People are considering whether university evaluations can survive in the AI age. Hollis Robbins wrote on Substack: “How to limit unauthorized AI use in the classroom“
Robbins emphasizes class size and teaching load against the time of an instructor. An instructor teaching 4 sections with 100 students each is very limited in their ability to monitor and prosecute AI teaching. It’s worse if this instructor is on a temporary contract.
Limited eyes and hands and human attention really are a constraint here, at least for now. Some people see AI tools in the hands of students as the end of education itself.
I have been tweeting my replies to this:
I don’t do remote exams, but I hear about improvements to remote proctoring technology. The arms race is not over.
Technology goes both ways. The phone students were using to cheat are now being marshalled as a “second camera” for remote test proctoring. Instructors are going to largely win this year if they take current technology seriously, for multiple choice and short answer evaluations.
The commercial Respondus program has just added Word extensions. This technology already exists and can run on the students’ laptops.
Right now, a clever student might still be able to shift their carbon-based eyes to a direction where the answer is displayed illicitly. And the instructor’s eyes can only monitor so many eyes. This is all so 2024. This conversation may be over soon. Human students can be placed under the supervision of machine eyes. Right now, we are still dealing with issues of false positives when machines flag students for cheating, but the machines are improving.
I believe that the roads will eventually be dominated by machine drivers and their unblinking eyes. Humans might drive cars for fun in the hinterlands, but it will no longer be considered a serious thing humans to do for work. Monitoring student cheating will become like truck driving. Human eyes are on the way out. We are going to become more cheat-proof than college has ever been before.
As a college professor, that will have implications for my job, although I can imagine a not-completely-negative future. Maybe I could do more fun work with students because the work of proctoring will be handled automatically. I have spent many many hours constructing tests that would be hard to cheat on and watching students take them. I take cheating seriously, and all the faculty at my business school work hard to protect the value of our degree. I predict that this will become a trivial part of teaching within 10 years.
Will students respond with various forms of hacking and deep fakes against such a system? Maybe. So far, in any arms race, Uncle Sam has been winning in the end for a century now.
If there is a will to do so, we could even bring back the research paper by having students work on a monitored computer that does not let them use AI to write. (We could almost do that already, but perhaps the true limiting factor is that, as I like to say, readers are that which is scarce.)
[Credit to my colleagues Art Carden and Anna Leigh Stone who have talked with me about test proctoring this semester.]
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