Been saying this for a while. There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative.
Speaking as an (assistant) professor in theoretical CS, I see there are many bad approaches in the original post and mentioned in this discussion, but I strongly disagree with:
> There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative.
I can attest to the following problems to good homework creation, from my own experiences playing with ChatGPT and teaching:
1. If you want to give a very illustrative yet easy theoretical exercise in algorithm design, one that computer scientists have solved over and over in the last few decades and which furthers your understanding, there are very likely solutions online and ChatGPT will give you the solution with very high probability.
2. If you create your own dataset and want the students to implement some algorithm and create a simple plot/discussion from the results, it will be very hard to distinguish a "student solved it on their own, but they did not invest too much time into it" submissions from ChatGPT submissions produced by a couple of queries.
3. Switching to oral presentations is hard to scale (as others attest) and also does not resolve much, because some students are perfectly okay with being handed a solution from somewhere (colleague, ChatGPT), not understanding it very well, and yet presenting it. Failing these students likely leads to overly difficult classes.
4. In-classroom exams without a computer work best, but they also do not scale very well (a lot of prep/correction needs to go into them) and some students with bad anxiety management skills, which includes me as a former student, dislike them passionately.
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As you can see, this topic is quite critical for my profession. The ugly truth is that university professors have only a very limited time allocated in their busy workweeks for teaching, and hence they have to take many shortcuts, including suboptimal homework sheets and limited innovation year-over-year. I also do not allocate as much time for philosophy of teaching/improving teaching skills as I would have liked.
If anyone here has novel ideas how to actually implement "a class that can't be cheated with AI", specifically university CS classes, I am all ears.
> If anyone here has novel ideas how to actually implement "a class that can't be cheated with AI", specifically university CS classes, I am all ears.
May not work for you, but as a CS student our department had the policy if that if you failed the final, you failed the course. The finals were usually structured that rote memorization would earn a C- (depending on course complexity and importance). They were all pencil-and-paper exams.
While cheating was policed, collab was encouraged with the proviso that lab submissions needed to be own-work, and they'd run basic comparisons to make sure that they weren't copies. As a result, the administrivia on finals was longer...but there was a little less concern about the rates of cheating.
> not understanding it very well, and yet presenting it. Failing these students likely leads to overly difficult classes
What does a grade even mean in your classes, if not understanding the subject isn't grounds for failure? Isn't the point of a grade to measure exactly that?
> some students with bad anxiety management skills, which includes me as a former student, dislike them passionately
So what? Nobody likes exams, they make everyone anxious, why is that even considered relevant? Did you not pass through exam halls with hundreds of students in them to get to university in the first place? How did this supposedly non-scalable system scale when you were 16?
> If anyone here has novel ideas
Why are you acting as if this is an unsolved research problem?
Here's a novel idea for you: talk to people who teach 15 year olds and then copy the way they do it. They'll probably tell you to do things you don't personally like doing but if it's really "critical to your profession" as you claim, then that won't matter, will it.
For programming CS exams, you can try doing them in a computer lab with internet disabled. These exams should be allotted time much more than needed as one should not be testing for problem solving under strict time constraints.
FYI its oral exams, not oral presentations. You give the student half an hour to solve a sequence of problems and gauge their thinking skills. Scales to perhaps 30 students at most.
I was not very clear about it, but I was discussing regular semester work, as opposed to final/midterm exams. Think courses that are strongly grounded in theory but need the students to experience the coursework, like Discrete Mathematics or Linear Programming.
"Oral presentations" in my case meant presenting a homework solution to the TA in person, in front of the class, and the TA accepting this solution live (or not).
At least at my university, the responsibility for homework structure and homework sheets lies fully on the lecturer, and the TAs are tasked with grading the homework/projects and leading the exercise sessions.
Oral exams are great if they can be done at scale, and I do use them. Some other teachers (as well as the administration) prefer written exams, as there is a clear proof of work that can be analyzed if grades are disputed.
> I was discussing regular semester work, as opposed to final/midterm exams
In my experience, these are completely useless for any core course as you mention. I have tried stuff like this in my courses, and it doesn't work. In fact, I know some students pay others to make the presentation for them, and coach them on the presentation.
Even for course projects, I have graded meetings with students before the final presentation/report. This helps ensure that they are doing the work themselves rather than depending on others. But yes, this takes a lot of time.
> Some other teachers (as well as the administration) prefer written exams, as there is a clear proof of work that can be analyzed if grades are disputed.
I'm not keeping them secret at all. We've had discussion about this before. It seems that the best strategy is to set the weight of HW as very small (~10%) with exams weighted heavily but make it clear that exam problems are loosely pulled from HW. Even if you're remote-only, you can ensure all exams are required to be proctored at an approved facility.
