A teacher I know says it is easy to determine if a student wrote their paper if you interview them about it. You’re right that automated methods are risky.
That’s it. As a teacher who has been dealing with this in the last 2-3 years, the only reliable way I have found is to do short interviews.
Students hand in their work, I grade it, then I ask them verbally a few easy questions about what they mean in specific sections of their work. How they score on these questions is used as a coefficient that I apply on the grade to get the final score.
So they can use LLMs, but they have to understand its output.
Hell, back in my day, teachers were even very picky about what kind of calculator you could use. And if it was a graphing calculator, you had to show them yourself wiping the memory at the beginning of the test.
(Except for one algerbra teacher, who was really cool about it. He’d allow custom programs to stay on the calculator if you programmed it yourself. On the theory that if you can write a computer program that reliably solves these math problems, then you must have a very good understanding of how to solve these math problems. And, yes, I was one of the few kids who actually did that. Ah, writing my own custom software for the TI-83 on the TI-83, because that seemed easier than actually doing the math problems by hand … good times.)
but there’s a tendency of focusing more on the work during the semester than in the exam itself
Perhaps this tendency needs to be reversed?
If you have one big exam (or a few of them spread over the year) that it’s impossible to use LLM help for and those exams carry enough weight to make the student fail the class if they completely bomb it … then you’ll be stopping the LLM-cheaters dead in their tracks. Sure, they can be lazy and do much of their coursework that way, but if they’re being lazy like that, they’re likely not actually learning anything, and that will show up during the big exams. And when they fail those big exams and then fail the class, hopefully they’ll learn their lesson about relying on LLMs to get them through classes.
Right, and that’s what’s going to have to change: a bigger focus on things like in-person tests (including in-person bluebook essays), oral presentations/thesis defenses instead of other project deliverables, etc.
Before you can punish for using LLMs, you need to be able to reliably detect the use of LLMs, including guarding against false positives.
Current AI checkers are woefully inadequate and prone to errors.
A teacher I know says it is easy to determine if a student wrote their paper if you interview them about it. You’re right that automated methods are risky.
That’s it. As a teacher who has been dealing with this in the last 2-3 years, the only reliable way I have found is to do short interviews.
Students hand in their work, I grade it, then I ask them verbally a few easy questions about what they mean in specific sections of their work. How they score on these questions is used as a coefficient that I apply on the grade to get the final score.
So they can use LLMs, but they have to understand its output.
Interviewing every student would take a lot of time.
You can tell they’re using an LLM if they have a computer out during the pen-and-paper test.
How is that allowed?
Hell, back in my day, teachers were even very picky about what kind of calculator you could use. And if it was a graphing calculator, you had to show them yourself wiping the memory at the beginning of the test.
(Except for one algerbra teacher, who was really cool about it. He’d allow custom programs to stay on the calculator if you programmed it yourself. On the theory that if you can write a computer program that reliably solves these math problems, then you must have a very good understanding of how to solve these math problems. And, yes, I was one of the few kids who actually did that. Ah, writing my own custom software for the TI-83 on the TI-83, because that seemed easier than actually doing the math problems by hand … good times.)
Not US, but there’s a tendency of focusing more on the work during the semester than in the exam itself
LLMs are going to be a massive headache for me when they get older
Perhaps this tendency needs to be reversed?
If you have one big exam (or a few of them spread over the year) that it’s impossible to use LLM help for and those exams carry enough weight to make the student fail the class if they completely bomb it … then you’ll be stopping the LLM-cheaters dead in their tracks. Sure, they can be lazy and do much of their coursework that way, but if they’re being lazy like that, they’re likely not actually learning anything, and that will show up during the big exams. And when they fail those big exams and then fail the class, hopefully they’ll learn their lesson about relying on LLMs to get them through classes.
Right, and that’s what’s going to have to change: a bigger focus on things like in-person tests (including in-person bluebook essays), oral presentations/thesis defenses instead of other project deliverables, etc.