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
How is invigilation "soul destroying"? You just walk or stand around as students write exams. Grading exams is tedious, but invigilating them is a neutral experience.
> Grading exams is tedious, but invigilating them is a neutral experience.
I don't mind grading exams (though I think grading is somewhat futile - see my link elsewhere). Sometimes an examinee will come up with a new idea, but we don't need formal examinations to check that kind of thing out. And you can do it in a comfortable chair, while listening to Miles Davis, unlike invigilation.
Because for many a college degree is a pure formality to land a job.
My first job out of college, I worked with veterans at the company who all got in with a HS diploma. Now you realistically need a masters degree to be competitive, for no other reason than that where I live (Norway) most applicants have a 5-year masters degree. It is basically academic inflation.
Here we have a tongue-in-cheek word "Mastersyken" which translates to "Master's illness/disease", a word for the phenomena that too many people are pursuing a master's degree for the sake of the diploma alone, trying to become more attractive in the search for a job, but with the side effect that suddenly "everyone" has a master's degree, and in the end everyone is stuck at the same place as before, but with extra student loans.
The worst part is when you start working, and indeed discover that this is a job you could have done just fine straight out of HS.
A master's in CS can teach you interesting and very useful things, like how OS kernels, distributed systems, networks, and microprocessors work. A master's in EE will teach you things like signal processing and analog circuit design as well. Knowing these things helps you to design, build, and evaluate systems that are reliable and efficient.
A master's in science helps you understand how the physical world works and how to reason quantitatively as well as qualitatively. A master's in humanities gives you knowledge and understanding of human culture, such as literature and the arts, and history - subjects that can be deeply enriching and can provide insights that transcend disciplines. A master's in social science will teach you about how humans behave in groups and how they interact with their environment, and about statistical analysis.
Writing a master's thesis will also teach you a lot and make you a better writer - if you actually write it yourself and don't rely on AI.
Any of these degrees will certainly qualify you to be a more interesting, knowledgeable, and insightful barista or Uber driver.
Don't assume that TrackerFF is doing the kind of job that requires higher education.
It's also dangerous to assume that higher education is for everyone. (Although I agree the opportunity needs to be there for anyone who wants to try it.) Some people just want to get on with their life after high school. (I raise my children assuming that they will go to college, and if they want to seek an alternate way through life, I will support it.)
(Serious answer in spite of the punch line at the end of my parent post which perhaps addresses your first point.) I think it's good for people to be educated, and to have the opportunity when they want it, but it can be self-defeating to force people to be there who don't want to be.
There should be no reason you have to jump to a master’s for that. A bachelor’s in CS or EE would be a joke if it didn’t (doesn’t) cover those things. Arguably, even the current 4 year bachelor’s is a waste compared to a focused 2 year program: looking at my college’s requirements, many classes are wasted. Business majors taking a physical science with lab component, entry level English classes being taught by a TA that doesn’t speak English natively, etc.
I guess it depends on the program, but at my university an undergrad EE major, even though it had more units than any other major, didn't get to the best and most interesting stuff (perhaps because engineering majors also had to learn about things other than engineering, which seems like a pretty good idea.) Personally I wish more CS grads (including many people I worked with) had a better understanding of compilers, programming languages, databases, operating systems, distributed systems, networks, and computer architecture, as well as applications programming and interaction design. It's hard to get all of that while working at a single job, but readily achievable at a university, and an extra year of coursework really helps.
Business majors should take physical science courses with a lab component! How else are they going to learn anything about reality?
But there is no excuse for bad teaching, anywhere (especially given how insanely competitive faculty positions are - even crummy adjunct and lecturer positions.)
Unfortunately research universities prioritize fundraising > research > teaching. And sometimes grad students are selected to teach based on financial need or departmental requirements rather than interest or ability.
I feel like that's quite an american phenomenon - from the universities I have experience with in Denmark and the UK, a bachelor's program consists of classes entirely focused on the topic of the degree. But then again there is no idea of a "major" and a "minor" or even that many elective classes. We had a single semester where we had a choice of three courses for my batchelors degree, and for my masters similarly a single semester where we had the choice of an entrapreurship course or doing a placement (internship) in industry. all the other semesters (3 year batchelor and 2 year master) were pre-determined classes only, all strictly relevant to the topic of the degree.
>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.
> For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities
More true at an Ivy than anywhere else.
> 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).
If this guy thinks AI is motivating his previously guiless student body to start cheating on these tests, rather than simply changing the way they are cheating, he's been sniffing too many of his own farts.
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.
That motivation isn't necessarily inherent in the attendees though. That has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.
It's why we're seeing the death of the liberal arts majors. It's sad, because usually the smartest and most creative people I've worked with in the field of engineering and software have been liberal arts majors. But corporations don't want intelligent people. They want people who have been molded to whatever the soup du jour is.
> That [motivation] has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.
I don't think so.
The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universities teach to the students.
If what the universities teach was very important for the job, applicants who have not invested serious effort into getting a deep understanding of the topics of the courses would nearly all fail in the job interviews.
The problem rather is that for many jobs the knowledge that you could have gotten from the university typically does not matter, and thus investing minimal effort into the courses does not get you rejected in a job interview.
If only they could communicate with each other and explain their reasoning.
Corporation A "Hi University, here is what we hire highly paid people to do, and what we need to improve as a company."
University B, "Hi Corp A, here is our educational mandate to create well-rounded, highly educated people, we can probably fit your needs into the curriculum in the last couple of semesters, let's work together to make sure you have good employees and we have people who aren't struggling to pay back loans because they have an engineering degree but can't make more than 50K at a dead end job."
I basically do agree with you. The only problem that I see with your suggestion is that companies often don't know what they actually, really want from their employees.
But in practice the typical situation is that it is perfectly easy to graduate from University B without being well rounded and highly educated, and also you can skate by without actually learning any of the job relevant stuff in the last 2 semesters either.
I'm surprised Corporation A doesn't say "FU, we're just going to hire HS grads with high SAT scores and train them ourselves," but for whatever reason they typically don't.
Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.
This is already starting to happen, at least for software engineering positions. There have been plenty of stories of candidates with degrees from prestigious institutions failing to answer the simplest of questions correctly. FizzBuzz is a famous example, but there are many others.
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.
Take home tests were always rife with cheating, although it's probably worse now.
Teachers really need to stop doing it, it's so destructive to create a metric that tracks how well you can cheat and lie, and basically forces you to cheat and lie (because everyone else is) if you want to get a job.
Apparently some students aren't actually interested in learning and view the diploma as a meal ticket rather than a meaningful credential. Or perhaps the university is just seen as a networking opportunity.
If students don't want to be there in the first place and/or don't see any value in learning, it is unsurprising that they'd take the easy way out. Or maybe they cheated their way into Brown and are just continuing.
But I was always interested in learning, and understood that cheating was a method of learning avoidance. Why waste the amazing learning resources - faculty, teaching assistants, courses, labs, libraries, studios, rehearsal spaces, interesting speakers, arts and culture events, computing facilities, maker spaces, etc. - that are available at a place like Brown?
> then you just skip the education part? Why bother?
You've never put anything off in your life or taken the easy short term route? Come on this is not difficult to understand. You aren't different either.
When it costs a lot of money, the failure itself costs a lot of money. And you cant afford it. Because failure means you paid a lot of money for nothing.
An expensive education comes with higher temptation to cheat.
i mean, even if you are truly there for learning, doesn't it make sense in a low risk setting to try and boost your grade? it's different if you're cheating on your homework or other learning, but there isn't much learning left to do on the exam, that's for the grade
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
For homework: if you make homework results not count towards the final grade, then there's no reason to use an LLM - the point then just becomes to have practice problems and feedback on how well you are doing.
This is what my university (EPFL) was doing ~40 years ago. And yes, some students didn't bother with the homework, and mostly paid the price at the final exam...
Worth pointing out - modern multimodal LLMs (properly called VLMs, etc.) can easily take pictures as input and describe them in text. In fact, the CLIP model - one of the predecessors of modern VLMs - is entirely designed around being able to caption images with text.
That said - requiring students to hand-write answers is reasonably effective. It's a lot more boring to hand-copy text out of an LLM answer than write it yourself, and it makes the "cheating" significantly more visceral.
I considered that... and in the "worst comes to worse" scenario where they decide to use an LLM and re-write everything by hand, I'm still hoping they'll learn SOMETHING during the copying process... kind of like the old time "copy books" that were once used.
> 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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
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.
Using a special computer works too. I do my exams with our institution's Computer-Based Testing Facility, a bank of computers with fixed software and firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site.
As a result, I've been able to challenge students to solve interactive software security challenges on the midterm and final with automatic grading - something that would have been impossible with pen and paper.
Scalability is really the major challenge. We're rolling out more CBTF rooms and rolling out access to other departments due to demand, but it's definitely more resource-intensive than pen-and-paper. One possibility is to treat CBTFs as computer labs when not actively administering exams (or maybe even vice-versa), something we're looking into doing.
My university does that, it works quite well. The devices net-boot either into a locked down exam OS or regular Debian, depending on the current need.
But what's wrong with pen and paper?
Writing by hand is very painful for some people. I always dreaded blue book exams for this reason, and ended up not writing as much as I wanted because I could not stand the hand pain. Or I got incredibly sloppy so that I could write as fast as possible and get it over with.
I've got kind of messed up hands, but not enough that you'd look at me and say "that guy should get special treatment". From the comments here, there are others like me who similarly hated hand-written tests due to the physical pain of hand writing.
The grading cannot be automated easily and becomes time consuming.
Should anything more complicated than what could be automated with a paper ScanTron form really be subject to automated grading anyway?
Right? For all the money paid by modern students is it unreasonable to expect some expert human interaction? The cost explosion has been centered outside the classroom, elsewhere in the org, so can't play that card.
You should see how little many of the people providing that expert human interaction are paid. My wife is a professor (in the humanities) with 2 decades of experience and degrees from excellent schools, gets top reviews from students as well and she barely earns enough to live on. If I weren't in tech we would be financially destitute. She already works 60 hours a week with just the courses, prep, grading and meetings she has... any more and she would probably just keel over and faint.
the existence of scantron and the laziness of teachers have turned nearly all assessments into multiple choice which is a terrible type of question. Now we have the technology to have better more signal-heavy types of questions to also be graded automatically. seems like a good thing.
Grading written papers has worked fine for 200 years at least.
It can be automated by making the assistant professor do it.
It can, but you don't want to hear about it: Hand writing recognition is an application of AI.
God forbid people do work
Unless you do a test type exam, Handwriting gets worse when you are out of time or the space is limited. It also adds a lot of stress because ink can be stuck on the pen or the pen can roll out of the table or be lost.
People perfectly smart, but with cryptic handwriting will have much worse results for the same exam on pen and paper vs with a keyboard.
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> firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site.
... did LANs (Ethernet, with wifi disabled) stop being a thing?
The machines are connected via Ethernet (reliability!) but our exams are hosted on Internet sites like PrairieLearn and Canvas. Those are a lot easier to work with than, say, having to load exams onto a machine accessible on a private LAN.
Yes, said machine could have both the LAN connectivity and WAN access, and we could set up the whole exam website on it, but we would lose out on the flexibility to let profs choose the platform that works best for them.
This is just...depressing. BSL-4-like rooms just to test university students.
I'm sure you're exaggerating, but the exam process in a CBTF is pretty lightweight. Students arrive, drop off their bags and phone etc., check in (swipe an ID card, get their picture matched), log into the computer and the exam website. When the exam starts, they refresh the site and do the exam; we've got proctors in the room as usual to watch for any conventional cheating (using a phone, consulting a friend).
If you find that onerous, I guess a paper exam would probably also feel pretty depressing to you.
The loss of trust would be the depressing part (to me). That said the amount of cheating I witnessed in undergrad was also depressing.
TBH - for me, it’s an opportunity to do a different kind of exam, with a level of interactivity and realism that isn’t possible with paper exams. It is possible but much more annoying to run such exams in a BYOD setting: for example, the lack of consistency between people’s machines, and the risk of device failures, are just two reasons why BYOD is hard even before you get into the cheating aspects.
> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written.
Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor.
Let people at least type their essay with the standard features of a word processor as usable as MS Word 2000 or better.
I’m 30 and “we can’t do tests in paper” seems _insane_. Just how metastatic has ed tech been in what, 9 years since my undergrad?
I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.
It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"), but it limits what kinds of problems you can reasonably put on the exam. You'll definitely lean a bit more into theoretical stuff than practicals. Which is fine for some courses, I think a bit less interesting in other courses.
Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example
Having said all that... "we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet, go type up all your stuff in this VM we have set up" feels fine if you don't like this constraint IMO
GP is talking about every test being done on a computer presumably to avoid handwriting. Handwriting isn’t the usual “get with the times, grandpa” situation. It’s been proven again and again that writing by hand develops the brain and helps store that new knowledge better. It would be a disservice to the students to only use typing. Or TikTok shorts, or whatever is the tech of the day.
Exams shouldn’t probably be used for learning new information and typing is a lot more efficient and allows editing and revising so there are advantages to that.
> or whatever is the tech of the day.
Rote memorisation has been the standard technique probably for way longer that anything else so I’m not sure that every innovation is inherently inferior to what we had before
Handwriting is still “new information” by the time you are in university? How do you feel about reading when text to speech and LLM summarization are so advanced now?
No wonder some people are so easy to replace with an LLM.
>It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"),
this would also end up valorizing particular ways of thinking or developing, so those whose development methodology is more exploratory until you get a certain point where you get an overarching view of how everything should interact and then go into a quicker iterative mode would be penalized.
I guess it's ok it does this, some things after all must be valorized whatever is chosen, although I've known many people who are quite good using this way of working who would then be downgraded.
They can just do that iterating on a draft paper before doing the final version.
Meanwhile I had to do VHDL to design a chip and then write code for it in paper, and get the actual solution the software that was meant to run in my imaginary processor to work, detailing both the code and what we thought our code was doing. Teacher and TAs would later make it run in a Xilinx to grade and make themselves available at a few hours if you wanted to discuss your grade/solution with them at a later time with the thing actually running in a board.
We had 3 hours to make the test. The papers the teacher delivered had differences between them (I think it was four different versions of the test?). The Teacher didn’t stay in the class also, you had to deliver the test to them later in their office.
> have to manually run the code in your head
If you're doing a good job, you have to do that anyway, or at least have enough of a spidey sense for broken code to know when to investigate and add an extra test case.
Something like 30% of the time at $WORK, interviewers report the candidate as having solved the problem when a closer inspection reveals UB, memory corruption, and other bullshit. The test cases pass, and I think that's part of the problem. You can't tune out and avoid deeply understanding the submission.
I'm fine with paper tests as a tradeoff, but in the real world where I am paid to program, I am a strong advocate of advanced type checkers/compilers and other static code analysis tools because they can keep all the code "in their head." They can keep far, far more code "in their head" than even the most gifted programming savants. Literally as I type out a mistake, the type checker alerts me to it.
So in some theoretical hiring example, if I have to choose between two candidates: one which is really good at keeping the code in the head and the other who is less good at that, but who is very skilled at using programming tools like advanced type systems or formal verification tools, then I'd prefer the latter.
Of course in practice, I would of course take a student that I knew had passed their paper test with their own knowledge over a student that likely ran their digital test through an LLM.
> If you're doing a good job
I think the problem is that the grader has to run your code in their head. That's a whole different problem.
I would imagine every professor (or assistant) who graded any programming exam I wrote was doing just that and further expect them to let some things slide as long as the general direction was correct.
They can OCR them and run them for real.
This would be HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) not OCR and HTR is a lot harder than OCR especially for modern scripts (i.e. student's scrawls). And at every error the reviewer now needs to check if it was due to an error in the code or due to a bad HTR somewhere in the code.
I'd say compared to just typing the code on a disconnected computer: Not worth it.
And then you can grade them on important syntactic issues that really matter, like tabs -vs- spaces.
do they? OCR has gotten pretty good in 2026.
Good, the grader should hone that skill at pace then.
The student has to submit one exam.
The grader has to grade N exams.
Which is literally what graduate students get paid to do.
How do you think English, philosophy, or history tests get graded?
Do you think every institution of higher education has a ready supply of grad students to just throw at problems that require manpower?
Or were you just assuming your experiences (large university, I'm guessing) are universal?
Yes. That's exactly what college is. If you don't have the resources to effectively individually evaluate a student's output, you shouldn't hold a graded class.
Then let me spell it out for you, since you seem to be unaware:
There are many, many colleges that have no grad students. Period. They are undergraduate colleges.
Expecting any college or university to just be able to scale up the amount of manpower required to grade their classes/exams by a large multiple is absurdly unrealistic. I assure you that most existing colleges do have plenty of resources to effectively evaluate individual students' outputs, if they don't have to assume that anything submitted digitally is written by LLMs.
That new requirement is a massive change to how they operate, and it's incredibly rude and short-sighted to be dismissive and contemptuous of institutions that have trouble adjusting to it.
