If it's a math for finance course then some kind of model building for the midterm and being marked on the quality of the model or something. If AI becomes so good that it always chooses the best fitting model and requires no numerical optimization then they will have to change the courses to be more like UChicago where it's primarily undergrad directed research but AI assisted.
You can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. Maybe a student's sincerity should play a larger role in the admission process, maybe with a sharp expense curve such that students judged to be more sincere have to pay less tuition. It is an inherently subjective evaluation though.
Edit: I completely misread your comment. Asking students to build a model is not a finance class anymore.
For example the old and new Berkeley model to study rent control effect on market prices
I never understood this behavior from undergrads though, you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?
One need only look at the resume filtering process, a once manual bias that has now been codified into algorithmic bias with AI. A degree from a good school boosts your chances immensely, and other facets such as coursework don't matter much.
If you have ever seen someone filter applicant resumes, you will understand instantly. There are too many, you have to filter them somehow and the allure is irresistible.
Because you are viewing the motivation of college wrong for most people. For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities. Ergo, they are just doing whatever required to get said piece of paper with least amount of effort.
Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.
I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.
Hand written exams are either very labor intensive to grade or are confined to multiple choice, so either inflationary to cost of education or inauthentic / inaccurate representation of most knowledge and skills.
The best answer, which enables authentic meaningful high integrity assessment that is also unit cost efficient is to have testing center facilities with institution supplied devices and well trained proctors.
This way instructors can assess students in ways that are relevant and authentic to the subject matter while ensuring the assessments are accurate, consistent, fair and actually reflect the students abilities.
It was certainly not difficult to cheat at a "closed book" take home exam before.
Edit: typo
a) I got bullied into sharing my math homework so people could copy it, just like high school and college... but this was math grad school!
b) In 2011 I TAed a 4000-level course where the instructor left the solutions to the homework online (he wrote the book). I estimate 95% of students copied the solutions. It was only 5% of the grade and they paid for it on the exams. Still. Kind of stunning to see at U Waterloo - it was a continuous optimization course and most of them wanted to work in finance, yikes.
Im going to guess that it is a safe bet that the 50 cheaters are all legacy enrollments.
1/2 of the graduating class is there for the education, the other half is there because the parents are keeping up the network.
These news articles are just tiresome at this point. Obviously folks cheated previously, obviously it's easier now, obviously the answer has been to not have take homes all along.
Since students are notorious for being cheap
Still cheaper then being jobless or without the bachelor
Earned credentials are a marker that you once demonstrated some sufficient combination of both.
What an oxymoron. I agree with the others here that AI isn't the problem.
EDIT: Rate limited so: "smarter" here means how well the student will perform in a career in their chosen field. Fast + accurate is the ideal.
Lots of reasons a slow student can be just as smart or smarter than a fast one.
I have written an article on how I have adjusted my classes to the situation:
https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/
Ironically, I think the AI era may make university degrees a better signal of the intellectual abilities of students due to the presence of pre-computer infrastructure like large lecture halls, industrial-scale copiers, etc.
In addition, at many institutions such tests are given infrequently and can be worth a significant component of a student's overall grade, increasing both student stress levels and the tendency for such assessments to measure short term knowledge students have obtained by cramming, not more meaningful longer-term knowledge gains.
I see you're giving quizzes every three weeks, which is better than twice a semester, but still not what I would consider an ideal cadence. In my course weekly computer-based quizzes comprise 70% of a student's grade, but that's supported by a significant institutional investment in high-frequency computer-based testing: https://cbtf.illinois.edu/.
I'd like a citation for this being the "biggest known scandal" in the "entire Ivy League". Frequently such situations are kept somewhat quiet, for a variety of reasons. But fifty students is not a large number in courses that can enroll hundreds or up to a thousand students.
You can crunch the numbers on this to verify for yourself – most of these have a population of 6000 undergrads or so. 1/6 of all of the undergraduates need to take a single course for your "up to a thousand" to be true.
I agree that a citation would be nice, but the number of students is indeed large for Ivy League courses (as per the article, in this econ course, he had 86 students for a class that usually only has 30).
This is a trap. I understand they've done this in the past, but profs are paranoid now.
I don't believe he's 100% correct on each incident of fraud and he's going to ruin students lives because of it.
He understands the stakes here. If a university degree becomes useless, then what?
I was very fortunate to attend Brown University for grad school, and consider it a great place.
