Students are relying on AI so heavily that universities are being forced to fundamentally rethink how they grade their work.
England’s higher education regulator, the Office for Students, is warning universities that they may need to replace traditional take-home essays and open-book exams with supervised assessments that prevent students from relying on artificial intelligence to do their work.
AI-detection tools are too unreliable to consistently determine whether students have used the technology, the OfS said in a report published Wednesday.
For me it’s insane that they were allowed to take the test at home in the first place. Trusting in honor isn’t ever going to work.
Although we didn’t have take home tests, most were open book and even open internet. But the catch was that you had to know the material well beforehand to have any hope of finishing before the end of the hour.
I felt it was a very reasonable system to reduce stress at the time, and it encouraged you to take good notes.
In the pre-AI age, I think take home tests were fine. However they were generally much harder than a similar in person exam on the same material. I remember one professor gave the advice “if you are given the option between a take home exam and an in person classroom exam, always take the latter. Since the former doesn’t have as tight of a time limit as the latter does, and will almost always be far more challenging” (or something to that effect)
That guy didn’t see my heat transfer final during junior year. Some of the other students were crying at how bad it was
Lol, that doesn’t mean that in person exams will be easy. This was my linear algebra professor, who had very difficult in person exams.
Dude, I know plenty about hard linear algebra exams.
In my undergrad program, we were expected to take linear algebra spring of freshman year or fall of sophomore year. I opted to take it freshman year, but for some reason about 1/3 of the class was grad students.
Because of the grad students, the instructor told us at the start that he was going to make it a graduate level course. “But what about the undergrads in the course?” you may ask. Well, this jackass didn’t care. And I later learned he had his doctorate delayed because of how badly he fucked over multiple freshman classes with the same shit he’d pull this semester.
Now, I did alright with the required curriculum for the class. The problem with that is the instructor blew through all of the required topics in the first 3-4 weeks, and started going off into more theoretical mathematics despite most of his class being freshman/sophomore engineering students.
What’s worse is that this guy liked to write problems in mathematical notation. For those of you that don’t know what that means, it’s effectively a different language with completely different symbols. For most of the class he’d mainly just sprinkle notation in here and there as shorthand, but not too crazy and we could always go back and look up what it meant.
Then came the final exam. That fucking final. It was entirely in mathematical notation, some of which I’m pretty sure was never covered during the class. Imagine taking a history class on the American Civil War, but the final was written entirely in Chinese.
I could barely understand half of the questions, so I filled out what I could and left after 30 minutes. I just retook the next class the next semester and got a 98% because the second instructor was actually sane.
You might be referring to something else, but we learned mathematical notation in high school.
Do you mean he used Leibniz notation? At the time I was learning calculus teachers would switch between that and whatever didn’t wear out the “d” key willy nilly so it got confusing.
You have to use a special lockdown browser and it’s timed - this obviously only works if you only have one computer in your house, not one on your desk, one im your pocket and one in your lap.
Even five years ago, these were fine. You couldn’t cheat if you didn’t know the material.
Take home tests? I didn’t read that in the article, take home essays yes. Which is just normal homework
I’m from before the era of take-home tests. We still had homework though which is still an awful way to do things, so maybe AI will motivate the educators to do something better.
Especially when you can offload to AI like a jock offloading on a nerd. No papers, oral… in person shit.