Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating.

The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.

But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.

K-12 needs to be changed as well.

> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test.

In Germany, all exams are like this. Homework assignments are either just a prerequisite for taking exam but the grade is solely from the exam, or you may get some small point bonus for assignments/projects.

> But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class.

The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Fail 3 times and you're exmatriculated.

This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe.

The US will continue down on the path you describe because it's in the interest of colleges to keep well-paying students around. It's a service. You buy a degree, you are a customer.

> The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum.

The course might be mandatory but which professor you choose isn't. What if multiple professors teach it? Word gets around and everyone chooses the easy profs.

I studied for a popular degree at one of the largest universities in Germany. I never had a course be taught by multiple professors. If a course had many attendants, the room just got bigger.

But that's just my personal experience. I don't know if it's different at other large universities.

In smaller countries like Germany increasing the class size makes sense but countries like the US, it just doesn't scale. Just to give a better sense, my quick google-fu (so take it with a grain of salt) shows Germany having 2.8M people actively enrolled in college vs the US with 18.1M.

So roughly 6x the amount of students.