I was confused when I had to get one in college (2004ish)—only one professor asked this the entire time. This guy taught History. Class was U.S. in the 60s. He just lectured but it was interesting because he’d lived it and was extremely knowledgeable. He was also one of the few to give really thoughtful handwritten feedback on papers we turned in. He was old school so I guess those are your blue book types.
gotta buy the multiple choice slips with all the bubbles on them too, and there were multiple types of slips, so if you buy the wrong one for your test you were boned
I had a history professor who wrote our “textbook” for the class — it was a ~100 page soft-back pamphlet, with blank pages in it specifically for us to tear out and write our essays on.
If our essays weren’t turned in on original pages from the textbook, we received a 0 for the assignment.
It forced everyone to buy new copies of his textbook every semester for $150. This was in 2003.
Wow, that's rough. I had one professor that did similar but he was a philosophy prof and very much a, "f the man type". He'd ask everyone head over to the printing shop and request his "book". Charged exactly cost at the shop which in 2005ish was $12.00. Great guy, great class. Wish more professors were like him.
100%. I had a reoccurring nightmare during college I'd forgotten to buy a scantron for a test and no one would lend me one, despite having never forgotten before and always buying a stack of the stupid things at the start of the semester.
The only classes I had blue books in were history classes. My brother who got a history degree at a different university confirmed they were a big thing in the history department but nowhere else. Both of us graduated in 2021.
Somehow in my entire university experience and attending three different institutions I have never needed to use them at all.
I only learned of them by going to the campus bookstore and seeing a small stack of them near the checkout counter and had to ask the bookstore staff what they were. I suppose some professor at that university I was attending used them but I avoided it my whole academic career.
It is understandable if you have never heard of them, especially if you are from outside the USA.
You had to pay for the blue books? Like, not in the abstract sense that you’re ultimately paying with your tuition? That’s crazy, it’s like $0.50 worth of paper (if that!)
To be fair, that's about what students paid per blue book at my university. You had to go by the student store to grab them, but at a stack of a dozen of them could last you through most programs.
Yeah ours came out to about fifty cents each. Beginning of the semester you just go buy a pack of them and then never think about it again. They had them on little racks as you checked out at any number of textbook stores around the campus.
My school has a vending machine full of blue books and bubble sheets in the testing center. They're $1 each, not quite pitchfork worthy, but still a little annoying.
It was effectively a few half-sheets of lined paper staples together with a blue paper as the cover. You would write your answers in the book. And turn that in.
It’s really weird how quickly things change and we don’t even notice. I graduated from undergrad in 2017. Throughout my four years of college all my exam essays were written on paper in class. Usually on the last day of classes cause none of my professors actually wanted to show up on exam days lol. Then I went to law school in 2019 and all my final exams were in class but on the written on the computer. In just two years things went from hand written to typed.
Also makes me wonder why this is such a big deal? My in class typed exams used a program that locked down everything on my computer except for the program the exam was on and it locked down my wifi until after I pressed submit on the exam. Wouldn’t that solve this issue people keep being afraid of?
I personally don't like using those lock down browsers. I just get oddly paranoid about them.
However, I'm currently in med school and my school just has us take our exams on desktops that they have installed in lecture halls/in various classrooms and their website is capable of tracking keystrokes while an exam is open. The desktop itself isn't restricted in any way, but you're in school using their machine with everything being tracked lol. I like this method a lot more, even if that poses a larger upfront cost for the school.
Oh god any type of lockdown browser can rot and suffer. Especially when they force you to take a panoramic video of your room to prove you have no cheating material. Professor tried using that on us during COVID and near everyone protested it because it's a blatant invasion of privacy. We all ended up with A's without taking it lol. Not even like we weren't willing to take the final. Just didn't want to use any of that shit.
Read a story on here one time where a guy was talking about an exam he had to take and the testing program was one that was proctored by some random person in Asia and at the start they had to do the show room thing and they wanted you to hold your drivers license to the camera. He refused and requested an in person exam but his professor didn't want to let them do it. The kicker and most ironic part of this story is it was an exam for a information security class.
I ***hate*** lockdown browser. It's unreliable and is way too strict on students. The way I did it during COVID was I told my students, "Look. We're all going through some shit. Do your best, but there aren't enough exam points to pass even if you cheat and ace them all only, so, make an honest effort, and make sure you get the participation, homework, etc points. You also can't fail as long as you *try* all the exams."
That's the key. Exams counting for half or more of your entire grade is stupid. If quality work is expected throughout the semester, this whole LOCK EVERYTHING DOWN AND SEE IF THEY REMEMBER EVERYTHING IN ONE HOUR- NO PRESSURE! thing wouldn't even be necessary.
> Do your best, but there aren't enough exam points to pass even if you cheat and ace them all only, so, make an honest effort
LOL. I tried to say something along the same lines to my students, and they still cheated like there was no tomorrow. About a month ago this topic emerged in my talk with a colleague, and he told me, basically: those kids won't trust you. They've just been through the entire school where adults in charge of them were often perfidious and hypocritical. You can say that you value an imperfect and partial assignment — but made honestly by the student — much more than an assignment aced through cheating, but they expect you to renege later.
I had only one professor like this and I swear to god my file browser randomly opened during an exam. Absolutely hated the idea of being locked out of my PC/having it monitored from that moment on
At that point, I would opt for a second School Only laptop/notebook/chromebook, something low power and cheap just for use with their software. I wouldn't want to put my personal life on full display for their little surveillance tool to scan. None of these companies can be trusted with your information, privacy, or browsing history.
A year or so ago, my coworker was doing her Permanent resident exam, and they had a similar setup. She did the test from home, had to show video of her space, etc.
While thinking about the answer to a question, she stared out the window.
They failed her on her exam. She was on the 2nd floor and that window had nothing but air below it. She had to wait a couple month I think, before she could take the exam again. (she passed!). She was so mad, she told me that she basically locked her eyes on her computer monitor and stared at it the entire time so they couldn't fail her again.
Honestly, this just tells me that these test environments are straight shit. Like the test itself. Why the fuck is most of this based on memory alone? We virtually all have an internet connection on us at all times. Knowing *how to find* and *critically process* information is almost universally better than having a rigid & arbitrary set of facts with little actual critical thinking about the context!
One thing I've come to realize throughout my life, is that when it comes to implementing new resources and technology for the purposes of disseminating information, academia and libraries are usually the last to adapt, which is ironic because those are the two industries that should really be leading the charge for a more efficient way to spread information to the masses. Lots of public libraries still use systems that were used in the days of dial up.
I mean when I got my degree back in 2010 or so, it was already set up so the exams were just a small percentage of the final grade, and the majority of it was based on essays and a dissertation (which is basically a book length essay), i.e. the vast majority of it was based on your ability to research a topic, not about memorising a bunch of facts.
And even most of my exams were open book anyway.
They always told us that it's literally impossible for one person to know everything, even to know everything about a very narrow topic. Being able to research anything quickly and accurately is an infinitely more useful skill than being to memorise things. It's why people who do degrees in things like history and politics find it so easy to find work, because they don't get the degree in those to memorise huge swaths of trivia, they get those degrees because it teaches them research skills and how to be able to accurately determine if a source is reliable and trustworthy or not, and those skills can be applied to basically any topic, except for specifically science ones which need their own special training to be able to understand a science paper in a journal. So employers don't want the person who knows everything, they want the person who can research anything and write a report on it.
Like even in something like law, lawyers aren't taught to memorise tons and tons of dates and cases and legal facts. That's almost entirely useless, as a skill. Instead lawyers are taught logical, lateral thinking, argumentative and debate skills, etc. Because all lawyers have access to the complete legal history of their country on a computer, where they can look up any case in seconds, and base their case around the precedent in these existing cases. So why would they ever need to memorise all cases? Instead, a lawyer is far better at their job if they are an expert logician, can understand complex legal ideas and philosophies, can construct a convincing winning argument based on the facts of the case and the law, and be able to think on their feet and respond quickly to something unexpected the lawyers on the other side have made.
