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My take is that there's some vicious cycle going on with cheating. It's comparatively hard to cheat significantly in a pen-on-paper exam in a classroom proctored by vigilant humans. It's much easier to cheat on other forms of assessment. But exams are rather unpopular, not necessarily entirely for bad reasons. They don't really test what we care about in an ideal way, and exam-specific technique is too important. Also, students are _terrible_ at exams. In my class I'm faced with two choices: make the grade highly contingent on exam success, deal with awful grades, angry students, and a department that wants my teaching to be modernized; or make the grade about homeworks, quizzes and project work that 10% of students cheat on _blatantly_ and an unknown percentage that I figure is 20-50% "cheat" in some way that significantly damages their learning because they lean so hard on Google, ChatGPT, Chegg, smart friends, ... The vicious cycle is that more professors are moving away from exams so students aren't getting any practice at exams and hence flunk them ever harder. Anybody who still has an exam component is under significant pressure to reduce it, increasing the cheating-vulnerable surface area and hence the competitive advantage of cheating. Of course cheating increases! And as cheating increases, actual learning decreases, thus increasing the pressure on proffessors to avoid assessment that actually tests their students understand, because then there are unacceptable failure rates. The fact of the matter is that I simply cannot afford to fail 30% of my students. The school and department won't have it. My response to some of the AI handwringing over things like "ChatGPT gets 100% on my intro to Python course" is to say that your stupid python course isn't testing understanding it's testing trivial syntax. But of course it's not testing understanding, doing so is weeded out by the pressure to avoid failing entire cohorts of incredibly weak students. |