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427 points JumpCrisscross | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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lwhi ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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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light_hue_1 ◴[] No.41902444[source]
Oh yes. When I'm teaching a class of 200 students it's totally plausible that we're going to do 10 15 minute one on one conversations with every student. Because that's only 20 days non stop with no sleep.

We would need to increase the amount of teaching staff by well over 10x to do this. The costs would be astronomical.

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michaelt ◴[] No.41902605[source]
I said one conversation per student per class, and ten classes per year. Not 10 conversations per class per student.

> The costs would be astronomical.

Those 200 students have paid the college $549,600 for your class.

The costs are already astronomical.

Is it so unreasonable for some of that money to be spent on providing education?

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1. light_hue_1 ◴[] No.41908202[source]
I can't express how out of touch with reality this reply is.

The students paid me nothing. The university provides some TAs, that's it. But even if they gave me all of that money in cash to spend, this would be totally impossible.

I'm supposed to grade a student based on 1 conversation? Do you know how grading and teaching work? Can you imagine the complains that would come out of this process? How unfair it is to say that you have one 15 minute shot at a grade?

But fine, even if we say that I can grade someone based on 1 conversation. What am I supposed to ask during this 15 minute conversation? Because if I ask the every student the same thing, they'll just share the questions and we're back to being useless.

So now I need to prep unique questions for 200 people? Reading their background materials, projects, test results, and then thinking of questions? I need to do that and review it all before every session.

Even with a team of TAs this would be impossible.

But even if I do all of this. I spend hours per student to figure out what they did and know. I ask unique questions for 15 minutes so that we can talk without information leakage mattering. You know what the outcome will be? Everyone will complain that my questions to them were harder than those that I asked others. And we'll be in office hours with 200 people for weeks on end sorting this out and dealing with all the paperwork for the complaints.

This is just the beginning of the disaster that this idea would be.

It's easy to sit in the peanut gallery and say "Oh, wow, why didn't my arm surgery take 10 minutes, they just screwed two bones together right?" until you actually need to do the thing and you notice that it's far more complex than you thought.

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2. selimthegrim ◴[] No.41908648[source]
OK, so how is it that USSR made this work?
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3. michaelt ◴[] No.41909942[source]
> I can't express how out of touch with reality this reply is.

> The students paid me nothing.

Well gee, there I was thinking they were paying $27,480 per year for "tuition"

4. ThrowAaaaway ◴[] No.41910107[source]
Soviet professors were poor, so it was easy to bribe them to get passing grade. To weed out bribers, some trickery was used by state, so bribers can pay for few years or cheat on tests and then fail an exam anyway. In my class, 36 enrolled, 11 graduated.

Later, people learned that and started to buy diploma: faster, cheaper, no risk of failing the final exam.