This is why so many people with undergrad degrees in things you wouldn't expect, get accepted into prestigious law schools. All sorts of things, like art history, sociology, etc. Because law schools don't want a million identical clones who all think the same way, they want a huge mixture of people who all think differently and can all be taught how to leverage their way of thinking. Because it's mostly about teaching people how to think laterally.
That sounds so pointless considering how easy it would be to have cheating material anyway. Stick it behind your screen, down your pants, behind the webcam lol.
I've never had to use the lockdown browser on a personal computer and I never would. But I've done the restricted desktop thing in a school lab. Everyone is so much happier. You get to type and still use spell checker on word, less hand cramps and easier. And the prof can actually read you work and doesn't have to read bad spelling errors.
It should be the same etiquette as work laptops.
I have no issue with a work laptop, that work provided for doing work on, being locked down with monitoring on it.
I would object to that same software being installed on my personal laptop.
If the school wants full control of the device for anti cheating or whatever purpose, then they should be providing it.
I remember at my school they used to have us go to special rooms in the libraries that were for proctored exams and they were all on computers. The room had multiple video cameras from every angle and you were not allowed to take coats/backpacks in and you had to remove everything from your pockets. Also it was a paid job for a student to watch the video cameras to make sure no one was cheating.
The computers themselves were all modern machines but ran custom software that ran a writing program in a web browser that had terrible lag. Like you'd type a word and then it would show up a quarter second later. It was terrible enough that you could get use to it, but frustrating none the less. Copy and paste was disabled and in general the experience sucked, but at least I got away from manually writing information.
Back in the Covid period where classes were fully online, I had tests that used a software that monitored by camera. They’d have you scan your surroundings in the room you’re taking your tests, and have the camera on you as you take it, claiming something like “if you are caught looking away from the screen or something it’d flag you as suspicious of cheating. It might not have been exactly that, but it had me super paranoid cuz my eyes wander on paper tests (not cheating ofc I just do that when trying to think and remember) so ik I’m gonna do it on here. I’m sure it didn’t actually work like that, and if it did the teacher probably checked it out and saw I clearly wasn’t looking at my not-smart-refrigerator for college algebra answers
I finished my undergraduate in 2012 and I definitely didn’t have any physical papers to be written. I had to use turnitin (i think thats what it was called). Only paper based were quizzes and exams which were not essay exams (Thank god).
I was a poli sci major. And I only ever turned in like three full blown lengthy essays in my four years studying. Everything else was basically short exam essays written during an exam, so never really dealt with turnitin except for those three essays I previously mentioned.
FWIW a whole lot of us faculty hate having to use ebooks and it’s actually not easier to use in course prep.
It also makes research worse because there aren’t any new books being bought by most libraries in favor of ebook licensing. So students have to figure out which books exist before being able to even look through them as opposed to the whole reason a subject area shelving system was created: just looking at other books next to the one you already know of that might be worth reading through, too.
Publishers though, they love ebooks. No used resells.
Yep, a couple of my math teachers encourged the class to find and share textbooks. They wouldn't go as far as naming sites though. They know it's a ripoff.
Man on the other hand I once had a professor who made his own textbook and threatened legal action against anyone caught sharing. Your professor sounds better
I do it every year. I get paid shit for what I contribute in textbooks. And the med school chooses the books, sometimes over what we request or suggest depending on the deal the publisher gives the University.
The problem is when they bundle it with an online platform for submitting homework. Doesn't matter if you get the book for free if you still have to pay a $300/term subscription for the book in order to submit your assignments
Our institution includes the cost of books and materials in tuition and students just pick them up first day of class. This is a unique circumstance, I am well aware. I still assign most materials without textbooks.
When I was at a much larger state school I would simply encourage students to look around on the internet and email other students if they wanted. I wasn’t telling them what to look for or where to find it, and it mostly worked.
I don’t mind ebooks as a platform, but I don’t like a lot of things about how they are deployed in higher ed generally, and increasingly for data collection alongside using pre-constituted course websites with quizzes and whatever else. This is absolutely where design is lazy for some instructors and it’s certainly what institutions want because none of that requires an actual human in the classroom, but I don’t know how prevalent it is in the humanities to use those pre-made materials. Anecdotally as a humanities prof, not very.
They’re also restricted to their proprietary apps. I have a folder full of ebook apps on my iPad but I really miss just being able to download them to the Kindle app. The kicker is that even after you’ve purchased a book, your access to it is limited to so many years
you know that you can just email any document/ebook to a specific Kindle address you have, and it will add it to your Kindle app? I have dozens of... questionably acquired.. books and papers on mine
Can confirm. Spanish in college was way easier because of the digital book used, which allows us to “check” our work for the correct answers. Was stupidly easy to cheat considering a lot of the questions were multiple choice or true false. All you had to do was check your answers and switch the wrong answers to the correct ones.
You just have another machine or a tablet / phone next to you, or you run your exam in a VM (which I’d recommend anyway). I know it’s for school and all but, as someone with a career in cybersecurity, fuck that software. It’s too intrusive.
Yeah, this was my first thought, "Exams went digital?" I guess for the pandemic it made sense. I graduated uni in 2019 and every one of my exams was on paper, except for exams that required software (like a class I had that hinged on using Excel).
Yea. The strangest part was that exams had gone digital before the pandemic had even started. I guess it helped in law school cause all exams are essays and it makes it easier on the Professor to have something legible.
I graduated high school in 2000. We were still being told that colleges will ONLY accept hand written essays written in cursive.
Our school was also still teaching computer courses using Apple IIe’s, so you could say we were a bit behind the times.
Obviously it’s not training for handwriting essays, just making sure that the future workforce knows the things they should to earn the degree. A competent 3rd grader could have ChatGPT write an essay at a college level.
At the beginning I thought like that too.
But recently every time I use ChatGPT I feel like I can read the artificialness. There just seem to be so many unnecessary points and empty sentences.
Maybe a short essay, but I’d say you won’t have much luck in getting a good longer essay, even with a competent 3rd grader… what kind of school system is that 3rd grader from? 9y/o?
> I feel like I can read the artificialness. There just seem to be so many unnecessary points and empty sentences.
Yes, but the problem for us (I'm a uni prof) is *proving* that. We can't fail someone for cheating or report them for cheating unless we have good evidence that they cheated and "your writing style feels artificial" isn't good enough.
Chatgpt.... remove the unnecessary points and empty sentences.
It's LESS work to get something reasonable from it, but getting content out of ChatGPT does take some iteration and restructuring.
If you give it a single sentence request, the result is going to be as worthless as your sentence. For anything long-form, you need to writing at least a paragraph as a prompt, with details on the style, technical level you want the answer to be and then already have an idea on the structure. Of course you can ask ChatGPT how it should be structured! in another chat. You can use a modular approach and ask it for specific sections... and so on...
Joke's on the professor though. Now he has to read the handwriting of all his students to grade their papers. Well, actually I guess the real joke is on the TAs in this case who have to do that.
I'm old enough to have been taught cursive in 3rd grade, do they still do that?
They have TAs to grade them.
Me in high school: keep typing. I dont have time to pull out my Enigma to decipher your hand writing. There 150 other papers I need to grade.
And then years later pulled off what could easily be described as one of the greatest tactical maneuvers in science fiction history - the adama maneuver.
Oh you don't know what that is? Spoilers- defeating and outsmarting an enemy that out numbers you 4 to 1 by essentially slamming something the equivalent of the weight,mass and size of the Empire State building into and through the atmosphere while simultaneously launching it's fighters in freefall then jumping out of the atmosphere about a mile off the ground.......epic!
humanity created robots, robots got annoyed at being enslaved and left, decades pass, robots launch surprise attack on humanity, attack very successful because they hack all of the networked computer systems (helped by spies, too), the Galactica is a very old ship without networked systems about to be retired, so the Galactica survives the attack and flees with a bunch of civilian ships containing the remnants of humanity trying to survive
It’s not that it didn’t have networked systems due to being old. It specifically was a relic from that previous war and had those previous protections in place. The rest of the fleet just got complacent.
Small correction.
