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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

There's an awful amount of cheating going on. In certain environments, there's a > 50% chance that an essay was not written by the student.

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We need to rethink the concept of a term paper and how it is graded. If a machine can produce a paper then why should we be doing it at all?

In my opinion, the purpose of producing a paper is to interrogate an issue in depth. I think we should replace/augment papers with oral defenses if the topic and hard questioning . Obviously this is more effort to grade but academia has been quite lax for awhile now.

My more cynical take on the use of papers is that it already was a lax way to assess students. They write stuff, and the teacher skims it. And also important, it gets less complaints than written or oral exams, while you can still maintain the illusion that the students are being tested on the topic.

We'll have to go back to sitting in a room, answering questions on paper. Or indeed oral exams, but those are almost everywhere infeasible. A decent exam should take 1 hour or so. Times 100 to 200 students makes anywhere between 2 and 5 weeks of work, excluding the increasing amount of time it takes to handle complaints about the grading. And the TA has to sit in as well, to provide some check. So that's not going to happen, except for very small groups, or very rich institutions.

For the amount of money college costs you would think that colleges could afford to hire enough people to perform that kind of rigor.

For the same reason we still make people do calculus without a machine even though a machine can do it.

Morally wrong?

- but there's a crisis!

- made up statistics

- think of the children

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