This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Really sucks for people with disabilities and handwriting issues.
It's always sucked for them, and it always will. That's why we make accommodations for them, like extra time or a smaller/move private exam hall.
And readers/scribes! I’ve read and scribed for a friend who had dyslexia in one of her exams and it worked really well. She finished the exam with time to spare and got a distinction in the subject!
Yep, my girlfriend acted as a scribe for disabled students at a university. She loved it, and the students were able to complete their written work and courses just fine as a result.
My handwriting has always been terrible. It was a big issue in school until I was able to turn in printed assignments.
Like with a lot of school things, they do a shit thing without thinking about negative effects. They always want a simple solution to a complex problem.
My uni just had people with handwriting issues do the exam in a separate room with a writer for you to narrate answers to.
People have been going to universities for millennia before the advent of computers, we have lots of ways to help people with disabilities that don't require computers.
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!
We get in trouble if we fail everyone because we made them do a novel synthesis, instead of just repeating what we told them.
Particularly for an intro course, remembering what you were told is good enough.
The first step to understanding the material is exactly just remembering what the teacher told them.
My favourite lecturer at uni actually did that really well. He also said the exam was small and could be done in about an hour or two but gave us a 3 hour timeslot because he said he wanted us to take our time and think about each problem carefully. That was a great class.
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.
Same in Germany
They're about to find out that gen Z has horrible penmanship.
Millennial here, haven't had to seriously write out anything consistently in decades at this point. There's no way their handwriting can be worse than mine and still be legible lol.
Am I wrong in thinking student can still generate an essay and then copy it by hand?
Not during class. Most likely a proctored exam. No laptops, no phones, teacher or proctor watching.
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.
So what you’re telling me is that written tests have, in fact, existed before?
What are you some kind of education historian?
Can we just go back to calling this shit Algorithms and stop pretending its actually Artificial Intelligence?
It actually is artificial intelligence. What are you even arguing against man?
Machine learning is a subset of AI and neural networks are a subset of machine learning. Saying an LLM (based on neutral networks for prediction) isn't AI because you don't like it is like saying rock and roll isn't music
But then the investor wont throw wads of money at these fancy tech companies
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.
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.
And forget about having any sort of integrity or explaining to kids why it's important for them to know how to do shit themselves instead of being wholly dependent on corporate proprietary software whose accessibility can and will be manipulated to serve the ruling class on a whim 🤦
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.
as someone with wrist and hand problems that make writing a lot by hand, I'm so lucky i finished college in 2019
Chat GPT - answer this question, add 4 consistent typos. Then hand transcribe it.
Well if i go back to school now im fucked i cant read my own hand writting.
Might as well go back to oral exams and ask the student questions on the spot.
That's actually something that is done (PhD viva). If I had the budget to hire another 6 assistant profs to viva my 120 students, I'd probably do it for my module too!
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?
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.
You became the smartest kid because everyone else had a stroke trying to read what you wrote.
Your comment is full of errors, interestingly enough...
It's so bad lol. There's multiple errors in each sentence
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.