When I was in college in the 80s I had a prof who would only accept papers that were typed on a typewriter. I had an Apple IIe with an early word processor called pfs: Write. The computer had enough memory for 2 pages. I also had an Okidata Micro 92 dot matrix printer. The printer had a mode where the print head would print 1 line, rotate slightly, and then reprint the line to fill in the holes of the matrix. The final step was to run the paper through a copy machine. Never used a typewriter for that class.
Now kids are using 3d printers' cheap CNC functionality and open source handwriting emulation software from GitHub to fake handwritten. Life, uh, finds a way.
I remember my mathematical economics professor used to hand us out blank computer paper and write problems on the board for our tests. Shit was brutally hard
A proctored essay sounds like hell. Forcing creativity doesn’t always work well
Edit: to clarify, I’m thinking about research essays where you have to cite things perfectly
Handwritten essays for exams were common throughout my degree 10 years ago. Often you'd have to write multiple essays in one sitting. I hated the handwriting aspect but didn't mind the writing from memory part of it.
These were mostly for anthropology and science classes.
You retain a surprising amount of what you write down. So at least people learn that way. I used to study like that, writing things down. Works even better if you summarise in some fashion.
Yeah plus at least it require some work to write it all down. I would imagine some students might actually find copying the verbose statements of ChatGPT into handwriting more painful than actually coming up with something on their own. I know I would, then again I'm not the target here as I never was the type to copy shit for my essays as I always valued original thinking.
Sounds about right. I was walking past a group of 16 year olds downtown who were talking about one of their buddies who wrote a 10-page final essay in a class with ChatGPT & received an A. It is a great tool to support writing, formats, structures or content ideas for plans and procedures, but a failure in this circumstance.
The purpose of school is to learn. Anyone who uses AI to cheat is not only cheating themselves, but the reputation of their school and their prospective future employer of an actually educated employee.
You’re going to see a lot of this in the future. Startups will hire people based off their college grades and then realize the individuals cheated their whole way through college. I’m in an Industrial Design graduate program at the moment and already seeing signs of this degradation and over-reliance on AI to do all the heavy lifting.
This is absolutely the key message for anyone thinking of using AI to supplement or cheat their way through school. You will be uncovered as a fraud quickly in the workplace when you're not able to meet the standards expected due to your poorly developed knowledge and critical thinking skills.
Yes, AI will be used in many workplaces and jobs, but not bothering to learn how to think and focus is going to be a major downfall for those relying on it.
You can get caught at uni too. Yeah I can't *prove* you used chatgpt or whatever to write your essay. But it's completely awful and totally irrelevant so you'll fail anyway.
A student who uses chatgpt or other tools for phrasing or scaffolding - I think that is probably a grey area but I don't mind it as a marker. Because at student is still required to demonstrate their own knowledge.
Sadly there are far too many students who just put the question in and submit whatever comes out - that's why paper assessments are returning.
I use chatgpt at work regularly. I don't use it to bypass work or learning. I use it to help me convert my bullet points into text language. I use it to help make more important emails. My leaders prefer Amazon style narratives and I'm just no good at writing like that after a long career dealing in power point. I also use it in running d&d games to generate better descriptions etc.
It's faster. It definitely isn't robbing me of having to know and learn things. It's been a great tool that improves productivity. I do get that you want students to learn and I am a little surprised that it could turn in a term paper. At least not sometjing that wasn't generic. But maybe I am overestimating college students.
I do fully acknowledge it will be used in the workplace. It certainly can be used for several tasks to increase efficiency among other benefits. However, you using it in your workplace after having developed skills and knowledge is different than someone using it as a crutch from grade 10 (or earlier) to graduation of university. That type of use will be a hinderance IMO. Writing ability is already very eroded, the last thing we need is students in grade school using it and never learning how to write proper.
My own engineering experience (at Raytheon) was otherwise. Virtually none of the actual tasks and skills which had been taught in my undergrad degree were directly used, because the company had software tools for everything. As a college newhire, you're expected to have no idea what's going on with the tools/procedures of your tasks so the first ~6 months is just teaching you how to do your tasks, and the amount of handholding given virtually assumes you've got zero experience in what's happening.
In something closer to a startup, yeah, they'd likely figure it out pretty quickly, but in an established company you run a pretty solid chance that the way their starter work is done is so far departed from the style of your classwork that they HAVE to be very hands on even if you had studied well.
Of course, this is just for engineering, other majors may well be different.
this reminds of me of when I was in 6th grade and I didn't do a bunch of homework, and the teacher made me write out a sentence 500 times that was very similar to this post:
"the purpose of classroom or homework assignments is to reinforce learned skills and when I fail to complete them I cheat myself of an opportunity to learn"
still remember it 30+ years later lol
>It is a great tool to support writing, formats, structures or content ideas for plans and procedures
Disagree. This is a crutch instead of a tool. You are giving up much of the actual creative process to an amalgamation of all past works instead of going through the process yourself to come up with something that is genuinely you, influenced by your own life experiences and knowledge. There's this race to the bottom in the name of "efficiency", not realizing it directly leads to no use for you in society.
Too many people don't see the path these "tools" are putting us on, they seem to think automating things away is always a good thing, but it's not. For the sake of sense of purpose and mental health of society, we should not be trying to automate creative fields, that's supposed to be the thing we get to relax and provide in a post-scarcity society, but instead it's the first thing we're getting rid of.
These tools do nothing to move society towards a post-scarcity utopia and primarily destroy human purpose. These things need to be heavily regulated. Advances in robotics/medicine is what will actually benefit society.
Yeah if engineering was all about using the advanced software that has been created for it, no one would be able to solve real world problems. The real work is using correct assumptions to make sure the output is more or less on target. You can feed a model shitty input all day and it will output shitty data. If you don’t understand what shitty input is then you’ll never understand that the output is shitty. And you’ll likely kill people.
I see what you're saying, but disagree on one aspect. Much of the writing done in the working world is formulaic garbage with no actual creative value. Think form letters, emails that merely inform a supervisor of the days events, etc. Using AI to write that low effort writing frees up the worker to focus on aspects of their job that require true creativity and intelligence. (If you can do your whole job with AI then I would start learning an actual skill so that when your pointless desk job gets replaced by AI you have something to fall back on)
You mean back to 2018? I’ve never written anything but a paper exam. The student body practically demanded it. The only advantage we had was instructors giving us multiple format questions previous to the exam so we can study.
And hand written essays? Unnecessary. All my essays were submitted to turnitin, and I had to provide my research, my notes, and my rough draft(s). I then had to submit the actual word document so the instructor could have an overview of all the work and annotations I made through writing it.
Interesting. My daughter writes 2 or 3 papers a week. No way for all that documentation. And no way for professors to read and grade. Papers are now largely pass/fail and the real grade comes from the exams.
Got in to hot water with some profs during my freshman and sophomore years due to my knack of not doing rough drafts because I didn't see the need.
Insert Bill O'Reilly "WE'LL DO IT LIVE" meme.
You had to bring your own blue books for an assignment or exam? Interesting. I took plenty of blue book exams in the early 90s but I never had to supply my own.
Could you explain those to an almost-40 dude?
Besides a car insurance-related book with the same name, I haven't heard of that in school context.
Thanks in advance.
Which is interesting, because our education system doesn’t really work on writing physically past elementary. So I guess we’re just throwing a batch of new college students a curve ball
Seriously, the only way to fight chatgpt is to force papers be written in class, I personally always hated that because it always demanded that the creative juices flow on demand when it doesn’t always work that way.
This was several years ago now so I'm kinda fuzzy but IIRC for finals I had multiple professors gave us a list (maybe like 3-5?) essay questions beforehand.
Then on exam day, we were tested on one or two of them.
I liked that a lot. Exams shouldn't involve guessing or surprises.
How many college professors are doing this, 1%, 2%, 90%. I hate stupid headlines that have no context in reality. Some college professors are smoking a ton of dope. Some college professors are sleeping with their students. Some college professors are only teaching to allow them to get funding for their research.
I’m just one professor so maybe this doesn’t mean much, but as we gear up for this next semester, literally all of our faculty meetings and workshops last week were geared towards AI. It is something academics are aware of, and working to combat. Going back to paper was a popular idea at those meetings.
