Teachers can foil ChatGPT: Handwritten essays | Hacker News Reader

Teachers can foil ChatGPT: Handwritten essays

washingtonpost.com

5 pointsGalenErso8 comments

I think oral exams would be better, even though they aren't scalable. Asking a person a follow up question live is the best way to test knowledge. You would need a traditional way to cheat if you wanted to use ChatGPT during an oral exam.

I don't think teachers are going to be able to detect cheating. Teacher do a very poor job of catching traditional cheating already. The severe consequences of cheating are because fear is the only meaningful tool left to deter students. But since you're already starting with the most extreme punishments possible, there's no way to escalate consequences further.

ChatGPT is about to quote passages accurately, even though it produces the same quote for many different prompts. I only asked it questions from 1984, it might produce incorrect quotes for other books. How can a teacher reasonably argue that the quote was chosen by ChatGPT and not the reader? You would have to confiscate all electronics and not allow any bathroom breaks during the testing period as a bare minimum.

Oral exams are more scalable than you would expect, it's most of how military training and training verification works. Some of those fields are highly technical like Navy Nukes (IE: even unfavorable colleges will transfer 70 credits from the program). And most rates, even nontechnical ones eventually have a board with the captain for a final qualification (wouldn't be surprised if even culinary specialists have something, or something you would technically count like advancing to khakis).

Already technical work arounds:

tooth hearing aid : https://newatlas.com/hearing-aid-tooth/14042/

contact version of google glasses : https://massivesci.com/notes/smart-contact-lens-google-glass...

https://newatlas.com/wearables/team-hart-vibrating-sleeve-la...

Not convinced by this article until they mentioned cursive. Now fully convinced that essay writing will follow the same path as cursive. Irrelevant and dying skill

Obviously still needs to happen inside a classroom otherwise students could hand copy the ChatGPT output. Could drop the essay and do oral exams.

The point is the teachers assume the student is using CheatGPT(sic), but copying it by hand helps them learn anyway since they have to both read and write what ChatGPT told them about the subject.

They're basically hacking the system to get ChatGPT to give the students the Cliffs Notes version of the subject. Having the student write out the essay is just tricking the student into taking notes.

I'm guessing you'd get a year or so until you can train an AI on your handwriting and hook it up to a CNC plotter ;-)

Oral exams do not assess writing skills. Unless writing skills are no longer a learning outcome, this will remain a problem that cannot be solved by oral examination.

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