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.

Written assay evaluation is not and has never been an effective evaluation. It was always a cost saving measure because allocating 30min face to face time with each individual student for each class is such a gigantic cost for the institution that they cannot even imagine doing it. Think about that the next time you look at your student debt, it couldn’t even buy you 30min time per class individually with the teacher to evaluate your performance. Instead you had to waste more time on a written assignment so they could offload grading to a minimum wage assistent.

You can still do written essay evaluations. You could just require proctored exams whether or not you use software like Examsoft. If it's a topic that benefits from writing from a store of material, you can permit students to bring either unlimited supplemental printed material or a limited body of printed material into the exam room.

For longer essays, you can just build in an oral examination component. This face time requirement is just not that hard to include given that even in lecture hall style settings you can rely on graduate student TAs who do not really cost anything. The thing is that the universities don't want to change how they run things. Adjuncts in most subjects don't cost anything and graduate students don't cost anything. They earn less than e.g. backroom stocking workers. This is also why they, by and large, all perform so poorly. 30 minutes of examiner time costs maybe $11 or less. Even for a lecture class with 130 students, that's under $1,500. Big woop.

There are some small changes to grading practices that would make life very hard for AI cheaters, such as even cite checking a portion of citations in an essay. The real problem is that US universities are Soviet-style institutions in which gargantuan amounts of cash are dumped upon them and they pretend to work for it while paying the actual instructors nothing.