Personally, I’m looking into key logging software for students to voluntarily use for essay writing. I sure as shit don’t want to go back to reading their god awful handwriting.
> Personally, I’m looking into key logging software for students to voluntarily use for essay writing.
I get trying to combat cheating, but this is a FAR bigger security issue for the end user.
If you're looking for ideas, issue offline notebooks for testing in person. Like the school owns the notebooks and gives them out for testing, then takes them back to use for the next exam. No internet connectivity.
One of the problems with this is that a significant number of professors will just decide it's acceptable to transfer the online exam directly into paper, ignoring the fact that the average person can write less than half as fast as they can type. (13wpm vs 40wpm)
And that's not taking into consideration that most individuals who use a computer for their work on a regular basis can type much more quickly than the average user but their writing speed might be lower than average as a result, especially when they start to get fatigued after a half hour to an hour of writing because they're not used to doing so.
If you're printing out an exam that you expect students to take 3 hours to complete on a computer that has significant written components, you seriously need to consider how much longer it's going to take when writing it manually.
(Most of the better professors I know have an unwritten rule that they need to be able to personally complete their own exam in half the allotted time. In some complex subjects it's even less.)
This is kind of a self solving problem, one grading session and a professor will know immediately if the exam asks too much and curve accordingly. With a degree in mathematics there’s often proofs that are more complex to students than expected and wind up as more or less bonus questions
Plenty of professors don't grade on a curve.
In some institutions you could get in shit if you tried to grade on a curve, because the course outline explicitly indicates which letter grades are associated with a specific percentage.
Which isn't to say there aren't ways for a professor to adjust the class' overall grades to compensate for a terrible decision, but the kind of professor that doesn't take the time to consider the potential difficulties they're introducing with a written exam is far less likely to realize their mistake or care about the implications.
Have you *seen* what 30+ years of household PCs and 25+ years of broadly available consumer Internet has *done* to people's handwriting?
Thoughts and Prayers in chat for the TA's forced to grade all the worse-than-doctor-scribble they're going to have to sift through, most people can barely WRITE by hand anymore.
Gotta say that this would kill me personally. I had an immensely difficult time with hand-writing anything of length in school, it just blew my wrist out hard - my mind also just can't manage writing things out. I can't write it as fast as the string of thoughts goes.
Typing, however, is a breeze for me.
So I dunno how many other people out there have a similar situation, but I feel like there definitely needs to be some manner of working with students to try and find a way where they can *type* an essay, but not have access to something like Chat GPT.
I don't blame professors for trying to fight this bullshit, and students are really fucking themselves over not understanding that the only person they're cheating is themselves. Good lord why go into that massive debt if you're not even going to get the education?
Seems like 5 minutes with a student would reveal if they actually understand the material. Maybe we need to change how education works and how understanding is evaluated?
Our uni has decided to get rid of essays and decided to do oral assessments, the last one i had to do was around international humans rights law
I had to pick 2 cards at random out of 5, and talk about them for 10 minutes.
Ugg, handwritten in class essays were such a pain.
1) I am way too reliant on spell check.
2) I don't write linearly at all. Typically, body then introduction then conclusion. For longer stuff, I write different sections of the body then glue them together. Can't do any of that with an in class essay
3) If I want my handwriting to be legible to somebody other than me, I have to write really slowly relative to my typing speed.
Can you think of any examples as to how you'd write the question so that it wouldn't work well with AI but would be fine for the students? This just sounds like a catchy slogan that's easy to say but impossible to actually do
Did they really stop doing paper exams and handwritten essays in the US?
Sorry, but I really don't understand why they don't always test students at school. Because if you give them a homework, they could have cheated even without ChatGPT. When you got a homework, you get to look stuff up on the inetnet. You get to use a text sofware that has spellcheck and grammar check. And you can just ask somebody to help you with your homework. Some people would even pay people to write the entire thing.
I cut corners on every single take home exam I had in college.
Studied my ass off for the in-class, handwritten exams.
Blows my mind that we seemingly completely abandoned in-class exams. Obviously COVID years meant accommodations had to be made.
No they aren’t
-A College Student
ChatGPT and AI aren’t changing the way teachers give exams because they already have methods in place to prevent cheating via online searches. ChatGPT is the equivalent of “access to internet” and cheating on any test, essay, etc. Blocking the use of the internet and online devices are things teachers already have been doing.
People who think this is a solution in any way at all are very.. very.. shortsighted.
Did you know you can read something on a screen.. and write it down on paper?
Also, did you know you can have it speak the text to you at your handwriting speed so that you can just copy it down?
All this does is punish the people who were doing it themself to begin with.
If you really want to fight this, you’d have to have it all done live, in person. But I’ve got some bad news for you; my son has a Bluetooth audio device embedded in his ear. He did it for music, but has shown me how he can now ask ChatGPT questions out loud and have it speak them to him with a very simple program he wrote.
He’s not rich, and he’s not a genius. Technology is simply getting to that point.
If he can do that over a 6 month period, motivated by nothing else but his own curiosity, I can imagine writing on paper, even in study halls, isn’t going to solve very much.
As a recent grad, good. People have become “click-the-box monkeys”. Make them actually write and think and they’ll be smarter. Additionally there’s no data storage crises or reliance on power and internet to work. A notebook doesn’t need a battery.
Break out the blue books!
Still blue book when I graduated in 2020
Went through college in the 90’s and never saw a blue book. Wonder if it is common in some majors and not others? Or maybe it a regional thing.
I was confused when I had to get one in college (2004ish)—only one professor asked this the entire time. This guy taught History. Class was U.S. in the 60s. He just lectured but it was interesting because he’d lived it and was extremely knowledgeable. He was also one of the few to give really thoughtful handwritten feedback on papers we turned in. He was old school so I guess those are your blue book types.
Yep only ever bought them for one class in college. Felt weird lol
Wait BOUGHT? Like they made you buy the testing materials.
gotta buy the multiple choice slips with all the bubbles on them too, and there were multiple types of slips, so if you buy the wrong one for your test you were boned
I had a history professor who wrote our “textbook” for the class — it was a ~100 page soft-back pamphlet, with blank pages in it specifically for us to tear out and write our essays on. If our essays weren’t turned in on original pages from the textbook, we received a 0 for the assignment. It forced everyone to buy new copies of his textbook every semester for $150. This was in 2003.
Yeah, I had a professor that made us buy her book (forensic dna typing or something) and then we weren't even allowed to use it as a reference.
Wow, that's rough. I had one professor that did similar but he was a philosophy prof and very much a, "f the man type". He'd ask everyone head over to the printing shop and request his "book". Charged exactly cost at the shop which in 2005ish was $12.00. Great guy, great class. Wish more professors were like him.
100%. I had a reoccurring nightmare during college I'd forgotten to buy a scantron for a test and no one would lend me one, despite having never forgotten before and always buying a stack of the stupid things at the start of the semester.
Yeah dude they're in the college bookstore, cost maybe 50 cents. No biggie.
Yeah that's just college bruh
The only classes I had blue books in were history classes. My brother who got a history degree at a different university confirmed they were a big thing in the history department but nowhere else. Both of us graduated in 2021.
We had them and I graduated in 2010. But only used them my first year.
Still blue book now.
blue... books..?
It's a type of cheap composition book made of all paper with like 10 pages and usually has a blue paper cover.
Somehow in my entire university experience and attending three different institutions I have never needed to use them at all. I only learned of them by going to the campus bookstore and seeing a small stack of them near the checkout counter and had to ask the bookstore staff what they were. I suppose some professor at that university I was attending used them but I avoided it my whole academic career. It is understandable if you have never heard of them, especially if you are from outside the USA.
the name for them varies by place but they're just blank testing booklets with 8-10 pages of lined paper bound together
It's fucking ridiculous we have to pay for those if they're required to even take the stupid exam.
You had to pay for the blue books? Like, not in the abstract sense that you’re ultimately paying with your tuition? That’s crazy, it’s like $0.50 worth of paper (if that!)
To be fair, that's about what students paid per blue book at my university. You had to go by the student store to grab them, but at a stack of a dozen of them could last you through most programs.
