College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT

Technology@lemmy.world – 889 points – 1 years ago

College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT::The growing number of students using the AI program ChatGPT as a shortcut in their coursework has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.

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I think a central point you're overlooking is that we have to be able to assess people along the way. Once you get to a certain point in your education you should be able to solve problems that an AI can't. However, before you get there, we need some way to assess you in solving problems that an AI currently can. That doesn't mean that what you are assessed on is obsolete. We are testing to see if you have acquired the prerequisites for learning to do the things an AI can't do.

AI isn’t as important to this conversation as I seem to have implied. The issue is us, ie humans, and what value we can and should seek from our education. What AI can or can’t do, IMO, only affects vocational aspects in terms of what sorts of things people are going to do “on the job”, and, the broad point I was making in the previous post, which is that AI being able to do well at something we use for assessment is an opportunity or prompt to reassess the value of that form of assessment.
Whether AI can do something or not, I call into question the value of exams as a form of assessment, not assessment itself. There are plenty of other things that could be used for assessment or grading someone’s understanding and achievement.
The real bottom line on this is cost and that we’re a metric driven society. Exams are cheap to run and provide clean numbers. Any more substantial form of assessment, however much they better target more valuable skills or understanding, would be harder to run. But again, I call into question how valuable all of what we’re doing actually is compared to what we could be doing, however more expensive and whether we should really try to focus more on what we humans are good at (and even enjoy).

AI can't do jack shit with any meaningful accuracy anyway so it's stupid to compare human education to AI blatantly making shit up like it always does