AI Checkers Forcing Kids to Write Like a Robot to Avoid Being Called a Robot
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
This means graded longer tasks such as writing or programming, which in the past were done outside of class and then handed in, are instead done in person (like most exams are, traditionally). To acknowledge the longer process, the time alotted for such a test is much longer (up to 3 hours instead of 1) and I can expect less of work created in 3 hours than work created over 6 weeks.
Students still have the opportunity to hand in work that was done outside of such an in-person test, which I will grade, but that grade isn't on the record is serves only as an indication.
I wish I could trust students, but plagiarism has become so easy now (added to a zeitgeist of personal gain above all) that a critical mass fails to resist.
I think diploma's are very useful. They get their usefulness from the trustworthiness of the party handing out the diploma. Only recording grades for work that has been done in an environment controlled by that party has downsides, but in the current and foreseeable situation I don't see a better way of maintaining a base level of trustworthiness.
I love teaching without grades or diplomas involved so much more. Then it's all about doing what's best for the students.
How I set up my course is different from traditional education. Most instruction happens from self study (including videos and software). Face to face time is for questions. All elements, material, staff, and students, have to be tuned for this setup to work though and is hard to pivot to in existing setups because education (in the Netherlands at least) is very entrenched.
This self-study centered learning approach, like the in-person tests instead of projects, comes from necessity. Great (and I expect ever increasing) teacher shortages.
He also heavily encourage student to learn with each other during "perm" hours (basically in highschool, hours where student have to stay in school but have nothing to do and can work on their own, go to the library or play/chill/whatever), but that was before and because he fondly remember the days where all 26 of us, the full class, all teamed together against homework (yeah, i had great classmates)
Of all of the tactics I've heard teachers taking, this is the one that seems both the most effective and most fair. It's a terrible thing that it's necessary because it's a less effective use of classroom time, but it's hard to think of a better approach.
I worry that the uncomfortable truth AI is revealing is that essay writing is a less essential skill than we'd like to believe. We can say things like "personal gain above all" and the pursuit of a diploma being our downfall, but I can't help but wonder if it would be better if we just got rid of essay writing altogether or wait until the student knows what kind of writing they want to do.
Of course you prefer teaching without grades; the only people in the room are people who want to be there.
If I need to know when Abraham Lincoln was born or when the Berlin Wall fell, I could either 1. memorize it in high school history class to demonstrate some kind of "knowledge" of history, or 2. just look these things up or ask an AI when I need them. If the bar for "mastery" is at the level of what an AI can output, is it really mastery?
Because studying a thing is a world apart from having it explained. When you study a thing to gain understanding, your understanding is not only deeper but you are also learning and practicing essential skills that aren't directly related to the topic at hand.
If you just have a thing explained to you, you miss out on most of the learning benefit, and the understanding you end up with is shallow.
Sorry, but I don't get this. Isn't this exactly what the teachers/lecturers and books do - explain things?
Sure, you have to practice similar things to test yourself if you got everything right. And, of course, it's different for manual skills (e.g. knowing how to make food is kind of different from actually making food).
But a language model trained on a education materials is no different from a book with a very fancy index (save for LLM-specific issues, such as hallucinations), so I fail to see the issue in ability to get answers for specific questions. As long as the answers are accurate, of course.
And - yeah - figuring out if the answer is accurate requires knowledge.
In part, sure, but not solely. I wasn't saying that getting an explanation is a bad thing, I was saying that only getting an explanation doesn't advance your learning much.
> And, of course, it's different for manual skills
I don't think that's different. It's the same for intellectual skills as for manual in this regard.
> I fail to see the issue in ability to get answers for specific questions. As long as the answers are accurate, of course.
There's nothing wrong with getting answers to questions. But that's not the process that leads to learning anything other than the specific answers to those specific questions.
Getting an education is much, much more than that. What you are (or should be) learning goes far beyond whatever the subject of the class is. You're also learning how to learn, how to organize your thoughts, how to research, and how the topic works at a deep enough level that you can infer answers on it even when you've not been told what those answers are.
If what you're learning in class is just an compendium of facts that you can look up, you're missing out on the most valuable aspects of education.
At some point someone actually has to do some thinking. It's hard to train your thinking if you just offload every simple task throughout your entire education.
I find your analogy works against your point, because manual labor does use a forklift and other heavy machinery whenever possible. It's better for human health (and the backs of blue collar workers) that way. Now the only people lifting weights in gyms are those who choose to be there for their health and not because they're forced to.