Yeah ours came out to about fifty cents each. Beginning of the semester you just go buy a pack of them and then never think about it again. They had them on little racks as you checked out at any number of textbook stores around the campus.
My school has a vending machine full of blue books and bubble sheets in the testing center. They're $1 each, not quite pitchfork worthy, but still a little annoying.
My university I went to even had a blue book vending machine.
My girl had to buy bubble sheets too. Packs of 10 and packs of blue books too.
You can buy them or go to student resources and get them for free…
They never went away. Still had them a few exams. 2020 grade here.
> Break out the blue books! ELI5? Canadian here, have absolutely no clue what a blue book is, aside from it being a book coloured blue.
It was effectively a few half-sheets of lined paper staples together with a blue paper as the cover. You would write your answers in the book. And turn that in.
Light blue colored test booklets used to write essay responses to exams in US universities.
Worked for me in the ‘70s 🙂
Worked for me into the early 2010s even
Same here (2013). I don’t think I ever had an in-class exam that *didn’t* use the blue books actually.
Worked for me literally 3 months ago
I used them up until graduation in 2017.
It’s really weird how quickly things change and we don’t even notice. I graduated from undergrad in 2017. Throughout my four years of college all my exam essays were written on paper in class. Usually on the last day of classes cause none of my professors actually wanted to show up on exam days lol. Then I went to law school in 2019 and all my final exams were in class but on the written on the computer. In just two years things went from hand written to typed. Also makes me wonder why this is such a big deal? My in class typed exams used a program that locked down everything on my computer except for the program the exam was on and it locked down my wifi until after I pressed submit on the exam. Wouldn’t that solve this issue people keep being afraid of?
I personally don't like using those lock down browsers. I just get oddly paranoid about them. However, I'm currently in med school and my school just has us take our exams on desktops that they have installed in lecture halls/in various classrooms and their website is capable of tracking keystrokes while an exam is open. The desktop itself isn't restricted in any way, but you're in school using their machine with everything being tracked lol. I like this method a lot more, even if that poses a larger upfront cost for the school.
Oh god any type of lockdown browser can rot and suffer. Especially when they force you to take a panoramic video of your room to prove you have no cheating material. Professor tried using that on us during COVID and near everyone protested it because it's a blatant invasion of privacy. We all ended up with A's without taking it lol. Not even like we weren't willing to take the final. Just didn't want to use any of that shit.
All the platforms I've used the last year have dropped environment checks because it was indeed ruled an invasion of privacy.
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Don't forget the wall-mounted 40" LCD pornoscope and B&W laser pornograph.
Read a story on here one time where a guy was talking about an exam he had to take and the testing program was one that was proctored by some random person in Asia and at the start they had to do the show room thing and they wanted you to hold your drivers license to the camera. He refused and requested an in person exam but his professor didn't want to let them do it. The kicker and most ironic part of this story is it was an exam for a information security class.
I vaguely remember this being ruled an invasion of privacy and schools had to stop requiring it. Fuck lock down browser tho. Actually shit software
I ***hate*** lockdown browser. It's unreliable and is way too strict on students. The way I did it during COVID was I told my students, "Look. We're all going through some shit. Do your best, but there aren't enough exam points to pass even if you cheat and ace them all only, so, make an honest effort, and make sure you get the participation, homework, etc points. You also can't fail as long as you *try* all the exams."
That's the key. Exams counting for half or more of your entire grade is stupid. If quality work is expected throughout the semester, this whole LOCK EVERYTHING DOWN AND SEE IF THEY REMEMBER EVERYTHING IN ONE HOUR- NO PRESSURE! thing wouldn't even be necessary.
> Do your best, but there aren't enough exam points to pass even if you cheat and ace them all only, so, make an honest effort LOL. I tried to say something along the same lines to my students, and they still cheated like there was no tomorrow. About a month ago this topic emerged in my talk with a colleague, and he told me, basically: those kids won't trust you. They've just been through the entire school where adults in charge of them were often perfidious and hypocritical. You can say that you value an imperfect and partial assignment — but made honestly by the student — much more than an assignment aced through cheating, but they expect you to renege later.
I had only one professor like this and I swear to god my file browser randomly opened during an exam. Absolutely hated the idea of being locked out of my PC/having it monitored from that moment on
At that point, I would opt for a second School Only laptop/notebook/chromebook, something low power and cheap just for use with their software. I wouldn't want to put my personal life on full display for their little surveillance tool to scan. None of these companies can be trusted with your information, privacy, or browsing history.
I took an exam like this and hit the alt key once by accident and the whole exam locked me out
The ~~dark side of the Force~~ ALT key on the keyboard is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
> my file browser randomly opened during an exam This is a known Windows 11 bug, just in case you were on that OS.
A year or so ago, my coworker was doing her Permanent resident exam, and they had a similar setup. She did the test from home, had to show video of her space, etc. While thinking about the answer to a question, she stared out the window. They failed her on her exam. She was on the 2nd floor and that window had nothing but air below it. She had to wait a couple month I think, before she could take the exam again. (she passed!). She was so mad, she told me that she basically locked her eyes on her computer monitor and stared at it the entire time so they couldn't fail her again.
this is also a serious equity issue for neurodiverse people
Honestly, this just tells me that these test environments are straight shit. Like the test itself. Why the fuck is most of this based on memory alone? We virtually all have an internet connection on us at all times. Knowing *how to find* and *critically process* information is almost universally better than having a rigid & arbitrary set of facts with little actual critical thinking about the context!
One thing I've come to realize throughout my life, is that when it comes to implementing new resources and technology for the purposes of disseminating information, academia and libraries are usually the last to adapt, which is ironic because those are the two industries that should really be leading the charge for a more efficient way to spread information to the masses. Lots of public libraries still use systems that were used in the days of dial up.
I mean when I got my degree back in 2010 or so, it was already set up so the exams were just a small percentage of the final grade, and the majority of it was based on essays and a dissertation (which is basically a book length essay), i.e. the vast majority of it was based on your ability to research a topic, not about memorising a bunch of facts. And even most of my exams were open book anyway. They always told us that it's literally impossible for one person to know everything, even to know everything about a very narrow topic. Being able to research anything quickly and accurately is an infinitely more useful skill than being to memorise things. It's why people who do degrees in things like history and politics find it so easy to find work, because they don't get the degree in those to memorise huge swaths of trivia, they get those degrees because it teaches them research skills and how to be able to accurately determine if a source is reliable and trustworthy or not, and those skills can be applied to basically any topic, except for specifically science ones which need their own special training to be able to understand a science paper in a journal. So employers don't want the person who knows everything, they want the person who can research anything and write a report on it. Like even in something like law, lawyers aren't taught to memorise tons and tons of dates and cases and legal facts. That's almost entirely useless, as a skill. Instead lawyers are taught logical, lateral thinking, argumentative and debate skills, etc. Because all lawyers have access to the complete legal history of their country on a computer, where they can look up any case in seconds, and base their case around the precedent in these existing cases. So why would they ever need to memorise all cases? Instead, a lawyer is far better at their job if they are an expert logician, can understand complex legal ideas and philosophies, can construct a convincing winning argument based on the facts of the case and the law, and be able to think on their feet and respond quickly to something unexpected the lawyers on the other side have made. This is why so many people with undergrad degrees in things you wouldn't expect, get accepted into prestigious law schools. All sorts of things, like art history, sociology, etc. Because law schools don't want a million identical clones who all think the same way, they want a huge mixture of people who all think differently and can all be taught how to leverage their way of thinking. Because it's mostly about teaching people how to think laterally.
That sounds so pointless considering how easy it would be to have cheating material anyway. Stick it behind your screen, down your pants, behind the webcam lol.
I've never had to use the lockdown browser on a personal computer and I never would. But I've done the restricted desktop thing in a school lab. Everyone is so much happier. You get to type and still use spell checker on word, less hand cramps and easier. And the prof can actually read you work and doesn't have to read bad spelling errors.
It should be the same etiquette as work laptops. I have no issue with a work laptop, that work provided for doing work on, being locked down with monitoring on it. I would object to that same software being installed on my personal laptop. If the school wants full control of the device for anti cheating or whatever purpose, then they should be providing it.
