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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

A couple of things from inside the belly of higher education.

Students have always cheated, yes, but the barrier is UNBELIEVABLY low now. Take a picture, get the answer. This has never been a thing on such a large scale. No one knows how to deal with this.

In person testing is a solution for most issues, but not all. First off, class time is precious. I shouldn't have to waste incredibly valuable instruction time doing the actual test. We should be reviewing the test and learning things. Second, on-line classes are massive for many if not all schools. Requiring students to show up physically is both inconvenient, and (depending on which accrediting agency you are accredited by) not allowed.

It's not that simple. No problem of this scope will be simple.

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The barrier has always been low. It's just lowering for certain kinds of assignments. I took a lot of blue book exams 10+ years ago, and heard all about how to write on the inside of the label of a water bottle. As far as I know, this is still the SOTA cheating method for tests like the SAT or other pen-and-paper exams.

What seems to have shifted is that the consequences are getting far less severe. Cheating on an exam used to be an expulsion-worthy offense. Now it's just "you get a zero" at most. In that environment, why not cheat? Why not be blatant about it?

I wonder if lack of consequences might be related to lack of proof. Cheating in the past looked like reusing an essay you found online or paying off someone to write it for you -- methods that offer a definitive way to prove it happened.

AI isn't particularly provable. Worse, a lot of professors are lazy and will rely on tools that tell them something was produced with AI; and like any tool, they'll produce false positives. Just imagine being expelled for writing because you don't make spelling mistakes, and do use em-dashes, bullet points and typographic emphasis.

> I wonder if lack of consequences might be related to lack of proof.

Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/rbzJTTDO9f4

Perhaps the only way to really to provide evidence against cheating accusations is to also provide a version history of the document the student worked on over time, plus notes (hand written preferably), and so on?

That would exponentially increase the workload of educators though, so it's unlikely to be taken up.

(I'm an instructor in a vocational field - students need to demonstrate their skills to achieve qualification, rather than write essays/reports/etc. - so AI isn't as a significant deal as it is in the academic fields.)

That would be a good theory, but punishments for cheating have been declining for 10+ years. Lack of proof is still a problem in many cases.

Not taking up precious lecture time is a simple logistical fix — testing facilities. The professor should not have to do menial work like proctoring an exam.

> In person testing is a solution for most issues, but not all. First off, class time is precious. I shouldn't have to waste incredibly valuable instruction time doing the actual test.

Have a final be worth 50% of a student's grade. Have very cheap by the hour proctors proctor the test. Even if it was just during class time, it's just one class. To ensure pretty fair grading, it seems a small price to pay.

> Second, on-line classes are massive for many if not all schools. Requiring students to show up physically is both inconvenient, and (depending on which accrediting agency you are accredited by) not allowed.

Mkay, make them come in one time. If it's online only, then... whelp you're out of luck. Although, I think the students were cheating mightily on online-only before AI.

It is that simple, if what you're looking for is a fair grading framework.

>Requiring students to show up physically is both inconvenient, and (depending on which accrediting agency you are accredited by) not allowed.

Wait until you get into the workforce and you have to be in the office for 5 days for RTO

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