Why would many people who were also fortunate to attend there not honor that opportunity?
...
"But it also hurts him that the one time in 34 years that he decided to offer a take-home exam, for highly justified reasons, the response was wide-scale fraud."
-----------------
Not to in any way defend or condone academic misconduct, the fact that this was his teaching-career-first take-home exam is probably relevant. Take home exams can be fiendish. I remember having one in grad school where we were given a very insufficient 36 hours to complete it, and many people just didn't sleep. That was from a prof who knew what he was doing. This guy may have accidentally made his exam absolutely sadistic.
Couple this with the fact that students often have other exams they need to be studying for in the same time window. The pressure can be immense. The temptation to use AI to help is going to be hard for many to resist unless the penalties are severe and strictly enforced.
AI cheating is probably going to be a problem going forward in all situations, but open-book, take-home tests are going to bring it out more strongly than other test formats.
The problem is that kids, even (or especially?) in the elite schools, are treating college as a box to tick. At the Ivies, for many students, it's nothing more than the requisite means to get their ticket punched so they can become/remain part of the elite class. This has been the conventional wisdom for half a century.
Now, this paragraph doesn't apply to an economics class like his, which is actually a useful degree, but many students will never use what they learn in college in a professional capacity, so it barely even matters if some (maybe even most?) students cheat because outside of the useful degrees, it's mainly a sorting hat to determine who works at Starbucks to pay back student loans, while rolling their eyes because of their 'valuable degree,' and who works there unironically, to pay their bills.
What needs to happen though is that students at all levels need to either believe that they need to learn what they're choosing to take courses in, or even better, actually innately want to learn it to satisfy their own interest. Either will do. If you have neither intention toward the material, of course you'll cheat your way through it. No student who actually wants to learn would waste their time and money taking a class only to not learn, and cheat their way through it.
We're currently designing a new intro systems curriculum, and we're thinking of it as an adversarial problem. That is, we're designing the course to ensure that a student optimizing for the best grade per unit work still meets our learning objectives. That means, as everyone else is saying, paper exams, but also 1-on-1 interviews to check that students understand each assignment they turn in. These interviews feature both factual questions ("You're using this macro from that library. What does it do?", "Please describe what this function does and how it works.") and conceptual questions ("Why is this code structured this way instead of $whatever?", "How else did you try solving this?", etc.) This doesn't stop students from generating code, but at least they have to understand that code in detail.
This is not as good as writing the code yourself, but how much worse is it? For math classes, this gap is gigantic. Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own. For programming classes, I think (without evidence) that the gap is somewhat smaller.
My experience from the past is that when this kind of evaluation is made clear up front, the students know what to expect and either do fine or drop the class in the first week. If you start with take-home exams and then spring paper exams on them halfway through the course, then half the class is cheating and won't be able to recover, as we read in the article.
In general, our students are somewhat motivated by an abstract desire to learn, but are much more motivated by grades. If there exists a straightforward path through your course that leads to a good grade without doing much work, most students will take it. (Our undergrads' course review website is literally called "Layup List." They are actually this shameless.) It's our job as instructors to ensure that all paths leading to a good grade either require learning the material or are more difficult to pull off than just learning the material.
It's best not to blame the students. They are good at optimizing metrics; that's how they ended up here in the first place. We just need to better align the evaluation metrics with the outcomes that we're looking for.
It's why we're seeing the death of the liberal arts majors. It's sad, because usually the smartest and most creative people I've worked with in the field of engineering and software have been liberal arts majors. But corporations don't want intelligent people. They want people who have been molded to whatever the soup du jour is.
I don't think so.
The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universities teach to the students.
If what the universities teach was very important for the job, applicants who have not invested serious effort into getting a deep understanding of the topics of the courses would nearly all fail in the job interviews.
The problem rather is that for many jobs the knowledge that you could have gotten from the university typically does not matter, and thus investing minimal effort into the courses does not get you rejected in a job interview.
Corporation A "Hi University, here is what we hire highly paid people to do, and what we need to improve as a company."
University B, "Hi Corp A, here is our educational mandate to create well-rounded, highly educated people, we can probably fit your needs into the curriculum in the last couple of semesters, let's work together to make sure you have good employees and we have people who aren't struggling to pay back loans because they have an engineering degree but can't make more than 50K at a dead end job."
More true at an Ivy than anywhere else.
> This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools).
