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427 points JumpCrisscross | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.386s | source
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lwhi ◴[] No.41901852[source]
It is no longer effective to solely use a written essay to measure how deeply a student comprehends a subject.

AI is here to stay; new methods should be used to assess student performance.

I remember being told at school, that we weren't allowed to use calculators in exams. The line provided by teachers was that we could never rely on having a calculator when we need it most—obviously there's irony associated with having 'calculators' in our pockets 24/7 now.

We need to accept that the world has changed; I only hope that we get to decide how society responds to that change together .. rather than have it forced upon us.

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pjc50 ◴[] No.41902041[source]
> I only hope that we get to decide how society responds to that change together .. rather than have it forced upon us.

That basically never happens and the outcome is the result of some sort of struggle. Usually just a peaceful one in the courts and legislatures and markets, but a struggle nonetheless.

> new methods should be used to assess student performance.

Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now.

Return to the old "viva voce" exam? Still used for PhDs. But that doesn't scale at all. Perhaps we're going to have to accept that and aggressively ration higher education by the limited amount of time available for human-to-human evaluations.

Personally I think all this is unpredictable and destabilizing. If the AI advocates are right, which I don't think they are, they're going to eradicate most of the white collar jobs and academic specialties for which those people are being trained and evaluated.

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1. Ukv ◴[] No.41902261[source]
> Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now. Return to the old "viva voce" exam? Still used for PhDs. But that doesn't scale at all.

For a solution "now" to the cheating problem, regular exam conditions (on-site or remote proctoring) should still work more or less the same as they always have. I'd claim that the methods affected by LLMs are those that could already be circumvented by those with money or a smart relative to do the work for them.

Longer-term, I think higher-level courses/exams may benefit from focusing on what humans can do when permitted to use AI tools.

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2. pca006132 ◴[] No.41902400[source]
Yeah, LLM is kind of just making expensive cheats cheaper. You can do it without LLM, and indeed students did similar things prior to the release of ChatGPT, just less common.