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This approach does not really solve the core issue. In practice, students often do poorly when evaluation is concentrated in one end of term exam. It also pushes many students to cram at the end of the term instead of learning steadily.

A better approach is to rethink what we assess and how we assess it. Research shows that the design of assessments plays an important role in academic integrity. Assignments that require original thinking and regular engagement can reduce incentives to cheat and improve learning outcomes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...

Why not multiple exams? In fact, why not many exams?

Sure, it requires more resources, but it shouldn't require much more:

- We've had multiple exams before AI, and I don't see how AI makes it any harder. Obviously these are closed-book

- Schools should already be banning phones in class (and colleges have insane tuitions, they can afford more exams)

- The students who go out of their way to cheat - as long as they're a minority, let them. Why not? Either they'll fail later in life, or they didn't need to learn the material because they're pathological fakers (even if you won and forced them to learn the material, they'd probably still fake their way out of using it). Then, I doubt you need much proctoring to ensure that most students don't cheat, because most of the smart students are generally smart enough to know that actually learning the material is probably important (or if the material is probably not important, it doesn't matter if the students all cheat...)

Meanwhile, downsides of one exam:

- Disadvantages students who get overly stressed about unrecoverable exams, or have a particularly bad day on the exam

- Many students will blow off the (ungraded) assignments and put off actually learning until the end

- Less graded content (especially if the exam isn't overly long, which would disadvantage some students)

I got diagnosed with cancer just before finals in the first semester of my senior year. Sure, it kill my chances at graduating Summa Cum Laude, and I didn’t make the Dean’s list that semester even though I worked my ass off, as usual. Frustrating, but that’s life. I should not, however, have failed that semester, which I would have if only the final week’s assignments were counted. People have bad weeks. In most white collar jobs I’d have probably been able to take some time for myself, maybe given someone else my most urgent tasks, and likely been given plenty of leeway. Even doctors, lawyers, etc. People deserve to have bad weeks without losing months of work.

Why a single test at the end of the semester? Why not allow the student to demonstrate mastery at anytime during the semester when they are ready? Then they can move on to the next objective, or, if they fall short, continue to study until they meet the objectives.

Of course, creating good exams is difficult, but you have to do that either way.

I don't disagree with you that a reasonable way to cope with the current problems is to ensure everything that "counts" is done in a controlled environment, but pedagogy and its goals are vast.

There are things you learn from spending several days structuring a 20-page argument that you will not learn (and cannot assess) from oral examination or a 5-paragraph essay written in a blue book.

Throw in some oratory presentations as well and that sounds like a curriculum.

What exactly would the goal of this change be?

Came here to say the same thing. The AI problem is functionally no different to the paid essay writers. Grade everything at face value, and then have people write essays under exam conditions for grading.

Schools stopped doing that because students largely refuse to prepare. Testing throughout the year is like a CI pipeline and is shown to work better for the median student.

> one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. The resulting grade depends on that, and that alone.

I love this idea. And if a student is having a really bad day, or their dog just died, or they have bad cramps, or they have a hard time dealing with the intense stress of your entire grade being decided in one exam... well, those loser students can just fuck right off.

I'm always startled about how HN approaches these topics. When we have a press release from a university about how researchers can detect thoughts via fMRI, we have no issue with the claim. But if a vendor makes a pretty believable claim that there are repetitive statistical patterns in LLM output, it's all of sudden treated the same as palm reading.

The problem isn't that AI detection doesn't work. State of the art in this field is pretty solid. The only issue is that it's probabilistic, so it sometimes fails, and when it does, we have nothing else in situations where you actually want to know if someone put in the work.

So what are you proposing, exactly? That we run a large-scale experiment of "let's see what happens if children don't actually need to learn to do thinking and writing on their own"? The reality is that without some form of compulsion, most kids would rather play video games / scroll through TikTok all day. Or that we move to a vastly more resource-intensive model where every kid is given personalized instruction and watched 1:1?

Does crapping on the average school's deep well of expertise for evaluating how effectively AI software solutions address their problems somehow fix the underlying problem (that the cost of catching cheaters is significantly higher than the cost of cheating)?

(This is roughly the same problem as evaluating software that only does an approximation of what it claims to do.)

(Aside: AI-based variations on this theme are in the early stages of proliferating across our society. They're being developed by many people using this forum and being sold to our schools, businesses, governments, and other organizations with little regard to whether they actually do what they claim.)

One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-reading you have to write that way, or your post will spawn all kinds of really stupid tangent strings of posts (and they still do anyway, sometimes). And, yes, the excessive and too-close-together repetitiveness you mention is part of that.

The result is that a ton of web forum/social-media posting would, in any other context, be fairly poor writing (even if it's otherwise got no problems) simply because of the the extra crap and contortions required to minimize garbage posts by poor readers who are, themselves, allowed to post to the same medium.

This is in addition to, though not wholly separate from, the tendency toward combativeness in online posting.

One thing that helps: remember that there are many people reading your response, one of them possibly being the person you replied to. Write for the audience, not specifically for the person you're responding to. It's a rare thing for someone to change their mind; it's a much more common thing for others to read your comment and gain something from it.

