Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

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.

The best method for assessing performance when learning is as old as the world: assess the effort, not how well the result complies with some requirements.

If the level of effort made is high, but the outcome does not comply in some way, praise is due. If the outcome complies, but the level of effort is low, there is no reason for praise (what are you praising? mere compliance?) and you must have set a wrong bar.

Not doing this fosters people with mental issues such as rejection anxiety, perfectionism, narcissism, defeatism, etc. If you got good grades at school with little actual effort and the constant praise for that formed your identity, you may be in for a bad time in adulthood.

Teacher’s job is to determine the appropriate bar, estimate the level of effort, and to help shape the effort applied in a way that it improves the skill in question and the more general meta skill of learning.

The issue of judging by the outcome is prevalent in some (or all) school systems, so we can say LLMs are mostly orthogonal to that.

However, even if that issue was addressed, in a number of skills the mere availability of ML-based generative tools makes it impossible to estimate the level of actual effort and to set the appropriate bar, and I do not see how it can be worked around. It’s yet another negative consequence of making the sacred process of producing an amalgamation of other people’s work—something we all do all the time; passing it through the lens of our consciousness is perhaps one of the core activities that make us human—to become available as a service.

I've found that in adulthood, I've still been judged on results, not effort, and unless we're going to drastically reduce student:teacher ratios, I don't see how you even could judge on effort. Some kids are going to learn more quickly than others, and for them, no effort will be required. At best you might assign them busywork, but that doesn't take effort just as it wouldn't take effort for an adult to do the work.

I also don't think effort can be recognised in some spaces; as a programmer, I often produce results that in the end, result in very few lines of code written, looking at the end result alone doesn't indicate much.

It's like looking at a hand carved match-stick judging the result as low effort, not knowing that they started with a seed.