Unless you're telling me you never did that in any of your classes growing up, but I'm going to be highly dubious of such a claim.
I did extremely poorly in school, actually. It wasn't an environment that I could function in at all. But I got a great education outside of school.
I'm really talking about what's needed in order to get a good education rather than anything school-specific. Technically, school itself isn't needed in order to get a great education. But you do want to get educated, whether school is a tool you employ to that end or not.
"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library." -- Frank Zappa
But, outside if reading, writing, and arithmetic, the thing I did learn in school that was the most valuable was how to learn. So, that's my bias. The most important thing you learn in school is how to learn, and much of what teachers are doing in the classroom is trying to teach that.
My fundamental point is that what we need in order to learn is not just getting answers to questions. That approach alone doesn't get you very far.
When I was younger, I was a bit of an idealist about education reform. As I grew old, I began seeing this the failings of education as a reflection on human nature. Now, I just don't think we should be wasting student's time trying to make them do something that, for whatever reason, they cannot or will not do the way we want them to.
What’s an alternative way to show those things?
But I think you're missing my point. If a student can go through their education never writing an essay the way everything thinks they're meant to do it and end up doing just fine in life, maybe the merits of essay writing aren't all what they're cracked up to be? Save the skill for specializations where the students are more motivated to learn it, like metalworking or pottery.
“I didn’t have to do that and I turned out fine” isn’t a very rigorous pedagogy.
And no, it isn't rigorous, but it's a pretty good hint that you've got correlation and not causation. Perhaps it's worth entertaining the possibility there's a better way.
https://herbertlui.net/dont-think-to-write-write-to-think/
I remember this every time I solve a problem while explaining it to someone in an email.
I was always a horrible test taker (the pressure being a large part of that, but not all) and I often needed the time outside of class for any papers I need to write. No matter how much I tried, it just wasn’t happening in class.
I acknowledge the problem but I would be worried how this could negatively impact a lot of people.
I was really hoping AI would make our world more accessible, not less.
(eta) Additionally, it would take more instructor or docent time, because no one can't be trusted to actually learn the material we're paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for.
It ain't the future dystopia I'm afraid of, it's the one we're creating this week.
I hadn't realized programming was being taught pre-university. From a quick look online it seems high-schoolers may be learning Python. That's pretty cool. Wonder how widespread this is, and how early children are taught.
Now days American high schools are becoming much more focused on teaching technical skills again (thankfully). There's a renewed focus on teaching things like CNC machine programming and robotics alongside traditional computer science courses.
I wish they taught JS/HTML web dev stuff. Even if someone only gets a year in the knowledge will stay relevant because they are using the internet daily. Just basic understanding of cookies, http, IP addresses, etc. is something kids should know.
For my msc thesis, which I finished 6 years ago, I researched how to teach programming to people without natural talent. I found a method with great results, and have yet to see anyone do something remotely similar. I'm not teasing a sale, all my stuff will be fully free. I've been working on it fulltime for the last three years, and I expect to have a 1.0 in two years, so let's say four years.
> but that grade isn't on the record is serves only as an indication.
I think that kind of output is often under-appreciated, especially by students. Even as pure advisory feedback, a grade on a subject or section helps people recognize where to allocate their limited time and effort.
I think it might give you the assurance you need while giving the best experience and opportunity for your students to do honest / hight integrity work with the latest (AI) tools.
The benefit of forcing students to write their grades work in person is you know it's coming from them, but the downside is it's a very artificial test not representative or what real world work will be like. I think examind can give you the best of both.
It's vacuous, makes vague claims that don't leave room for proof/disproof, and doesn't offer any reason that it's any better than a prompt that asks GPT4o "was this generated by AI y/n"
Your comment is full of unnecessary animosity and resentment and I think it is inappropriate.
I know the founders and I also know they have very happy customers.
Just because you have experienced some vapor ware startups or whatever doesn't mean every company is one...
I shared it with the OP because it sounds like they care about the problem the product solves.
Lastly, I want you remind you that the very first line in the community guidelines is "Be kind. Don't be snarky". I find your comment both unkind and snarky.
I don't really see how it's about an AI vs anti-ai arms race.
It's not my company and I'm not responsible for selling it so I'm probably doing a poor job...
