Comment by yellowapple
7 days ago
> that the cost of catching cheaters is significantly higher than the cost of cheating
This is tackling the problem from the wrong direction. The right direction would be to make it harder to cheat in the first place. For example: if the student submits an essay, and that student is able to coherently and accurately answer any questions asked about the essay in a face-to-face conversation, then that student is probably the genuine author of that essay.
I agree with you that a face-to-face q&a is a reasonably good way to detect low-effort cheating, but I'll still quibble a bit:
- I don't think this lowers the cost of detection as much as you imagine. You still need to know the paper better than the student and have to sacrifice already tight instruction/planning/grading time to have all of these conversations. Even if you catch enough to successfully deter most, it likely means not covering something else. It won't be too hard to catch low-effort cheaters who can't be bothered to read the paper, but you're on the low-leverage side of an arms race with the remaining students. You have experience on your side and they can't know what you'll ask, but they outnumber you and can certainly read the paper and use LLMs to quiz them on it. You have to invest your effort without knowing how each student prepared, so you'll spend about as much effort on every low-effort cheat as you do on the highest-effort cheat you are prepared to catch.
- Not sure it is "from the wrong direction" since both approaches raise the cost of cheating and lower the cost of detecting it.
- While this does avoid encouraging students to dumb down their work, it does still raise the cost of not-cheating. Unless you surprise the students with these conversations, the ones that care most will still anxiously prepare.