Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

An essay written under examination conditions is fine. We don’t need new assessment techniques. We have known how to asses that a student and that student alone for centuries.

Yeah we always did that in high school for essays that were actually graded, otherwise there's always the option of having someone else write it for you, human or now machine. The only thing that's changed is the convenience of it.

The problem is more with teachers lazily slapping an essay on a topic as a goto homework to eat even more of the already limited students' time with busywork.

My ability to write an essay under exam conditions is...poor. Thankfully there were less than a handful of essays I had to write as part of my undergraduate CS degree and I only remember one under exam conditions.

I think it's probably more concerning that spitting out the most generic mathematically formulaic bullshit on a subject is likely to get a decent mark. In that case what are we actually testing for?

In most cases that only tests a students memory and handwriting ability, while under pressure in a limited time.

Can't perform any research, compare conflicting sources, or self-reflection.

That depends on the questions. There are also open book exams. A viva is a type of exam so I don’t see they are incompatible with assessing research

The lazy essay assignment is 100% real. However, the driving force there is not the teacher, but parental complaints causing ass-covering administrative mandates. "Why wasn't there any homework on topic X before the exam?" "We apologize so much for that, Mrs Keen. First, we will change Precious's grade, but from now on..."

Conformance.

Amusingly, willingness and capacity to conform to a system you are paying $30k a year for is a pretty good proxy for general intelligence. So maybe it's not that bad?!

Not every class is STEM. Are you writing a 4000 word research paper sitting in class?

A few of my high school teachers in the early 1990's made our final paper into a big project.

It was not just "turn in the paper at the end" but turn in your topic with a paragraph describing it. Then make an outline, then bibliography of the sources we were using. During the process we had to use 3x5 index cards with various points, arguments, facts, and the specific pages in the books listed in our bibliography. We did this because this was later used to make footnotes in our paper.

By structuring the project this way and having each milestone count as 5-10% of the overall grade it made it much harder to cheat and also taught us how to organize a research paper.

I suppose you could ask ChatGPT to do the entire paper and then work backwards picking out facts and making the outline etc.

No, but we had to write essays in class during exams.

There's a good question about the future and utility of long at-home research paper projects in school, but it's not a cornerstone of education.

In 9th grade I procrastinated the semestral paper so much that I bought an essay online that explored unexpected gay themes in Ray Bradbury's corpus of work. I was so lazy I didn't even read it first, only skimmed it, and then back to Runescape. So it's not like this is a new problem due to LLMs, and I think take-home semester projects are all quite bad for these reasons that predate LLMs.

(It turned out to be such a phenomenally audacious essay that my teacher started fascinated email correspondence with me about it and I was forced to not only study the essay but also read the quoted parts of his work. Ugh, backfire.)

You can do all those things, just in less time. Which is a different skill set I admit.

But, for example, high school AP English exam is 3 45 minute essays (plus multiple choice). You have the read the passages, compare/contrast, etc.

We had in class essays in my history class in highschool. “Write everything you know about the triple entente” or something like that was often the prompt. You were merely expected to pay attention in class to pass not bring in outside research.

Are you saying all you needed was attention? :)

It depends on what we think education is for. If the goal is to teach students, it's not so great. If the goal is to signal future employers the intelligence of the student, Maybe that's ok. But maybe the future employers should be paying the tuition instead of the student.

Some of my experience of exams comes from a history degree where around eighty to ninety percent of the overall grade came from final exams. I can only speak of my experience but I don’t think this is atypical depending on educational system.

One of the reasons I mentioned the viva was an example of how we can decouple production of some work from an assessment of quality and some reason to believe that some candidate is capable of the work without assistance.

It would be unreasonable to spend five or so years working under examination conditions. But that doesn’t mean we can’t subsequently examine a candidate to determine likely authorship amongst other things.