[jventura]

Fellow professor here, I don't think your approach would work where I teach. I teach in a Polytechnic school (Portugal), which is almost free for the students, so the incentive that they are paying good money does not work.

This semester I'm teaching a web development course (fullstack development), and my policy is that the project must be done on github classroom repositories, and I'll be asking clarification (face to face) on some of the commits. They can use whatever they want (stackoverflow, chatgpt, whatever), but they better know how to explain their commits to me. I don't know if my approach will work in the end, but I surely got their attention.

I'm doing this because it got so bad that, last semester, on my Object Oriented Programming course, even using moodle with the Safe Exam Browser on and an instance of Visual Studio code to try the code, we caught lots of cheaters. How they were doing it? By installing co-pilot plugin. How did we caught them? Some students solve all the exercises in 10 minutes, others had comments that were clearly made by AI, etc. etc. Of some 15 students we caught, only 3 came to us to review the exam.

Hard problem to solve..

[mike_hearn]

Is it hard? What's the difficulty with just having assessments be done in a controlled invigilated exam room?

I don't quite understand why higher education is acting like this is an impossible problem to solve when high schools manage to stop 13 year olds using phones and calculators just fine by virtue of having teachers watch them as they write their answers.

[jventura]

> What's the difficulty with just having assessments be done in a controlled invigilated exam room?

Not all assessments are exams, eg: projects, and students cheat even in exams with professors present, eg: the OOP exam I mentioned before, where we had 2 teachers for 40 students.

Maybe you’re suggesting 1 professor watching 1 student on a 2,5h exam? For 40 students we would need 40 professors.. We don’t have that number of professors in out departament..

[mike_hearn]

> Maybe you’re suggesting 1 professor watching 1 student on a 2,5h exam?

Does your local school bus in hundreds of professors on exam day to act as personal security guards? Probably not. When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating, in exam halls with procedures designed to prevent cheating.

Professors keep acting like this is some unsolvable research problem when it's not. What's "hard" is stopping cheating for the near-zero price universities seem to expect to pay, and the solution is to get real and change the underlying practices to prevent cheating, regardless of what it takes. If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well.

CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it.

The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing right now as a preview of what happens when the credibility of public sector education and research falls too low. If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis?

[gmac]

> Professors keep acting like this is some unsolvable research problem

I am a professor, and yes, it's trivially solvable. The solution has been well known for hundreds of years (at least). If only the institutions we work in would let us *@#$ing solve it!

Where I work, administrative obstacles have been erected to make it pretty much impossible to give my students traditional closed-book, unseen, invigilated exams. I have been fighting this for several years.

But I'm hoping management are going to have to cave in before too long, because students are surely going to realise pretty soon that their degree certificates will be worthless otherwise.

[jventura]

> When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating..

Not here where I leave (not USA)..

> If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well.

I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam?

> CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it.

Do you think we are police officers or what?! There's a limit for what we are able to do, and what students are able to tolerate..

> The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing (...) If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis?

Ok, I get your point now! You probably live in some third world country where there's lots of wealth inequality and the state does not help its own citizens. Here in Portugal (and I guess almost all of EU) the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year), so I wouldn't consider failed experiments for now..

[mike_hearn]

I don't live in the USA nor grew up there, and "invigilator" was a job title when I went to school. Usually people who wanted a bit of part time work. Mums, retirees, students, that sort of thing. It doesn't take much time or skill and is a nice way to help out in the local community so they had plenty of takers.

> I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam? Do you think we are police officers or what?!

Nope. You have to watch them do it anyway, if you want your credentials to mean anything. Arguably they already don't, very few companies are willing to hire a software developer given just a proof of a degree exactly because universities are so willing to graduate people who can't do the work. But that's not sustainable. It may take decades but that path leads to Venezuela. Eventually, this will catch up with universities and they will be gone because they're not delivering value.

> the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year)

The price charged up front is 700EUR/year but the cost is a lot higher than that, obviously. All your government does with this policy is force everyone else to pay for the industrial-scale production of well rewarded cheaters, enabled by professors who don't care enough to stop them. It's a socially corrosive policy.