But if you want to evaluate your students writing and ensure integrity and also provide them with longer windows to work on bigger writing assignments (and even allow them to use LLMs to help them write in accordance with your rules) then wouldn't an application like this help you?
I don't understand why I'm getting such a negative reaction from everyone for sharing this... I genuinely thought I was helping by pointing out a solution to your problem...
The whole point of the product is to give professors more flexibility in the kind of assignments they use (and even allowing students to use LLMs in a controlled way and be evaluated in how they use them) while ensuring academic integrity.
For example allowing students to use LLMs as research assistants and even to help them consider and structure ideas, while ensuring the student paraphrases everything sufficiently to prove they actually understand it and can put it in their own words.
To be clear I understand and respect your desire to protect the integrity of the diplomas and credentials you are giving out (especially in contrast to the so many who let cheating run rampatnt), but at some point you may want to be able to accurately evaluate how students use industry-standard tools. (like when calculators were first introduced).
So sure, be skeptical, but maybe be careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I would not feel assured of students actually completing the work themselves with _only_ something like examind.io as an extra measure. For it to be used in their own time, they would use it on their own hardware. As user viraptor pointed out, whenever there's anti-cheat software, someone is going to create targeted anti-anti-cheat software. That's what I meant by arms race.
For me to feel assured of students not fooling the anti-cheat software, for their input device they would have to use hardware controlled by me. It's not feasible to let them use hardware controlled by me in their own time.
I can see how a tool such as examind.io might help in accurately evaluating how students use other tools on a computer. For that they could use hardware controlled by me, during a test.
I don't know the answer.
Unlike many of my classmates I was really good at the mathematical part of the exam questions and could straightforwardly solve them analytically. However, this took too much time! I bombed several important exams learning that "good enough" is an important attitude to have when solving engineering problems. I hated this intensely at the time. (Never give that Stalinist institution a dime till I die.) BUT. There's a reason I went into numerical analysis in graduate school. Which I loved then, turned into a transient career that I enjoyed immensely, and remember fondly.
I doubt this approach is feasible for non-engineering disciplines.
[edit: redundancy removal]
Of course, that involves more on your part as teacher/professor -- you actually have to teach and test and act as editor -- on an ongoing basis. At university, that's part of what TA's are (or should be) expected to do. As a teacher, it's your responsibility.
So, if you happen to be a CS 101 instructor ask for the evolutionary copies of a program. If you happen to teach poetry and cover Herrick, ask for an original poem in the style of "Upon Julia's Dress" and see what the students happen to see from the same poem.
Teaching without ensuring that learning happens is a waste of time and a disservice to your profession.
They may have to go to the local press or a board meeting to get that result though.
I saw a post saying that the opposite happens, i.e. AI output, when prompted to write like Shakespeare, can beat AI detectors[2].
[1]: https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector and https://www.zerogpt.com
[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/1amngnv/i...
But my guess is that it works both ways depending on the cheating detector and the prompt used.
It should be like getting a blood test from a doctor unless they are testing for drugs why would you try to cheat with someone elses blood?
We don't need to figure out how to sidestep the fundamental flaws with our institutional education we need to find and fix the root cause.
Being "autheticated" as "knowing stuff" (your degree and GPA) doesn't translate into companies being able to tell if you can do a job. It didnt before AI and it doesn't now.
Everyone should stop and think about how dumb it is that children and adults are trying to cheat at learning. You can't cheat learning. So why do people try and succeed? Because we arent actually asking for learning we are asking for something else.
Personally I think the whole endeavour is a waste of energy. Unless there's a massive civilisational collapse, humans will always have LLMs as writing aides, so trying to teach them to write without one is teaching them a skill they'll never need to use.
If you want to teach them to reason on the spot, then go back to requiring them to orally put forth and defend an idea.
I have been thinking for the last couple years that we may end up in that spot. It is more labor intensive, and perhaps a little more susceptible to bias, but pretty hard to fake. At the end of the term, each student has half an hour with the professor (or a TA) where they discuss the content of the class. It should be quickly apparent who knows the material well enough and who skipped too many lectures.
Unfortunately, the way I write, (like any well educated Indian) is a rather verbose, formal and rather florid in it's manner, and with no fewer than 3 conjuctives (when I don't want the reader to understand what I just wrote) per sentence. This style is for good or bad understood by turnitin as being AI generated.
So, I have had to unfortunately simplify and write in a more stilted manner, just to be able to submit my assignment.
