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.
open-book exams
I’ve never had access to AI during an open book exam. What are these universities doing?
What’s a “book”?
It’s a metaphor for a restricted set of study materials. I’ve never brought an actual book to an open book exam, because physical textbooks are expensive AF
This makes me feel old.
We had to learn formula, and I think now they are given to students in their exams. Books were cheaper though.
Now get off my lawn!
Back to scantron tests and hand written problem solving. Not a problem
I thought you wrote “Scranton”. I was like “what the fuck does The Office have to do with all this?”
Scranton makes paper. Students write on paper in a proctored environment to guarantee against the use of any electronic devices.
Oh I know, since ai detectors are unreliable, just have them pass a polygraph to show they didn’t use ai.
Even more low level to be safe, if you beat them up but they don’t break they get the grade.
For me it’s insane that they were allowed to take the test at home in the first place. Trusting in honor isn’t ever going to work.
Although we didn’t have take home tests, most were open book and even open internet. But the catch was that you had to know the material well beforehand to have any hope of finishing before the end of the hour.
I felt it was a very reasonable system to reduce stress at the time, and it encouraged you to take good notes.
You have to use a special lockdown browser and it’s timed - this obviously only works if you only have one computer in your house, not one on your desk, one im your pocket and one in your lap.
In the pre-AI age, I think take home tests were fine. However they were generally much harder than a similar in person exam on the same material. I remember one professor gave the advice “if you are given the option between a take home exam and an in person classroom exam, always take the latter. Since the former doesn’t have as tight of a time limit as the latter does, and will almost always be far more challenging” (or something to that effect)
That guy didn’t see my heat transfer final during junior year. Some of the other students were crying at how bad it was
Lol, that doesn’t mean that in person exams will be easy. This was my linear algebra professor, who had very difficult in person exams.
Dude, I know plenty about hard linear algebra exams.
In my undergrad program, we were expected to take linear algebra spring of freshman year or fall of sophomore year. I opted to take it freshman year, but for some reason about 1/3 of the class was grad students.
Because of the grad students, the instructor told us at the start that he was going to make it a graduate level course. “But what about the undergrads in the course?” you may ask. Well, this jackass didn’t care. And I later learned he had his doctorate delayed because of how badly he fucked over multiple freshman classes with the same shit he’d pull this semester.
Now, I did alright with the required curriculum for the class. The problem with that is the instructor blew through all of the required topics in the first 3-4 weeks, and started going off into more theoretical mathematics despite most of his class being freshman/sophomore engineering students.
What’s worse is that this guy liked to write problems in mathematical notation. For those of you that don’t know what that means, it’s effectively a different language with completely different symbols. For most of the class he’d mainly just sprinkle notation in here and there as shorthand, but not too crazy and we could always go back and look up what it meant.
Then came the final exam. That fucking final. It was entirely in mathematical notation, some of which I’m pretty sure was never covered during the class. Imagine taking a history class on the American Civil War, but the final was written entirely in Chinese.
I could barely understand half of the questions, so I filled out what I could and left after 30 minutes. I just retook the next class the next semester and got a 98% because the second instructor was actually sane.
Even five years ago, these were fine. You couldn’t cheat if you didn’t know the material.
Especially when you can offload to AI like a jock offloading on a nerd. No papers, oral… in person shit.
Take home tests? I didn’t read that in the article, take home essays yes. Which is just normal homework
I’m from before the era of take-home tests. We still had homework though which is still an awful way to do things, so maybe AI will motivate the educators to do something better.
Just make finals and exams oral, like interviews.
You kidding? All the stage fright kids will mess it up. Puts them at a disadvantage before tests starts
Jensen huang style
I like the idea of an oral exam. You come prepared to present a topic and answer questions. You are allowed to reference your notes, cards, etc. on the fly.
My professional qualifications all had an oral exam board. Was some of the most nerve wracking things I ever had to stand/sit through.
My masters in classics had your full class grade based on a colloquium. I really enjoyed them, we were a cohort and got to see each others’ projects.