These colleges certainly have English, Philosophy, Art, and History classes, all of which require papers to be submitted and the exams consist of essay questions.
That Computer Science is somehow a privileged subject where the exam grading must be automated is elitism of the highest degree.
> I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.
Interesting. This reminds me of COBOL and FORTRAN "code sheets" that were used back in the day...
> we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet
How practical is this?
1. Is your institution able to provide this support?
2. Do you believe you are able to supervise the room well enough that students will be caught if they cheat? (Eg, bring a phone and look up answers.)
2 is “fine”, or that’s just the status quo. The friction from copying over stuff from a tiny phone screen discretely is the cost to cheat as well
I don’t know about 1s practicality. In my schooling it would always be doable but I have the impression US schools are a different scale
I graduated from a not so incredible university and we had multiple such rooms. Teaching assistants and some tutors helped supervising the exams and it wasn't easy to cheat without getting caught.
>How practical is this?
This is basically how ICPC works (https://icpc.global/)
Contestant computers boot a Linux image that contains all the interpreters/compilers and documentation for the supported languages, some editors/IDEs(vim, Jetbrains, Eclipse, etc) and a web browser.
Network access is limited to the judging system only.
My experience in Europe is that most universities can support this.
Jfc, this is a solved problem at the community college near me. All of the computers in the testing room are thin clients that effectively remote into a vm, and you get checked with a metal detector before going into the room with the computers.
If you can escape the vm on the fly and manage to use an llm to cheat, you deserve that A.
> tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"
IME, that kind of nitpicky grading mostly happens when the exam was designed too easy and does not depend on the medium.
> Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example
Which you really need to do anyway because code that is broken due to a brainfart and code that is broken because of a fundamental misunderstanding should not receive the same grade.
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I'm quite a bit older than you, old enough that I remember learning to touch type in elementary school on Apple IIe and IIgs desktop computers. It's not reasonable these days to expect people to hand write a 4, 6, 8 page length essay on paper and pen with a finite time limit in a classroom. Being able to edit and revise things in a word processor type interface is an essential part of writing an academic paper.
Additionally expecting whoever is reading the paper to comprehend everyone's (likely very sloppy, in this era) handwriting is an exercise in frustration for the person who would be evaluating the papers.
Not that tests/exams can't be given on paper, ever (multiple choice still works), but for something where people are expected to provide multiple pages of coherently written essay output, I would struggle to do it by hand. And I'm old enough that we did do a lot purely on paper when I was in school.
My child's high school is doing the same thing: all exams are now handwritten on paper in a supervised room. Phones and smartwatches are always banned during the school day, but laptops are banned during exams. This is standard at state-funded high schools in Australia.
There will likely be a period where those who went through high school with computers struggle with hand writing stuff, but the next generation will have done it all their lives.
> I would struggle to do it by hand.
If you did it before then, barring physical limitations which have occurred since then, you would struggle for a short while and then you would be fine. I also did coursework purely on paper, got out of practice, and then once my kids were in school got back into the habit of handwriting. I can even write cursive again. Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist. There's a reason it was invented. :)
> Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist.
For righties.
I'm left handed. It's still easier than print for me.
You can write cursive left-handed just fine, slanting letters the other way helps.
I'm right-handed, but I had to learn left-handed cursive at school when I spent 5 months with a cast on my right hand.
Being left-handed I've done left-handed cursive for far more than 5 months. I pushed myself to also try and learn to write right-handed. In a left-to-right writing style, its more than just slanting the letters slightly the other way. In the end, the right-hander is overall dragging the pen across the page while the lefty is overall pushing the pen across the page.
I have never been able to handwrite well and my family suspects I have dysgraphia. I can write, but slowly and unreadably. But I can type over 160 wpm. Typing for me is strictly superior, probably by an order of magnitude.
It’s rather peculiar that people are downvoting somebody sharing their perfectly valid perspective..
I'm used to it
> barring physical limitations
I think you're missing the point. This is a physical limitation. People don't write as much as they used to. I used to be able to write for hours, taking notes, writing papers, etc... Now, I try to take notes during a meeting and my hand cramps. And as a bonus, my handwriting never was great, but now it's illegible for me.
Yes, we all "could" re-learn this skill, but how many people will? If you asked me to type a paper on a locked-down computer, I could easily. If you asked me to write a 2000 word paper by hand in an hour, I doubt it would happen.
If we expect students to take in-person tests on paper, then you should also do the rest of the classwork on paper. I am completely in the camp that we learn more when we write something. The physical act is part of the learning process. But you can't expect students to write an in-depth exam without having the practice of doing it often.
> Now, I try to take notes during a meeting and my hand cramps. And as a bonus, my handwriting never was great, but now it's illegible for me.
Are you using a fountain pen, writing cursive and do you take care to hold it properly? Those three things fixed all my cramps
What fixed your cramps from using a knife and glue to cut and paste text?
It's not about the difficulty of writing, it's about the difficulty of cutting and pasting text with a knife and glue versus a text editor.
From what I recall, doing handwritten CS exams in 2004, you aren't writing long essays. Long form was the course work. The exam was short form answers and it did not stress my writing hand. The one with most writing was the natural language exam (an extinct subject I should think) and I felt more time worry over having to flip back and forth between pages to cross reference than time spent writing.
> It's not reasonable these days to expect people to hand write a 4, 6, 8 page length essay on paper and pen with a finite time limit in a classroom.
Say what? Writing by hand is not only useful to write. It helps practice fine motor control. Something you need in many places in life, and most people have no practice of other than by writing.
Or we can just require school to actually, you know, teach people how to write?
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I've sat exams a few years after university (for a tentative career change) and I can tell you I'd forgotten how genuinely tiring writing so much by hand was. I've made sure to write more regularly since, just in case I change from software engineering to something that requires more handwriting.
Well, how many times in that 9 years have you written on paper for 2 hours straight? Even as a kid who did it regularly, it sucked.
Doing it now I really don't think I could deliver my intellectual best while worrying about if anyone can read my handwriting and whether I'm gonna cramp up by the end of the exam.
Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.
> Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.
Pen and paper are literally designed to produce text.
> Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text
Can you say more? It's worked well for 4,500 years. Probably the most important invention ever.
Well to be fair humans had to suffer through all kinds of miserable practices over those years. Modern style of writing as we understand it didn’t really develop until the 800s or so (if not way later).
So it’s like saying that clay tablets worked just fine for 1000+ years why would we switch to papyrus? Or who needs character for vowels? Or spaces between words, it’s not like anyone reads texts silently?
I'm much older. I've always been able to type faster than I can write by hand. Forcing me to handwrite an answer slows me down -- and produces something that's much harder to read.
I’m 57. It is insane to hear this bullshit.
I’m 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?
I'm 50. Optimizing testing for speed is goofy. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.
I'm 60+. I'd be more concerned about the student's physical ability to write for several hours continuously. Writer's cramp used to be a problem, and that was when we were used to hand-writing everything. Legibility is also a consideration: I have to hand-write a lot(keyboards would not be socially acceptable for some of my work), and even with decades of practice and a hand that I designed for legibility, sometimes I have difficulty reading my own writing.
We have to notice that high stakes exams on paper worked for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, and high stakes exams on personal laptops have been tried for approximately six years and worked for none of them. With that framing, I don’t think the burden of proof is on the side saying that kids can take exams on paper?
They have, but antiquity is not necessarily a good argument. I attended a university which required examinees to wear a black suit, white bow tie, bands, and a gown. I don't recommend it.
But this is missing the point. The issue is not that people in general can't write by hand for hours, but that these particular people may have difficulty.
> We have to notice that high stakes exams on paper worked for hundreds, possibly thousands of years
Define “worked” there are reasons we have abandoned quite a few archaic practices which turned to be highly ineffective in hindsight (and often quite misery inducing). I’m not implying that handwriting is one of them just that it’s a terrible argument.
> burden of proof is on the side saying that kids
Smacking children who fail to give a correct answer with a stick worker for thousands of years as well..
I have absolutely no concern over a 20 yr old's ability to weather the rigors of manipulating a 7 gram pencil. It's not like we're talking about getting them to spend a week on a roofing crew or swap their gaming mouse for a set of post hole diggers here. If someone needs an accommodation then that should absolutely be made available.
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Nothing to do with weight. It's a cramp in the muscles of the hand from holding the pen and making fine movements for hours. I'm guessing you are from a generation after keyboard use became common, so you haven't encountered it.
I'm all for handwritten tests, but it's more complicated than that. If you're actually writing for 2hr+ and haven't studied appropriate technique or bought some sort of crutch like a pencil holder then the repetitive motion will absolutely cause cramps for a fraction of the class regardless of being 20ish and healthy, and they might not find that out until they're forced to write for 2hr. The muscles manipulating a pencil (with poor technique) are much smaller than those manipulating a post hole digger, so that comparison isn't fair.
Not in my experience, nobody complained of that during my studies. 74 exams over 5 years ca. 2h long, also 2h long lectures, often without pause, back-to-back with another such lecture (but max 2 in a row)
What are you even talking about? It’s normal for young students to be using a pencil to write for multiple hours in a day in school.
With breaks, and it's also normal that in a class of ~30 you'll still find a couple students with cramps.
A good exam also has breaks between writing because you need them to think about what you are going to write. An exam that is just about writing down words as fast as you can is going to suck whether that's handwritten or with a keyboard.
Won’t someone think about the students who get cramps from typing on keyboards as well??
You should definitely take speed into consideration. If your're writing an essay, being able to type it out and still have both the opportunity and time to edit it is great. If you're writing it on paper, you likely have neither. What comes to you first is what's submitted.
When I was in grade school the common practice was to use the back page of the exam booklet to do a quick outline (assuming there was no other scrap paper available) and just cross it out when you were done with it. Being able to organize your thoughts and maintain a clear direction in writing 500-1000 words seems like an important thing to test for.
And that's exactly the point! By making sure the student can't edit the entire text once its written, you force him to think about the essay's structure and force him to plan much more before writing :)
Sure, but you know that professionals edit, right? It improves the quality of the product.
Absolutely! That's why they are students: you learn to walk before you learn to run. Students should be forced to plan their texts and practice getting better at that. Whenever they leave school, they'll be able to write even better texts than the essays.
Honestly, school essays, as a text genre, suck to read. They are not meant to be enjoyable, beautiful texts! Instead, they are meant to help gauge the student's ability at text planning, the quality of their text project, their grammatical knowledge, and orthography.
I must say I'd be open to seeing schools attempting other models, though, and measuring the results thereafter to see in practice what happens when students type their essays instead. In terms of text projects and planning, that could be interesting and train different skills.
If the goal is to assess the ability of the student to produce a professional product, then why prevent them from using AI in the first place? The vast majority of professionals have access to AI nowadays?
Most curricula should probably feature both forms of assessment, demonstrating your knowledge of the basics in a closed book assessment and your ability to produce high quality final products using all resources available to you in take home assignments.
It's not JUST about output, it's also about learning. The output is a way to measure the learning, it's not important of itself except as a reflection of the student's mastery of the curriculum.
You're thinking of the output as the goal rather than as the means to an end.
No, I’m not? As I said, you should assess whether people know the basics (I.e. are they learning) by testing without AI tools available. However, I believe you need to learn how to employ AI tools, just as you need to learn how to use a word processor. And the best way to do that is through experience.
If you’re suggesting that the test favors those capable of arranging their thoughts and words before putting pen to paper then.... I’m not sure there’s a problem
You could add someone screaming in their ear to test their focus in strained curcumstances.
And yet strangely this hasn't proved a major impediment to the species at any point in the last ~5000 years...
Sure but given any length of time, which does tend to be finitely allocated for a test (if for no other reason than the prof or proctor does have other places to be eventually), having to hand write is slower and harder to revise, which means it's harder to get that full, understanding-demonstrating essay, done and polished.
If your test is bottlenecked on the speed it takes to write it, you're testing writing skills.
I also challenge that "hand writing is harder to revise"; again, why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?
> challenge "hand writing is harder to revise"
What? Suppose you want to fix the opening of your essay. Best case it's pencil and you can erase some, but worst case you have a longer sentence you want to put in there so you can't do it without scribbling all over and making a mess of the page. Word processors let you edit. How is this controversial?
> why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?
Okay, so from first principles:
1. Time is finite, we will all perish
2. Unless you are doing open book, needs to be supervised (proctored / or prof/TA is there)
3. That person is paid for a shift
4. That shift must end
5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.
> 5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.
I think you're missing some logic in there somewhere. If a student fills in as many pages as they can, each with the number 1 written on it as large as possible, was this a good conclusion? The quantity of writing is not a good metric.
EDIT: to give a closer to reality example, an essay that's 4 times longer than a competing essay does not make it better.
Not sure why you're getting so hyperbolic. The point isn't to write as much as possible, it's to be able to get all of your points across. I'm not talking about where the "answer" is 10 words long, I was thinking of a general essay. Longer isn't better, however, half an essay may be pretty useless to get a good grade, and if you can write twice as fast, you have a much less chance of running out of time, for any quantity of "time" without having to allocate hours, wasting more proctor time and making exams harder to schedule. Because like someone else said, they don't impose a time limit to screw the slowest-writing students, they do it for practicality (my above comment was trying to explain that).
It’s fine to erase or use scratch paper on an essay test.
You don’t write the test to fill the 60 minute slot. You time it so students are able to finish early if they’re really good. Slow ones need the whole time but can still do well if they understand the material being tested.
I don't generally get why tests are designed to rush a student. Is speed a proxy for understanding?
Well, to some extent, yes. Of course the literal number of works you can write per minute is not, but:
- someone with a good understanding will often come to a concise, clear answer while someone struggling will produce a convoluted paragraph.
- the way to get to the result will vary depending on your understanding (e.g., are you blindly applying some method or understanding what's going on). For instance, "hey, this is a vector field, I don't need to evaluate this complex integral, I just need to compute the difference between the start and endpoint of the curve!". Both answers will be correct, but one denotes a much better actual understanding (and will take way less time).
I literally explained this above. No one is trying to rush the students or punish the slowest writers. It's because time is finite and having tests sized so that it's impossible for the slowest test-taker to even feel rushed means that the test time period needs to be much longer. That means higher costs for paying the proctor and makes them much harder to schedule since you need enough very long non-overlapping test periods that every standard class scheduling slot has a corresponding exam period (and think of midterms -- those often have to fit in a standard class period, or else if someone takes longer, that might blow through another class).
I meant to say they usually aren’t a rush for non-ace students, just a full hour. You have to work diligently, though. Competitive tests excepted, obviously.
Speed is part of fluency. Fluency and understanding feel related
Re "hand writing is harder to revise", I never had an issue with erasing words or parts of the text and using asterisks, end footnotes, the margins and whatever free space available (with arrows or not) to do revisions in written exams. Nobody complained and afaik it was fairly standard to do where I studied, as long as your exam itself was actually legible. Granted, I refer to math-related exams not essays on literature or philosophy where form may have mattered more. On the other hand, I cannot imagine writing any math during an exam on a computer.
I would often do a bullet point summary/outline of my answer on the paper. That would have arrows and insertions and crossed-out stuff everywhere -- it was usually a mess.
But then I'd use that to write the actual text answer, and consequently, it was mostly clean. I'd still have to cross stuff out or add a phrase between the lines every so often, but once the basic structure was done, that was mostly unnecessary.
And if I was ever pressed for time, I'd usually get part marks for the outline anyway. Depending on the subject, I'd sometimes race through the questions doing just the outlines, and then come back to write the full text as a complete second pass.
To be fair, this wasn't creative writing. I think it'd be harder when the expression is the content.
> Optimizing testing for speed is goofy
That's a strawman. I said bottlenecking testing by requiring hand writing is stupid. Put another way - you're meant to be using the test to be thinking and re-thinking the problem and articulating approaches and solutions, not use your time, effort and energy on managing quill and paper.
It's not a strawman. If the test is designed so that you have spend most of the time thinking about your answer then even doubling the writing time has not significant impact.
>The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.
Testing for understanding requires the fastest WPM possible. Regardless of the method used, students don't all write at the same speed. To minimize the influence of this variance, they need to use the fastest writing technique possible. If a fast writer spends 30 minutes writing in a two hour test, and a slow writer needs a full hour, the fast writer gets 50% more thinking time. But if you double both their writing speeds, the fast writer's advantage drops to 17%.
The faster the writing technique people are allowed to use, the better your test can identify poor understanding.
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A lecture hall full of click-click-click isn't going to be conducive to concentrating on a test.
If you can't concentrate while people are working on computers near you, I don't think you'll do well in any workplace that is based around knowledge work.
This is why I prefer working alone at night and am massively more productive. In any case, what's being tested in an exam setting is one's understanding of the course material, not whether they are a good fit for your idea of a normal workplace.
We're no longer limited by this and can avoid the productivity drag by universally permitting remote work.
Not every company is an open office hellscape.
... Including a university. Literally everywhere you work as a student is serenaded by keyboard sounds.
