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.
Pen and paper. Let’s not think too hard here. The answer is simple.
On one hand, I agree with you. On the other, take home tests and in-person tests are meant to assess different things. In-person are shorter time windows, it assess recall of standard concepts and their application in mostly-already-seen situations. Take home exams are meant to test creativity with the concepts presented in the course. Giving the students the time to work on the problem while doing some additional research to try to figure out the solution.
Ideally, most of your career will involve take-home-like tasks, not in person ones. On top of that, take home favors people with anxiety, that are penalized by in person work.
Hi! Nerdy uni student here, it’s an 80 people classroom. People just sit in the back and use their phone during paper exams. They then go to class groupchat to boast about how clever they were for coming up with that idea…
Also since professor has actual research to do, exams are proctored by the teaching assistants who frankly don’t care. In fact TA’s openly use AI to grade homeworks.
May sound slightly biased, but I think the solution is people going “exams were not meant to be part of this system, or at least in the current state they are” and making some reforms.
Another nerdy uni student here. Our biggest venue has capacity for 320 students during tests. But we have enough invigilators and cameras that it’s impossible to use a phone during exams.
Faraday cage on the room. Your phone is now a glorified calculator.
I wish it was that simple, I really do, but when did handwriting get dropped from the curriculum? Ok slightly hyperbolic, that was the US, still on the UK curriculum. But the importance of it has dropped dramatically.
Even 10 years ago the legibility of student answers was sufficiently awful we were doing exam technique training for students and it has degraded substantially since then.
Have you ever proctored an exam before?
I do for work.
Everyone is searched and scanned before entering the test room.
Exam is computer based. Each person gets a specific number of pages of scrap paper (depending on test sponsor). Paper color is random.
There are lots of cameras. We walk through and check each person’s workspace often.
Of course this is not cheap.
There’s the right answer, and then there’s the practical answer. This is the former.
They’ll just use AI then copy it to paper.
That’s not how that would work at all, because they wouldn’t have their phones. They would have pen, paper, and a desk. Where’s the AI coming from?
You are aware that teachers still preside over the classroom correct?
You are aware that this article is about take home work for college, right?
It’s only about take home work in the sense that it’s advocating against it
Then pen and paper aren’t necessary to prevent AI use. Its trivial for IT security to pull logs of students suspected of using AI to cheat (it’s part of my job), or to block AI at the firewall level.
Are you implying that mobile networks do not function on university campuses?
Why would that matter if they’re taking the exams and writing essays in the same room as the professor?
Part of this thread was people talking about students using their phones in the back and TAs not caring enough to intervene. It seemed to me that your response was related to that but perhaps it was not.