Papers are being disrupted. Exams will become more relevant. Can't use AI with only a pencil and paper
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Very easy to tell if someone knows what they wrote about in a two minute conversation. My wife grades/t.a's at a university, it's obvious when someone doesn't know the information in person (and she's very understanding towards people who cannot verbalize the information but still know it). The old professors aren't very keen to it, but the graders can very easily smell the bullshit.
And if you know the information well enough, but send it through gpt for editing/refinement, that's usually accepted, unless you're in a class that grades on composition.
Even back around 2006, my biology teacher did exams on paper only, with questions that are free response only. Even AI and cheating aside, people get way too lucky with multiple choice exams
That may work in senior courses, but a freshman class with hundreds of students needs standardized tests.
Or maybe a freshman class with hundreds of students should be split into more classes with more emphasis on actually learning
I don't know how you extrapolate "no emphasis on learning" from "large classes". The classes are large because they can afford to be large. They teach introductory courses, and their goal is to even out the baseline before the students go into sophomore courses. Freshmen come from many different education systems - private vs public, local vs out of state/province/country, fresh out of school vs returning to education after working, etc. This is also why these courses can be graded with standardized testing, because they set the standard themselves.
When I did my undergrad the core modules had upwards of 400 people in them, never had a single multiple choice test in my entire degree. Thats a choice not a neccessity.
I think it's obvious that students have a higher potential of learning with a teacher that actually has time to have a conversation with them now and then.
Personally, the fact that stand and deliver lectures is the norm for college classes has never ceased to amaze me. Why even have a professor rather than just read a book at that point? University has become a twisted simulacrum of it's original form and it saddens me to watch it decay even more with time.
Not to mention that the "more and better teachers" mantra should be applied all the way down to primary education.
Unfortunately our societies prioritise these things differently.
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Here's a novel idea, maybe it needs less students per teacher. Or more teachers per student, however you want to call it.
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I had a TA for my quantum class tell us, "Look, I know you're all working together or sharing homework. But I'll see who knows the material when I grade your exams."
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Computer science is going to be q commodity job. Prediction of three tiers:
- Tier 1: No education requirement. I write code and build things. Large percentage of developers.
- Tier 3: Science based, high education working on algorithms, physics, and other elements requiring an understanding of matters in deeper education
- Tier 2: Right in between 1 and 3, may require formal education, but definitely experience. Will understand applications of high science, and can both program well and manage teams. Will replace current nontechnical middle management, because who needs that when the market is flooded
We've been headed this way for years, AI is just speeding it up.
While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort.
Lee goes on to claim everyone cheats. (He's also that AI Amazon Leetcode interview person.)
Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat.
Well duh, what other kind of people would he know.
A thief is someone that thinks everyone steals.
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I feel like one of the more important things to take away from this is the wildly different degrees to which various students use ai. Yes, 90% may use it, but there is a huge difference between "check following paper for grammar errors: ..." and "write me a paper on the ethics of generative AI," though an argument could be made that both are cheating. But there are things like "explain Taylor series to me in an intuitive way." Like someone else here pointed out, a 1-2 minute conversation would be a very easy way for professors to find people who cheated. There seems to be a more common view (I see it a LOT on Lemmy) that all AI is completely evil and anything with a neural network is made by Satan. Nuance exists.
This. Especially in the humanities, the essay is the preferred form of assessment. I don't have a birds eye view of all colleges, but I know that some of those courses should not have had essay exams. It's as if teachers forget that other forms of examination exist.
make education stupider and less important, put AI assistants in front of everyone, automate as much as possible, and allow the proletariat class to enjoy decreasing levels of control over society
College courses have long been structured to incentivize rote memorization and regurgitation over actual critical thinking and understanding. When i was in college the "honors" students literally had filling cabinets with a decade of old tests for every class in their dormatory. I'll admit llms have probably made it even worse, but the slide of colleges into worthless degree mills has been inexorably progressing for like 40 years at this point.
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Always have been, as I've seen during my UCLA days of people buying exam answers from previous weekends and paying for papers, etc.. I'm glad I never bothered, mostly because of dignity but what because I was poor (although those correlate). Rich people have plenty of ways to game the system, though.
Why are you borrowing like $3,000 a credit hour to use ChatGPT? Take some fucking humanities courses so you don’t grow up to be like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk challenging each other to an MMA match. This might be your last chance in life to be surrounded by experts and hot people having discussions.
Being able to use software everyone uses isn’t a marketable skill. Learn some shit. You’re an adult now.
"This might be your last chance in life to be surrounded by experts and hot people having discussions."
The things that really matter.
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I seen students put no work into changing the output text from chatgpt. Like, not even trying to hide it. Shm.
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I caught my middle schooler googling her math homework problems. I can hardly blame her, I just completed a work training on Measles the same way. I told her I understand the urge, but you have to put in the work in order to earn taking the easy way out because otherwise you won't know when the machines are lying to you. So anyway yeah we're fucked.
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Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat.
How far do you have to be into the AI shit bubble to think everyone is cheating with AI? Some people are always going to cheat, but that's been true since long before AI tools existed. Most people have some level of integrity and desire to actually learn from the classes they're paying thousands to attend.
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