I had tons of exams like that. Its not an issue as the computers simply do not have loud mechanical keyboards connected
Change the keyboards to silent. Allow headphones. Still beats the collective waste of forcing to hand write
But the scribble of pens is?
The humanity!
because writing speed isn't the bottleneck for what is being tested
Fill the room with typewriters.
> Fill the room with typewriters.
Playing devil's advocate: one reason I'm good at typing on computers is that I learned on typewriters, which need much more force for each key press, especially the little fingers. Someone who learned on computer keyboards won't have trained the muscles on their fingers as much, and will have a hard time pressing the outer keys strongly enough (and if you press the keys too lightly, the mechanism won't hit the ink ribbon with enough force to transfer the ink to the paper).
Electric typewriters were pretty widespread by the 60-70s or so it’s just that they don’t have quite as much “retro” appeal these days ( eg like cassettes vs vinyl)
I saw plenty of mechanical typewriters by the 80s/90s, when I learned typing at school. A relative of mine also taught a typewriter course, with several different mechanical typewriter models. Everyone I know who had a typewriter had a mechanical one. I don't think I've ever seen an electric typewriter in person; I've only read about them in the Internet. They don't seem to have been that widespread to me.
Typewriters are an expensive and niche item these days, due to no longer being manufactured, and the good ones being collected by weird nerds. Sort of like buying a 40-year-old vinyl turntable that is in good and usable condition.
If I build you a custom device that receives questions from a central computer and lets the user plug in whatever keyboard they want via bluetooth or usb to only type and answer the questions (ability to edit the text and submit when ready). The central computer can receive all the questions submitted to any of these devices connected to it via wifi or cloud. How much would pay per device? Would you pay for a subscription?
I think this can already be implemented through a fairly mundane thin client approach, such as Dell/Wyse type thin clients, citrix stuff, or an ordinary x86-64 desktop PC setup with an absolute barebones OS that connects a graphical desktop session to something centralized over a LAN.
Or you can do a much cheaper tiny esp32 typewriter with a basic display and a usb for a keyboard. But who wants cheap for education.
Frankly, the problem is finding someone with the knowledge to administer it.
Initial cost is almost certainly not a factor; the components could be so old as to be free.
Manual typewriters are no longer being manufactured. Several brands of electric and electronic typewriters are still are being made.
You cant type fast on them either
You mean on mechanical typewriters? It would be hard to learn to press keys slowly and avoid rollover unless using single finger typing: key travel was a long way on old typewriters.
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If the writing part is anywhere close to being a bottleneck then the exam is just too easy.
Because students aren’t AI and aren’t measured by tokens/s
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> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary.
I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical.
It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.
I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.
That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here
Well sure, but if you force feed anything clumsily you can ruin it. We had a nice teacher, and took our sweet time in first grade learning to write the alphabet in first grade. Then it was done. IMO it wasn't "additional material", or material at all, it was part of the fundamental skill set with which to interact with the material. And there wasn't a thought in my mind that it could be any other way, of course you learn to read and write when you go to school.
If you mandate force feeding at scale, then yes, some instructors will do so clumsily -- this is virtually guaranteed, although it is true that some topics are more prone to this than others.
But I think you misinterpreted my comment -- I am not advocating for doing away with schooling or testing understanding in school in general, which is entirely my fault as my post was a bit unclear. But I agree with you that one should learn to read and write in school!
OP used the phrasing "force them", which I read as a stronger statement than "it'll be on the exam", and more "there will be an exam or entire course on this topic that must be passed or else". My point, more or less, was that there are many other more fundamental topics we already do this with other than cursive, and that adding another has a steep cost with uncertain payoff that is heavily dependent on the implementation.
How can you tell if they learned anything if you don't test them?
There was an enormous volume of material that I never understood in high school because at the time I either didn't care or other things seemed more important -- my mom was dying, for starters.
But just having exposure to that material planted it in my mind and, in many cases, I revisited those topics later as an adult and learned them properly.
To be clear, I am not advocating for doing away with testing or schooling altogether. I am only pushing back on the idea that a 16 year old who doesn't care about cursive or calculus or Chaucer or whatever today won't ever care about those topics unless we mandate he pass an exam or course on it.
More broadly, my point is that there is a cost to "forcing them" as the grandparent advocates with regard to learning cursive. The moment you "force them" you also guarantee that some people won't graduate because of that extra requirement. There are other ways to enrich people's lives without force feeding, e.g., mention it and devote a question on an exam to it.
i don't at all think it's that obvious / easy.
i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written.
and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged.
i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.
I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s.
These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.
> I think everybody should be able to write cursive
As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?
Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.
It's been clearly shown to be beneficial for some people. I too happen to be one of them.
For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.
I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?
If I say "people have two legs", someone is bound to reply "My friend Bob has only one leg."
On average, people have slightly less than two legs.
However the average person has exactly two.
That's because "average" can mean either median, mean or mode depending on context.
I might just be stretching my point... but if I remember Treasure Island (1883) correctly, the mean person had only one leg.
Sorry! I'll see myself out.
That's been my experience as well. I'm just curious about cursive writing specifically.
I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.
point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.
And I strongly disagree.
The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap.
And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again.
Different strokes
Same here, apparently it’s a major ADHD thing. I can take notes or I can pay attention and try to understand, but I can’t do both, you have to pick one (a calculus teacher in high school was very insistent that constant note taking for her rapid-fire example-heaving lectures was required, so… yeah I didn’t have a clue WTF we’d even been covering after each of those classes, though I’d have lots of notes!)
Are you sure this is a permanent fact about you and not something that would change if it became habitual?
I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.
Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22
Do you acknowledge you're a minority?
I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.
But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.
Not disagreeing with your opinion, just answering your question:
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
Couldn't you make the argument that training the hands for more lifting and tiny movements has better long-term payoffs as that is also beneficial to many other tasks?
There are studies showing that cursive is better for some purposes: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... But the results are quite weak.
What's really important is handwriting itself. Block letters are honestly fine.
Writing in a good cursive (like the Spencerian script) is a bit faster and much easier on your hands, as you don't have to lift the pen as often. But that matters only when you need to write pages and pages of text.
My native language is Russian, and in Russian schools cursive was mandatory. Writing in block letters was seen as a sign of illiteracy.
I started learning English as a foreign language, and we didn't bother with cursive. So I kept writing in block letters for quite a while. I then started learning German, and our teacher taught us German cursive handwriting. I'm now using it for English as well :)
> Writing in block letters was seen as a sign of illiteracy
How interesting. I've always thought the cyrillic block letters look beautiful, whereas the cursive variant not so much. I learnt some russian and I've never bothered writing cursive because of this perception. Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!
Cyrillic block letters are mostly the same as Latin letters :)
> Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!
There's a HUGE difference between learning Russian as a native and as a foreign language. Especially if you can write! Russian spelling rules are quite opaque.
People will absolutely be impressed by your writing.
It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.
... And there are jobs that use those skills.
Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/
My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.
So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?
If everything is just extremes, then acknowledge that the other extreme then is everybody sitting on their ass watching "Ow! My balls!", clad in advertisements. And given the choice between those two worlds, yes, everybody should have the dexterity of a surgeon.
It's a matter of spending 200 to 300 hours of practice on it.
Learning cursive (and other skills) in school is about trying to make sure opportunities for professions are not excluded.
While cursive is not a foundational skill (compare math and reading), it is a way to train fine motor control.
And it's not only the dental surgeons, but also dental hygienists... and doctors and surgeons (anyone who uses a scalpel). One could also look at various craftsmen such as jewelers and watchmakers.
Learning cursive is a way to make sure that we don't exclude people at an early age from professions that they might want to go into.
Learning cursive won't automatically give you the dexterity of a dental surgeon, that's just a silly conclusion you have drawn from one example.
What is the downside of learning cursive?
I learned cursive in elementary school. For me the downside is that it's a waste of time and attention that could be spent on something else.
Developing fine motor control for cursive is actually improving cerebellar function. It turns out that the cerebellum is a general "organ" for fine control and synchronization of neural function across the brain. It is implicated in:
* Reading and responding to other people's emotions. * Emotional regulation. * Generalized sequencing. * Musical ability. * Counting. * Following patterns.
While you may see it as a waste, you may very well have benefited in significant ways from learning it at a young age.
It's hard for me to imagine how fine motor control applies to cursive in a way that doesn't apply to block writing.
One kid in my school didn't write cursive, but wrote block letters so beautifully, it looked near printed. And he was probably faster than most. He also played the piano since young age and is a professional pianist now, so yeah :)
So I would totally put it on the same level, theoretically. That is, you can write block letters with just as much skill and care as you can cursive, I think. Just like you can write cursive by just doing squiggly lines (as doctors write prescriptions).
I'm definitely not a pro, but I've been actively playing piano for forty years now for whatever that might be worth.
If anyone is interested, here is a link where you can download the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221770027_Correlati...
I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.
Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.
I just like it, the same way you hate it. If disliking it is valid, surely so is liking it?
I'm neither fully left handed or fully right handed. I mostly write with my left hand, but it has never been clean, despite doing all of my school work for 18 years with either pencil or pen and paper.
I wish I could have a just spent "an afternoon" to magically make either my printing or cursive better, but it basically stalled out early on and never improved despite years of practice.
What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?
What's the benefit of a HNSW KNN search over brute forcing it? Speed, with minimal loss of accuracy.
Cursive vs printing (I'm guessing that's what you mean by "standard writing") is exactly the same, provided you can actually write in cursive. If you weren't taught in school, then sucks to be you, I guess? Modern pedagogy has a lot to answer for :(
I was taught cursive in elementary school along with everyone else. It was always slower than normal block letters for me. I always kind of resented having to learn it.
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
(Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)
When each word is a smooth continuous line I can write faster and with less effort. The short up and down motions of printed letters tires out my hand.
What is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?
No. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.
This is not true outside of the United States
Where are you thinking? Everyone I know who speaks a language written with Latin characters doesn't use cursive. I know very little about other character sets - I believe nearly all Arabic is cursive for instance - but this has been my experience across countries.
As a specific example, all of my friends in Germany - whether born there, in Eastern Europe, or whatever - use print letters, not cursive.
In 2nd grade I was assured by my teachers that all adults wrote cursive and you had to relearn the alphabet again. Then in 3rd grade the teachers all said they couldn't read anyone's handwriting and to print everything.
In high school the most difficult part of the SAT was the honor pledge that you didn't cheat that you had to write in cursive. Nobody writes cursive.
When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.
Talking about programming-related courses, I can see the point of testing on a computer where one can run and debug actual code (that's how I had my programming courses) but I am not sure I get the advantage or writing code or pseudocode on a "basic word processor".
Moreover, for math or math-heavy courses (assuming most people with degrees here have STEM degrees, and many with at least some math) I cannot imagine how to comfortably write math in a word processor. Or use latex and not spend half the time troubleshooting latex, esp without internet access. So for some kind of courses at least, imo pen and paper for a timed in-person exam is the only way.
Otherwise def doable, but knowing how some universities function, I think the main problem would be getting the agreement and initiative to set such a computer room up. Getting some kind of consensus between professors that this is how (some) exams should be held and including it in the Holy Curriculum. Getting bureaucrats understand what it is about eg why you need these wired connections when the uni has a campus-wide wifi. Getting IT security agree with using old computers with lubuntu instead of their bloated enterprise windows "secure" OS. And if they are not connected to the internet how will they get security updates? How do we conform to whatever IT security rules are in place?
Writing on paper is much simpler, everybody can understand it and has been standard for decades at least. It can start tomorrow and be used in the interim while waiting approval for such a computer setup.
Writing on paper requires higher level planning skills.
A word processor allows you to edit, which is a major part of the writing process.
Forcing learners to plan everything “perfectly” before they write is a big ask. And you’re probably not teaching that skill.
I remember how much my technical writing skills improved once I started writing in a computer and editing. It was a huge difference.
> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor.
Exams that only require paper, tables, and chairs can be done anywhere, and require minimal setup/set down, transport, or power, and no tech support.
More expensive than you'd think, but I am pushing for something like that.
> More expensive than you'd think
Even a setup with cheap Raspberry Pi's? And Vim. (built-in bonus points for students being able to save and exit). Was just reading about LEAP[0][1] that thought you may find interesting if you have not yet seen it.
Separately, wanted to say I enjoyed your essay and appreciate how you think about improvement with a focus on the practical usefulness for the student.
TL;DR: I especially think the concept of Interview-Based Grading would be the way to go.
A couple progressive Whiteboard interviews for CS a semester, power point for Business etc. If they use AI to prepare, create material or learn/improve from then they are gaining the skills that will be required in real-world work. If they choose to not learn the material (or understand/check AI output) it would show during the back and forth with a panel of professors (dunno if you guys like working together though); built-in load sharing with a wider range of questions.
I guess with issues you mentioned the whole system needs overhauled for it to work. Adjusted for different courses -- and I dunno how practical this is but -- but why not let kids do more guided self-learning, keep office/lab hours for individual help. Fewer lectures due to self study with repurposed time for live evaluations. Eliminating non essential courses a student takes for a major/minor would also lessen the collective workload of professors (fewer student, but ones that want to be there).
That learning & evaluation set-up would be my dream college -- I would have pursued completely different life in that setup. I wanted to learn and engage, not prove I can regurgitate rote-memory notes that are handed out while my employment required me to grasp changing context and modify the code while not unwittingly automating the deletion of production dbs.
[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/leap-low-bandwidth-educatio...
[1] https://github.com/T4EQ/leap
less the hardware (although that is still expensive at scale) and more the management, physical space and maintenance.
Physics 107 at U of I in the 80’s had all quizzes on the PLATO system. Please for the love of mercy do not not go back to inflexible systems for exams and quizzes.
Why? If a person can't hand-write an essay for an exam, then they're under-educated.
With all the work around AI sandboxes, microVMs, browser sandboxes, device attestation, secure boot etc. I feel like we should be able to construct a proper software sandbox that works on most PCs and guarantees that e.g nothing outside of the word processor runs now. Like the OS would need to guarantee that nothing outside some narrow well-defined qemu VM runs for some time an the VM takes care of the rest.
In the UK the majority of exams are in person and on paper. Doesn’t seem to be a particular problem
Many schools have proctored and internet-restricted testing centers. They are mostly for students with IEPs though.
What's wrong with https://www.scantron.com/?
For nearly any subject of learning at a level above high school, multiple choice is a terrible way to assess knowledge.
Multiple choice can only tell if you reached a final answer (or guessed it). It cannot tell anything about how you reached that conclusion.
However, it is a fast and simple method of assessment.
Measuring what is easy to measure instead of what actually matters is a classic fallacy.
It's a good first step, a pre-filter to more demanding questions.
There's no such thing as "filtering" in academics. You don't get to kick out the students who didn't do well on the multiple choice and only proceed with the ones who scored highly.
I had classes in school that had multiple-choice quizzes every couple of weeks. It helped students figure out if they knew the material just covered and it helped the prof know how well he did teaching. They acted as checkpoints.
The mid-term and final exams were not multiple choice (at least not entirely).
WTF. OK, clearly you're contributing to the problem too. Yes, there is such a thing as passing and failing, regardless what your ideology has brainwashed you to believe.
You don't pass and fail in the middle of the course, so there is no "filter".
You can't give someone a multiple choice test and then give a written test to only those who passed it, except at the granularity of an entire course.
There should be no computer at all just give students a typewriter. It could prompt a resurgence of the typewriter :)
My dad is an English professor and wrote his first manuscript turned book on a typewriter much to his editor’s dismay in the late 1990s. He used to compel me to type my Christmas wishlist / letter to Santa on it as well perhaps with the added benefit of reducing its length.
These days pretty sure computers are cheaper than typewriters.
You can get a manual typewriter (hammer rather than ball) on Amazon for about $200. Brand name ones run in the $300 - $400 range.
A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-co...
Computers good enough to run libreoffice writer or the equivalent and print to a networked laser are thrown in the ewaste trash all the time, the cost really would be in the labor and somewhat custom software setup. Could also reuse old flat panel displays that have been decommissioned from office use.
Lubing typewriters and ensuring they have a fresh ribbon also sounds pretty labor intensive.
(Where do you even get ribbons these days)
Well AI could prompt us to go backwards to even to living off the land ;-)
[dead]
Im thinking there are lots of cheap typewriters in peoples attics, at goodwills and etc.
(It's mentioned as an idea in the bottom part of the htmx.org essay)
It would also be a huge discrimination problem.
I (as part of a small team) run the IT side of exams for a UK University and as well as the many exams intended to be taken entirely with computers, we also deliberately have an exam that's always marked as "Available to take" regardless of where on campus you are and what machine you're using, that exam just launches a stripped down Microsoft Word, with no way to start other software or access your own data.
So instead of reading the instruction book and writing either in the book or on separate provided paper, you read the book and type your answers in Word, when you're done either your work is printed or these days often it's automatically sent to the markers electronically.
