[nsyne]

I personally dislike placing a heavy emphasis on exams. Assignments/projects have been consistently the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of the courses I've taken so far in university.

It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI.

[Aurornis]

> It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI.

They were more prone to cheating before AI, too.

Cheating has always existed at some level, but from talking to my couple of friends who teach undergrad level courses the attitudes of students toward cheating have been changing even before AI was everywhere. They would complain about cohorts coming through where cheating was obvious and rampant, combined with administrations who started going soft on cheating because they didn’t want to lose (paying) students.

AI has taken it further, with students justifying it not as cheating but as using tools at their disposal.

I was talking to my friend about this last week and he was frustrated that several of his students had submitted papers that had all the signs of ChatGPT output, so he asked them simple questions about their papers. Most of them “couldn’t remember” what they wrote about.

It’s strange to me because when I went to college getting caught cheating was a big problem that resulted in students getting put on probationary watch and being legitimately scared of the consequences. Now at many schools cheating is routine and students push the boundaries of what they can get their classes to accept because they have no fear of any punishment. YMMV depending on the institution

[nradov]

Those students will go on to "cheat" in job interviews. And the sad thing is that many of them will never face any consequences because the majority of jobs at large companies don't require any actual competence. The college degree allows them to check a box on job applications but the jobs don't actually depend on anything learned in college.

[Aurornis]

> because the majority of jobs at large companies don't require any actual competence.

An interesting side effect of the AI gold rush is that companies are starting to look critically at these do-nothing email jobs where someone forwards emails around and makes slides and Notion pages.

I’ve worked with many who occupied jobs that didn’t contribute much other than organizing text and sharing it around, but they got a pass because it looked helpful enough. Now it’s a lot harder to justify those positions when management realizes that having the not-really-competent person summarize communications and documents isn’t much better than having ChatGPT do it.

[DaSHacka]

Almost like most degrees may not be very useful (or worth the cost) to get in the first place.

[jimbokun]

I wonder if the companies hiring students from those universities have come to understand there’s no guarantee they learned any of the material.

[nradov]

The dirty secret in HR is that performance in most regular jobs doesn't really depend on having learned anything in college. Companies only require a college degree to filter the candidate pool down to a manageable level. Line managers know they'll have to train entry level hires on almost everything.

IBM used to hire software developers based on aptitude test scores regardless of formal education, then put them through an extensive internal training program. It worked fine.

[ghaff]

IBM (among other companies) used to have multi-month internal training programs based on their specific needs. And, in many cases, the expectation was that you'd be there for 25 years or whatever afterwards.

[watwut]

Performance does depend on whether you are capable to overcome obstacles by yourself, learn by yourself and produce by yourself.

People who got through via cheating in college tend to be low performers in work for the exact same reasons.

[LtWorf]

Most companies expect people to be productive sooner rather than later, and not every job is completely trivial.

[razakel]

This is what happens when you make education a business. You end up testing credit score instead of aptitude.

[kcexn]

The problem with exams is that everyone has a bad experience with a poorly written one. Well-written exams will have questions that test students at different levels of understanding across the whole curriculum.

So a student who only understands the basics should be able to answer most of the easy questions and students who have a deeper understanding can answer the harder ones.

Well-written exams should feel pretty fair and leave students feeling like the result they got is proportional to the effort they put into studying the material (or at least how well they personally felt they understood the material).

[CSSer]

Exams almost filtered me out of this industry before I even got started. I later went on to be a lead developer! I went to a rural high school with a poor math curriculum. I understood the concepts, but I was slow. When I got to undergrad, my first calc professor gave us a 60 question test with 50 minutes of allotted time. He told us if we couldn't do the problems fast enough we weren't cut out for the work and it would be better if we quit now. I've never felt more inadequate in my life. It's one of my only Ws.

[sudahtigabulan]

> a 60 question test with 50 minutes of allotted time

Is this kind of test - many short questions - a standard thing for math in your country?

My university exams were pretty much all "2-question", in 90 minutes.

The first half was an essay where you have to reproduce a lesson from the curriculum, in your own words.

The second half was "the formulas" - you have to develop one or two formulas from first principles.

I once got an A- even though I got "the formulas" half very wrong. As the teacher explained later, I simply chose the coordinate system beginning at not the same place the textbook did. And this was supposed to be a bad teacher - he actually gave Ds to almost all of us (180 people). This was a makeup exam.

[hawaiianbrah]

What does W mean? Withdraw?

[CSSer]

Yes. You can do it a set number of times, opting to either retake the course for a better grade or simply not take it again. Either way it shows on your transcript.

[bawolff]

Exams are kind of like interviews, at some level they are always at least a bit artificial and sometimes very artificial. I don't really think they do a good job of proving understanding but we also don't really have anything better.

[ransom1538]

Every class. Teachers think: "We want a curve, not everyone is getting an A". This pushes the teacher to ask questions not covered in the material. If they stick to what is covered it is hard to get a decent curve. So, in the end, teachers just hand out grades based on IQ, and there isn't a point of grades.

[bawolff]

Courses aren't supposed to be pure memorization. If you can only answer questions directly covered in the material but can't apply it to new situations, you should not get an A.

[MengerSponge]

Many "straight A" high school students earn their first B (or C) with this misunderstanding.

[thaumasiotes]

> Teachers think: "We want a curve, not everyone is getting an A". This pushes the teacher to ask questions not covered in the material. If they stick to what is covered it is hard to get a decent curve.

You've never been a teacher.