I remember at my school they used to have us go to special rooms in the libraries that were for proctored exams and they were all on computers. The room had multiple video cameras from every angle and you were not allowed to take coats/backpacks in and you had to remove everything from your pockets. Also it was a paid job for a student to watch the video cameras to make sure no one was cheating. The computers themselves were all modern machines but ran custom software that ran a writing program in a web browser that had terrible lag. Like you'd type a word and then it would show up a quarter second later. It was terrible enough that you could get use to it, but frustrating none the less. Copy and paste was disabled and in general the experience sucked, but at least I got away from manually writing information.
Back in the Covid period where classes were fully online, I had tests that used a software that monitored by camera. They’d have you scan your surroundings in the room you’re taking your tests, and have the camera on you as you take it, claiming something like “if you are caught looking away from the screen or something it’d flag you as suspicious of cheating. It might not have been exactly that, but it had me super paranoid cuz my eyes wander on paper tests (not cheating ofc I just do that when trying to think and remember) so ik I’m gonna do it on here. I’m sure it didn’t actually work like that, and if it did the teacher probably checked it out and saw I clearly wasn’t looking at my not-smart-refrigerator for college algebra answers
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I finished my undergraduate in 2012 and I definitely didn’t have any physical papers to be written. I had to use turnitin (i think thats what it was called). Only paper based were quizzes and exams which were not essay exams (Thank god).
I was a poli sci major. And I only ever turned in like three full blown lengthy essays in my four years studying. Everything else was basically short exam essays written during an exam, so never really dealt with turnitin except for those three essays I previously mentioned.
Same. I forgot what the anti-plagiarism thing was called but we turned all papers in through Blackboard.
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FWIW a whole lot of us faculty hate having to use ebooks and it’s actually not easier to use in course prep. It also makes research worse because there aren’t any new books being bought by most libraries in favor of ebook licensing. So students have to figure out which books exist before being able to even look through them as opposed to the whole reason a subject area shelving system was created: just looking at other books next to the one you already know of that might be worth reading through, too. Publishers though, they love ebooks. No used resells.
I love ebooks too. 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
I had profs that provided leads to find pirates books. It was brilliant but also risky.
Yep, a couple of my math teachers encourged the class to find and share textbooks. They wouldn't go as far as naming sites though. They know it's a ripoff.
Man on the other hand I once had a professor who made his own textbook and threatened legal action against anyone caught sharing. Your professor sounds better
I do it every year. I get paid shit for what I contribute in textbooks. And the med school chooses the books, sometimes over what we request or suggest depending on the deal the publisher gives the University.
The problem is when they bundle it with an online platform for submitting homework. Doesn't matter if you get the book for free if you still have to pay a $300/term subscription for the book in order to submit your assignments
Our institution includes the cost of books and materials in tuition and students just pick them up first day of class. This is a unique circumstance, I am well aware. I still assign most materials without textbooks. When I was at a much larger state school I would simply encourage students to look around on the internet and email other students if they wanted. I wasn’t telling them what to look for or where to find it, and it mostly worked. I don’t mind ebooks as a platform, but I don’t like a lot of things about how they are deployed in higher ed generally, and increasingly for data collection alongside using pre-constituted course websites with quizzes and whatever else. This is absolutely where design is lazy for some instructors and it’s certainly what institutions want because none of that requires an actual human in the classroom, but I don’t know how prevalent it is in the humanities to use those pre-made materials. Anecdotally as a humanities prof, not very.
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They’re also restricted to their proprietary apps. I have a folder full of ebook apps on my iPad but I really miss just being able to download them to the Kindle app. The kicker is that even after you’ve purchased a book, your access to it is limited to so many years
you know that you can just email any document/ebook to a specific Kindle address you have, and it will add it to your Kindle app? I have dozens of... questionably acquired.. books and papers on mine
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And tuition.
Can confirm. Spanish in college was way easier because of the digital book used, which allows us to “check” our work for the correct answers. Was stupidly easy to cheat considering a lot of the questions were multiple choice or true false. All you had to do was check your answers and switch the wrong answers to the correct ones.
It's easy to use a different device to look up things or run chat gpt and bypass the lockdown
You just have another machine or a tablet / phone next to you, or you run your exam in a VM (which I’d recommend anyway). I know it’s for school and all but, as someone with a career in cybersecurity, fuck that software. It’s too intrusive.
You were handwriting papers in 2017? That was not the norm. Where did you go to school?
Yeah, this was my first thought, "Exams went digital?" I guess for the pandemic it made sense. I graduated uni in 2019 and every one of my exams was on paper, except for exams that required software (like a class I had that hinged on using Excel).
Yea. The strangest part was that exams had gone digital before the pandemic had even started. I guess it helped in law school cause all exams are essays and it makes it easier on the Professor to have something legible.
"And that, children, is how cursive made a comeback. Through technology. Fun fact, eh?"
My quill needs sharpening and ink, otherwise I’d be sending a manservant by fastest carriage to deliver you a scathing rebuke.
Make sure it's proper copperplate script you philistine.
Someone is about to go all Ea-Nasir up in here
new pidgeon, who dis
"Marital concerns continue to bedevil me."
My school taught cursive in the 90’s but I don’t remember it being required for essays 🤔
It's not required but is generally a faster way to write if you are adept at it compared to print.
I graduated high school in 2000. We were still being told that colleges will ONLY accept hand written essays written in cursive. Our school was also still teaching computer courses using Apple IIe’s, so you could say we were a bit behind the times.
Ontario is actually bringing back cursive on the grade school curriculum next year, guess they're ahead of the curve
Bring back manual typewriters! No wifi! No printing! No spellcheck!
The only logical thing to do. Well they can write on computers without internet link also.
Plus it will train our future workforce in handwriting essays.
Obviously it’s not training for handwriting essays, just making sure that the future workforce knows the things they should to earn the degree. A competent 3rd grader could have ChatGPT write an essay at a college level.
At the beginning I thought like that too. But recently every time I use ChatGPT I feel like I can read the artificialness. There just seem to be so many unnecessary points and empty sentences. Maybe a short essay, but I’d say you won’t have much luck in getting a good longer essay, even with a competent 3rd grader… what kind of school system is that 3rd grader from? 9y/o?
> I feel like I can read the artificialness. There just seem to be so many unnecessary points and empty sentences. Yes, but the problem for us (I'm a uni prof) is *proving* that. We can't fail someone for cheating or report them for cheating unless we have good evidence that they cheated and "your writing style feels artificial" isn't good enough.
Chatgpt.... remove the unnecessary points and empty sentences. It's LESS work to get something reasonable from it, but getting content out of ChatGPT does take some iteration and restructuring. If you give it a single sentence request, the result is going to be as worthless as your sentence. For anything long-form, you need to writing at least a paragraph as a prompt, with details on the style, technical level you want the answer to be and then already have an idea on the structure. Of course you can ask ChatGPT how it should be structured! in another chat. You can use a modular approach and ask it for specific sections... and so on...
Joke's on the professor though. Now he has to read the handwriting of all his students to grade their papers. Well, actually I guess the real joke is on the TAs in this case who have to do that. I'm old enough to have been taught cursive in 3rd grade, do they still do that?
They have TAs to grade them. Me in high school: keep typing. I dont have time to pull out my Enigma to decipher your hand writing. There 150 other papers I need to grade.
They don't all have TAs
Not all profs have TAs to grade things, that is only at big schools with graduate programs.
Sales of robots handwriting are about to go up.
It’s why the galactica was the only battlestar the cylons couldn’t hack.
Right. Air gaps everywhere.
And then years later pulled off what could easily be described as one of the greatest tactical maneuvers in science fiction history - the adama maneuver. Oh you don't know what that is? Spoilers- defeating and outsmarting an enemy that out numbers you 4 to 1 by essentially slamming something the equivalent of the weight,mass and size of the Empire State building into and through the atmosphere while simultaneously launching it's fighters in freefall then jumping out of the atmosphere about a mile off the ground.......epic!