> I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.

Ask more questions. It takes work when dealing with smart people who think beyond the question you asked, adding their own context, and then replying with a different question. But those are the people who are willing to engage with you. Statements without questions can be ignored, and people who engage with different questions than the ones that you asked can be safely ignored as those who don't want to engage.

The cure to a purely adversarial conversation is educated curiosity. The educated part being being able to differentiate the threads that will lead down a tribalistic path vs those that will lead down an exploratory one.

More important than all of the above, is knowing when to walk away. It's barely a majority, but that barely majority "want" to waste your time. Ignore their DOS attempt, and save your time for people who want to engage, fairly. The fairly part being the most important.

It might not mean much, and it won't lead to an interesting conversation, but here's one that has read your comment, and every single word resonated like a tuning fork.

I find that a little faith goes a long way here: assume that you have a higher audience and speak to them accordingly.

Don't let the loud ones confuse you: normal, reasonable people (with normal, reasonable thoughts, just like yours) might not always reply, but they also read you.

I'm guessing you mean politics, but surely this is topic, person, time, and space dependent.

For example, I abhor talking about modern politics. If it’s election season and I’m being asked to cast a vote or take some other specific civic action, then I understand it’s my civic duty to understand the situation and make a decision accordingly and I do.

But if it’s March and there’s really nothing specific I can do as a result of this particular conversation, I would probably also be in your camp of the “unwilling”. I would much rather chat about something else, or nothing at all.

I'm also assuming you're referring to in-person communication. If it's online communication, all bets are off. It's unlikely you're having a linear conversation and these days you're probably not even talking to a person.

> So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me.

If they don't want to listen, why waste the time?

> So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand.

If they don't want it, why stuff it down their throats? Aren't they allowed to have their own ideas?

> I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.

I'm told blogging works for some. I don't really know how you build an audience, though, and it's hard to keep going (first-hand experience) without one.

> If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted.

But wouldn't this apply to any cheating method? I don't think educators would be able to tell the difference between using a calculator, getting answers from previous tests, resubmitting assignments, etc.

The point has always been the act of writing itself. What you write about is almost irrelevant; it’s that you spent the time writing, that you had ideas in your head, and that you squeezed them onto the page.

I had fun with those because they only care about the quality of the writing not the content so I would make sure that none of my facts or references were real.

Being able to write in a formulaic manner is a skill though. Not being able to write properly is not great for communication.

I think peak writing was probably greatest generation. We lost the art of correspondence in the years since.

em-dashes have been house style for where I've worked for over a couple decades. If people don't like it, F them. I'm not going to change how I write because people may think it make me more AI-like.

Right? It’s the obvious question:

why are they using software to detect software?

I can detect AI written prose in less than five seconds; I would expect a trained teacher to be able to do that as well.

Do you have any evidence to back this up or is it speculative?

My institution subscribes to TurnItIn's AI detector. The documentation is quite clear that the system is tuned in a manner that produces a significant number of false negatives and minimizes false positives. They also state that they don't report anything under "20% AI-generated" content.

So the marketing I've seen is intended to reassure skittish administrators that the software is not going to generate false accusations.

That being said, I have no idea whether the marketing claims are true. The software is a black box.

Here's one vote for just be the witch if that's what people need from you.

Just make it be what you want to say and how you want to say it. And when they come after you, shame them to the best of your ability or treat them like they are not there.

AI only uses big words to engage in elegant variation, not to compress information.

If someone calls an article like this a "jeremiad" I know they're a human.

I don’t think this is a good long term solution. LLMs can do easy language substitutions and you can even force them to add errors. So relying on that alone won’t work as people intentionally make things look more “human.”

> now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt.

I've begun downvoting each and every entry that questions the authenticity of a comment or article.

I don't even bother if the claim is true or not. A text can be AI-generated and interesting, or human-written and dumb.

I have never really gotten the impression that HN or Reddit commentators write in any particular way overall.

LinkedIn, OTOH....

I put a piece of text in one and the only line it flagged is the one line I actually wrote.

[flagged]

This is true, I know someone that has read multiple versions of the bible and their writing style became very similar to that. There's a term for it, I just forgot what the term was

Avoid the theory-heavy disciplines. You won't be told what to think (as often) if you take History and Geography rather than Sociology and Gender Studies.

An essay is a good gauge of how one can organise their thoughts, argue a position, respond to a stimulus.

In short it’s a good way measure thinking.

Public Schools. I think terror there is built as a feature, not a bug. So be afraid.

But keep in mind, it may have always been this way. God bless those few cool teachers in each school who are aware of this and work to rescue a few who need it.

Love changes everything. Good teachers matter.

> essay writing is no longer a viable form of assessment.

Of course it is. In person, with an unseen prompt/question. By hand or not doesn’t really matter as we can airgap or just monitor via software when in class.

> This is what terrifies me about the public school system.

This has nothing to do with Public School in particular. This is impacting private and university education too.

> I've been thinking about this in product contexts too.

Have you considered using your own words to express those thoughts?

Perhaps they had trouble enumerating every possible input to test their detector.