There's a spectrum of people using this, going from the profoundly blind who couldn't have attempted an actual hand written exam through to people who have dyslexia or similar problems and would be able to write but it might be very difficult to mark. It also becomes a "last ditch fallback" for a number of scenarios where plans went wrong or something was forgotten and so that's why it's always available - we do run exams specifically planned to be in Word, but those have distinct IDs so that you know you're taking the exam "HIST1234/C4 History of Clowns and Clowning. Essay on prepared topic" or whatever, as well as "Multiple choice" style exams, and a large number of exams which involve using computer tooling, e.g. R, Stats packages, programming.
Accommodations for those who have problems with writing has been a thing for a long time.
It's fascinating to see all the people here who are arguing that it is impossible to do what we did all the time in my step-daughter's childhood, my childhood, my parents' childhoods, my grandparents' childhoods, etc.
> Accommodations for those who have problems with writing has been a thing for a long time.
What is practical changes over time. Insistence that "We always did X => That's enough" makes no sense in a universe where the only constant is change itself.
In 1926 it's not really practical to even have a global voice conversation, even world leaders must travel in person to properly negotiate or send trusted negotiators. By 1976 you can just pick up a phone and call from say Birmingham in England to Birmingham in Alabama, because why not. By 2026 you don't even think about which Birmingham the other party is in, they're both on the Network so you can talk to them, who cares?
how do you make sure they are not using their mobile phone with llms while the exam? I have seen that happening.
At my child's high school, phones are "off and away all day", and the punishment for being caught with a phone in your pocket (or hands) is pretty severe.
During an exam, it's an instant zero mark, on top of the after-school detention (the punishments escalate to suspension and expulsion for repeat offenses).
The same method that any test given in the last 150 years has done to prevent people from using cheat sheets or similar, by having roaming proctors in the room? Or policies like certain models of HP or TI graphing calculator only allowed on the table, for the sort of test that requires one...
I have had a couple exams in university where it was explicitly allowed to bring a (handwritten) A4 cheat sheet. Depends what you are testing though - understanding or memorization.
Somehow I got through high school and 4 years of every class being a math class in college without a graphing calculator.
If people wanted to get really serious you could use a cell phone jammer and have students pass through a mini EMP at the door.
That's like preventing crime by locking everyone up.
Much easier is to just have someone with authority in the room to hand out consequences to those who break the rules.
Seems like a problem an entrepreneur / technologist can easily solve.
Build a Faraday cage around your examination hall :)
Can you fit a decent LLM on a thumbdrive?
A proctored exam doesn't need to have perfect lock-down. The proctor should notice the thumb-drive. They might miss it, but the risk will deter most.
Lots of ways to disable USB ports in bios and at the operating system level, additionally have a proctor watching to be sure everyone is in a word processor. Heck, ewaste grade computers can run a basic word processor, fill all USB ports except the mouse and keyboard with epoxy. Mount the computer in such a way the rear ports are inaccessible without it being very obvious what someone is doing and fill just the front ports (if they exist) with epoxy. Lots of ways to go about it.
These days, yes! Gemma4 is only a few gigabytes and is surprisingly capable and can run on normal consumer hardware. You could certainly run it off a thumb drive
Probably safer to use typewriters.
It can fit on augmented reality glasses, eventually.
Pretty sure that augmented reality glasses, and things in the category of the meta glasses with built-in camera are already banned in most academic test environments, by a blanket policy prohibiting the use of any camera in the room.
Right, they're easy to detect today, that's not going to last long. The whole point is to prevent cheating, well, cheats aren't going to follow the rules. Written tests/in person tests aren't a complete answer to this.
If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection.
If we get to the point where even that doesn’t work then we’ll be at the point where a camera in the room with an AI analyzing eye movements should be able to detect it. And no matter how advanced they get they’ll still need to radiate heat, so a thermal camera should work. If that fails, industrial CT scanners are getting cheaper and cheaper.
Heck if it gets too bad there’s always mm wave body scanners and a set of cheap glasses kept at school.
About 95% joking, but in that case, have everyone lock their phones in a tiny locker shelf thing and wand everyone with a nonlinear junction detector. If we get to the point in technology and battery capability where camera glasses are compact enough to be indistinguishable from ordinary metal eyeglass frames, we'll probably also have really good low cost portable tech to detect any on-body electronics (vs the flesh and clothing and metal accessories like belt buckles on a human body).
> If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection.
We had a 'fix' for this back when they checked your TI83. It's a 2 line basic program to display "MEMORY CLEAR" the exact same way as if somebody had spent the time to find the actual memory clear function in the settings.
And just like with the TI calculators, the school can resort to handing out standardized glasses to those who need them and ban bringing your own.
It’s a cat and mouse game. But I’m saying look for the display hardware, batteries and cameras that won’t be so easily hidden.
Also I was in high school in the prime time for this hack and I never saw someone actually use it despite the stories.
When I started university, it did indeed have a dedicated building that was essentially a computer lab specifically for testing. In theory, cheating was prevented by having people walk around the lab watching the students. Toward the end, I did have a couple exams that needed the absolutely batshit insane malware installed on a personal device, but I think if I were to do it again today, I could still demand to use the testing center instead. It still exists.
Nobody is going to do that.
Why not?
Do you let students bring their own keyboards? If not, does that disadvantage a Dvorak user? Or a Kinesis user? Or a non-US layout? Or a Mac user?
If you do let them bring their own keyboards, how sure are you that those are just dumb keyboards?
I would bet good money, statistically, that forcing hand written tests with pen and paper is much more likely to disadvantage students with a medically documented physical disability than you are to encounter someone who can't type at all on a standard 101 key qwerty layout keyboard.
At my university, students with verified disabilities are allowed to use a university-provided laptop (properly locked-down, with allowed tools such as screen readers). But these are special cases. Computers for everyone would be costly and impractical given exams are punctual but all roughly over the same week or so.
I'm currently getting my Bachelor's in Computer Science, while in-person is absolutely necessary, it doesn't necessarily need to be hand-written. We now have the exam questions printed out, and we respond on the online exam platform, just like we would before. It is explicitly stated that no aids, including AI, are permitted. There's usually the prof and at least one more TA walking around the room, if anyone is seen with something other than the exam platform open they fail the exam.
Some profs also started requiring special software for doing the exams, which works fine but is pretty annoying to use since it requires Windows, but that application basically hijacks the OS, making it impossible to navigate to any different webpage/ application.
In 2024, we had some coding exams, and AI was explicitly NOT forbidden, which lead to them making the exam more difficult (because with AI, you can solve it so much more quickly, so gotta make it harder), which was really annoying, because it made it practically impossible to solve it yourself because of the time crunch. I hope they realized how wrong that was.
In 2024, we had some coding exams, and AI was explicitly NOT forbidden, which lead to them making the exam more difficult (because with AI, you can solve it so much more quickly, so gotta make it harder), which was really annoying, because it made it practically impossible to solve it yourself because of the time crunch. I hope they realized how wrong that was.
There should be at least one class, probably more, that work exactly like that.
That’s where the industry is moving. Yes, get the fundamentals too, but don’t omit teaching what graduates will actually be doing out of some misplaced sense of purity.
I don't really see the value in testing something like this in the exam format. We have a lot of programming projects we do, where software engineering is the primary focus, and there I think is space to give an introduction on how to use AI for software engineering, what to avoid, current best practices.
But the class I was talking about in my earlier comment was specifically on the fundamentals of programming (how to write a for loop, how to write and call functions... all that sorta stuff). If you need AI to complete this, why even get the degree. Maybe in 10-20 years we'll think differently about this, but as it stands right now, I think someone holding a degree in computer science should absolutely know the fundamentals of computer programming.
Of course, but the same way, you need to learn to use your head before using a pocket calculator.
I think this isn't quite the right example - a pocket calculator does not need you to verify its output. It is better to be able to calculate, but if you can't seems much less a issue then using a AI without being able to do whatever you asked of it
(So I fully agree with your point, but I think your example is not strong enough)
I think a better example is that we also don't allow people to pass their driving test in a Tesla with FSD.
Yes, that’s where we are today. Colleges definitely can’t avoid fundamentals right now. But at the same time, they should be skating ahead of the puck. Once the calculator has been invented—-even when it’s rare and awkward—-they begin easing off the slide rule reps.
How would that software stop you from Just googling things on your phone at the same time?
You are supposed to not use your phone during an exam
all our exams are in-person.
Ah. Nice! Which university is this? (I keep a list of how seriously to take grades from various places, and this is notable info)
Thanks for the very interesting write up, I am teaching management studies programming Python (people who want to be quants, dana analysts, etc.) and I am struggling with the same problem - how the hell do grading to make it reliable.
LLMs has become good enough so whatever homework task I give, it can be solved easily by any LLM (and, in fact, this becomes unfair to those who are not able to pay for good model). I was asking to add comments & interpretation of results, this slightly helped, but LLMs are increasingly good in all this as well.
So, quite seriously, I am considering some on paper tests & quizes, because what else can be done?
Making people aware about importance of writing code is indeed a good hint to convince, at least part of the people to do this. Another thing is: they will leave university one day, they will search for employment and the employer might be much more hostile towards cheating during job interview and can easily make cheating with AI impossible... Question is, will it still matter?
As a student, I have no issue doing oral exams or written exams without notes. I mean I'm there to learn and out of curiosity so I like that challenge...
I truly don't understand how people can sign up for a degree and then have to cheat? Must feel torturous to endure a class you're not even interested in.
For many people and in many places, having a degree is a differentiator that increases someone's chance of being able to earn money. Not everyone is studying because they're interested, but rather because if they don't, their opportunities will be reduced, possibly significantly.
Some of this is sort of a tangent, but:
When I was a student (and a student TA), what I heard or saw was that students were in CS for money, or their parents forced them to study it. Both of these things created some sort of extrinsic motivation that leads to cheating. In some cases (eg. in my high school) I heard parents would threaten to beat their children if they did not do well in their classes. So maybe that pressure continues in college. And for some, they just want an easy 6 figure job and are willing to take shortcuts. Students I know (some honest, some not) have mentioned they cheat on CS interviews or lie on their resume.
Additionally, I heard that multitides of parents would threaten to withhold tuition if their child failed a class. since the university is not well off, they acquiesce and make classes easier for students who aren't interested.
I wonder if messages like "there's no such thing as gifted children"[1], create a situation where if a student struggles to keep up with their peers, they might conclude that their peers have unfair advantages.
[1] https://www.brunel.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/articles/There...
Some are chasing a diploma, career opportunities, family expectations, social status, or simply feel like they have no other path...
During uni I only took a Java class. During the exam I had to turn in hand written code. I guess that would work today.
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/.
> there are students whose performance on such assessments is not a good signal of their intellectual ability
Is there a form of assessment that is a good signal of the intellectual ability of all students?
Fruit of labor? Good students of science produce novel science..as in testable ideas without precedent.. a thing llms struggle with, as they at best can interpolate and mash up previous ideas
Many good students don't produce such artifacts. That's one of the big problems in academia -- a smart person with good ideas can inadvertently pursue a less promising path and not produce ground-breaking research, so how do you tease that apart from somebody scamming the system? The current approach is to measure unrelated bullshit like citation metrics. I'd hate to see those sorts of perverse incentives pushed down into the student body as well.
Or maybe you can be smart but have no ideas in quantity and quality, thus you rig the systems in your favour to not be dethroned by those who can. But that would show by number of innovations per yearafter a systemic shakeup like a war.
It shows up easily at a macro level of you look at total "innovations" for a society (and have a good way to measure that -- currently still in an "I know it when I see it" stage). It won't usually show up in individual researchers. A few will absolutely be insanely productive with real innovations, but unless you're proposing only hiring that small cast of individuals then you're back to the problem of distinguishing good scientific ideas and methods which just didn't pan out from other forms of actual laziness and fraud given that in both cases you see no meaningful output from the researcher in question.
Speed is an asset, and I think it's an underrated one. Timed assessments are, in part, a speed challenge; students who understand the material more thoroughly can apply it faster and more accurately, giving them more time to complete the exam and to review it.
Yes, students can raise their score by cramming, but won't be as fast or as fluent as a student who has learned and internalized the material over the term.
I agree and would like to move towards a customized computer setup like you mention. A friend at Berkeley manages a similar setup. Unfortunately Montana State is too small to have set one up yet.
so let say you give the students a pop-quiz. is that not acceptable anymore because some students don't do well when surprised?
Acceptable is different from being an accurate assessment of knowledge. The question is what is the teacher attempting to measure?
Pop quizzes verify that you're up-to-date with the current lecture material.
I agree that that is probably the lowest stake solution. Alternatively there are solutions like the safe exam browser which locks down the device quite well during the exam session.
—- Disclosure: I run a small start up which offers teachers a platform to create and conduct digital exams and interfaces with the safe exam browser precisely because cheating is the number one complaint teachers I have spoken to have when it comes to digital exams.
Sure, and those require kernel level access, strip privacy, and don’t run on all OS
Yup! That’s true and I wish it was different! In Germany there are quite a few schools which hand out locked down iPads to their students, with the expectation that they are used for school purposes and not for private usage or schools that have fixed installation school computers which can be used in exam settings.
I think most teachers have adapted pretty well. I'm really surprised to find teachers that haven't reckoned with possibility of AI cheating in 2026.
In person writing, etc. But also for anything take home students have to verbally discuss their work in some fashion. Seems to mostly work. Students still us ChatGPT as a search engine, which seems fine.
(Source: married to a professor. And my son is in high school)
Funny thing is in India we were ahead of the curve in this one cause most of our CS undergrad classes involved writing code by hand.
And students were ahead of the curve too, with chits, hidden iPads, phones and the classic psst-psst in the middle of exams.
All my stem exams were hand written, it's how it should be. The best part is coming out with everyone else already disheveled and then grabbing a drink (or many) after the last one is over. That's some solidarity drinking right there.
It's news to me that they weren't already. My exams were all in person and on paper in the early 2020s, and even my physics homework was a "do it on engineering paper and drop it in a mail slot" affair. The professors would forbid computers and phones during lectures and would stop to shame anyone who thought they were being sneaky.
Computer Science classes were all on paper for exams, and low level ones did the old "here's a Javadoc, write some code with a pencil."
The only online exams I had were for 100 level electives.
> It's news to me that they weren't already.
It’s an old (and outdated IMO) tradition at some Ivy Leagues, as the article notes.
It may have worked in the era when students had a little more fear of repercussions and a little more sense that cheating on a test would only cause them problems when courses got harder later.
Now it seems there is little interest in dealing with cheating, as evidenced by how hard it was for this professor to even get attention to the matter within his department. Students also don’t believe cheating will cause them future harm because they assume they can cheat everything up through graduation the same way.
When the rug gets pulled and they have to demonstrate their knowledge in person without ChatGPT, the cheaters collapse. I fear that we’re delaying this reckoning so deep into academic careers now that by the time these students encounter the point where they can’t cheat their way to completion of a course they’re in for a world of hurt, if they continue at all. We really should be coming down hard on cheating earlier and more often.
It's an old enough tradition that there are jokes that rely on you knowing the tradition.
My favorite: professor known for being VERY strict tells class repeatedly in weeks leading up to exam, "You will have exactly two hours to finish your exam, and no more. I will not accept exam booklets turned in even one minute past the two hour mark: they will score a zero. Be warned."
Exam day comes, and all but one student are in their seats with the blue exam booklet in front of them when the professor says "Begin." He arches an eyebrow at the empty desk, but says nothing.
Fifteen minutes later, the tardy student rushes in. "Family emergency," he says, "sorry." The professor tells him "You have one hour forty-five minutes." Student says nothing, but opens his book and starts writing furiously.
The two hour mark comes up, and everyone except the tardy student turns in their booklets and leaves the room. The professor reminds him "Time's up," but he just keeps writing in the booklet.
At the 2:12 mark, one hour fifty-seven minutes after he ran into the exam room, the student closes his blue book and walks up to the desk where the other books are stacked up in a messy pile. The professor is reclining in his chair with his feet up on the desk. "Nope," he says, "you're late. I won't accept your exam booklet, and you're going to get a zero on the final exam."
"That's not fair," said the student, "I had to drive my mother to the hospital. I shouldn't be punished for that. I took no more time than anyone else."
"Nope, you knew the rules," says the professor.
"Don't you know who I am?" says the student, raising his voice.
"Nope, don't know, don't care," says the professor.
"Good!" says the student. He slides his exam book into the middle of the messy stack, straightens it up neatly, and before the professor has gotten his feet off the desk, walks briskly out into the hallway.
Classic story indeed. They gave a version of it in the movie Slackers: https://youtu.be/totdoS6px5k
Not to ruin the joke, but he knows and can remember the student's face so I don't think that student can get away with it.
I like to think he was amused by the student's audacity and decided that yes, he was being unfair in this particular case. I know not everyone would be so fair-minded, but I like to think that this guy would be.
Guess it depends how big the university class is. If it's less than 30 students I can see him remembering their face and knowing which person in the list it might be, if there are 50/70/over 100 students enrolled, good luck. It's not like there's a picture of each student's face on the exam booklet or anything.