I mentioned this in another post, maybe in a few.
The college I’m going to requires you to now use a Microslop account instead of a student one; this isn’t new but it sure was confusing when you have three different emails for the school.
So when you log in. You’re greeted by ChatGPT. The website for the school is such a clusterfuck that their website search uses AI. Then your writing is checked by AI. Now they encourage you to use an AI website for MLA/APA citation. Also your work is probably being graded by AI since most of the time it takes forever to get an answer from whoever is teaching the class. The amount of scripts seem to point that your mouse movements and keyboard strokes are being checked by AI since using RespondASS(the show us your room and you’ll get flagged for looking at your keyboard and more! Like we might accidentally brick your computer!) was so very welcomed(sarcasm).
So there’s a point where you start to think about whats really going on when you’re rammed up the ass with AI shit and the syllabus says you can’t use AI and assignments say “write it in your own words.”
It’s interesting. I wouldn’t doubt that all the written papers are being used for llm training. Then you write your paper in your own words, and get a lowered grade because you made a jokey joke. If your friend has an issue in Windows 8.1 and came to you for help, what would you do? Find a new friend. I answered whatever the question.
Nothing too serious, and you ask why the lower grade. It wasn’t professional and this class is being monitored. I answered the question and to top it off there were two-three other people that copied and rehashed my answer…
What I wrote was correct as I had done it, I just wrote it in a anti-AI way that someone had to read it and understand the concept.
So in conclusion, college is fucked. Half of it is advertising software and the other half is wasting your time. I’ve had good teachers and then I’ve had more idiots that don’t belong teaching, well they don’t if it takes almost a week to get an answer.
I can also confirm that functionality in Microsoft products is (I think deliberately) being dumbed down and made counterintuitive in order to force people to use CoPilot. This has been especially problematic with Sharepoint.
It’s very likely deliberate. Even the operating system. I booted an old computer up with W7 and I was surprised how much easier it is to use.
One class I had, they do a VM style “sim” and you’re asked to open the terminal. Okay I press win+r to type in cmd. Incorrect! Use the search bar and type in terminal… I was pissed off
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.
People just sit in the back and use their phone during paper exams.
Back in my day exam invigilators would immediately kick you out of the examination centre and report you to Student Administration for this.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
There’s the right answer, and then there’s the practical answer. This is the former.
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.
I want to say that this explains a lot about the quality of offshore code, but it probably doesn’t.
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.
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.
That’s a silly argument, since whitespace is not thusly syntactical in most languages.
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.
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?
I don’t why so much of it is dependent on writing a long paper and having several people read through it. It’s a waste of time even before AI.
Just do a quick 10 minute oral exam and you’ll know if they understand it.
Some things take more than 10 minutes to explain, but only if you need to start from scratch, so for more advanced topics they should just ask questions from the top down and assume the basics. Anyone who fails to understand the basics will obviously fail the deeper meaning as well, or shouldn’t have been able to come to that level of exam anyway.
The point of an essay is that a person may, accurately and succinctly, convey a complex idea to a stranger across an ocean using only the written word. Which is half the point of literacy. Where I to hire a college grad who couldn’t compose an email about a complex, nuanced subject, i would think real hard about hiring any alums of theirs.
Knowing stuff isn’t enough. You have to be able to present it in a communicable fashion.
Nobody reads college student essays over the ocean.
Anyway, you misspelled “were” and forgot to capitalize “I”. I will forgive your comma mistakes, because I am not in a position to correct commas in English.
C-.
Lol. Missed the point
Nobody reads college student essays over the ocean.
… They’re to practice.
In the near future or already, the skill of writing essays will be as useful as having neat hand writing or horse back riding. It’s great to know it, but it’s not going to be the industry standard outside of school.
Fuck AI and all, but it will eventually become the standard tool for anyone who wants to put a lot of words on a page for whatever reason.
Yeah, that’s a bad thing. People de-skilling themselves is like eating too much candy and getting diabetes.
