This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sure as hell ain't my students; it's been a steady decline since ChatGPT came out and I think I may have failed more students than ever over unfinished projects. You can't GPT the semester long project, there's a paper trail and data to collect can it becomes super clear who is AI brained now...
Edit: PS, grade inflation has been a thing for a few decades now, btw; the As aren't the problem so much as the mush brain.
The good students are still getting A grades naturally. And the bad students are getting A grades with ChatGPT. A grades for everybody! (Until we get to the closed-book, in-person test at the end of the year...)
Education needs to change. Including punishment for using LLMs.
We are allowing LLMs for all of our homeworks. As long as you can solve the problems in the indicated way with a reasonable answer.
In case you are not sure about the "indicated way", there are practice questions with detailed step-by-step solutions for each hw problem that you just have to change the numbers/equations a bit and you'll get points.
What we've noticed is that the year-after-year averages are significantly higher, especially this year. However, students are bringing in details that we explicitly didn't go over in lecture and putting that on the homework (e.g. Delayed branching in Computer Architecture, because it's a random quirk of MIPS that even assembly programmers don't have to deal with). None of these details are ever mentioned in lecture or the practice homeworks (in a few cases, they are mentioned with the explicit wording "do not worry about this now")
We can only assume people are copying the homework into LLMs and copying the results straight down. The latest exam had a question where students were asked to analyze a specific chunk of assembly code to deduce certain properties about it. Approximately 20-30% of the students didn't know the FORMAT to answer it, despite it literally being item 1 on last week's homework.
And when I say format, I don't mean exactly "you must write these exact words or you lose points". It's literally just point out "line A and B have this property X because of attribute Y". Just including ABXY as shown in the practice homework is enough. But apparently people are too lazy to read a 10 bullet point answer...
As someone who works in ed tech these days, I’m kind of down for them as a study tool. For example, synthesizing notes and turning them into flashcards, practice tests, etc. I find that stuff to be suuuper handy if I’m trying to learn something.
But for cheating, yah, fuck that noise. A lot of classes are moving back to pencil and paper because of this, and I totally support that.
Before you can punish for using LLMs, you need to be able to reliably detect the use of LLMs, including guarding against false positives.
Current AI checkers are woefully inadequate and prone to errors.
Before you can punish for using LLMs, you need to be able to reliably detect the use of LLMs, including guarding against false positives.
You can tell they're using an LLM if they have a computer out during the pen-and-paper test.
Surely this won’t cause any problems at all
