College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT::The growing number of students using the AI program ChatGPT as a shortcut in their coursework has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Prof here - take a look at it from our side.

    Our job is to evaluate YOUR ability; and AI is a great way to mask poor ability. We have no way to determine if you did the work, or if an AI did, and if called into a court to certify your expertise we could not do so beyond a reasonable doubt.

    I am not arguing exams are perfect mind, but I’d rather doubt a few student’s inability (maybe it was just a bad exam for them) than always doubt their ability (is any of this their own work).

    Case in point, ALL students on my course with low (<60%) attendance this year scored 70s and 80s on the coursework and 10s and 20s in the OPEN BOOK exam. I doubt those 70s and 80s are real reflections of the ability of the students, but do suggest they can obfuscate AI work well.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Is AI going to go away?

      In the real world, will those students be working from a textbook, or from a browser with some form of AI accessible in a few years?

      What exactly is being measured and evaluated? Or has the world changed, and existing infrastructure is struggling to cling to the status quo?

      Were those years of students being forced to learn cursive in the age of the computer a useful application of their time? Or math classes where a calculator wasn’t allowed?

      I can hardly think just how useful a programming class where you need to write it on a blank page of paper with a pen and no linters might be, then.

      Maybe the focus on where and how knowledge is applied needs to be revisited in light of a changing landscape.

      For example, how much more practically useful might test questions be that provide a hallucinated wrong answer from ChatGPT and then task the students to identify what was wrong? Or provide them a cross discipline question that expects ChatGPT usage yet would remain challenging because of the scope or nuance?

      I get that it’s difficult to adjust to something that’s changed everything in the field within months.

      But it’s quite likely a fair bit of how education has been done for the past 20 years in the digital age (itself a gradual transition to the Internet existing) needs major reworking to adapt to changes rather than simply oppose them, putting academia in a bubble further and further detached from real world feasibility.