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427 points JumpCrisscross | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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another-dave ◴[] No.41902287[source]
> Such as? We need an answer now because students are being assessed now.

When I was in university (Humanities degree), we had to do lots of mandatory essays throughout the year but they counted little towards your overall mark, maybe 10% iirc.

The majority of marks came from mid-year & end-of-year exams.

A simple change to negate AI is to not award any points for work outside exams — make it an optional chance to get feedback from lecturers. If students want to turn in work by AI, it's up to them

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1. gwd ◴[] No.41902477[source]
> make it an optional chance to get feedback from lecturers.

My sense is that if writing was entirely optional, it would be too easy for students to let it slide; having 10% count toward your grade is a good "nudge" to get honest students to actually do the work. I'd just give a little admonition at the beginning saying that I'm not going to bother checking if you use LLMs, but if you do you're an idiot, because you'll be completely unprepared for the hand-written essay you have to compose yourself in the exams.