It only sorta worked, but failed basis m basic "formalism" tests. So could not be directly used.
The writing style and vocabulary expected by Indian universities is a style of English that has not been used in England for 80 or so years. It is uniquely frozen in time, florid, and all together horrid. (I had to make it rhyme, sorry)
Unless you are writing poetry or art (where ocasionally this makes sense, to avoid censorship for instance, or to make a point), that's just bad writing. Should you get penalized for plagiarism? No. Should you get bad grades for writing like this? Probably yes.
If a tree falls and nobody heard it, did it actually fall?
Also relevant, this is for my final year engineering project, not a writing course.
The report that I write is not even read by those who grade my project, rather, the page count is checked, and a small amount of sanity-check-reading to make sure I have not just filled the pages with cinema songs is done. My grade is decided by my relationship with the panel, nothing else, not the quality of work done, not the idea, not the deliverables shown.
I am absolutely sick and tired of this.
I just wanted to do a good job, and write good code, but no, that does not move the needle one bit with our panel of reviewers.
(Pardon my rant, but I really did want to do a great job with my project, but my university did not want to reward it)
At any rate, I can get into a whole rant about incompetent lecturers at many Indian universities, but that is way off topic.
Yes, you could still use AI for any take home work, but I think what forces students to AI isn't the lack of will to do the work. It's the "I have a 5 page paper due tomorrow and I haven't started" cliff.
I mean, writing education is messed up in so many ways, but if I'm being realistic this is the path forward.
It’s hard to use AI to do this, and if a student did use AI effectively like this, they’ll still learn a lot about the topics, because they’re forced to think about it.
Imagine, rather, that you have these kids actively use AI to help them write an essay, but make them provide the transcripts so you can so how they think and use the tool. Perhaps even sit with them and use the AI tools and show how they can be used as a guide, as long as you don’t take the responses as facts like in an encyclopedia, but rather use AI like a parent who is getting but doesn’t quite remember the details. You’d not trust it implicitly but just use as a guide. Perhaps someone should make an AI that isn’t so sure of itself, and suggests ways to research things yourself but points you towards the closest cardinal direction to your question?
It doesn't even work, its non deterministic, and most importantly - if the teacher is familiar with the student's writing it should be pretty obvious if this is a fake or not based on something they can be observed doing.
LLMs have grammatically correct blithering nailed. One amusing result is that Derrida and his followers now sound like an LLM with the temperature medium high.
Maybe we should be teaching kids to not write like that.
Mandatory XKCD.[2]
I really wonder why these tools even show detection percentages when they’re meaninglessly low. A 17% result from a classifier model is totally meaningless. You could show a well-trained animal classifier the first Google Images result for “cat” and it would still say there’s a 17% chance it’s a cow. Showing low-likelihood predictions will do nothing but freak people out and confuse them.
I like the relative mobility in the Indian system since anyone can swot to the test, but clearly the US system is much more enjoyable for a wider variety of students and they have a wider range of skills.
I think I'd like for my children to have a composite of the two. I dislike neverending homework and love tests because spiky activity allows for lots of self-directed exploration and the tests allow for evaluation. Though it's like that this is because I, personally, am quite capable with tests: I operate very well under time pressure and have an exceptional memory.
I would argue that for the exams that actually matter (the JEE, say) PCM scores are very poor indicators of success in the chosen branch, and are an arbitrary selection criteria, and not very removed from a lottery.
A better system may include psychometric pairing for branch of engineering opted?
My argument is essentially that if I like (say) Civil engineering more, then I would have demonstrated some additional knowledge in parts of the desired branch, so testing that should in theory give better civil engineering graduates, instead of people who joined it for the tag of the institute and not for the branch?
But again, I am a _bit_ salty about the 12th standard exam treadmill in india.
- demonstrates a floor of intelligence and skill
- is demonstrably fair
- has high dynamic range
- can be trained against by the conscientious
I think the JEE behaves well against these criteria. In addition, affirmative action is explicitly handled by quotas. This gives a predictable system with known constraints. When participating, you know your targets. Personally, if I know my constraints ahead of time, and I can optimize to them by studying, and the studying is directionally useful to education, that is sufficient to me. If I fail, it's on me and I can accept that.
I have batch mates who hate CS, but chose it simply for the placements, and wholeheartedly believe that they are a wasted seat, because they are not interested in learning the subject.