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.
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.
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.
> 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 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
> 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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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)
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.
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.
Google isn’t that far in the past, at the time going to college was sold as the key to a prosperous life.
Integrity only means something if you have a benefit to doing something else. I’ve taken a closed book take home test and never even considered cheating despite suspecting many other where cheating. I got a slightly worse grade, they sacrificed something even more valuable.
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.
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
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.
> 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).
Why wouldn't it 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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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
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 big 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.
My take is that we should avoid using the first, use the second for foundational subjects you have to learn, and the third for more creative or open-ended subjects where you do some kind of live presentation.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
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?
> 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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 also challenge that "hand writing is harder to revise"; again, why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?
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.
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 (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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?
... 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.
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.
A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-co...
(Where do you even get ribbons these days)
If you do let them bring their own keyboards, how sure are you that those are just dumb keyboards?
—- 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.
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)
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.
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.
Integrity only means something if you have a benefit to doing something else. I’ve taken a closed book take home test and never even considered cheating despite suspecting many other where cheating. I got a slightly worse grade, they sacrificed something even more valuable.
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.
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/.
Is there a form of assessment that is a good signal of the intellectual ability of all students?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.academia.edu/145843509/Creating_Meaningful_Homew...
Earned credentials are a marker that you once demonstrated some sufficient combination of both.
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.
What an oxymoron. I agree with the others here that AI isn't the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Lots of reasons a slow student can be just as smart or smarter than a fast one.
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.
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.
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’ve talked to a big 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.
My take is that we should avoid using the first, use the second for foundational subjects you have to learn, and the third for more creative or open-ended subjects where you do some kind of live presentation.
[Edit: typos]
I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.
Yes
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?
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
* 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?
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.
so you have a huge population of people bullshitting their way through to the piece of paper.
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.
An expensive education comes with higher temptation to cheat.
It was certainly not difficult to cheat at a "closed book" take home exam before.
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.
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.
Edit: typo
Surf the chaos, bro.
...
"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.
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?
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 lives because of it.
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.
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).
He understands the stakes here. If a university degree becomes useless, then what?
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.
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.
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
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.
Since students are notorious for being cheap
Still cheaper then being jobless or without the bachelor
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
Whether that really matters if your goal is to climb the social ladder and have power and influence, I don’t know.
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?
Ivy league is such a scam, in so many different ways.
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.
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.
For example the old and new Berkeley model to study rent control effect on market prices