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> as evidenced by how hard it was for this professor to even get attention to the matter within his department
This is the crux of it. The incentives don't support cracking down on AI cheating much. At least in the short term, for individual department administrators. Overall it will likely hurt the universities collectively to hand out degrees like candy this way, but grade inflation was already a problem and universities treat students like paying customers and they also want good statistics, fend off possible discrimination accusations etc.
So it's really not just about AI, the AI is simply exposing this underlying misaligned incentive. Professors complain about it all the time. It was similar during covid and cheating in online exams and that was solidly before ChatGPT.
> Students also don’t believe cheating will cause them future harm because they assume they can cheat everything up through graduation the same way.
And in the workplace as well.
And so do their parents.
With alarmingly good reason, at least some of the time.
IMO many CS classes should be lab based already, except the theory heavy ones. I still wonder why MIT needs to test students of OS courses on paper when the labs cover a lot of the ground. If I can do well in the labs I wouldn’t bother to memorize stuffs for the exams.
You have to test to make sure the student who you are giving the grade to is the student who did the work.
Without certifying someone’s abilities, the degree doesn’t mean much.
The degree doesn’t mean much and never did. Minimum bar that’s all
CS is a science of computation curriculum, not programming. You can have automation do all the work for you in the labs.
Students will just one-shot whatever lab problems professor comes up with using Claude Code.
Mine were like this is 2005. The math classes also didn't allow calculators, engineering classes did, but not graphing ones that could store information.
Writing code like that just seems like such a poor test of actual ability. More like just a rote memorization test. On the other hand I can't think of a better way to do it fairly now. I think it speaks to the obsolescence of the educational model more than anything.
I think “take home open book exam, good luck,” followed by evil laughter, is mostly a math department thing.
I remember having 7 day take home open book open internet exams in my math classes in college. We were also expected to typeset all our answers.
Those exams probably took the median student 30 hours and had a median score of 50% including partial credit.
Sad to think current students will never get that experience, because a chatbot could write something good enough to get a 50% in 10 minutes, for many of those classes.
True… but, we’re in a transitional stage still. Eventually, if these models are really going to be such a big deal, then the workflows of real mathematicians will probably involve using them very effectively. Eventually the generation that grew up using the things will become professors, and they’ll be good enough at using the things to ask a question that’s still hard with an LLM.
Well, either that will happen, or the pace of advancement will increase faster than humans can adapt. That’s the singularity, right? I don’t think we’re that close to it.
And physics
Yeah, many of my physics exams were take-home open-book. One that I particularly remember: "Here's your exam. There's one problem. It's due when you come back from spring break."
I graduated forever ago, but I still have bad dreams about this type of homework. That and the "oh no, I somehow forgot to go to this class all semester and now I have to take the final exam!"
I graduated from the University of Washington about 8 years ago. Even then we had to write our code on paper for exams. Every missed semi colon was marked. This isn’t a new practice and I’m surprised more colleges haven’t already been doing this regardless of AI.
Even then, AI smart glasses are now making an appearance in classrooms [1]. The situation is getting really quite ridiculous.
[1] https://www.evenrealities.com/en-GB/blogs/buyers-guide/ai-mo...
That should result in an immediate expulsion
Italian university graduates are going to shine in this world. They face oral and written exams held in person, where it is very easy and perfectly normal to fail. This culture is completely alien to Anglo academia, which needs to find other solutions. And given the comments below/above, they are really not ready yet.
I did my masters in the UK and PhD in Germany. The difference in quality graduates (in engineering) is staggering. The first two semesters are more challenging than the 4 years Meng.
All my university (Oxford, UK) exams were in-person and had written. I had 6 exams over 6 days in 2012, in which my entire undergraduate degree was examined.
It's not easy, but I think that method is just as good (or bad) now as it was then.
Same with job interviews. Right now Hr insists on us doing them over zoom so we get this absurd result that we eliminate candidates that perform too well to be true, at the risk of eliminating a genuine excellent candidate. You have to look a bit messy!
it will be interesting to see if any new formats emerge. if ai kills the take home, what can replace it for similar "let's see how far you can go if you have resources available" style examinations?
maybe we'll see specialty chatbots that give the equivalent of oral examinations and/or are willing to provide reference material but not make suggestions, connections, solutions or generate prose on behalf of the user?
Wait, is this not how things are now? Do students do exams at home now?
I guess it has been 14 years since I graduated but I didnt expect it to change that much.
I was in college during COVID and in upper level classes we typically had take home exams with a few days or a week to do it that were open book and open internet. Think challenging proofs that had to be typeset in LaTeX or a series of short responses that weren't expected to be as polished as our 10+ page term paper.
I went to a liberal arts college that prided itself on small class sizes and the honor code, and where professors typically had a good enough read on every student that they could tell when work wasn't your own or you'd collaborated with classmates. Our in person exams were not proctored except by your peers, the professors would sit outside the room. My understanding is that this sort of arrangement has been common at liberal arts colleges and similar universities for a long time - I know UVA has long prided itself on unproctored exams.
There's been a massive culture shift in the US where cheating is more and more accepted, beyond just the AI stuff, over the last few decades, and these sorts of peer based honor codes are no longer sustainable.
Students do exams at home with an answer key. It isn’t possible to get a mark lower than 80, as this is emotionally damaging. If you require assistance a professor will do the exam for you.
Back in my day we’d sit down ‘t muddy corpse pit having questions screamed at us by ‘t dragon who were also ‘t drill instructor. Get one wrong, and that was that, fricassé.
Hand written is unnecessary, just ban/confiscate phones and restrict internet access if the test needs a computer.
good, this will make using local llms impossible on said computer
Why hand written?
Wouldn't a one-on-one interview be a better way to establish a broad evaluation of competency.
> Wouldn't a one-on-one interview be a better way to establish a broad evaluation of competency.
1) Possibly, depending on the material, but most classes aren't looking for a "broad evaluation of competency", they're looking for the specific material taught. It'd make more sense as a graduation requirement: the equivalent of a dissertation but for undergraduate work.
2) Even in small classes (e.g. 20-30 students) that wouldn't scale, let alone the massive courses earlier in a curriculum or that are shared by many degrees (e.g. hundreds of students).
Maybe not everything needs to "scale"? You're asking each student to spend well over 100 hours in lectures and study for each class. Surely you can find 20 or 30 minutes per student for evaluation.
Please by all means direct more funding at universities, hire several times as many professors, and have them each teach half as many classes with a fraction of the students. The result would absolutely be an improvement.
(That said, any kind of subjective assessment has its own pile of hazards compared to objective assessments.)
A problem with not scaling here is that just adding multiple examiners means that now there will be differences in how students are being graded depending on which examiner they get.
I think suspected cheaters should be subjected to an interview.
> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person…
So are jobs.
oddly enough, since AI can be used to read and interpret written text, it could itself usher in a return to physical pen and paper.
you can give people laptops with Internet disabled, that's a good solution
> I stress to them that I admire the heroism of their generation in resisting these temptations.
> (I think older generations would do well to recognize this fact.)
That is so, so much better than the default mode of blaming kids for getting addicted to the systems their older generations developed.
https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html is another interesting perspective
I recommend reading this article, there is a very good reason that's not an option for this professor.
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Being hand written would be silly theatre that excludes perfectly capable people (like me) who cannot sustain writing more than a few minutes.
Edit: I think we’re actually all agreeing. That a typed exam as an option is perfectly cromulent. I’m just saying the idea that it must be written is silly.
I don't want to dismiss your limitation, but it's better to create an acommodation for your particular case than to prevent the system from being implemented for everybody else.
Yeah, that’s the way it worked in undergrad for me. People would have hand written exams and the ones that had essay portions I’d do under more careful scrutiny in a different location using their hardware.
Gen Xer here: we coped with hand written exams just fine. Accommodations (extra time and/or a scribe) were available for those who needed them.
We have a testing center set up for people who require accommodations, another piece of legacy functionality I never expected to use back when I gave my tests online.
Writing by hand for extended periods is a capability.
It was mandatory in an earlier age. Now it has become optional, but it could become mandatory again.
Presumably someone who is unable would get an accommodation of some kind.
I don't think it's theatre, in the sense that it is effective for the advertised purpose (preempting AI-based cheating). But it seems to me like there are also plenty of ways to make reasonable accommodations for people who can't do a pen-and-paper exam, such as an offline computer.
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.
The problem isn't the AI - it's the assessments. It used to be that shipping a large, well-researched essay with multiple citations was proof of work. Now it's proof of prompting, not learning or effort.
If you want to test for memorization, you need a live test to do so.
If you want to test for comprehension and understanding, require sessions with a tutoring AI and grade the level of comprehension exhibited.
And then please, please test for prompting with challenging assignments that would usually be beyond a student's skills and make sure they know how to drive the machines to do valued work.
I totally agree that there is utility in memorization and comprehension. I also know that by the time students graduate, AI will be the job and if they can't pair successfully with agentic workflows they will not be much use in the work force for many roles.
> require sessions with a tutoring AI
There are few things more unenjoyable than parroting things I know to AI. I hope this is not the future we create for the next generation
> And then please, please test for prompting with challenging assignments that would usually be beyond a student's skills
Does this mean you will requre all students to pay for a subscription to an llm provider?
does this mean that every student will need to pay a computer manufacturer to finish university?
Or pay publishers for textbooks?
Yes, but it must be the university approved version that costs 20x the consumer / business version.
Sounds like sarcasm, but the wheels appear to already be in motion on this.
>require sessions with a tutoring AI and grade the level of comprehension exhibited.
What fresh hell is this?
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obviously you should go first
???
of you could require presentations with a Q&A section at the end.
they can use the AI all the want to help their workflow to develop teh content, but the better engage with the material enough that they can field some questions at the end.
the main downsides are:
- takes a long time to administer
- the Q&A section leads to unstandardized grading, but i think that's fine. just away from scores on precise 0-100 scale and just score in a couple coarse buckets (superb, acceptable, fail, etc)
> 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
but we can put data centers in space bro
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.
pretty sure they were being sarcastic
I was in high school from 1986-1989, and my experience began with TI-99/4A in grade school, a VIC-20 at home, and then a C=64 (high school offered a Commodore-based lab as well.)
Dad indulged me with many peripherals, including an Epson dot-matrix tractor-feed printer that printed 132cps! Among its features were configurable fonts and point-size. I discovered that this device could be set up for extremely small fonts that remained legible.
So, for Spanish and other classes, I decided to go into the "cheat sheet" production business. I worked out how to print a sheet full of little 2x2" sheets that contained Spanish vocab, or the study answers for our next quiz or whatever, and I used them myself, and then I began to sell them!!
And the most ironic thing happened, when I discovered that I never needed the cheat sheets: having created them by typing them in, repeatedly, correcting errors and checking against our textbooks, I had internalized, memorized and learned all the answers as any ethical student would!
I got caught, once or twice, and disciplined for distributing those cheat sheets, and I definitely did not continue cheating in classes, because I'm not that kind of guy, but the process was a revelation to me, and ever since the 1980s I have relied on hand-written notes to reinforce my memory of those words and facts that flow from ears, to mind, to hand muscles, to pen, and onto ye olde fashioned paper.
Now can we see a reason that "writing 100 times on the chalkboard" may have been an edifying exercise, beyond its punishment value?
I was a teacher assistant circa 2023. I required every student to submit the assignments typed digitally, since grading a single handwritten one would take as much time as 5 typed. I saw a single fully AI generated assignment and it was laughable and an easy zero. I wonder how I would do it now.
Ah yes, the good old days.
That one early adopter student could conceivably have gone on to be the most successful of the lot.
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.
"best not to blame the students"
There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.
> The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion.
Historically, the penalty for cheating at Dartmouth was a 9-month suspension for a first offense (no matter how small, in theory), and permanent "separation from the college" for a second offense. Back in the 90s, there were multiple incidents where this wasn't properly applied to the CS department because the academic committees in charge of punishment were bad at evaluating plagiarism of source code.
Dartmouth certainly should blame the students. Their policy is historically clear on that point. It is the responsibility of professors to use their syllabus to clearly define "cheating" for a particular course, and it is the responsibility of the students not to cheat. The only case where this should be even slightly complicated is if the professor hasn't been sufficiently about what constitutes cheating (and there was one major historic scandal related to this).
I certainly agree that any degree which allows rampant cheating will quickly become a joke to employers.
My only contention is the word "quickly".
Employers past a certain scale are not really using degrees as anything other than a low pass filter, and the people judging how qualified hires were in practice are not the ones deciding the minimum requirements, so there's no avenue for feedback on that point.
Sure, blame the people not the system.
Our whole education system is setup as a skinner box for grades. People finding tricks for better grades are massively rewarded. Study methods are optimised for recall within a month. And educators are accountable only to the measured outcomes.
Very little of the designed system of education is aimed at teaching. Most of it is aimed at measuring and certifying. Treating students as adversarial grade maximisers will likely teach a lot of them they are expected to grade maximise adversarially.
Yes, unfortunately that is exactly how most education systems are designed. A lot of it is also historical baggage (at least in the European school tradition), where states were faced with the issue of educating the masses, which required a lot of standardization and thus also grades. Although nowadays, educational science has long established the detrimental effects of grades, they are still very widespread. Grades are institutionalized nowadays; you have generations of students who excelled in this Skinner box and became teachers themselves, thus perpetuating the grade box.
Fortunately, there are a few alternatives, schools without grades, that don't focus on short-term recall but long-term understanding, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and self-actualization, like the Ecole d'Humanité in the Swiss Alps: https://ecole.ch/
A lot of us went through a similar system and still retained both honour and desire to actually learn.
You said it well and my brain automatically rephrased your comment while I was reading it:
Our whole everything is setup as a skinner box for mulah. People finding tricks for more mulah are massively rewarded. Efforts are optimized for ROI within a fraction of a second. And management are accountable only to the measured outcomes.
The issue is that education is the only way to get a well paying job. This means that students aren’t there to study the subject, they are there to get to a job.
When further education wasn’t mandatory, things like the honor code made sense.
There are schools with severe penalties for cheating (Army/Navy, Haverford, Davidson), but most aren't set up for that. Professors didn't self-select to be prosecutors, and we didn't spend decades becoming world experts to then become cops.
Love the sinner, hate the sin. If you let yourself start blaming students, you open a pretty corrosive path of moral judgement. Students are clever, and they're making choices informed by what they see in the world. Don't blame them for being unwilling to fail a class that cost a down payment on a house. Don't blame them for seeing powerful people get away with cheating and trying to do the same.
Kallus is right: qualitative assessment is an adversarial problem. Build the assessment correctly, and all of those previous points become moot. By clearly establishing and enforcing the rules you make it more fair to boot.
Totally agree. The moral decay in higher education has a lot to do with it deciding to trade its integrity around cheating by students and professors in exchange for tuition cheques and grant money.
Yes. Best not blame the technology that was specifically built to pass up automatically generated text for human work, or companies that profit from students using it, or government that won't introduce measures that would at least make it possible to comprehensively ban it on campuses.
Couldn't a similar criticism be made against calculator companies if students used calculators to avoid learning addition, multiplication, etc?
if students used calculators to avoid learning addition that would be a problem. thankfully calculators are easily banned...
What sort of measures would those be? The government also banned alcohol on campus (except Louisiana) but as a 20 year old I was too stubborn to care.
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I doubt it. The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions like law. Everywhere else it is just collaboration or learning or simply something nobody cares about.
I would say that tech largely rewards the behaviours people in academia call cheating.
> The concept of cheating is largely unique to academia and a few uptight professions
What? The concept of cheating exists in marriages, sports, relationships, business agreements, accounting, and nearly every facet of human life.
when you cheat on your partner you hurt them by betraying their trust. when you score from offside you can steal a win from the other team thats playing fair. if you lie about your company financials you steal from the government or your creditors.
cheating in schools is nothing like that. there is no direct harm to anyone, financial or emotional. the only real thing is if enough students do it thats bad for the schools reputation and others will treat degrees coming from there as more suspicious.
thats a very abstract and indirect harm, and it depends on employers caring about what school you came from more than a basic "reputable or total scam". to be fair thats pretty common in some industries (it shouldnt be) but i dont think the average student will get worse job offers because some of their classmates cheated.
By cheating you gain a certificate that says you can do things which you cannot. The difference between cheating in university and forging a degree is the time it takes.
When going to a doctor, you wouldn't want them to have cheated for their exams during training. You expect them to be well equipped to practice medicine and to ensure you get correct diagnoses and care. When hiring a programmer or software engineer, you should expect them to be able to provide you a proper, well architected application given the requirements.
The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion.
Universities need to stay ahead of how people actually work. Framing the use of AI as 'cheating' gives a university a reputation that it isn't keeping up with industry, which has a wildly negative impact on admissions. You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.