If this guy thinks AI is motivating his previously guiless student body to start cheating on these tests, rather than simply changing the way they are cheating, he's been sniffing too many of his own farts.
This is already starting to happen, at least for software engineering positions. There have been plenty of stories of candidates with degrees from prestigious institutions failing to answer the simplest of questions correctly. FizzBuzz is a famous example, but there are many others.
so you have a huge population of people bullshitting their way through to the piece of paper.
My first job out of college, I worked with veterans at the company who all got in with a HS diploma. Now you realistically need a masters degree to be competitive, for no other reason than that where I live (Norway) most applicants have a 5-year masters degree. It is basically academic inflation.
Here we have a tongue-in-cheek word "Mastersyken" which translates to "Master's illness/disease", a word for the phenomena that too many people are pursuing a master's degree for the sake of the diploma alone, trying to become more attractive in the search for a job, but with the side effect that suddenly "everyone" has a master's degree, and in the end everyone is stuck at the same place as before, but with extra student loans.
The worst part is when you start working, and indeed discover that this is a job you could have done just fine straight out of HS.
A master's in science helps you understand how the physical world works and how to reason quantitatively as well as qualitatively. A master's in humanities gives you knowledge and understanding of human culture, such as literature and the arts, and history - subjects that can be deeply enriching and can provide insights that transcend disciplines. A master's in social science will teach you about how humans behave in groups and how they interact with their environment, and about statistical analysis.
Writing a master's thesis will also teach you a lot and make you a better writer - if you actually write it yourself and don't rely on AI.
Any of these degrees will certainly qualify you to be a more interesting, knowledgeable, and insightful barista or Uber driver.
Business majors should take physical science courses with a lab component! How else are they going to learn anything about reality?
But there is no excuse for bad teaching, anywhere (especially given how insanely competitive faculty positions are - even crummy adjunct and lecturer positions.)
Unfortunately research universities prioritize fundraising > research > teaching. And sometimes grad students are selected to teach based on financial need or departmental requirements rather than interest or ability.
It's also dangerous to assume that higher education is for everyone. (Although I agree the opportunity needs to be there for anyone who wants to try it.) Some people just want to get on with their life after high school. (I raise my children assuming that they will go to college, and if they want to seek an alternate way through life, I will support it.)
If students don't want to be there in the first place and/or don't see any value in learning, it is unsurprising that they'd take the easy way out. Or maybe they cheated their way into Brown and are just continuing.
But I was always interested in learning, and understood that cheating was a method of learning avoidance. Why waste the amazing learning resources - faculty, teaching assistants, courses, labs, libraries, studios, rehearsal spaces, interesting speakers, arts and culture events, computing facilities, maker spaces, etc. - that are available at a place like Brown?
An expensive education comes with higher temptation to cheat.
You've never put anything off in your life or taken the easy short term route? Come on this is not difficult to understand. You aren't different either.
* This is brought to my attention by an exam question
* I have an oracle in the form of a textbook, an LLM, the internet, or all of the above
Which action is skipping the education: looking up the answer, or not looking up the answer?
Yes
[Edit: typos]
Surf the chaos, bro.
Also, your own example is an application of game theory; you've basically stated a 'prisoner's dilemma' problem. You state that in a high trust society, most people will choose cooperation, while in a low trust society, most people will defect.
And then consider whether the point of the class is to test smarts, or something else.
I’d expect that’s not the intent of most undergraduate degrees.
Memorization is already hacking the rules of the game that's supposed to be gauging understanding. An ideal test is resistant to rote memorization as well as outright cheating.
Assuming this is true (others have already addressed a few of the many reasons it might not be), wouldn't that imply that practically all existing tests are already flawed? If you want to grade on time, every exam should be graded with a formula taking both the time and the correctness into account. A binary "fast enough" vs "not fast enough" is about as useful as a pass/fail class grade.
The exams that felt like the fairest reflections of my own knowledge were proctored in-person, closed book, and time unlimited. Of course, being time unlimited works better for quantitative/engineering exams. I haven't put much thought into more qualitative/liberal arts type exams.
It always struck me as an ingenious way to get a feel for a new group of students, since it's quick to administer and equally quick to grade, while revealing quite a lot of information.
Certainly we hold speed to some regard, since a lot of academic accommodations involve granting extra time. If we aren't testing on speed, then surely we should give that to anyone that asks?