You should learn how to write, bstix. It’s enriching.
If you can’t articulate why schools use long essays, perhaps you shouldn’t suggest scrapping them. One should know how a machine works before one starts tinkering with it. And a course is a machine like any other. Don’t start pulling out pieces before you know what they do.
If you don’t how a system works, it’s the perfect time to disassemble it.
Why is that?
You’ll learn from it. (which is the purpose of universities, rather than grades or papers anyway)
In this case though, it’s more because the system clearly doesn’t work, so something has to be done eiher way.
They (schools) can’t fight AI forever. It will over burden them with slop no matter what they try. It’s futile to think that it can be detected, f.i. if the students put the AI in speech mode and writes down the answers in hand etc.
It’s better to rethink the entire purpose of what they’re trying to achieve. Hundreds of pages of written paper probably isn’t it to begin with.
They’re trying to educate: To get knowledge into the head of students. A written paper won’t really show what’s inside the head of the student regardless of it being written by the student, their parents, Indian fiver hirees, AI or simply paid to pass.
IMO the validition process has to be rethought, and it’s only good that AI has broken the system.
I agree that something has to be updated. Breaking it down is a good way to Understanding what you’re breaking down helps understand why and how to improve it. Especially something as complicated as an entire education system and the resulting tech relationship. On some level I agree, something needs overhauled. But it’s also impossible to anticipate future technological leaps that would do something like this again. We as a people need to be more measured in embracing tech so wholeheartedly. I don’t know that there is a blanket response to such things that every individual school can address. This is something national leadership should be addressing. The whole scale blind adoption of ‘AI’ is the cause, it’ll take more than college boards to address
I’m all for that, but some people will complain that they get nervous and that’s why they couldn’t state how they do the things.
The amount of accomodations in US colleges is insane to where some people are allowed to take extra time, or take their tests not in a classroom setting, or have their tests read to them because they’re illiterate or a variety of other things that just aren’t compatible with the workforce is insane.
Seems insane to not assist people learning. Reaching people you otherwise would not is a good thing.You WANT more people in the work force who can understand concepts. Who gives a shit how they demonstrate it or if they need an accommodation?
Supporting people through their weakness can help them find or reinforce their Strengths. That is absolutely something education should strive for.
The accommodations are other life skills that they are lacking in. I think oral examinations would really highlight weak points for a lot of people and they would seek exemptions that are easier.
I’m not saying that you don’t assist people with learning, but I think testing and learning are two different beasts. I think having a uniform standard for testing is a good thing, I’m all for oral examinations or proctored written tests, but I worry about all of the people that will seek exemptions from it because they can’t perform to the same standards on those tasks. It’s degrading to the letter grade of everyone else.
I do think that it is the responsibility of every student to study and find resources that best fit their learning style.
Is Education there to teach material or life skills? Yes, it’s important for Students to learn how to learn, but the institution SHOULD be trying to reach as many as possible. There should be guidance for people who learn differently. You certainly aren’t taught HOW you learn, but it is worth any institutions effort to assist.
I don’t support the idea that everyone need learn and consider topics in the same way. One Method for Everyone is how we get this Lowest Common Denominator, Min/Max bullshit.
This is the way
i went to a college that had no homework, but lots of recommend reading/exercises, all grading was tests and exams in class on paper. AI would have no use there
Please, they never even tried for the most part, they just wanted some easy bullshit tool where they could click a button and not worry about it. This bullshit predates AI by the way, companies like TurnItIn should be sued for fraud because people who actually wrote stuff have been falsely accused and people who plagiarized shit went undetected. These bullshit software packages never really did what they claimed to be able to do.
You want to actually stop AI cheating? Easy: In person tests and essays where the teacher is actually paying attention; no computers, phones, or other smart devices. Problem solved, you’re welcome. Yes “professor” that means you have to do your fucking job instead of clicking buttons in Learn or Canvas or whatever dumpster fire on an LMS you’re “teaching” on. Cry more I guess? People are paying a shitload of money for this, take it seriously, asshole.
