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.
I don’t understand why they ever stopped to grade with supervised assessment. Before AI they could get someone else to do the work for them. I don’t get it. It’s such an obvious and simple solution to AI cheating.
I did exams for Java and C++ with a pen and a paper. No books, laptops were too expensive, and no one was using this new wifi thing. It should be easy: a sheet of paper and a pen.
I once had to do two entire semesters on coding in RPG IV with only pencil and paper. We only got actual access to the school’s AS/400 server after, during the third semester. Kids and their AI slop these days… pfft
I went to India in the early '90s and happened to see a small software shop that had five programmers and one PC. The programmers wrote all their code with pencil and paper and the secretary typed it all into the computer. I want to say that this explains a lot about the quality of offshore code, but it probably doesn’t.
I myself just caught the tail end of the punch card era. It was actually kinda fun to sit at home with just a stack of cards and create working (hopefully, you wouldn’t know for days) code.
If anything, I would imagine that it would encourage the programmers to be more careful. The debug cycles would have been hell, so it would encourage the programmers to fully understand their code, and get it right the first time.
Uuugh… I hated having to write Java and C++ for tests and quizzes. That fucking sucked. Fortunately, that was only a problem during our first year. Starting our sophomore year, we submitted code projects to the server. No more having to write that shit down.
There was still writing down lots of code in our notes during lectures, though.
I stopped taking coding classes because we had to handwrite code and syntax was part of it. I’d be getting 60% on tests not because the code was wrong, but because I forgot to put a semicolon at the end of every line. Something that notepad++ did for me.
Actually, programming classes flipped my normal grade situation. Normally, I’d get 0% on homework (never did it) and 100% on tests, for a B/C average. My coding classes I’d get 100% on homework (I actually enjoyed it) and 60-70% on tests.
Sounds like you had trouble learning the importance of semicolons for separating statements.
Silly argument. In almost all code, the semicolon is implied by the line formatting. Forgetting to manually place it is not a sign of some deep misunderstanding, like e.g. not understanding recursion would be.
That is why Python doesn’t use semicolons. Because making the user type them is silly, when the line formatting already perfectly clearly separates statements.
I mean. Not really? I understand the need for proper sytax in separating statements, I just hate memorizing shit. That’s why I usually code with documentation open to check my syntax, and often rely on stuff like notepad++ to handle basic syntax for me. That way I can focus on doing the thing I want to accomplish, as opposed to spending time on glorified spell check.
That being said, I’m a chemical engineer, not a software engineer. I’m sure it becomes second nature given enough time.
I think the thing that annoyed me the most is that if you forgot proper syntax, you’d just lose points. In comparison, if I was taking a physics test and forgot an important formula, I could derive the formula I needed from basic principles relatively easily. No such luck with syntax. You either know it or you don’t.
Yeah, that’s part of the challenge of languages in general. I agree that physics is easier - I, too, would just re-derive forgotten formulas from first principles. But ad least language syntax shares commonalities, and is far less reliant on rote memorization than the bullshit that is biology.
I was in the middle of my Calculus III class when I took the GRE. For some reason I blanked on the formula for the area of a circle so I derived it during the test.
Oh fuck bio.
And I agree with languages. I speak three, and that definitely came from use more than memorization and learning. First two came from cultural immersion, but I took German classes. I still learned German by switching all my videogames to German though, and playing mmos on German servers for “cultural immersion”. Not the classes.
I’m sure that the purpose of taking points off for syntax failure was my professor’s attempt to do something akin to cultural immersion for programming, but the end result was that I continually lost points on tests for reasons I considered dumb. I picked up more syntax from programming RuneScape bots back in the day than from classes, analogous to how I learned German. I’m sure more advanced classes would have focused more on the theory of programming and logic, but I just didn’t get there. It’s kind of like losing points for bad grammar on a language test.
I guess the classes just didn’t work for how I preferred to learn.
Well, you should lose points for bad grammar on a language test. And the best way to learn just about anything, but especially programming, is to do it! Make more bots.
I mean I agree. It makes sense. I guess my problem was that the intro classes I took were too focused on syntax/grammar up front, instead of more focusing on theory of programming. If there was more focus on doing, like in the homework assignments, I would have been much more successful. Might have even gone into software instead of chemistry.
Interestingly, since we’re using language as a parallel, one of the benefits of my language classes was that grammar came second after vocabulary. Sure, there was some grammar in the intro classes, but the real grammar came in 102 level courses.
This thread is more food for thought for any programming 101 professors that happen to wander by. I’m well outside of college age, so I doubt I’d ever take a class on programming. Probably just kinda figure it out as I come across a need to code stuff.
Because classes swelled while faculty did not.
Their paychecks swelled though, right?
…right?
Oh, no…
This is UK, universities are chronically underfunded by government. They did this just to keep the lights on.
I am from the US where universities are also chronically underfunded by the government (an uneducated populace is easier to manipulate), but still pisses me off.
People who cheat are always going to find a way, but there’s still value in making it less convenient. If nothing else, a person has to learn more about real-world maneuvering if forced to get creative with it.
where I live, supervised exams are still the norm, but if you bother lookibg arround during the test you will quickly notice thwt pretty mcuh everyone is still cheating
That wasn’t my experience.
Exams at my university were supervised not just by the professor but all of his TA’s, who kind of patrolled the room. It would be very hard to cheat without someone noticing.
And I’m glad for it. Cheating should require creativity and effort.
Cheating how? If the exams are not silly copy pasting of raw knowledge and actual require to use intelligence to create a solution (as they should at this level), only having some hidden notes will not help much and this is not a big issue. It is still much better than delegating the thinking to an AI.
The wealthy can afford to have someone else do their work, and you wonder why the institution didn’t put a stop to it?