In addition I had to defend the report (120 pages of typescript and charts) of my final year project to my supervisor and another senior academic. And it was clear that they had actually read it.
All those exams were open note; anything in your own hand or a copy of a lecture handout was permitted. Again the weaker students would not have been helped by more time because they hadn't understood that you have to have enough familiarity with your notes to be able find the right information. Some brought in 50 litre rucksacks stuffed with ring binders and the noise of them furiously leafing through was enough for the invigilators to warn them to make less noise or risk being ejected.
In Norway it is typical that an exam of similar standard allows five hours.
Some people get up in their jimmies about this but if they don't want me doing something they should make it impossible to do it
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We had lots of time, and a fair idea of the range of questions. It rewards actuality mastering the material vs memorizing it.
For the CS exam some people brought more books than they could physically carry, I don’t think it helped them much.
Is there a form of assessment that is a good signal of the intellectual ability of all students?
Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor.
Let people at least type their essay with the standard features of a word processor as usable as MS Word 2000 or better.
If you do let them bring their own keyboards, how sure are you that those are just dumb keyboards?
(Where do you even get ribbons these days)
A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-co...
I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical.
It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.
As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?
... And there are jobs that use those skills.
Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/
My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.
Edit: I think we’re actually all agreeing. That a typed exam as an option is perfectly cromulent. I’m just saying the idea that it must be written is silly.
It was mandatory in an earlier age. Now it has become optional, but it could become mandatory again.
Presumably someone who is unable would get an accommodation of some kind.
Computer Science classes were all on paper for exams, and low level ones did the old "here's a Javadoc, write some code with a pencil."
The only online exams I had were for 100 level electives.
—- Disclosure: I run a small start up which offers teachers a platform to create and conduct digital exams and interfaces with the safe exam browser precisely because cheating is the number one complaint teachers I have spoken to have when it comes to digital exams.
Back in my day, you could also just Google the problems and find the solutions. What mitigated cheating at UVA was the honor code and each professor's faith and trust in our integrity. That culture was enough to not cheat.
Imo, the fix should be to work on culture. Cheating should always be a tempting choice, so that the student may challenge their integrity, which is a muscle that can atrophy.
However, some students will cheat, and for that reason, I am very much against curves.
In person writing, etc. But also for anything take home students have to verbally discuss their work in some fashion. Seems to mostly work. Students still us ChatGPT as a search engine, which seems fine.
(Source: married to a professor. And my son is in high school)
Wouldn't a one-on-one interview be a better way to establish a broad evaluation of competency.
1) Possibly, depending on the material, but most classes aren't looking for a "broad evaluation of competency", they're looking for the specific material taught. It'd make more sense as a graduation requirement: the equivalent of a dissertation but for undergraduate work.
2) Even in small classes (e.g. 20-30 students) that wouldn't scale, let alone the massive courses earlier in a curriculum or that are shared by many degrees (e.g. hundreds of students).
I also challenge that "hand writing is harder to revise"; again, why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?
What? Suppose you want to fix the opening of your essay. Best case it's pencil and you can erase some, but worst case you have a longer sentence you want to put in there so you can't do it without scribbling all over and making a mess of the page. Word processors let you edit. How is this controversial?
> why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?
Okay, so from first principles:
1. Time is finite, we will all perish
2. Unless you are doing open book, needs to be supervised (proctored / or prof/TA is there)
3. That person is paid for a shift
4. That shift must end
5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.
i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written.
and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged.
i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.
These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.
That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here
fhn•5h ago
carljungslabtek•4h ago
Ivy league is such a scam, in so many different ways.
rsfern•4h ago
It was a closed-book exam. The professor shouldn’t have to hold students’ hands for them to act with integrity, they are all adults.
In this particular class, the professor made the final exam in-person, and didn’t count the take-home midterm because the score distribution wasn’t consistent between the two exams. I think that’s a reasonable approach, but it’s kind of sad that it was necessary
revolvingthrow•3h ago
rsfern•3h ago
Whether that really matters if your goal is to climb the social ladder and have power and influence, I don’t know.
profmonocle•33m ago
It's become very difficult to have even a middle class lifestyle without a college degree. Obviously a huge percentage of people there don't want to be.
bigstrat2003•2h ago
vlod•1h ago
I've noticed more and more that people lie to me and I call them out immediately (aggressively, as if they've just spat in my face) and they just don't care.
Does "my word is my bond" not have meaning any more?