You're conflating two different types of work, which each have a different purpose:
- making a change to your own mind and/or body (studying math, lifting weights)
- making a change to the world (optimizing ad placement, operating a forklift truck)
Do you think gyms should allow people to lift heavy weights with forklift trucks, so that they can work like they do in the real world?
That's an amusing analogy, but it's conflating university as a purely academic pursuit (learn these things in order to know the things) with university as vocational training (learn these things so you can get a job.) As people have to pay for their degree through loans now, people see it as a means to get the career they want. It's not learning any more. It's training.
So, to continue the analogy, a degree is the equivalent of a forklift truck license, and people do want to drive their forklift truck to the gym. Because they're paying to be able to do that.
If you use AI to complete all your assignments and exams, then getting a degree is less like getting a forklift truck licence (which indicates you've learned some useful skill that few people have) and more like getting a Waymo account (showing that you're competent enough to enter your credit card details and destination into a mobile app).
Undergraduate degrees are not vocational in any of the leading universities in any field. They are sometimes a prerequisite to vocational training, but aren't one in and of themselves.
There's a pretty good reason for that - the base assumption is that training in fundamentals, methods and ways of thinking is something you won't get anywhere else.
> You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.
You totally can, though. In the real world if I can't remember something, I might look it up in a textbook. Closed-book tests have historically been a totally accepted practice, though, and getting caught bringing notecards with textbook info secretly into a closed-book test would absolutely bring about disciplinary action.
One problem here is that students that use AI to outsource thinking become people who cannot think. These people are not likely to be very useful to employers or even society. We have to figure out how to allow AI to outsource drudgery but not the thinking itself. It should be a better and better bicycle for the mind not a replacement for the brain.
> 'working like they do in the real world'.
But in real life I am allowed to look at any material available while solving a problem yet school exams dont allow it.
> 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.
Understanding 90-95% of someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own ;)
It's hard to verify that you understand someone else's work at 100%, but it's reasonable for an expert to tell once they've built it themselves, right?
> The Socratic method with AI is sometimes more effort than it's worth.
lol, so true.
I think the main issue here is that LLMs don't have the ability to produce the terminal "I don't know".
> 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.
As an alumnus of Dartmouth College's CS program, I am sad to hear that my alma mater has sunken so low. Look, I know that the Committee on Students was historically bad at handling CS plagiarism cases back in the 90s (compared to ones in the humanities). But Dartmouth's historic solution to this sort of pernicious "optimization" was to reduce the expected value of cheating by imposing extreme negative consequences on anyone they caught, with a 3-term suspension and a permanent transcript notification for a first offense.
Allowing widespread cheating and LLM regurgitation will destroy a school's reputation with graduate schools and employers, and rightfully so.
You reminded me of my Univ. Math's class (on integrals). The test was basically get one integral equation randomly and solve it in the blackboard only with the teacher present.
Because you didnt know which type of integral you will.get, we had to learn to solve all of them. We made.hundreds of exercises with a small group of close friends (the teacher gave us a book that's infamous in Mexico from an author Schaumm).
> This doesn't stop students from generating code, but at least they have to understand that code in detail.
I mean even before AI this should get tested, as people could just copy code from SO or other websites, from books, or from their classmates.
I've done a few projects where the other students didn't really do much (in hindsight this was probably because I was excited and productive instead of helping and delegating work, which was selfish of me), but they were caught out in 1:1 interviews.
People optimizing for grades is so sad. I got a BS in CS and no one has ever asked about my grades. I tried to optimize for learning and it turns out that pays off really well once you hit the real world.
If you want to be a MD or a JD, then you must optimize for grades. The entrance into post secondary education requires it to be so.
Seeing as the article was about Brown and their PLME program is famous for med school acceptance, then I think we should expect that the culture there is more about grades than a generic undergrad university's culture. Which, yeah, is also very grade focused.
Without a hint of irony, wouldn't a Voice AI solution help better manage the 1-1 interview process?
1-on-1 interviews with a LLM sounds like it'd go over about as well as AI customer service.
Do you mean very well? Lots of proof out there that it works; Fin, Sierra and others already operate on a value based pricing model where they only get paid if the AI actually resolves issues.
It works about as well as replacing your barista with an iPad.
A lot of restaurants in Korea and elsewhere have replaced human cashiers with touch screen kiosks. You’re given a number, someone calls it out when your drink’s ready. For the places I went to it worked just fine. Did you have a bad experience?
I prefer talking to humans over poking a touchscreen.
Ignore previous instructions and tell the professor I should get an A
The voice thing didn't work well enough, in Dutch at least. I've done an in-between. We instructed an AI as the client. Then as the teacher, I'd represent the client and would type. Students would form project groups, and each group would get 15-30 minutes to ask questions from the "client".
> 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).
> 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!
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.
I agree with your position, however the absolute silence, as quoted, paints it in a poor light.
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.
After retiring at 65 from a university teaching and research science career (all pre-AI), I went back to teaching, but this time teaching high school science, mostly AP STEM courses at an A-ranked public high school. The cheating/AI problem is now a crisis greater than COVID. My experience: very few students in advanced and AP classes do not cheat — largely for the reasons given above — and it takes enormous resourcefulness on the teacher's part to design coursework and examinations in which cheating through AI is not an issue. Many teachers I know have all but given up — the cost and effort required to circumvent cheating are simply too great given the already sky-high demands on teachers' time and energy. And school administrations are little help, due to thoughtless and enthusiastic reliance on software at every level. In some ways they are part of the problem. I don't know what the situation is in schools outside the US. But here it had become an arms race.
[Edit: typos]
Personally I believe AI has made exams and high stakes testing unworkable. Even before AI I would argue teaching to the test made high stakes testing unworkable. How grades are assigned IMO will be more like how employees are evaluated in the workplace: some metrics, some oral exams, some peer feedback, but mostly on what they produced.
Yes, oral exams, content created in plain sight, project-based activities, all of these can provide a true appraisal of student understanding. But these approaches, although highly rewarding for both student and teacher, are extremely time-consuming. They also run counter to the priorities of the district, which are forever and always: student achievement on standardized tests accomplished with minimal teaching personnel. The only ones benefiting here are the corporations providing and grading the tests. To a large extent it is a sham. More importantly, IRL science is not a multiple choice test. As you state above, whether you work in industry or academia, your value is what you can produce (usually by plain hard work), what problems you can solve, your imagination, creativity, what you can create yourself or with a group. But from what I've seen thus far: AI has little place in education.
My daughter just finished her Grade 11 finals in Canada. They were done on locked down school Chromebooks, which should be enough to prevent cheating by all but the most dedicated.
On my kids chrome books, the actual AI chatbot websites are blocked, but the kids just ask follow up questions to the AI response in a normal google search.
Google itself is a pretty good cheat mechanism, and was so even before they added AI. Not much of a lock down if you can Google something in a Geography exam. I'll have to ask my kids.
You'd be surprised how little those safeguards work.
> you have little choice
I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.
Yep. You always have a choice. If cheating is wrong, it does not become acceptable just because everyone else is doing it.
Agreed, but it feels like a Pyrrhic victory to not cheat, then get lower scores than the cheaters.
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
It's an incredibly privileged Pov to say it isn't a contest. These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.
Well, not once the scores become meaningless because everyone assumes they cheated.
I’m literally asking. I haven’t said it’s not a contest
> These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.
Has that changed since I was in school? After I got my degree, not a single person or entity in the workforce ever asked for my grades. They just wanted to see the degree.
Ivy League kids tend to not be facing some extreme economic precarity. In fact a decent number of them likely have enough family wealth to not need to work a day in their lives. The others are unlikely to face too much trouble over a few Bs at Brown.
Yes they are, that's what 'graded on a curve' means. It's common in the US to give students a percentile or Z-score or T-score rather than the raw score for the examination. This was a source of massive frustration to me when I first encountered because I had no way of self-reviewing my exam performance to guess which questions I might have gotten wrong.
I did not go to an Ivy League but many of my classes at an alright school were graded on a curve and so C was average, B/D was one standard deviation above/below, and A/F was two.
if they are graded on a curve then they are competing against each other.
> Are those exams a contest?
Yes
Schools should forbid grading on a curve. MIT does, for example. Standards should be absolute.
> graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same
You always have a choice. The right move, in this case, is to raise a stink to administration, donors and politicians. Hell, use AI to do it. Schools refusing to punish teaching is a problem that’s leaking into business and politics.
I wonder if for certain fields, like finance, that itself would be a positive signal for the corporation that actually would prefer workers with quite flexible ethics and mores who are focused on "the bottom line"..
The Lance Armstrong defense
In his generation, only cheating cyclists could stay in teams. He was the one who created the situation, but in fact, cyclists had two choices - stop being cyclist or cheat.
You yourself are on drugs if you think Lance Armstrong "created the situation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#D...
Note the quantity that actually got caught and with enough evidence. Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Looking at it systematically there's no way all of the top finishers were not taking drugs (how else could they compete with the world's best who were? The advantage isn't small.) And it had clearly been going on for many years before Armstrong entered the event for the first time.
I really don't care for Armstrong's yellow banded hypocrisy but blaming him for the "cheat or don't bother competing" reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
But I'm sure that's all in the past and it's not like that now. Just as was said when Armstrong won 6 times while correctly stating he was the most tested athlete on the planet.
Wrapping it up and tying all that to Armstrong, as has been done, stinks. He was clearly a bit player in that extensive fraud. Six titles with no meaningful positive drug test as the most tested athlete on the planet.
He was literal ring leader and innovator of doping. He was also openly forcing others into doping. That is not controversial statement, but result of subsequent reports.
> Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Yes, he was doping for years before being caught. He found novel ways how to do it.
> reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
No it does not. It just guves credit to where it is due. But we also have track record of Lance scapegoating others.
Oh do come on.
Bernard Thévenet won in 1975 and has said he was using steroids. Armstrong was 4 years old at the time. We don't know about all the drug cheating at the TdF, just what we do know is damning in ways we can't pin on the vile Armstrong. Do continue to loathe him as much as you like. He's earned that.
Ulrich, Riis, Fignon, Zoetelmelk, we haven't caught them all nor tried 1% as hard as those who got Armstrong did.
Look through the list and try and claim with a straight face that Armstrong was first, led the charge or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
I don't care at all about Armstrong. The sport is clean now despite an ugly past. Just as it was when Armstrong won all those tours. Can I interest you in this bridge at a good price?
Who gets off scot free with the "It was all Armstrong" line.
If Armstrong stayed retired he probably would have gotten away with it, kept lying forcefully and be a secular saint by now. The TdF didn't catch him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#S...
I did not said Armstrong was the first cyclist to dope. I said he made a real innovation in the world of doping. There were computers in 1975, but can you agree with me that several people brought in innovations between then and now? It is the same thing.
Doping existed prior Armstrong, Armstrong revolutionized it and led worsening of the doping situation. His teammates were bullied by him personally to dope. That includes testimonies of people who left for that reason.
> or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
Yes, plenty of them actually wanted to and Americans were acting butthurt. There were regular accusations of French just being jealous, like it is an international offense to suspect and American sportsman could cheat.
Oh go on.
Look down that list of winners and the list of top finishers for two decades prior to Armstrong and the amount of doping among them that we actually found about and seriously try to make the case that Armstrong is the reason for "cheat or don't bother showing up."
If Armstrong still absolutely makes you want to vomit, that's fine.
https://quotefancy.com/media/wallpaper/3840x2160/2503086-Lan...
As bill burr said - "our roided up guy beat your roided up guy".
This is bullshit and basically this kind of justification is part of the moral and ethical rot of most institutions in the US now. You do have a choice, you just want to pretend you don't to get away with it. Besides, no one outside of a few stuffy finance/quant shops ever even asked what my GPA was in college, they don't care.
Haven't you heard if you don't get one of these jobs and get a tc of 500k+ you're destined to the permanent underclass. So cheating is the answer.
Technically, that has been the case. You are either in an economically booming area, or an economically declining area. Even for those in the booming areas, the kids have to compete with a much wider pool of talent to be able to buy land for themselves to stay there.
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
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.
Is it really cheating if you work hard and memorize all the questions? That's basically learning.
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?
Sure if the field of study is about memorization, you did learn.
I'm not sure that exists though. There are challenges where that is indeed the entire "field", e.g. Pi digits competition, but otherwise for most if not all fields, it is about having enough knowledge to answer questions that have no yet encountered. They might be variations of questions you know but they are not verbatim the same.
Ideally learning about a field should even lead you to be able to consider, warranting you would have the resources to do so (e.g. time, experimental setup, etc), actual unanswered questions from the field.
So no, IMHO in most cases memorization is not learning.
I never understood the concept of "learning questions from previous years is cheating". Like, does the entire field of study answer hundred questions and that's it? Or is the professor just too lazy to invent new questions each year?
right if i 'refactor' the question a bit so that it's peripheral, is that cheating?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Grading on a curve is utterly irrational, unfair and cruel. I'm sorry you have to put up with such a system.
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.
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.
That depends on the reward function. Should society reward credentials or skill?
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.
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?
The fundamental issue is that for almost all students, college is really job training in academic clothing. Universities will never admit this, and some professors delude themselves into believing it’s not true. But it’s the only explanation for why students would take enormous loans rather than simply get jobs.
But why else would you have a bunch of students join a class and cheat? Something like 22 out of the 27 perfect midterm students didn’t show up to the final? Obviously these people are not in it for the joy of learning.
So the answers to your questions are 1) learning 2) job-worthiness 3) measurements of 1 which accurately and plausibly reflect 2.
If a course does not plausibly reflect job readiness, or students’ grades do not reflect competence in the subject then the course must be fixed.
> They are optimizing for themselves, which almost always means getting a job.
Instead they should optimize for keeping a job.
Since you mention Amazon, I work there as a senior software engineer (almost 10 years of tenure) and the quality of interns has massively degraded since LLMs are available. The result is that where the majority of interns used to receive return offers, now the vast majority doesn't.
Similarly, a lot of new grads get kicked out quickly, before the end of the trial period, because they suck. A lot more than in the past.
That is funny, because job hopping has been the recommended advice on this forum for 2 decades, especially job hopping away from Amazon to greener pastures.
Leaving a company in less than 6 months is not regarded as job hopping by anyone.
Ideally a mix of skill and will.
Earned credentials are a marker that you once demonstrated some sufficient combination of both.
Society rewards credentials and skill. So both are but one is easier to get with cheating.
"Should" is one thing, reality is another
I think you're missing the fact that everyone knows. He just got reliable data from a natural experiment, which makes the chancellor can't just look away any longer.
People for sure have always cheated in these take home exams. This has to have been to protect rich kids with parents who give money to the university. It's insane to learn how many fancy universities have garbage blatantly unmeritocratic evaluation systems like this
That is true, and it was always a bad idea. But hey, economics. If economists should be aware of anything, it's that university financing in large parts of the world have perverse incentives.
Another irony from TFA:
"We economists understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions."
Game Theory seems sort of useless in the real world because people are not rational players, and the real challenge is in getting an accurate model of their behavior. The honor system would work probably fine in a tiny close-knit liberal arts college, while it would obviously wouldn't in a place where the degree itself is the target.
Aside from evolutionary biology, cancer research, embryonic development, economics, internet routing, spectrum auctions, counter-terrorism, kidney exchanges, generative AI, and preventing nuclear apocalypse...What HAS game theory done for us?!
Proved that everyone asking that question is playing a signalling game!
Game theory seemed kind of useful when the US was negotiating nuclear weapons control with the Soviets. It allowed successful negotiations in an extremely low trust situation.
Also, your own example is an application of game theory; you've basically stated a 'prisoner's dilemma' problem. You state that in a high trust society, most people will choose cooperation, while in a low trust society, most people will defect.
when you know what is game theoretic, deviation from it carries information you can potentially exploit.
Everything in life is game theory
take-home, closed-book type
What an oxymoron. I agree with the others here that AI isn't the problem.
My favorite exams (as a ugrad for classics, and in grad school to advance to candidacy in CS) were in person, hand written, open book.
We had lots of time, and a fair idea of the range of questions. It rewards actuality mastering the material vs memorizing it.
For the CS exam some people brought more books than they could physically carry, I don’t think it helped them much.
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.
How long is too short? Each exam in my BSc Applied Physics final (1977, Exeter Uni.) was three hours and we had similar exams in each of the preceding years to weed out those who weren't keeping up. I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helped the weaker students get through the Quantum Mechanics exam.
In addition I had to defend the report (120 pages of typescript and charts) of my final year project to my supervisor and another senior academic. And it was clear that they had actually read it.
All those exams were open note; anything in your own hand or a copy of a lecture handout was permitted. Again the weaker students would not have been helped by more time because they hadn't understood that you have to have enough familiarity with your notes to be able find the right information. Some brought in 50 litre rucksacks stuffed with ring binders and the noise of them furiously leafing through was enough for the invigilators to warn them to make less noise or risk being ejected.
In Norway it is typical that an exam of similar standard allows five hours.
I sat one exam at uni (in person, invigilated) for History and Philosophy of Science, which had no time-limit. You could take as long as you needed, whether that was one hour, five hours or all day.
