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Comment by bluenose69 | Hacker News Reader

The author makes many sensible points. I see only one solution: stop using assignments altogether, and rely instead on oral examinations, or hand-written examinations that take place in a controlled environment.

This will be unpleasant for those students who have difficulty with the stress of examinations, but the alternative is that honest students will be even more seriously disadvantaged than they are now.

Ironically, the future will mirror the past, with grades reflecting a scary exam at the end of the year, or at the end of a degree program.

It seems that everybody saw this coming, but I am one of those who has to admit being surprised by how quickly it hit us.

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With so many resources becoming available for self-directed study, and also things like this, I wonder if we'll move toward a de-coupling of teaching and testing/verification. I could envision a world where having a degree in a subject from a particular school essentially just means "we verified, in person, to our specific set of standards, that this person has mastered this subject". And how you come to acquire that mastery may be provided by the same (or a related) institution, or may be done on your own, or with the help of some third party.

I think we already have moved in this direction, in the sense that a degree doesn't get you much in the job market. Employers tend to place much more importance on work experience, tangible accomplishments, certifications, and so on. (Even certs might not be so useful, since the ability to pass a test is often quite different than the ability to actually do a job.) In addition, landing a job often ultimately comes down to who you know (networking, or more cynically, nepotism) and luck.

Or we go the other way and just pay for certificates without any testing.

I mean I went to university mostly to party ;) But you still need that cert so that society won't condemn you for "wasting" 4 years. I put in the quotes because I believe university was an excellent way to learn social skills.

>rely instead on oral examinations, or hand-written examinations that take place in a controlled environment

So, basically, the same methods the education system has been using for hundreds of years?

People have been cheating at written exams a lot in my country. Usually used some minuscule wireless earphone shoved deep in the ear canal. We'd basically need to use radio jammers or EMPs to stop modern high tech cheating solutions.

Most systems that have a set of variables known in advanced end up getting gamed into oblivion to achieve the desired results.

Really, I expect more friction from faculty than students. Most professors I know would not be too happy having to give oral exams personally, that's a lot of extra time.

But I think there's an opportunity to integrate an "interview" component in projects, which would also help students when they go look for jobs. Going to be tough to make it fair for all students, but after accommodations it should be easy to determine which students actually did/understand the work.

Pretty hard to fake an oral exam right now. But after a few generations of HUD improvements, even that might get tricky without sweeping the student for "bugs"

Have whisper listen to the question, feed it into chatgpt and read out the solution. The pipeline is already here

The software is there. Difficult to detect hardware is not (excluding low-bandwidth devices a la the Carlsen vs Niemann scandal)

The "controlled environment" may need to be a Faraday cage, among other things.

Even then, llama shows that local models can be fairly powerful. Tuning for, say, the GPUs used in handheld gaming devices, on a specific knowledge base, doesn't seem implausible.

That's true, and over the long term it's only going to get easier to hide these things. A shame, we might need to include metal detectors on the way in like they're in prison (and even that might not be enough).

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