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Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

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427 points JumpCrisscross | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 17:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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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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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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1. hombre_fatal ◴[21 Oct 24 14:55 UTC] No.41904877{5}[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.)