Failing them completely seems a bit heavy-handed and unfair. Surely some did leverage ChatGPT, but likely not all did so.
Most problems with education are simply due to scale. The most notable one being Bloom's finding that private tutoring produced 2 standard deviations better results than classroom education.
We can kind of approximate that now with GPT :) One tutor per child!
American colleges regularly collect $10,000+ in fees per student, so I'm not sure why a 20 minute oral exam would be infeasible?
Then, even with all that you aren't really making any real improvement, as the skills involved in an oral exam are not necessarily relevant to those which need to be tested, thus making the exam at best similar in uselessness to a written exam and at worst, actively harmful in testing performance.
Why is this thread full of academics claiming that apparently normal workloads of the sort everyone takes on, or trivial solutions of the sort high school teachers manage, is somehow impossible for them? They do realize they're accepting money in return for a commitment to do teaching activities, right?
Look, there are constituencies that matter here other than academics. There are the students who have a reasonable expectation that their grade means something and isn't corrupted by other students cheating. And the rest of the world has a reasonable expectation that academics do a good job of teaching and assessment. The vast majority of people care far more about this aspect than the research aspect, so the fact that academics seem to be giving up on teaching and assessment is going to result in a world of richly deserved pain for universities one day.
Sure, students have a reasonable expectation of having their grade mean something, but it's obvious that oral exams are not the solution. It's also kind of hilarious that in this thread, about a professor falsely accusing an entire class of cheating, you seem to imply that there is enough cheating going on for grades to be meaningless.
That class of 100 has likely paid the university over $1 million in tuition, even if they're all in-state students. Assuming they take 12 courses, we've got $83k per course coming in.
Assuming each TA is paid a generous $20 per hour, that's $800 for a 40-hour week.
I'm no professor, but I'm pretty sure $800 is less than $83,000. I know universities have a lot of overheads, but surely 1% of the tuition money could be spent on tuition?
I helped my nephew in High School, not college for a few months last year and I was so sick and tired of constantly getting so many of these assignments every single god damn week. I just couldn't understand the point of it, you were given so little time since it seemed like every week several classes wanted one of these on top of the regular homework and sometimes there would be two of them on the same week from the same class so of course the quality would be low and I just do not see the point of this type of assignment if its not given the proper amount of time it requires.
I hated everything about it and when chatgpt came along I saw it as a blessing hoping that now that there was something that could do this the teachers would stop relying on them so much.
> There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative.
I can attest to the following problems to good homework creation, from my own experiences playing with ChatGPT and teaching:
1. If you want to give a very illustrative yet easy theoretical exercise in algorithm design, one that computer scientists have solved over and over in the last few decades and which furthers your understanding, there are very likely solutions online and ChatGPT will give you the solution with very high probability.
2. If you create your own dataset and want the students to implement some algorithm and create a simple plot/discussion from the results, it will be very hard to distinguish a "student solved it on their own, but they did not invest too much time into it" submissions from ChatGPT submissions produced by a couple of queries.
3. Switching to oral presentations is hard to scale (as others attest) and also does not resolve much, because some students are perfectly okay with being handed a solution from somewhere (colleague, ChatGPT), not understanding it very well, and yet presenting it. Failing these students likely leads to overly difficult classes.
4. In-classroom exams without a computer work best, but they also do not scale very well (a lot of prep/correction needs to go into them) and some students with bad anxiety management skills, which includes me as a former student, dislike them passionately.
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As you can see, this topic is quite critical for my profession. The ugly truth is that university professors have only a very limited time allocated in their busy workweeks for teaching, and hence they have to take many shortcuts, including suboptimal homework sheets and limited innovation year-over-year. I also do not allocate as much time for philosophy of teaching/improving teaching skills as I would have liked.
If anyone here has novel ideas how to actually implement "a class that can't be cheated with AI", specifically university CS classes, I am all ears.
May not work for you, but as a CS student our department had the policy if that if you failed the final, you failed the course. The finals were usually structured that rote memorization would earn a C- (depending on course complexity and importance). They were all pencil-and-paper exams.
While cheating was policed, collab was encouraged with the proviso that lab submissions needed to be own-work, and they'd run basic comparisons to make sure that they weren't copies. As a result, the administrivia on finals was longer...but there was a little less concern about the rates of cheating.
FYI its oral exams, not oral presentations. You give the student half an hour to solve a sequence of problems and gauge their thinking skills. Scales to perhaps 30 students at most.
I was not very clear about it, but I was discussing regular semester work, as opposed to final/midterm exams. Think courses that are strongly grounded in theory but need the students to experience the coursework, like Discrete Mathematics or Linear Programming.
"Oral presentations" in my case meant presenting a homework solution to the TA in person, in front of the class, and the TA accepting this solution live (or not).
At least at my university, the responsibility for homework structure and homework sheets lies fully on the lecturer, and the TAs are tasked with grading the homework/projects and leading the exercise sessions.
Oral exams are great if they can be done at scale, and I do use them. Some other teachers (as well as the administration) prefer written exams, as there is a clear proof of work that can be analyzed if grades are disputed.
In my experience, these are completely useless for any core course as you mention. I have tried stuff like this in my courses, and it doesn't work. In fact, I know some students pay others to make the presentation for them, and coach them on the presentation.
Even for course projects, I have graded meetings with students before the final presentation/report. This helps ensure that they are doing the work themselves rather than depending on others. But yes, this takes a lot of time.
> Some other teachers (as well as the administration) prefer written exams, as there is a clear proof of work that can be analyzed if grades are disputed.
Video record them, my friend.
> not understanding it very well, and yet presenting it. Failing these students likely leads to overly difficult classes
What does a grade even mean in your classes, if not understanding the subject isn't grounds for failure? Isn't the point of a grade to measure exactly that?
> some students with bad anxiety management skills, which includes me as a former student, dislike them passionately
So what? Nobody likes exams, they make everyone anxious, why is that even considered relevant? Did you not pass through exam halls with hundreds of students in them to get to university in the first place? How did this supposedly non-scalable system scale when you were 16?
> If anyone here has novel ideas
Why are you acting as if this is an unsolved research problem?
Here's a novel idea for you: talk to people who teach 15 year olds and then copy the way they do it. They'll probably tell you to do things you don't personally like doing but if it's really "critical to your profession" as you claim, then that won't matter, will it.