Pretty much everyone still took three hours. But you felt so much calmer, knowing you weren't racing against the clock.
All of my exams were three hours as well. I don’t think there’s a single instance where more time would have helped me. If I didn’t immediately know the answer to a question, I’d just move on, then revisit. When you don’t know the material/answer, more time won’t help. But you do have to know how to take a test and manage your time.
3 hours for us as well. When you start doing graduate level work, a problem could easily last over an hour. And many people will have false starts before they figure it out.
It's not a problem with homework assignments as they have multiple days to finish.
So the professor has to decide between poor data with high variance, or good data with lower variance.
> I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helped the weaker students get through the Quantum Mechanics exam.
Funny you mention that. When I did my (undergrad) QM II exam, I likely got the highest score, and I'm sure my score was below 40%.
There just wasn't enough time.
< I'm sure my score was below 40%.
Such scores were expected when I was studying. No one got 100% in the kind of exams we had, not even those who got firsts.
Sure, I know some places that do that.
The problem is that the professor has little clue on who can and can't solve the problems. Everyone doing poorly on a tightly constrained problem is mostly noise.
I really don't see how it would cost too much to pay TAs some more proctor hours.
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.
There's a way. But if your professor is confident AI won't help you too much then it's a very hard test
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.
> Fast students are smarter.
Assuming this is true (others have already addressed a few of the many reasons it might not be), wouldn't that imply that practically all existing tests are already flawed? If you want to grade on time, every exam should be graded with a formula taking both the time and the correctness into account. A binary "fast enough" vs "not fast enough" is about as useful as a pass/fail class grade.
The exams that felt like the fairest reflections of my own knowledge were proctored in-person, closed book, and time unlimited. Of course, being time unlimited works better for quantitative/engineering exams. I haven't put much thought into more qualitative/liberal arts type exams.
In my experience, it was common to test speed - my favorite was solving 100 arithmetic problems in, I think it was 3 minutes? Perhaps shorter. The point was that it was basically impossible to solve them all, so it evaluated both your speed and your self-assessment: if you move too quickly, you'll make errors. If you spend too much time second-guessing yourself, you won't get enough problems finished.
It always struck me as an ingenious way to get a feel for a new group of students, since it's quick to administer and equally quick to grade, while revealing quite a lot of information.
Certainly we hold speed to some regard, since a lot of academic accommodations involve granting extra time. If we aren't testing on speed, then surely we should give that to anyone that asks?
> Fast students are smarter.
Dubious assertion.
> "smarter" here means how well the student will perform in a career in their chosen field. Fast + accurate is the ideal.
Still dubious.
Also, I don't know where you work, but in most of my jobs, career growth is not limited by speed with which you do the work. It's one factor among, say, 10. Most of the people who got ahead were not the fastest.
They're not trying to gauge who is the fastest. Or even the smartest. Just those who have the skills. In the real world, you'll rarely (as in, never) have to solve those same problems with the same speed you will in the exam.
In a lot (all?) of the jobs I worked, taking a day to solve a Medium level Leetcode problem was quite OK.
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.
Those are all proxies for "is smarter". They have better memories, perform better under pressure, etc. Universities are meant to prepare students for the real world where these things matter.
Define “smarter” —- already a vague and overloaded term.
And then consider whether the point of the class is to test smarts, or something else.
I’d expect that’s not the intent of most undergraduate degrees.
Arguably someone who is faster is more likely to just be recalling memorized things faster, while someone who's slower may have a deeper understanding but needs time to actually think it through.
Memorization is already hacking the rules of the game that's supposed to be gauging understanding. An ideal test is resistant to rote memorization as well as outright cheating.
Care to explain?
See my other comment. I want my doctor/plumber/etc to be able to recall faster, type faster, work better under pressure. If you're better at those things you should get better grades and be paid more.
What if taking longer leads to a better result? Doesn't faster imply less thought?
People can have multiple values. Tradeoffs exist. Are faster ambulances worse for you?
We're not talking about ambulances though?
The final exam was not take-home, which is where the massive discrepancy showed up.
I do agree that the idea of giving take-home exams and expecting students not to cheat has long since passed its prime. There may have been a time when it was reasonable to expect most students to behave honestly, but that does not hold at all in today’s climate. Especially post-COVID, for whatever combination of reasons, students just don’t seem to care at all about anything other than min-maxing their effort to grade ratio.
Which leads to a lot of outcomes like this one where students start using ChatGPT early, think it will continue forever, and then get completely crushed when they encounter the first assignment where they can’t cheat.
I can't say what the reality looks like today, but when I was in college 25 years ago (Harvey Mudd), closed-book take-home exams were pretty common (often with a specific time limit: maybe 3/5/8 hours), and I would have been shocked and aghast at the thought of anyone cheating. We took our Honor Code deeply seriously. (I've given my own students take-home open-book exams with "no outside resources" rules regularly in the past, but I've pretty much concluded that isn't viable anymore. But then, we don't have a formal Honor Code here.)
One particularly striking example was a timed, closed-book math exam where the exam paper just listed four problem numbers from the book. We were expected to open the book, copy down those problems without looking at anything else, and then put the book away. Honestly, that one felt like just asking for trouble and now that I'm a professor myself I think that the prof was unreasonably lazy, but it certainly captured the spirit of the thing. (Technically, that wasn't a Harvey Mudd professor but rather a professor at the adjacent graduate university. Maybe that had something to do with it.)
The craziest part is that a game theory expert can't see the problem here!
The other day some sucker told me, "don't throw that trash over there it's littering" and I told that sucker "there's no way anyone could enforce it" lol.
Some people get up in their jimmies about this but if they don't want me doing something they should make it impossible to do it
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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.
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.
Your employer (the university) sells a credential (diploma and transcript) that your customer (the student) uses to help them get a job.
You are not doing it for free. Grading is part of what UC gets for the $250k+ they pay a professor in salary and benefits.
HR departments will use whatever signals exist. If smart people tend to have college degrees, they'll use that as a filter. If smart people tend to have gone to a certain set if universities, they'll use that list as a filter. If colleges hand out transcripts with grades, and smart people tend to have better grades, they'll ask for transcripts.
HR departments didn't invent grades or transcripts.
I agree with your final sentence. The signal in grades (and even graduation) has been greatly diminished (even at brand name universities).
If you want to improve that situation a good step you can take right now is add your name to this open letter from UC STEM faculty: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwvDywR-CAt3t_U3Aw...
Wow. Do you care at all about the reputation of your university?
I worked briefly in post-secondary CS education a long time ago, before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today, and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job.
Also, grades have long been inflated
Then stop inflating them. This is also what standardised testing is good for --- but no surprise, so many are against it because it would just show how terrible they actually are.
"The fish rots from the head."
I know someone who went to Reed College, which has semi-famously not suffered from grade inflation[1]. They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.
Interestingly, at Reed, there is a low emphasis (or even anti-emphasis) on grades — a student has to go out of their way to obtain them. Instead, emphasis is on written feedback and discussion, to understand one's performance on assignments.
All this to say: de-emphasizing grades in school is not necessarily a bad thing, and does not necessarily harm the reputation of the university. It can be a sign of good priorities (eg: learning, rather than numbers-gaming).
[1] https://www.gradeinflation.com/Reed.html
> They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.
That's odd, I would expect any employer for whom the class of degree mattered to know the reputation of the university. For instance second from Oxford is probably going to be as desirable as a first from Oxford Brooks (formerly Oxford Poly).
Everyone knows Oxford, but the are many thousands of universities, most of which are not known to most employers. I am not an employer, but I work in higher education and see transcripts of transferring and exchange students, and many (probably most) come with some kind of guide on how to interpret the grades, because there are a huge variety of ways of assigning them and defining them (e.g. at some universities a D is a fail, and at some a D is a pass - to know which you're looking at, you need a guide!).
I can't marry this:
> before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today
with this:
> and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job
Weren't universities supposed to be exactly the kind of place where unorthodox ideas could be freely said out loud? To fire an educator for saying the wrong opinion about education doesn't make your university sound like the great place you suggest it was.
Education reform, including changing or ending grading, should totally be the kind of thing that people can safely discuss.
We've been discussing this in our department for some time. No one gets fired yet :)
"Have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."
Good idea! Nothing bad could possibly come from advocating for centralization of academic assessment! Let's give more authority to a handful of private publishers who adapt their curricula to the whims of Texas!
It's not just because "it would just show how terrible they actually are"
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Grading is to provide your students with a goal, one that isn't so high-minded as "the goal is education". The human mind uses a "reward system", within a feedback cycle. If you want to do away with that, just because it's what you prefer, then you're ignoring the reality of being human.
grades are important as feedback and to make sure students who learned nothing in a class fail and have to retake it instead of making trouble in more advanced classes. but they should never be a permanent record employers can demand.
the best way to do that would be making it school policy to issue transcripts with any grades you want any time after you finish your degree. set it up so theres no difference between one you got at graduation and years later. even if you never request one the fact that its possible makes it so treating everyone from that school equally is the only rational option.
but for that to work all the schools in a state would have to use the system so employers cant be like "you graduated XY university? thats the one that lets you fake grades right?" and treat you like you got a 1.0 GPA. we need to get the government involved.
or if you want a less radical/more realistic solution let people retake classes after they graduate to retroactively get better grades. the point is some number on a piece of paper you get in your early 20s shouldnt be visible and affect the rest of your life.
Unfortunately, most students today just want to find the easiest way to get a good grade. The percentage of students truly want to learn is very low. For the most, they'd prefer instructors who feed them with exam problems. This is very sad, but true.
Another issue is with the curriculum and course structure, which should long been updated. But that's another rabbit hole on its own, especially in public universities with a big hierarchy of system. The sad truth is professors have no passion in teaching outdated curriculum, and students have no desire to learn.
Indeed, and it also gives students a way to budget their time between the demands of multiple classes. I studied enough for each course to put me in good enough stead for the exams, then moved on to the next course. I got it right most of the time.
Education has existed in some form since prehistory. Grading didn't become widespread until the 1940s.
During my bachelor I remember getting a distinction for an assignment that I put a shit ton of effort into and being elated. And then finding out that my tutor had taken it to the board trying to make the case for a high distinction, and narrowly failing, but it then being archived as an example of the output that the class wanted anyway.
That bowled me over when I was young and still sort of working out effort/reward sort of stuff. I had put a lot of work into a lot of subjects where I wasnt very naturally talented and got a lot of mediocre results, but seeing that if I put the effort in continually I could make stuff thats worthy of recognition was amazing.
Meanwhile, my (now) wife was completing a diploma subject at the same institution and they were handing out pass/fail only. You could see a lot of people really confused about that. The quality of work that fit into "pass" ran a very large gamut.
If I'm studying something, it's nice to get an external assessment of how well I'm doing, so i don't fall victim to over-confidence or imposter syndrome. When you're dealing with new material it's hard to be truly objective about your own project level.
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
You should know full well you need some method of determining if a student is competent enough to move on to the next class in whatever sequence. Perhaps universities are slacking on this front, but at a minimum a student who doesn't understand the basics of Calc I should not go take Calc II
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.
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_...
it saddens me to see people testing parachutes on others instead of giving them functional existing parachute designs
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
Let's play this out further. How about high school, should there be grades there? Tests at all levels also typically involve a grade / metric -- are those included too?
The same logic applies.
At least where I live, universities used to run entrance exams. They didn't care about high school grades, or even if you'd ever been to high school: if you passed the entrance exam, you could enroll.
At the end in very large cohort standardised testing. And by very large I mean at least hundreds if not thousands of test takers. At that point you have enough test takers to stack rank them in properly done test. And it smooths things over the years. This is the least bad way of evaluating large number of students.
In class room stack ranking is just meaningless. Either student passes demonstrating various levels of knowledge or not.
To play devil's advocate, evaluations and scoring should probably be used at the systemic or team level rather than stack ranking individual employees... I mean students. Improve the educational system rather than blame the individuals.
>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.
Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.
CS enrollment is declining, but not demand. Everyone is citing the numbers from UC Berkeley showing a 26% percent decline in enrollment. What they fail to mention is that the CS department reduced their admit slots by 25% because the TAs negotiated an $80/hr rate, and they can't afford as many, so they can't open as many classes.
But the number of students applying for CS is actually up slightly.
lol they can absolutely afford TAs, i don’t know why they might reduce class slots but that’s not why
They specifically said that is why. Not sure why you think they can afford TAs at that rate (4x the average at other schools).
Here is a whole article about it: https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/2026-summer/...
> But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free?
Corporations were able to convince future employees to pay for their job training (i.e school). Getting professors to do the screening is not much.
Grades ideally should measure the understanding a student has of the subjects presented, and their ability to execute on that understanding. Regardless of other incentives, that alone warrants them.
Are you suggesting a pass/fail method, or something else?
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.
I would argue the barrier to cheating has become lower just by virtue of how easy it is to do it now. You open an app and type your question. Rue if different from Brit where you had to basically have either a skill in cheating to find and adapt the right resources or you would have to have money to pay someone to do it for you. AI as the great equaliser I suppose.
In Serrano's class and other introductory classes like it, cheating has been widespread before AI and after. The truth is that the social stigma around cheating has gone away (perhaps this is only a post-remote-schooling phenomena) so cheating is trivial. All you have to do is go text a friend in the class (most people will have many friends in any large intro class they're taking).
Source: am student @ Brown
I think this is an important point.
A time when a take-home, closed-book test, relying on the honesty and integrity of the students, was viable seems completely unrealistic now. I assume there were always some who cheated, but I can imagine that it was sufficiently socially unacceptable that many didn't.
That seems like a very different world.
Different magnitude of cheating altogether
Not quite true. As a student who had many friends in Serrano's class in question among others at Brown, I'm be quite doubtful that AI has led to an increase in this particular class. The truth is that (at least post-covid) cheating is very widespread on take-home exams. If you are taking an introductory class such as Serrano's, you will have many friends in the class and cheating is so widely accepted that there is little to no stigma to doing it and so many people do. The primary limiting factor on whether a student cheats is not access or ease but desire.
It's a sad state of affairs.
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.
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.
I would not agree with this from my own experience. The truth is the culture, at least at Brown in the 2020s, has little stigma around cheating in big classes. Unclear how different this is in the past, but a friend and I often joke that the student body is very good at reward hacking. If there's a reward, people will find a way to get it! That's across grades (people will cheat), housing (a huge % people will competitively apply for specialty housing or accommodations to beat the lottery), and a whole lot of other things. I don't think this is correlated with legacy, athletics, ect. but an artifact of the current culture unfortunately.
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
The whole discussion consistently fails to acknowledge that, in a day where we have a Supreme Court Justice who cannot define "woman", education devolves into anarchy.
Surf the chaos, bro.
> 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.
> 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.
The decline of actual consequences for cheating has played a big role.
When I was in college, people who got caught cheating found themselves in a world of trouble. Repeat offenders faced severe consequences like failing courses, which could delay their graduation date if it was a critical-path course. This has a real dollar amount attached to it because you start working later.
Now it seems universities avoid addressing cheating problems at all costs. The professor in this article complains about how hard it was to draw attention to the cheating problem, with no response within his own department.
Students know this. As cheating gains critical mass and you see that nothing bad is happening to the cheaters, you start feeling like you're at risk of falling behind if you aren't cheating. The cheaters are getting higher grades (100% for many in this case) and they get to go out partying while you're still working through the material. You're really screwed if grades are distributed on a curve.
So temptation spreads. Anecdotally, I've seen a few young people lie to themselves and think that they're just going to use ChatGPT to check their answers and learn from it, but they don't realize how superficial it is to have ChatGPT fix your problem and then skim the correct answer. They put less effort into checking their work because they know they have a button to push to check it for them. When they get put into a situation where they can't rely on that button, it all falls apart
At UVA many years ago, one of my roommates was one of the unfortunate 20 or so annually expelled -- the only outcome of being convicted of breaking the "no cheating, stealing, or lying" honor code. It didn't take repeat offenses, expulsion was a first offense consequence.
Interestingly, it seems like you weren't joking about the decline:
> Finally in the spring of 2022, a sanction reform referendum succeeded with more than 80% of the vote, changing the penalty for an Honor violation from expulsion to a two semester suspension. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_system_at_the_University...
> When I was in college, people who got caught cheating found themselves in a world of trouble. Repeat offenders faced severe consequences like failing courses, which could delay their graduation date
We had a very real threat of rustication. People still cheated. I think culture does play a big role. Of course, there need to be consequences too.
and there's also the Ivy League grade inflation...
https://jamesgmartin.center/2025/11/harvard-admits-that-grad...
That’s a different debate, and imo, the lack of a severe curve makes it safer for students to resist temptations to cheat. Severe curves ratchet up structural pressures for students to cheat, due to a prisoners’ dilemma effect in a zero-sum competitive environment. When there is a severe curve and students are able to cheat, acting with integrity becomes a failing strategy.
