[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

> AI has already rendered academic take-home assignments moot

Not really, there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do. It is just a asymmetric attack on the professor's (or whomever is grading) time to do that.

IMO, credentials shouldn't be given to those who test or submit assignments without proctoring (a lot of schools allow this).

[mofeien]

> there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do.

Name three?

[c0balt]

1. Make the student(s) randomly have to present their results on a weekly basis. If you get caught for cheating at this point, at least in my uni with a zero tolerance policy, you instantly fail the course.

2. Make take home stuff only a requirement to be able to participate in the final exam. This effectively means cheating on them will only hinder you and not affect your grading directly.

3. Make take home stuff optional and completely detached from grading. Put everything into the final exam.

My uni does a mix them on different courses. Especially two and three though have a significant negative impact on passing rates as they tend to push everything onto one single exam instead of spread out work over the semester.

[NitpickLawyer]

> Not really, there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do.

Could you offer some examples? I'm having a hard time thinking of what could be at the intersection of "hard enough for SotA LLMs" yet "easy enough for students (who are still learning, not experts in their fields, etc)".

[c0balt]

Present the results of your exercises (in person) in front of someone. Or really anything in person.

A big downer on the online/remote Initiatives for learning but actually an advantage for older Unis that already have existing physical facilities for students.

This does however also have some problems similar to code interviews .

[rootusrootus]

> Present the results of your exercises (in person) in front of someone

I would not be surprised if we start to see a shift towards this. Interviews instead of written exams. It does not take long to figure out whether someone knows the material or not.

Personally, I do not understand how students expect to succeed without learning the material these days. If anything, the prevalence of AI today only makes cheating easier in the very short term -- over the next couple years I think cheating will be harder than it ever was. I tried to leverage AI to push myself through a fairly straightforward Udacity course (in generative AI, no less), and all it did was make me feel incredibly stupid. I had to stop using it and redo the parts where I had gotten some help, so that my brain would actually learn something.

But I'm Gen X, so maybe I'm too committed to old-school learning and younger people will somehow get super good at this stuff while also not having to do the hard parts.

[NitpickLawyer]

Sure but that's a solution to prevent students from using LLMs, not an example of something a professor can ask students that "LLMs can't do"...

[c0balt]

The main challenge is that most (all?) types of submissions can be created with LLMs and multi-model solutions.

Written tasks are obvious, writing a paper, essay or answering questions is part of most LLMs advertised use-cases. The only other thing was recorded videos, effectively recorded presentations, thanks to video/audio/image generation that probably can be forged too.

So the simple solution to choose something that an "LLM can't do" is to choose something were an LLM can't be applied. So we move away from a digital solution to meatspace.

Assuming that the goal is to test your knowledge/understanding of a topic, it's the same with any other assistive technology. For example, if an examiner doesn't want you[1] to use a calculator to solve a certain equation, they could try to create an artificially hard problem or just exclude the calculator from the allowed tools. The first is vulnerable to more advanced technology (more compute etc.) the latter just takes the calculator out of the equation (pun intended).

[1]: Because it would relieve you of understanding how to evaluate the equation.