College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT

I think that's actually a good idea? Sucks for e-learning as a whole, but I always found online exams (and also online interviews) to be very easy to game.

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.

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They're about to find out that gen Z has horrible penmanship.

has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.

I'm sure they'll write exams that actually require an actual understanding of the material rather than regurgitating the seminar PowerPoint presentations as accurately as possible...

No? I'm shocked!

There are places where analog exams went away? I'd say Sweden has always been at the forefront of technology, but our exams were always pen-and-paper.

This isn't exactly novel. Some professors allow a cheat sheet. But that just means that the exam will be harder.

Physics exam that allows a cheat sheet asks you to derive the law of gravity. Well, OK, you write the answer at the bottom pulled from you cheat sheet. Now what? If you recall how it was originally created you probably write Newtons three laws at the top of your paper... And then start doing some math.

Calculus exam that let's you use wolfram alpha? Just a really hard exam where you must show all of your work.

Now, with ChatGPT, it's no longer enough to have a take home essay to force students to engage with the material, so you find news ways to do so. Written, in person essays are certainly a way to do that.

Am I wrong in thinking student can still generate an essay and then copy it by hand?

When I was in College for Computer Programming (about 6 years ago) I had to write all my exams on paper, including code. This isn't exactly a new development.

You can still have AI write the paper and you copy it from text to paper. If anything, this will make AI harder to detect because it's now AI + human error during the transferring process rather than straight copying and pasting for students.

Can we just go back to calling this shit Algorithms and stop pretending its actually Artificial Intelligence?

This thinking just feels like moving in the wrong direction. As an elementary teacher, I know that by next year all my assessments need to be practical or interview based. LLMs are here to stay and the quicker we learn to work with them the better off students will be.

Well if i go back to school now im fucked i cant read my own hand writting.

as someone with wrist and hand problems that make writing a lot by hand, I'm so lucky i finished college in 2019

Wouldn't it make more sense to find ways on how to utilize the tool of AI and set up criteria that would incorporate the use of it?

There could still be classes / lectures that cover the more classical methods, but I remember being told "you won't have a calculator in your pocket".

My point use, they should prepping students for the skills to succeed with the tools they will have available and then give them the education to cover the gaps that AI can't solve. For example, you basically need to review what the AI outputs for accuracy. So maybe a focus on reviewing output and better prompting techniques? Training on how to spot inaccuracies? Spotting possible bias in the system which is skewed by training data?

Copy writing about to make a real comeback.

Chat GPT - answer this question, add 4 consistent typos. Then hand transcribe it.

Might as well go back to oral exams and ask the student questions on the spot.

Isn't this kind of ableist? I remember when I was in school I had special accommodations to type instead of write, because I had wrists too weak to write legibly, but fingers fast enough to type expediently, they legitimately thought that I was a really stupid kid, until they realized that my spelling tests were not incorrect.

They just couldn't read that I had spelled it correctly. Somehow I wrote the word fly, and the teacher mistook my y for a v. I went from being the dumbest kid to the smartest kid as soon as the accommodation was put in place.

Joke's on you, I can't write by hand without severe pain after a short while!

The best part is there are hand writing generating programs or even web pages that convert text to gcode allowing you to use a 3d printer to write things out. In theory it should be really hard to pass it off as being human written, let alone match your own writing, but I'm sure it will only get better. I think there are even models to try to match someone's writing.

Waiting for 100% oral exams to make a comeback.

Mouse, meet Cat.

As an anecdote I used to do k-12 sysadmin and we once had a major issue during grade 12 English exam and the students had to handwrite their essays. Almost everyone failed. Most did not even finish. Most students can hardly even handwrite anymore and it makes sense

Our uni accepts 99% of things on paper (except some reports, which need to be done in Latex), and I am glad this is the case. I just can't think normally while at the screen. If there's a task - I need to do it on paper first and only then type out (which is a bit frustrating because I can only type with two fingers).

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Chatgpt jest darmowy, więc wielu uczniów korzysta z niego, aby w prosty sposób odrabiać zadania domowe. Potrzebujemy ściślejszej kontroli w tej kwestii

Because the presence of free chatgpt is so comfortable and easy to use, students can freely approach it.

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Discriminating people with motoric difficulties.

It just brings into question what the point of exams are.

AI in its current form is equivalent to the advent of the typewriter. Its just empowering you to do a whole lot more a whole lot faster.

Not using it is dumb.

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If a teacher expects you to write an entire essay on the spot, drop the class.

Only the ones too dumb to incorporate ai usage into their work and grade accordingly. Going to be a load of kids who aren't just missing out a learning how to best use modern tools but who have wasted their time learning obsolete skills.

Thankfully those kids will be able to get a proper education from AI soon.

If your exams can be solved by AI, then your exams are not good enough. How to get around this? Simple. Oral exams aka viva voce. Anyone who had defended their thesis knows the pants shitting terror this kind of exam does to you. It will take longer but you can truly determine how well the student understands the content.

Fuck them, Fucking assholes.