Comment by davrosthedalek
8 hours ago
Absolutely university has to change. But it's not a simple change. I say this as a professor for Physics:
My colleagues say "We must fully embrace AI as a tool". I agree. But how do you teach it? It's a moving target, and you can't even give homework like: "Research <this topic> with an LLM of your choice, and submit the transcript" because they can do that, or they can just copy the task into an LLM and have the LLM do it. It becomes meta quite quickly.
And independent what and how we teach, we have to change how we assess a students learning result:
The first thing we have to change is that homework needs to be completely ungraded. Reviewed and corrected, yes, but not part of the grade. That's the only way to make sure that people who don't want to cheat have to cheat anyway to compete with those that do.
Second, all exams have to be in person. Online, cheating is so trivial it's not even funny (many students are so stupid about it that we have a pretty clear idea what's going on). In person, we have maybe 2-3 years until we have to make sure its proctored and people's glasses are checked. I think in less than 10 years, local mobile AI will be good enough so even a Faraday cage will not help.
Maybe we have to go to oral tests only.
Of course, none of this scales. Some of our intro courses have a thousand students.
Any ideas are much appreciated.
> Maybe we have to go to oral tests only.
"Perfect homework, blank stares: Why colleges are turning to oral exams to combat AI" https://apnews.com/article/college-oral-exam-ai-chatgpt-7795...
I feel like German university was already well "LLM proof". Come to class or not, no ones keeping track and it doesn't matter for grade. There are regular exercises, but they are not graded; you can submit them if you want it corrected to check your understanding, but there is also gonna be a short presentation going through it in class. Your entire grade is a 2-3h written exam at the end, no materials, no remote, no books, no multiple choice.
That's how it used to be. At least at my alma mater, it changed a lot when they switched from Diploma to Master/Bachelor
>Of course, none of this scales. Some of our intro courses have a thousand students.
Any ideas are much appreciated.
Oral exams graded by LLMs? Scale with the improving models. Based on GPQA Diamond results they're mostly at PhD level for subject trivia anyway.
The problem here is that it will work for now, but how do you make sure the LLM talks to the student, and not a different LLM? I guess vision models FTW?
In the end, will be build a GAN loop?
Why am I now reminded of corewars?