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Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

(www.bloomberg.com)
427 points JumpCrisscross | 4 comments | 20 Oct 24 17:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.823s | source
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lwhi ◴[21 Oct 24 08:16 UTC] 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 ◴[21 Oct 24 08:54 UTC] 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 ◴[21 Oct 24 09:30 UTC] 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. ninalanyon ◴[21 Oct 24 11:55 UTC] No.41903158[source]▶
There are institutions that still require a public defence for a PhD, not merely a viva. Oslo University for instance: https://www.uio.no/english/research/phd/
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2. warner25 ◴[21 Oct 24 18:35 UTC] No.41907011[source]▶
What PhD program doesn't require a public defense?

I'm currently a PhD candidate, and our program includes separate written and oral qualifying exams during the first year or two, and a public defense of the dissertation at the end. I thought some minor variation of this was nearly universal.

It's also my observation, by the way, that the public dissertation defense (and even the written dissertation itself) is less of a big deal than outsiders tend to think. What matters is doing the research that the advisor / committee wants, and working on some number of papers that get accepted into workshops / conferences / journals (depending on the field). Everything else seems to be kind of a check-the-box formality. By the time the committee agrees that someone has done enough to defend, it's pretty much a done deal.

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3. calf ◴[21 Oct 24 18:45 UTC] No.41907099[source]▶
Imagine Alan Turing's defense being a summary of 3 papers. The actual issue is that advanced education is increasingly not about doing fundamental scholarship but a pipeline for (re)producing a clerisy-intellectual class. There are a lot of leftist academics who point out this sea change in academia over the last century, see for example Norm Finkelstein's remarks on this but there are others who talk about this.
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4. warner25 ◴[21 Oct 24 19:04 UTC] No.41907286{3}[source]▶
Oh yeah, there's a whole different discussion to be had (and HN does have it often), about the problems with peer reviewed publications and citations being the end-all for graduate students and professors.

My particular school and department is interesting because it doesn't have any hard requirement for publications, and it aims to have students finish a PhD in about three years of full-time work (assuming one enters the program with a relevant master's degree already in-hand). There has been some tension between the younger assistant professors (who are still fighting for tenure) and the older full professors (who got tenure in, say, the 1990s). In practice, the assistant professors expect to see their students publish (with the professors as co-authors, of course) and would strongly prefer to see a dissertation comprised of three papers stapled together, regardless of the what the school and department officially says. The full professors, on the other hand, seem to prefer something more like a monograph that is of "publishable" quality, maybe to be submitted somewhere after graduation. They argue that the assistant professors should be able to judge quality work for themselves instead of outsourcing it to anonymous reviewers. Clearly, there are different incentives at play.