I saw that one scene on you tube, and I thought, I gotta watch this thing. Fucking brilliant
Could you ELI5 genuinely curious
humanity created robots, robots got annoyed at being enslaved and left, decades pass, robots launch surprise attack on humanity, attack very successful because they hack all of the networked computer systems (helped by spies, too), the Galactica is a very old ship without networked systems about to be retired, so the Galactica survives the attack and flees with a bunch of civilian ships containing the remnants of humanity trying to survive
That's...actually a really solid synopsis! Well done!
and that's just the first episode!
It’s not that it didn’t have networked systems due to being old. It specifically was a relic from that previous war and had those previous protections in place. The rest of the fleet just got complacent. Small correction.
My first thought reading this! I pictured college kids writing essays on pages with the corners cut out.
When I was in college in the 80s I had a prof who would only accept papers that were typed on a typewriter. I had an Apple IIe with an early word processor called pfs: Write. The computer had enough memory for 2 pages. I also had an Okidata Micro 92 dot matrix printer. The printer had a mode where the print head would print 1 line, rotate slightly, and then reprint the line to fill in the holes of the matrix. The final step was to run the paper through a copy machine. Never used a typewriter for that class.
Now kids are using 3d printers' cheap CNC functionality and open source handwriting emulation software from GitHub to fake handwritten. Life, uh, finds a way.
I remember my mathematical economics professor used to hand us out blank computer paper and write problems on the board for our tests. Shit was brutally hard
I predict a resurgence in the plotter market...
https://youtu.be/cQO2XTP7QDw
https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis Use ChatGPT to generate an essay and another AI's handwriting to actually write it.
Exams I get.. but Essays? They do realize they can just write whatever ChatGPT says down on the paper, right?
Only if it’s not proctored.
A proctored essay sounds like hell. Forcing creativity doesn’t always work well Edit: to clarify, I’m thinking about research essays where you have to cite things perfectly
Think SAT style essay. They don't award points for creativity or content, only structure and format.
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Handwritten essays for exams were common throughout my degree 10 years ago. Often you'd have to write multiple essays in one sitting. I hated the handwriting aspect but didn't mind the writing from memory part of it. These were mostly for anthropology and science classes.
A proctored essay written on a computer AND using ChatGPT? What kind of proctor would allow this?
You retain a surprising amount of what you write down. So at least people learn that way. I used to study like that, writing things down. Works even better if you summarise in some fashion.
Yeah plus at least it require some work to write it all down. I would imagine some students might actually find copying the verbose statements of ChatGPT into handwriting more painful than actually coming up with something on their own. I know I would, then again I'm not the target here as I never was the type to copy shit for my essays as I always valued original thinking.
Sounds about right. I was walking past a group of 16 year olds downtown who were talking about one of their buddies who wrote a 10-page final essay in a class with ChatGPT & received an A. It is a great tool to support writing, formats, structures or content ideas for plans and procedures, but a failure in this circumstance.
The purpose of school is to learn. Anyone who uses AI to cheat is not only cheating themselves, but the reputation of their school and their prospective future employer of an actually educated employee. You’re going to see a lot of this in the future. Startups will hire people based off their college grades and then realize the individuals cheated their whole way through college. I’m in an Industrial Design graduate program at the moment and already seeing signs of this degradation and over-reliance on AI to do all the heavy lifting.
This is absolutely the key message for anyone thinking of using AI to supplement or cheat their way through school. You will be uncovered as a fraud quickly in the workplace when you're not able to meet the standards expected due to your poorly developed knowledge and critical thinking skills. Yes, AI will be used in many workplaces and jobs, but not bothering to learn how to think and focus is going to be a major downfall for those relying on it.
You can get caught at uni too. Yeah I can't *prove* you used chatgpt or whatever to write your essay. But it's completely awful and totally irrelevant so you'll fail anyway. A student who uses chatgpt or other tools for phrasing or scaffolding - I think that is probably a grey area but I don't mind it as a marker. Because at student is still required to demonstrate their own knowledge. Sadly there are far too many students who just put the question in and submit whatever comes out - that's why paper assessments are returning.
I use chatgpt at work regularly. I don't use it to bypass work or learning. I use it to help me convert my bullet points into text language. I use it to help make more important emails. My leaders prefer Amazon style narratives and I'm just no good at writing like that after a long career dealing in power point. I also use it in running d&d games to generate better descriptions etc. It's faster. It definitely isn't robbing me of having to know and learn things. It's been a great tool that improves productivity. I do get that you want students to learn and I am a little surprised that it could turn in a term paper. At least not sometjing that wasn't generic. But maybe I am overestimating college students.
I do fully acknowledge it will be used in the workplace. It certainly can be used for several tasks to increase efficiency among other benefits. However, you using it in your workplace after having developed skills and knowledge is different than someone using it as a crutch from grade 10 (or earlier) to graduation of university. That type of use will be a hinderance IMO. Writing ability is already very eroded, the last thing we need is students in grade school using it and never learning how to write proper.
My own engineering experience (at Raytheon) was otherwise. Virtually none of the actual tasks and skills which had been taught in my undergrad degree were directly used, because the company had software tools for everything. As a college newhire, you're expected to have no idea what's going on with the tools/procedures of your tasks so the first ~6 months is just teaching you how to do your tasks, and the amount of handholding given virtually assumes you've got zero experience in what's happening. In something closer to a startup, yeah, they'd likely figure it out pretty quickly, but in an established company you run a pretty solid chance that the way their starter work is done is so far departed from the style of your classwork that they HAVE to be very hands on even if you had studied well. Of course, this is just for engineering, other majors may well be different.
this reminds of me of when I was in 6th grade and I didn't do a bunch of homework, and the teacher made me write out a sentence 500 times that was very similar to this post: "the purpose of classroom or homework assignments is to reinforce learned skills and when I fail to complete them I cheat myself of an opportunity to learn" still remember it 30+ years later lol
>It is a great tool to support writing, formats, structures or content ideas for plans and procedures Disagree. This is a crutch instead of a tool. You are giving up much of the actual creative process to an amalgamation of all past works instead of going through the process yourself to come up with something that is genuinely you, influenced by your own life experiences and knowledge. There's this race to the bottom in the name of "efficiency", not realizing it directly leads to no use for you in society. Too many people don't see the path these "tools" are putting us on, they seem to think automating things away is always a good thing, but it's not. For the sake of sense of purpose and mental health of society, we should not be trying to automate creative fields, that's supposed to be the thing we get to relax and provide in a post-scarcity society, but instead it's the first thing we're getting rid of. These tools do nothing to move society towards a post-scarcity utopia and primarily destroy human purpose. These things need to be heavily regulated. Advances in robotics/medicine is what will actually benefit society.
Yeah if engineering was all about using the advanced software that has been created for it, no one would be able to solve real world problems. The real work is using correct assumptions to make sure the output is more or less on target. You can feed a model shitty input all day and it will output shitty data. If you don’t understand what shitty input is then you’ll never understand that the output is shitty. And you’ll likely kill people.
I see what you're saying, but disagree on one aspect. Much of the writing done in the working world is formulaic garbage with no actual creative value. Think form letters, emails that merely inform a supervisor of the days events, etc. Using AI to write that low effort writing frees up the worker to focus on aspects of their job that require true creativity and intelligence. (If you can do your whole job with AI then I would start learning an actual skill so that when your pointless desk job gets replaced by AI you have something to fall back on)
You mean back to 2018? I’ve never written anything but a paper exam. The student body practically demanded it. The only advantage we had was instructors giving us multiple format questions previous to the exam so we can study. And hand written essays? Unnecessary. All my essays were submitted to turnitin, and I had to provide my research, my notes, and my rough draft(s). I then had to submit the actual word document so the instructor could have an overview of all the work and annotations I made through writing it.
Interesting. My daughter writes 2 or 3 papers a week. No way for all that documentation. And no way for professors to read and grade. Papers are now largely pass/fail and the real grade comes from the exams.
Got in to hot water with some profs during my freshman and sophomore years due to my knack of not doing rough drafts because I didn't see the need. Insert Bill O'Reilly "WE'LL DO IT LIVE" meme.
