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Comment by geph2021 | Hacker News Reader

geph2021

   ask their students to write things in class and get a feeling for what those individual students are capable of. Then those that turn in essays written at 10x their normal writing level will be obvious

I think that's a flawed approach. Plenty of people simply don't perform or think well under imposed time-limited situations. I believe I can write close to 10x better with 10x the time. To be clear, I don't mean writing more, or a longer essay, given more time. Personally, the hardest part of writing is distilling your thoughts down to the most succinct, cogent and engaging text.

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> Plenty of people simply don't perform or think well under imposed time-limited situations

From first-hand experience, the difference between poor stress-related performance and a total lack of knowledge is night and day.

I have personally witnessed students who could not speak or understand the simplest English, and were unable to come up with two coherent sentences in a classroom situation, but turned in graduate level essays. The difference is blindingly obvious.

> I have personally witnessed students who could not speak or understand the simplest English, and were unable to come up with two coherent sentences in a classroom situation, but turned in graduate level essays. The difference is blindingly obvious.

Maybe someone helped them with their homework?

Unless their in-class performance increases as well, isn't that help "probably cheating"? (That's the "moral benchmark" I'd use, at least; if your collaboration resulted in you genuinely learning the material, it's probably not cheating.)

The point is for the teacher to get a sense of the students style and capabilities. Even if your home essay is 10x better and 10x more concise as your in class work, a good teacher that knows you—unlike an inference model—will be able to extrapolate and spot commonalities. Also a good teacher (that isn’t overworked) will also talk to students and get a sense of their style and capabilities that way, this allows them to extrapolate even better then a computer could ever hope to.

Sure, but what about all the students with mediocre and/or overworked teachers? If our plan assumes the best-case scenario, we're going to have problems.

Honestly if we can’t have nice things and we keep skimping out on education, I’d rather we just accept the fact that some will students cheat, then to introduce another subpar technical solution to a societal problem.

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