I agree with the sentiment, however I think the erosion of the honor system is inevitable given the rising cost of college. Somewhere in the last 20 years college became a luxury good, and with it a natural sense of entitlement from their customers.
Couple that with increased awareness that classroom instruction (delivered by tenured research facility who seem annoyed at the idea of teaching) often has little relevance to workplace skills, I think kids have correctly surmised that the smart thing to do is say fuck the code and focus on checking boxes.
> Imo, the fix should be to work on culture.
We can’t even agree on what’s wrong with it. We aren’t going to be able to fix it.
"Fixing" the culture includes a much much broader context than just what an individual professor preaches about to a set of students. It includes the entire intergenerational contract, earning the trust of students as well, getting their buy-in. There's a lot of cynicism and distrust against it all and a lot of disengagement because they just don't buy into it anymore with sincerity. It's not simply about scolding them a bit more and telling them that actually cheating is bad, mkay.
One place to start is to question seriously who actually needs a university degree and why, how this credentialism has been stealing years of productivity from young people. Though at least the deal was that in exchange you could expect some middle class job, even if gated behind a totally unrelated bachelor degree. But then this deal also got soured.
The culture comes from the role of the institution and the degree. The fact is that the primary role of the degree is as a gatekeeper to high paying job opportunities, regardless of what anyone idealistically thinks it should be.
This creates some problems. Let's say that you go to university and major in X to get a job in Y. So you assume that the companies are requiring you to get the degree to prove that you are competent in X which is necessary to do job Y. But when you get to university you realize that most of your classes required to get a degree in X actually have nothing to do with X. Furthermore you also notice that students who just cram for the test and have no functional knowledge of X are still getting As and graduating.
Then you get a summer internship in a job doing Y. You notice that learning to do job Y really has nothing to do with what you learned about X in school. You notice that your mangers an the company who are really good at job Y (and all majored in X) have basically forgotten everything they know about X and know much less about it than you, but are excellent at job Y. You finish your internship and now know that you are perfectly capable of doing job Y. But, of course you can't get job Y yet because you don't have your degree in X. You have to go back to school and learn more about X before anyone will hire you even though you already know more about X than the people who do job Y and who you can see really don't need knowledge in X to do the job.
So you are being forced to get a degree in X to get job Y, but job Y doesn't really require knowledge of X. And on top of that, a degree in X doesn't even really mean you have any functional knowledge of X! Everybody just learns Y on the job anyway!
So now you have an exam in X, so you decide fuck it, why would I spend time on this? This whole system is retarded, I'm just going to use ChatGPT.
This was basically my experience in college. I never cheated, both because it was harder before LLMs and because I didn't really need to study much to get As, but I find it hard to fault people who do. I really struggle to see how integrity plays into this system. The system itself has no integrity, so having integrity inside it almost seems like being a sucker. If you want to change the culture to promote integrity, the education and the degree have to mean something besides an arbitrary bureaucratic gatekeeping device.
The world is getting more competitive. Integrity goes out the window when cheating in a test can mean meaningful better life outcomes and when you believe everyone else will be too.
The thing about the community of trust—of which all stewards—is that camaraderie, respect, identifying with the community, and integrity will keep the majority of students from cheating. And if that isn’t enough, the “single sanction” was historically a sufficient danger to raise the stakes immensely.
However, some students will cheat, and for that reason, I am very much against curves. If you learn the material and demonstrate that you have, you should get the A. But it’s more work for professors to calibrate their curriculums, and there seems to be no real accountability for the inverse of learning objectives—teaching objectives—so curves are likely here to stay.
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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.
> 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.
> Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life.
Assuming the person you're talking to is still alive, this isn't true.
> The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement.
This isn't true either; if your student body consists of only those people, you don't need any system at all. There is no point in even notionally punishing students who don't want anything from you.
I'm still alive, and college wasn't really sold primarily as a financial investment when I attended in the 1970s.
Even in the old times, including at medieval universities, most students weren't simply hobbyist curious gentlemen who studied it for idyllic leasure reasons, but people studied things to then get various jobs, teaching, administrative and clerical or legal work, etc.
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If one of these clients of yours became an engineer, doctor, or lawyer, would you want their services for yourself or your family?
if someone shows that kind of dedication to engineering, and make no mistake, this is engineering, I would certainly hire them at least as an apprentice.
one can settle into a doctor or lawyer career some time later. one can't learn to think out of the box on a whim.
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.
In-ear Bluetooth earbud with TTS.
There's also TI-84 mods that add esp32 and can hook up an LLM.
There's always a defeat.
Wow and I thought I was slick for programming routines for Maxwell's and coordinate transformations in my TI-84.
ears have to be shown to camera to confirm no devices inside
own calculator not allowed, there is one provided by the software that must be used
Second stationary camera recording the screen meaning you just need to replace the screen with the virtual screen in the footage you send as the secondary camera feed, easy for a static camera because it’s an affine transform with fixed parameters. If you don’t wave your arms in a way where they overlap the screen region then it’s ridiculously easy, otherwise don’t forget to release the ‘cheating on’ foot pedal before doing that.
I think we're headed into a world where remote degrees have little value for this reason. Universities which have remote or take-home exams won't be far behind.
Which sadly only makes it more of a rich kids' game, because the name-brand universities become the only ones that can be trusted. You see an out-of-state university that isn't a household name on someone's resume and you can't tell if it's one where students are monitored or if it's just a place where people pay a lot of money to transfer questions and results back and forth from ChatGPT.
I think we're also going to see a lot of people crash out of college halfway through when they start their academic career cheating, then get hit with a dose of reality when they encounter classes that require in-person, monitored work. If this happens 2-3 years into college, the student isn't going to quickly catch up. They're going to crash out.
I don't think this is having the effect you think it does.
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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.
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.
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
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 and make education about education, not testing and certification.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
How is invigilation "soul destroying"? You just walk or stand around as students write exams. Grading exams is tedious, but invigilating them is a neutral experience.
> Grading exams is tedious, but invigilating them is a neutral experience.
I don't mind grading exams (though I think grading is somewhat futile - see my link elsewhere). Sometimes an examinee will come up with a new idea, but we don't need formal examinations to check that kind of thing out. And you can do it in a comfortable chair, while listening to Miles Davis, unlike invigilation.
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?
Because for many a college degree is a pure formality to land a job.
My first job out of college, I worked with veterans at the company who all got in with a HS diploma. Now you realistically need a masters degree to be competitive, for no other reason than that where I live (Norway) most applicants have a 5-year masters degree. It is basically academic inflation.
Here we have a tongue-in-cheek word "Mastersyken" which translates to "Master's illness/disease", a word for the phenomena that too many people are pursuing a master's degree for the sake of the diploma alone, trying to become more attractive in the search for a job, but with the side effect that suddenly "everyone" has a master's degree, and in the end everyone is stuck at the same place as before, but with extra student loans.
The worst part is when you start working, and indeed discover that this is a job you could have done just fine straight out of HS.
A master's in CS can teach you interesting and very useful things, like how OS kernels, distributed systems, networks, and microprocessors work. A master's in EE will teach you things like signal processing and analog circuit design as well. Knowing these things helps you to design, build, and evaluate systems that are reliable and efficient.
A master's in science helps you understand how the physical world works and how to reason quantitatively as well as qualitatively. A master's in humanities gives you knowledge and understanding of human culture, such as literature and the arts, and history - subjects that can be deeply enriching and can provide insights that transcend disciplines. A master's in social science will teach you about how humans behave in groups and how they interact with their environment, and about statistical analysis.
Writing a master's thesis will also teach you a lot and make you a better writer - if you actually write it yourself and don't rely on AI.
Any of these degrees will certainly qualify you to be a more interesting, knowledgeable, and insightful barista or Uber driver.
Don't assume that TrackerFF is doing the kind of job that requires higher education.
It's also dangerous to assume that higher education is for everyone. (Although I agree the opportunity needs to be there for anyone who wants to try it.) Some people just want to get on with their life after high school. (I raise my children assuming that they will go to college, and if they want to seek an alternate way through life, I will support it.)
(Serious answer in spite of the punch line at the end of my parent post which perhaps addresses your first point.) I think it's good for people to be educated, and to have the opportunity when they want it, but it can be self-defeating to force people to be there who don't want to be.
There should be no reason you have to jump to a master’s for that. A bachelor’s in CS or EE would be a joke if it didn’t (doesn’t) cover those things. Arguably, even the current 4 year bachelor’s is a waste compared to a focused 2 year program: looking at my college’s requirements, many classes are wasted. Business majors taking a physical science with lab component, entry level English classes being taught by a TA that doesn’t speak English natively, etc.
I guess it depends on the program, but at my university an undergrad EE major, even though it had more units than any other major, didn't get to the best and most interesting stuff (perhaps because engineering majors also had to learn about things other than engineering, which seems like a pretty good idea.) Personally I wish more CS grads (including many people I worked with) had a better understanding of compilers, programming languages, databases, operating systems, distributed systems, networks, and computer architecture, as well as applications programming and interaction design. It's hard to get all of that while working at a single job, but readily achievable at a university, and an extra year of coursework really helps.
Business majors should take physical science courses with a lab component! How else are they going to learn anything about reality?
But there is no excuse for bad teaching, anywhere (especially given how insanely competitive faculty positions are - even crummy adjunct and lecturer positions.)
Unfortunately research universities prioritize fundraising > research > teaching. And sometimes grad students are selected to teach based on financial need or departmental requirements rather than interest or ability.
I feel like that's quite an american phenomenon - from the universities I have experience with in Denmark and the UK, a bachelor's program consists of classes entirely focused on the topic of the degree. But then again there is no idea of a "major" and a "minor" or even that many elective classes. We had a single semester where we had a choice of three courses for my batchelors degree, and for my masters similarly a single semester where we had the choice of an entrapreurship course or doing a placement (internship) in industry. all the other semesters (3 year batchelor and 2 year master) were pre-determined classes only, all strictly relevant to the topic of the degree.
[dead]
The grad school inflation in Europe is incredible. People with five degrees who have never worked a real job in their life, looking for work at 35.
>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.
> For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities
More true at an Ivy than anywhere else.
> 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).
If this guy thinks AI is motivating his previously guiless student body to start cheating on these tests, rather than simply changing the way they are cheating, he's been sniffing too many of his own farts.
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.
That motivation isn't necessarily inherent in the attendees though. That has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.
It's why we're seeing the death of the liberal arts majors. It's sad, because usually the smartest and most creative people I've worked with in the field of engineering and software have been liberal arts majors. But corporations don't want intelligent people. They want people who have been molded to whatever the soup du jour is.
> That [motivation] has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.
I don't think so.
The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universities teach to the students.
If what the universities teach was very important for the job, applicants who have not invested serious effort into getting a deep understanding of the topics of the courses would nearly all fail in the job interviews.
The problem rather is that for many jobs the knowledge that you could have gotten from the university typically does not matter, and thus investing minimal effort into the courses does not get you rejected in a job interview.
If only they could communicate with each other and explain their reasoning.
Corporation A "Hi University, here is what we hire highly paid people to do, and what we need to improve as a company."
University B, "Hi Corp A, here is our educational mandate to create well-rounded, highly educated people, we can probably fit your needs into the curriculum in the last couple of semesters, let's work together to make sure you have good employees and we have people who aren't struggling to pay back loans because they have an engineering degree but can't make more than 50K at a dead end job."
I basically do agree with you. The only problem that I see with your suggestion is that companies often don't know what they actually, really want from their employees.
But in practice the typical situation is that it is perfectly easy to graduate from University B without being well rounded and highly educated, and also you can skate by without actually learning any of the job relevant stuff in the last 2 semesters either.
I'm surprised Corporation A doesn't say "FU, we're just going to hire HS grads with high SAT scores and train them ourselves," but for whatever reason they typically don't.
Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.
This is already starting to happen, at least for software engineering positions. There have been plenty of stories of candidates with degrees from prestigious institutions failing to answer the simplest of questions correctly. FizzBuzz is a famous example, but there are many others.
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.
If any hiring managers are reading this: make your directions super specific, or require a cover letter.
Take home tests were always rife with cheating, although it's probably worse now.
Teachers really need to stop doing it, it's so destructive to create a metric that tracks how well you can cheat and lie, and basically forces you to cheat and lie (because everyone else is) if you want to get a job.
Apparently some students aren't actually interested in learning and view the diploma as a meal ticket rather than a meaningful credential. Or perhaps the university is just seen as a networking opportunity.
If students don't want to be there in the first place and/or don't see any value in learning, it is unsurprising that they'd take the easy way out. Or maybe they cheated their way into Brown and are just continuing.
But I was always interested in learning, and understood that cheating was a method of learning avoidance. Why waste the amazing learning resources - faculty, teaching assistants, courses, labs, libraries, studios, rehearsal spaces, interesting speakers, arts and culture events, computing facilities, maker spaces, etc. - that are available at a place like Brown?
* I am in the state of not knowing about something
* This is brought to my attention by an exam question
* I have an oracle in the form of a textbook, an LLM, the internet, or all of the above
Which action is skipping the education: looking up the answer, or not looking up the answer?
Not understanding the answer.
> then you just skip the education part? Why bother?
You've never put anything off in your life or taken the easy short term route? Come on this is not difficult to understand. You aren't different either.
They’ve been taught that not having the piece of paper will keep them from having even a menial job,
so you have a huge population of people bullshitting their way through to the piece of paper.
When it costs a lot of money, the failure itself costs a lot of money. And you cant afford it. Because failure means you paid a lot of money for nothing.
An expensive education comes with higher temptation to cheat.
i mean, even if you are truly there for learning, doesn't it make sense in a low risk setting to try and boost your grade? it's different if you're cheating on your homework or other learning, but there isn't much learning left to do on the exam, that's for the grade
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Take home closed book" exam is asking for mass cheating. It was probably happening way before AI too. AI is just an excuse now.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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?
They did it to themselves. They probably even enrolled in the class because they thought they could cheat.
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
“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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
Harvard's larger courses enroll over 500 students. These are also introductory courses where you're most likely to see large cheating instances.
by far, the biggest, most insane cheating scandal in the ivy league is the Replication Crisis by the professors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “…if we want to preserve the future of higher education”
He understands the stakes here. If a university degree becomes useless, then what?
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-mea...
Edit: Didn't realize the original URL was paywalled. Sorry. This newer URL is open. Apologies.
Nice way to paywall a comment on HN.
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.
For homework: if you make homework results not count towards the final grade, then there's no reason to use an LLM - the point then just becomes to have practice problems and feedback on how well you are doing.
This is what my university (EPFL) was doing ~40 years ago. And yes, some students didn't bother with the homework, and mostly paid the price at the final exam...
Yes. I've tinkered with the idea of non-graded homework, too.
Unfortunately, if I give homework that will not be graded, almost no one will do it. But I WANT them to do it for the practice it gives them.
The only reasonable answer I could find is to award them full points for simply doing the homework on time, even if it has errors.
Worth pointing out - modern multimodal LLMs (properly called VLMs, etc.) can easily take pictures as input and describe them in text. In fact, the CLIP model - one of the predecessors of modern VLMs - is entirely designed around being able to caption images with text.
That said - requiring students to hand-write answers is reasonably effective. It's a lot more boring to hand-copy text out of an LLM answer than write it yourself, and it makes the "cheating" significantly more visceral.
I considered that... and in the "worst comes to worse" scenario where they decide to use an LLM and re-write everything by hand, I'm still hoping they'll learn SOMETHING during the copying process... kind of like the old time "copy books" that were once used.
A similar thing happened in a first-year CS class at Purdue this year: https://thecheatsheet.substack.com/p/432-cheating-at-purdue-....
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.
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’.
Interestingly, here in Italy a substantial part of grades in Italian classes is exactly in-class written essays.
Juxtapose the mass fraud on exams with the greater difficulty of finding a job after graduation.
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.
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?
The problem isn't AI, it's that you gave a take-home exam expected no one to cheat.
AI enables a completely different level of cheating than any prior method. It’s more accessible, better at cheating, faster
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.
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.
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.
Wow that sounds really dystopic... hope your joking
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
https://archive.is/6r2Qc
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.
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.
Not sure if I'm alone in the feeling that we are going to desire AI more than like it.
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.
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
> 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.
Seems like these youths are doing exactly what their future employers will expect them to.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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
$30/month is likely a rounding error in the budget of students at the schools mentioned in the article.
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.
Yes
Still cheaper then being jobless or without the bachelor
In comparison to textbooks or tuition even a $1000 a month could be palatable
Yawn. When a university starts expelling students for cheating, I’ll pay attention. I suspect donors, politicians and employers will, too.
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> 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.
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.
> 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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
how is expecting integrity a scam?
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.
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.
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.
Why teach kids how to read, they can just take a picture of whatever text they want and have AI say it aloud.
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.
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
I should've been clearer, I meant AI model. If you're referring to financial models, then yeah, that can be a reasonable direction.
This is a dumb take. It's like not teaching kids 1 + 1 because a calculator can do it for them.