[lorenzhs]

If you can't transfer the course's material onto new, unseen questions, then you might have memorised it, but you didn't understand it. Getting an A requires understanding, not rote memorisation.

[nullsanity]

You're forgetting the a large percentage of the student body simply does not care to judge the material fairly. Any difficult exam where they receive a low grade is perceived as unfair and complained about online. Professors that test fairly are reviewed harshly online. Universities that prioritize education over graduation receive poor reviews. Top universities specifically coddle and push their students making it nearly impossible to fail.

[gpm]

Also way more susceptible to cheating in traditional non-AI ways. And your mark ends up depending a lot on how much time you have to invest independent of how good you are at the course material.

Assignments and projects are great for learning, but suck for evaluation.

[lokar]

I really appreciated classes where there was rapidly demising returns to time spent :)

Another example, lit classes where the grade is based on time limited, open book exams, hand written in "blue books"

Read the book, pay attention in class, spend 90 min writing an essay, and you are done.

[jason_zig]

is evaluation that important? ultimately if you can't do the work you're only cheating yourself in the long run...

[musicale]

That is the traditional view, the view of those who want to improve their own knowledge and abilities, and presumably the view of those who would like to consider the degree to be a meaningful credential.

However I suspect that there are many who 1) are more concerned about the short term outcome, 2) consider the degree/diploma to be little more than a meal ticket or arbitrary gatekeeping without any connection to learning, 3) view the work as a pointless barrier to being handed said diploma, and/or 4) don't see the value of human learning in a world where jobs are done by AI and AI systems routinely outperform humans on complex tasks.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I'm curious about the objective competence of recent graduates compared to previous cohorts, not just in tech but in basic literacy and numeracy.

A lot of Gen Z are ferociously anti-AI, but for tribal and emotional reasons, not because of a nuanced understanding - which is ironic, because the nuanced reasons for being wary of AI are much stronger than the usual talking points about "stealing art".

Being tribal and emotional is going to make Gen Z easier to replace, because nuanced strategic insight is less common and more useful.

[antonymoose]

You say that but I was a Class of 2013, aka during the massive hiring boom of the teens. I tutored a friend of mine with a Ds get Degrees mentality who eventually graduated and now works an ass-in-seat job for Booz Allen or one of those types. I used to joke about it with another friend, that his diploma ought to include an asterisk and a half dozen other names for how much we ultimately did on his grades take homes. I’m pretty sure he makes about the same as me by now purely on tenure.

Personally, I dropped out despite a full ride+ becuase why would I put in work for a no name state school when I already has an FTE job as a developer out of high school anyway.

Turns out fraudulent action can still get the bag.

[WoodenChair]

I agree with your premise about why accurate evaluation matters, but your post comes across as pretty bitter. Unless you’re at the job with him, you really don’t know that it’s a “I just need to show up” job he has at Booz Allen. Perhaps he has other great traits like a high social or emotional intelligence that make him good at his job beyond whatever was being evaluated on those projects you helped him with.

[nradov]

I think you're missing the point. The majority of jobs at companies like Booz Allen are sort of like Kabuki theater and don't require any technical competence. The main responsibilities are to show up on time and present a certain image to customers.

[lupire]

I think you're missing the point because PP addressed that concern.

[II2II]

Part of the purpose for evaluation is to provide feedback. I'm not going to claim that the form of feedback is great, but it does offer motivation to improve.

The other thing that feedback feeds into is credentials. I realize that some people are dismissive of this aspect of the degree, but it is important to pursue further studies or secure a job. While you can argue that these people are only cheating themselves, and some of them are cheating themselves, a great many will continue to cheat as they advance in academia or the workforce. In other words, they are cheating others out of opportunities.

[jimbokun]

It’s important to signaling to employers you have obtained skills useful to them.

And for most students that’s all they really care about.

If the companies stop valuing the diplomas, students will stop paying tuition to attend, and the universities eventually collapse.

[TheOtherHobbes]

This assumes employers will still exist.

You can imagine a world where the Corporate or State AI handles education, tailors it to individual student levels and talents, and assigns work based on its own direct experience of a lifetime of interaction.

You can also imagine that in that world where most humans would be redundant - unless the AI was optimising for human-to-human jobs and for evidence of unusual insight and creativity, not managing bullshit work for corporate profit.

[lupire]

You're telling me the path to an A is to hook up the Teacher AI to a Student AI.

[jmye]

Yes. I care that the work I've done and what I've learned is actually good and correct. Vibes-based learning/anything is valueless.

[account42]

The problem is that Universities are no longer institutions where people who want to can go to educate themselves but have instead been turned into the first part of your job interview. In this world, Universities are judged on how well they evaluate their students.

[syntaxing]

I went to college as a MechE so unsure if compsci was different. But overall, all the “fun” projects were labs. We have three semesters of hell and all 3 semesters had 2-3 labs, and we write 20 pages or so for EACH lab a week (usually a team of 2-3).

[Cthulhu_]

I also think assignments and projects work best, but only for the percentage of students that are self-motivated, curious, interested, etc.

Unfortunately a lot aren't, they feel like they have to be there or these courses are the only path for them to get a good job. And unfortunately they end up in the workforce, too. You'll often see teams with one good developer and a lot of hangers-on.

[fma]

Then I suppose we can go back to having computer labs that can only access white listed domains and other study materials. Students code there to ensure no cheating.

[zdragnar]

The labs I was in weren't connected to the Internet at all, only a local intranet. Though, they were all running pre-oracle solaris if memory serves, so I'm probably dating myself a bit.

[nradov]

Will the students have to go through security screening for personal devices?