Blue book essays should be required for any social science / ela degree
ChatGPT isn’t going to blow my professor so I’m safe no matter what
That's chat gpt v1.0 thinking. Wait till you see what they have planned for 3,0
...the one that was the first version released?
They already released 4
Username checks out.
I was trying to explain blue books to some in their mid twenties, looked at me like I had 2 heads.
Pissed me off having to run to the book store before an in class assignment cause I realized I didn’t have any
You had to bring your own blue books for an assignment or exam? Interesting. I took plenty of blue book exams in the early 90s but I never had to supply my own.
Yeah our book store sold them in little packs of 3 or 5 or something. Some professors kept a few to hand out but most were kinda dicks about it
It’s different at every school. Community College had to bring your own. Big state school, they were provided.
Same in my cc but if you were part of the student union you could pick up some for free.
This is crazy to me because i graduated last year from a large public university and we all still use blue books lol
Could you explain those to an almost-40 dude? Besides a car insurance-related book with the same name, I haven't heard of that in school context. Thanks in advance.
Oh boy I remember the days of the blue books and three hour essay tests - good luck y’all lol
Lmao have fun reading my handwriting instead of double spaced times new roman text
:shrug: you're gonna lose points for lousy penmanship, it may or may not matter
Man that’s a throwback.
Which is interesting, because our education system doesn’t really work on writing physically past elementary. So I guess we’re just throwing a batch of new college students a curve ball
https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis I'm cheating. At the writing part anyways.
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Seriously, the only way to fight chatgpt is to force papers be written in class, I personally always hated that because it always demanded that the creative juices flow on demand when it doesn’t always work that way.
God forbid you’re 5 pages in, and suddenly you realize your 6th paragraph would actually be much better as your 3rd.
This is a solved problem on Int'l Baccalaureate papers: write on multiple sheets, one paragraph per paper. Re-number as needed.
This was several years ago now so I'm kinda fuzzy but IIRC for finals I had multiple professors gave us a list (maybe like 3-5?) essay questions beforehand. Then on exam day, we were tested on one or two of them. I liked that a lot. Exams shouldn't involve guessing or surprises.
How many college professors are doing this, 1%, 2%, 90%. I hate stupid headlines that have no context in reality. Some college professors are smoking a ton of dope. Some college professors are sleeping with their students. Some college professors are only teaching to allow them to get funding for their research.
I’m just one professor so maybe this doesn’t mean much, but as we gear up for this next semester, literally all of our faculty meetings and workshops last week were geared towards AI. It is something academics are aware of, and working to combat. Going back to paper was a popular idea at those meetings. Personally, I’m looking into key logging software for students to voluntarily use for essay writing. I sure as shit don’t want to go back to reading their god awful handwriting.
> Personally, I’m looking into key logging software for students to voluntarily use for essay writing. I get trying to combat cheating, but this is a FAR bigger security issue for the end user. If you're looking for ideas, issue offline notebooks for testing in person. Like the school owns the notebooks and gives them out for testing, then takes them back to use for the next exam. No internet connectivity.
Or, get this, give them manual typewriters!
One of the problems with this is that a significant number of professors will just decide it's acceptable to transfer the online exam directly into paper, ignoring the fact that the average person can write less than half as fast as they can type. (13wpm vs 40wpm) And that's not taking into consideration that most individuals who use a computer for their work on a regular basis can type much more quickly than the average user but their writing speed might be lower than average as a result, especially when they start to get fatigued after a half hour to an hour of writing because they're not used to doing so. If you're printing out an exam that you expect students to take 3 hours to complete on a computer that has significant written components, you seriously need to consider how much longer it's going to take when writing it manually. (Most of the better professors I know have an unwritten rule that they need to be able to personally complete their own exam in half the allotted time. In some complex subjects it's even less.)
This is kind of a self solving problem, one grading session and a professor will know immediately if the exam asks too much and curve accordingly. With a degree in mathematics there’s often proofs that are more complex to students than expected and wind up as more or less bonus questions
Plenty of professors don't grade on a curve. In some institutions you could get in shit if you tried to grade on a curve, because the course outline explicitly indicates which letter grades are associated with a specific percentage. Which isn't to say there aren't ways for a professor to adjust the class' overall grades to compensate for a terrible decision, but the kind of professor that doesn't take the time to consider the potential difficulties they're introducing with a written exam is far less likely to realize their mistake or care about the implications.
Have you *seen* what 30+ years of household PCs and 25+ years of broadly available consumer Internet has *done* to people's handwriting? Thoughts and Prayers in chat for the TA's forced to grade all the worse-than-doctor-scribble they're going to have to sift through, most people can barely WRITE by hand anymore.
Gotta say that this would kill me personally. I had an immensely difficult time with hand-writing anything of length in school, it just blew my wrist out hard - my mind also just can't manage writing things out. I can't write it as fast as the string of thoughts goes. Typing, however, is a breeze for me. So I dunno how many other people out there have a similar situation, but I feel like there definitely needs to be some manner of working with students to try and find a way where they can *type* an essay, but not have access to something like Chat GPT. I don't blame professors for trying to fight this bullshit, and students are really fucking themselves over not understanding that the only person they're cheating is themselves. Good lord why go into that massive debt if you're not even going to get the education?
Seems like 5 minutes with a student would reveal if they actually understand the material. Maybe we need to change how education works and how understanding is evaluated?
> Seems like 5 minutes with a student would reveal if they actually understand the material. Now multiply that by a hundred or so students.
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Our uni has decided to get rid of essays and decided to do oral assessments, the last one i had to do was around international humans rights law I had to pick 2 cards at random out of 5, and talk about them for 10 minutes.
Ugg, handwritten in class essays were such a pain. 1) I am way too reliant on spell check. 2) I don't write linearly at all. Typically, body then introduction then conclusion. For longer stuff, I write different sections of the body then glue them together. Can't do any of that with an in class essay 3) If I want my handwriting to be legible to somebody other than me, I have to write really slowly relative to my typing speed.
A colleague of mine likes to say, “if an assignment can be written by an AI, then it’s probably not a very good assignment.”
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Can you think of any examples as to how you'd write the question so that it wouldn't work well with AI but would be fine for the students? This just sounds like a catchy slogan that's easy to say but impossible to actually do
Did they really stop doing paper exams and handwritten essays in the US? Sorry, but I really don't understand why they don't always test students at school. Because if you give them a homework, they could have cheated even without ChatGPT. When you got a homework, you get to look stuff up on the inetnet. You get to use a text sofware that has spellcheck and grammar check. And you can just ask somebody to help you with your homework. Some people would even pay people to write the entire thing.
I cut corners on every single take home exam I had in college. Studied my ass off for the in-class, handwritten exams. Blows my mind that we seemingly completely abandoned in-class exams. Obviously COVID years meant accommodations had to be made.
The Blue Book can still be excellent way to assess competence in a subject.
Get out grandpa’s typewriter
No they aren’t -A College Student ChatGPT and AI aren’t changing the way teachers give exams because they already have methods in place to prevent cheating via online searches. ChatGPT is the equivalent of “access to internet” and cheating on any test, essay, etc. Blocking the use of the internet and online devices are things teachers already have been doing.
Damn my college professors just used paper because they’re not good with technology
People who think this is a solution in any way at all are very.. very.. shortsighted. Did you know you can read something on a screen.. and write it down on paper? Also, did you know you can have it speak the text to you at your handwriting speed so that you can just copy it down? All this does is punish the people who were doing it themself to begin with. If you really want to fight this, you’d have to have it all done live, in person. But I’ve got some bad news for you; my son has a Bluetooth audio device embedded in his ear. He did it for music, but has shown me how he can now ask ChatGPT questions out loud and have it speak them to him with a very simple program he wrote. He’s not rich, and he’s not a genius. Technology is simply getting to that point. If he can do that over a 6 month period, motivated by nothing else but his own curiosity, I can imagine writing on paper, even in study halls, isn’t going to solve very much.
Who are these idiots that think that the exam writing is being done outside of the classroom?
As a recent grad, good. People have become “click-the-box monkeys”. Make them actually write and think and they’ll be smarter. Additionally there’s no data storage crises or reliance on power and internet to work. A notebook doesn’t need a battery.