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.

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy.

As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating.

As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.

In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.

Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions?

-> GPA can be gamed, as laid out.

-> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use.

-> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts

-> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot.

What should be best practice here? Ideally something that controls for first-time interviewer jitters.

You have to use on-location tests. Do your best to be fair and get a true evaluation of the candidate's skills. It's not perfect but the alternatives are worse.

The other thing you have to do is that you have to be willing to fire the people who are underperforming. It's just a natural consequence of the interview process being imperfect.