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- Hacker News
- 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.
by nitwit005 - 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.
by smitty1e - Different magnitude of cheating altogetherby dgellow
- 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.by goobatrooba
- 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.by yiyingzhang
- 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.by siva7
- 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 IIby voxl
- 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
- 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.by anigbrowl
- 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.
by protocolture - 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.
- 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."
by userbinator - 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...
- 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.
by TrackerFF - take-home, closed-book type
What an oxymoron. I agree with the others here that AI isn't the problem.
by userbinator - 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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by vatsachak - The craziest part is that a game theory expert can't see the problem here!by levocardia
- 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.)
by Steuard - 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.
by Aurornis - 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.by BeetleB
- 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.
by lokar - 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.
by aabajian - Is it really cheating if you work hard and memorize all the questions? That's basically learning.by sixtram
- 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.by haritha-j
- Grading on a curve is utterly irrational, unfair and cruel. I'm sorry you have to put up with such a system.by dbspin
- 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.
by j-bos - 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.by LoganDark
- > 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.
- 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.by krackers