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427 points JumpCrisscross | 26 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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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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michaelt ◴[] No.41902246[source]
> Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now.

Two decades ago, when I was in engineering school, grades were 90% based on in-person, proctored, handwritten exams. So assignments had enough weight to be worth completing, but little enough that if someone cheated, it didn't really matter as the exam was the deciding factor.

> Return to the old "viva voce" exam? Still used for PhDs. But that doesn't scale at all.

What? Sure it does. Every extra full-time student at Central Methodist University (from the article) means an extra $27,480 per year in tuition.

It's absolutely, entirely scalable to provide a student taking ten courses with a 15-minute conversation with a professor per class when that student is paying twenty-seven thousand dollars.

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1. light_hue_1 ◴[] No.41902444{3}[source]
Oh yes. When I'm teaching a class of 200 students it's totally plausible that we're going to do 10 15 minute one on one conversations with every student. Because that's only 20 days non stop with no sleep.

We would need to increase the amount of teaching staff by well over 10x to do this. The costs would be astronomical.

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2. lupusreal ◴[] No.41902528[source]
When they're paying 27k maybe they deserve a lower student to instructor ratio. And for that matter, a lower administration to student ratio. The whole system is very inefficient, there's a lot of room for improvement.
3. lotsofpulp ◴[] No.41902546[source]
>The costs would be astronomical.

Countries have no problem spending astronomical amounts on old people. If the country wants productive young people, the country will find a way.

replies(1): >>41903275 #
4. kubb ◴[] No.41902602[source]
But you can read 200 essays? At this point you can be replaced with AI, you’re not adding any value anymore.
replies(1): >>41902817 #
5. michaelt ◴[] No.41902605[source]
I said one conversation per student per class, and ten classes per year. Not 10 conversations per class per student.

> The costs would be astronomical.

Those 200 students have paid the college $549,600 for your class.

The costs are already astronomical.

Is it so unreasonable for some of that money to be spent on providing education?

replies(2): >>41902662 #>>41908202 #
6. ◴[] No.41902662[source]
7. lwhi ◴[] No.41902784[source]
Would AI be used to carry out the conversation?
8. abenga ◴[] No.41902817[source]
Essays are async and easier to delegate.
replies(1): >>41903164 #
9. screcth ◴[] No.41902916[source]
Well, you could pick only 10% of the class for one on ones. Pick that 10% randomly or based on your intuition on the authenticity of their work.

That threat may be enough to dissuade students from cheating with AI.

replies(1): >>41903000 #
10. lnsru ◴[] No.41903000[source]
Pick 4 students per slot for oral examination and bring an assistant. That’s how my last exam worked. Assistant went through standard questionary and the main lector asked complex questions. The group of 50 was processed in a day with official grades and paperwork.
11. thechao ◴[] No.41903164{3}[source]
If I'm paying 30k$/yr the professor is damn well reading my essay. If they don't want to teach & grade, they can get a pure research position. Fun fact: pure research positions don't pay as well.
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12. arrowsmith ◴[] No.41903275[source]
We’ve already found a way: it’s called “mass immigration.”

Why bother training and educating the young people who are already here when you can just import them from poorer countries?

13. potato3732842 ◴[] No.41903282[source]
>We would need to increase the amount of teaching staff by well over 10x to do this. The costs would be astronomical.

We all know they'll just exploit grad students rather than hire real teachers.

14. batch12 ◴[] No.41903293[source]
200 students at 15 minutes is 50 hours or 33 hours and 20 minutes with 10 minute sessions. So just around the amount of time in a typical work week.
15. lupire ◴[] No.41903644{4}[source]
Pure taching positions pay barely minimum wage. Look up "adjunct".
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16. lupire ◴[] No.41903654[source]
That's what teaching fellows are for.
17. dagw ◴[] No.41904001{4}[source]
Fun fact: pure research positions don't pay as well.

Where do you get this from? The people I know with pure research positions get paid basically the same (after correcting for 'rank' and seniority) as those who split their time between research and teaching.