Sorry, I’ve had some shitty professors.
Another avenue is doing regular screenings, orally or hand-written. Any sus answers, that student gets flagged and further evaluated.
But, the problem is, as I’m sure the article I haven’t read points out, that cost-benefit is all fucked up. The benefit to students is they get a degree without having to do any work, so lots of people are going to do it, and the cost to Universities would be having to expel a good chunk of their students, which is going to cost them a lot of tuition money and alumni donations.
The reality is that the value of a university education–outside of STEM–in this bloated labor market is really just a social credit. What we need to tackle is all the poeple who can’t get hired for positions they are absolutely qualified for but can’t get because they don’t have a degree.
There is something called a BONAFIDE QUALIFICATION written into employment law, and “college education” is considred a bonafide qualification even if it’s not.
A real education is very important in many ways, some of which are harder to quantify. Instead of pushing people through these bullshit conveyor belts in what is sometimes little more than glorified daycare for adult children, we should actually fix education. Instead, it’s under attack by fascists all over the planet because an educated populace is not as easily controlled.
Yes, there’s education and then there’s degrees. In my experience, anybody is capble fo getting a degree, but education is optional and largely up to the student. The only degrees that demand an actual ability to think and research and formulate are PhDs.
I find colleges and universities are, at this point, largely extractive, dumping people into adulthood with massive debts and no employable skills and I am through supporting them in any way. That doesn’t mean I don’t value an education or the ability to think critically, I’m just using my ability to think critically to realize that much of higher education is a scam, and the role of a degree is socially determined.
The student is only part of the equation: If they were never given the tools to learn to begin with, that’s on society more than it is the student. I do agree though: One can obtain a degree without actually having received an education.
I think most people just don’t engage analytically no matter what tools you give them. My sister & I went to the same exact schools and she ended up a homeschooling anti-vaxer.
I think even many people who are willfully ignorant can be reached, but things have to kind of line up for it to work. The odds of that happening in an educational system that has been gutted are much lower, which is probably what the assholes doing the gutting are counting on.
It seems like the quality and nature of the education system is impacted by the economic system in which it exists
Okay, but here’s the situation at the institution where someone I know teaches…
Students enroll with Disability Services (roughly 1/3 of the class) because they tell their doctor they have test anxiety. Doctor then gives them a notes saying “so-and-so has test anxiety”. Nevermind the fact that anxiety around a test should be a normal reaction – particularly tests you never prepared for.
They get presented with a buffet of options for what will help them “succeed”. And THE STUDENT picks what they want. Triple time to complete their tests? Unlimited unsupervised bathroom breaks? Flexible scheduling (i.e. taking the test after everyone else got their results back & knows the answers)? Private testing rooms with no proctor? Ability to use AI “just for grammar”? It’s all there…
Absolute raging trashfire…
Blaming neurodivergent people for this is a chickenshit move TBF.
I’m blaming people who are LARPing as neurodivergent to game the system. TBF.
Oh, yeah, fuck em.
Hes saying people abuse the system thats in place for people with genuine issues.
Just like they gave up on all previous forms of cheating. Anyone clamoring that degrees will be useless NOW has not been paying attention. Until universities are held accountable for unleashing incompetent cheaters onto society, the financial incentive is to throughput as many students as possible and it has been for a long time.
And it’s not just financial incentives. Many institutions are difficult to get into. They have a process and hold that process, their judgement, in high regards. If someone gets in and is a failure that reflects poorly on them. They want students to succeed, one way or another, to show what brilliant students they attract.
Technology forces us to change the way we do things.
Interesting concept: attempting to detect AI use in drafting academic assignment solutions, when the AI itself is trained on works published by the academically trained…
How come no one in all the governments is thinking “we are destroying society and we will be fucked in 10 years”? I mean, it’s pretty obvious. I’m not a conspiratard but it feels like people in power want others to be really stupid.
Because you don’t get into positions of power with that mindset. You get into position of power with the mindset of “how can I look good today?”
Always has been.
