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Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

(www.bloomberg.com)
427 points JumpCrisscross | 6 comments | 20 Oct 24 17:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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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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dambi0 ◴[21 Oct 24 09:05 UTC] No.41902094[source]▶
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.
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jenscow ◴[21 Oct 24 09:35 UTC] No.41902282[source]▶
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.

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dambi0 ◴[21 Oct 24 09:38 UTC] No.41902303[source]▶
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
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1. lupire ◴[21 Oct 24 13:02 UTC] No.41903716[source]▶
Not every class is STEM. Are you writing a 4000 word research paper sitting in class?
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2. lizknope ◴[21 Oct 24 14:42 UTC] No.41904702[source]▶
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.

3. hombre_fatal ◴[21 Oct 24 14:55 UTC] No.41904877[source]▶
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.)

4. kjkjadksj ◴[21 Oct 24 16:33 UTC] No.41905823[source]▶
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.
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5. kazinator ◴[21 Oct 24 16:34 UTC] No.41905828[source]▶
Are you saying all you needed was attention? :)
6. dambi0 ◴[21 Oct 24 19:16 UTC] No.41907416[source]▶
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.