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Comment by dwheeler | Hacker News Reader

I'm a professor and up to this semester I've required a paper to summarize some area. I've already decided (before this was posted) to stop requiring them. It's too easy to create a paper that summarizes material without learning anything.

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Everyone learns and tests differently, so this is no panacea. But I absolutely loved this one exam I had where the prof had me in for a 20 min chat about a topic. An oral exam, but it was so informal and felt like a comfy chat.

Written tests are torture for me. But chatting about what I’ve learned?! Let’s go!

i was a university lecturer teaching a large foundation subject. at the start of semester i would show them how to plagiarise, summarise and obfuscate an essay — on-screen in real-time. it was lots of fun. we also showed them how our assessment practices were resistant to cheating (using a mixture of oral presentations, reflective writing, monitored testing and group moderation). it seemed to work well with very little plagiarism — except for those students who ignored (or missed) the message.

Wonder how many teachers/professors have considered using chatgpt to grade papers (turn this tech around)? Like you (or your grad assistants) could absolutely help your crazy workloads the same way.

This is good. Most of what chatgpt can facilitate automate wasn't a good evaluation of knowledge/skills acquisition anyway.

Seems like an oral exam would be interesting. Or base the grade on ability to have conversations on the subject?

What will you do now instead?

Oral exams.

Multimodal LLM Cyrano de Bergerac

Have a professor friend who says the same: oral exams are coming back to his classes. If you don't pass the oral, you don't pass the class.

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