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18. lupusreal ◴[] No.41904067{5}[source]
If their situation is that bad they can walk into a local staffing agency and get a factory job that pays 3x the federal minimum wage. Poor pay as a adjunct is a situation they choose for themselves for some reason.
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19. skhunted ◴[] No.41904087{4}[source]
Roughly 50% of higher education occurs at community colleges. We don’t do research. What you pay for the class does not correspond to what I make. I’m not paid enough to do all the stuff that is suggested in the comments.

The top earning professors in the nation in mathematics are all very good research mathematicians

20. jhbadger ◴[] No.41904384{5}[source]
At least in the sciences, and in the US, there is also the issue that research professors tend to be on "soft money" -- that is they get a minimal salary from their institution but can increase it (up to a point) by getting grants that they can charge their time to. And they also tend not to be in the tenure track system. That being said, if they get large enough grants, they can make as much if not more than traditional tenure-track professors with defined salaries. But in years where they don't get much grant funding they don't make much at all (I used to be an non-tenure track research professor myself).
21. analog31 ◴[] No.41904709{6}[source]
I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, many years ago. Like you say, there's usually a reason, such as collecting benefits while running some kind of side hustle. A teaching gig lends itself to this because the hours are flexible (outside of your scheduled class time), there is utterly no supervision, and no questions asked about what your other income sources are.

My office mate in engineering was trying to get funding for a start-up. I was trying to get a consulting business off the ground. Neither of us achieved those things, but whatever. He got a teaching gig at the community college, which is unionized and actually a pretty good situation. I found a regular day job through his network.

A friend of mine had an adjunct gig in the humanities, and used his off-time to learn how to code.

A lot of academic spouses get adjunct gigs, especially if they want to balance part time work with child care.

22. light_hue_1 ◴[] No.41908202[source]
I can't express how out of touch with reality this reply is.

The students paid me nothing. The university provides some TAs, that's it. But even if they gave me all of that money in cash to spend, this would be totally impossible.

I'm supposed to grade a student based on 1 conversation? Do you know how grading and teaching work? Can you imagine the complains that would come out of this process? How unfair it is to say that you have one 15 minute shot at a grade?

But fine, even if we say that I can grade someone based on 1 conversation. What am I supposed to ask during this 15 minute conversation? Because if I ask the every student the same thing, they'll just share the questions and we're back to being useless.

So now I need to prep unique questions for 200 people? Reading their background materials, projects, test results, and then thinking of questions? I need to do that and review it all before every session.

Even with a team of TAs this would be impossible.

But even if I do all of this. I spend hours per student to figure out what they did and know. I ask unique questions for 15 minutes so that we can talk without information leakage mattering. You know what the outcome will be? Everyone will complain that my questions to them were harder than those that I asked others. And we'll be in office hours with 200 people for weeks on end sorting this out and dealing with all the paperwork for the complaints.

This is just the beginning of the disaster that this idea would be.

It's easy to sit in the peanut gallery and say "Oh, wow, why didn't my arm surgery take 10 minutes, they just screwed two bones together right?" until you actually need to do the thing and you notice that it's far more complex than you thought.

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23. light_hue_1 ◴[] No.41908242{6}[source]
This is spot on! And that reason is peer pressure.

A lot of adjuncts sit around in precarious financial situations, developing serious mental health issues, and drinking problems because the system taught them that this is a form of success.

Going to industry and making money? That's failure. That's an "alternate career". Not scraping by in a system that couldn't care less about you. That's success.

It's pretty vile. I've never had a student become an adjunct. It would be a personal failure that I haven't given them the tools to thrive.

24. selimthegrim ◴[] No.41908648{3}[source]
OK, so how is it that USSR made this work?
replies(1): >>41910107 #
25. michaelt ◴[] No.41909942{3}[source]
> I can't express how out of touch with reality this reply is.

> The students paid me nothing.

Well gee, there I was thinking they were paying $27,480 per year for "tuition"

26. ThrowAaaaway ◴[] No.41910107{4}[source]
Soviet professors were poor, so it was easy to bribe them to get passing grade. To weed out bribers, some trickery was used by state, so bribers can pay for few years or cheat on tests and then fail an exam anyway. In my class, 36 enrolled, 11 graduated.

Later, people learned that and started to buy diploma: faster, cheaper, no risk of failing the final exam.