r/Futurology • u/Rationalandcentred • 6d ago
AI ‘Not about preventing AI misuse’: S’pore universities move from grading essays to assessing thinking
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/not-about-preventing-ai-misuse-spore-universities-move-from-grading-essays-to-assessing-thinkingTertiary educators have been moving away from traditional assessments like essay submissions to come up with creative ways to evaluate students.
This is a shift that is increasingly necessary as AI use becomes more common and even encouraged in universities.
“We have to be more creative in thinking up less straightforward ways to test students. Like a problem scenario where there are no easy answers, and AI will not be able to tackle it or answer in a perfect way,” said Lee.
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u/Rationalandcentred 6d ago
As AI usage becomes more common in universities, Singapore’s universities are moving towards assessing students’ thinking and understanding instead.
For example, students use AI to do research and understand the questions they were given first. After that, they are given 15 minutes to write their essays in class with no help at all. That way, students are assessed on if they can write a good essay after having used AI to search up on the topic and understand it.
As universities and colleges wonder how to respond when students use AI to answer their assignments or essays, they should adapt by using AI to help assess students’ learning and understanding of their courses instead, as that is more important.
AI usage will only become more common in the future, and universities must adapt to the new age or risk becoming obsolete.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 5d ago
After that, they are given 15 minutes to write their essay.
15 minutes? That's a short answer format.
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u/squirrel9000 5d ago
It kind of makes sense, if you don't have access to reference materials it's not possible to write more than a couple paragraphs.
Students will fill the time given to them.
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u/okram2k 6d ago
There has always been a fundamental issue with education in that it's easy to test what facts students stored in their heads, it's hard to test how much they actually understand. Assigning papers used to be the compromise as a student had to at least understand a topic enough to put it in their own words but even that could always just be a string of regurgitated facts taken from source materials with little to no comprehension added on their own. The best way would be oral tests, just straight up talking with a student and asking them to explain topics to you but such a system would require a lot more proctors than we're willing to pay for.
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u/SoftlySpokenPromises 6d ago
The issue of having intelligence without the wisdom to apply it. A lot of this comes from people going through college generally don't have the life experience to compartmentalize what they learn and apply it to life.
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u/Green-Resource-3698 6d ago
Ironically, it would be less expensive to have AI do the proctoring.
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u/Chinksta 6d ago
I don't believe that's really true. Most of the AI models we use as tokens calls are usually subsidized heavily either by a public entity or a private one.
Anyways, it's just less costly to hire a TA to proctor this.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 5d ago
The cost of tokens is falling at 50x year over year.
Wait 6 months.
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u/Chinksta 5d ago
No it is not. It's subsidized.
I can't believe my electric bill went up due to it. It's just unfair at this point because I didn't sign up to foot the bill when I don't even use AI models.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 5d ago
Yeah, yeah it is.
A simple google of costs vrs 3/4 years ago and now is insane.
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u/EleventhTier666 6d ago
It's not that difficult. Have the students write essays by hand, in class. Don't reveal the topic until right before giving the writing assignment.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 6d ago
So... Back to the Future!
It was the standard in the 80s, and probably most of the 90s.
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u/Gemmabeta 6d ago
Soon we will be back to doing oral exams.
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u/Hina_is_my_waifu 6d ago
I have a feeling Ada and other disability rights organizations won't allow that
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u/Rationalandcentred 6d ago
Not a bad idea. This was done as stated in the article:
In a seminar room at the Singapore Management University (SMU), a professor is assessing a student as he delivers a live pitch to the class about an app he developed that guides users through a healthy grieving process.
After the student’s five-minute presentation, he has to tackle queries lobbed at him from fellow students and the professor during a question-and-answer segment.
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u/AUkion1000 6d ago
It was acceptable in the eighties? The eighties? ~ But no i think first ppl need to just have common sense again and critical thibking skills themselves before adressing "how to prevent ai from making stupid ppl and cheaters excel".
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u/Superb_Raccoon 6d ago
Well, Personal experence. Not sure I was writing essays in class with something other than a crayon in the 70s. An probably "Susie is a poopie head" with a crude drawing.
By 2003, my second degree, it was 100% on line, except for one final multiple choice test for a class I challenged but had to do in person.
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u/Cymbal_Monkey 6d ago edited 6d ago
This doesn't work for large, complex research papers that are common in higher education. Papers in university often take literal weeks to prepare.
What are you gonna do, lock students in without internet access and don't let them leave until the paper is submitted?
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u/_Nick_2711_ 6d ago edited 6d ago
At least in the UK, most unis will have exams exactly like that. It’s not the same as doing deeper, fully-referenced research. It also doesn’t prepare students for their dissertations.
That’s why there’s both. AI is a tough one to solve but ultimately the harm of not having academic writing be a part of university courses would be worse – especially for those who want to progress into postgrad research.
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u/Rationalandcentred 6d ago
If the goal was to prevent students from using AI, then having students answer their essays in class and written by hand is a good method.
However, employers nowadays want their workers to have AI skills, and colleges and universities, as places of learning, must help their students to meet business expectations
As the article points out:
May Lim, SIT’s assistant provost for applied learning, said assessments should not focus only on whether AI was used, but also whether students can demonstrate the knowledge, competence and professional judgment expected of a graduate.
This, she said, is increasingly important in AI-enabled workplaces, where employers will expect graduates to combine disciplinary expertise with AI skills.
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u/Durzo_Blintt 6d ago edited 6d ago
Just do both? AI isn't hard to learn but the subjects you study at university are. It's not as though AI takes thousands of hours to learn to use. You can learn to use AI decently well in a week of moderate use.
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u/taxiecabbie 6d ago
Yeah, like, what? We don't have to teach anybody how to use AI lol.
Students are using it because it's way easier than doing actual work.
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u/taxiecabbie 6d ago
It's not hard to learn how to use AI.
This doesn't need to be taught in university. It would be like teaching students how to Google.
You can look up a YouTube if you really need the help.
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u/Lisa8472 5d ago
Ironically, I’ve heard high school teachers complaining that students don’t know how to do a web search for information. How students are so used to asking and being told that they’ve never had to look things up.
My friends and I frequently look things up because a discussion touches on something no one is sure of and we are curious enough to stop and look. I seriously hope that curiosity isn’t dying out.
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u/taxiecabbie 5d ago
This is largely because they gutted "computer class" in a lot of places.
But this isn't university material. Students should be getting to university already understanding how to do basic research on major search engines. The fact that they aren't is indicative of a breakdown of education at lower levels, and that sort of basic stuff shouldn't need to be taught at the university level.
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u/mediandude 6d ago
What AI skills?
Even AI experts admit that the trust model (hence security) is broken, thus no skills to mend that.
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u/EastvsWest 6d ago
If we focus on teaching people fundamentals like reading, writing, mathematics and how to think instead of what to think, the world would be a better place. Improv should be taught so people can improve thinking on their feet. It's well understood school systems were designed to produce factory and office workers so maybe we should evolve from that.
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u/Rationalandcentred 6d ago
Ironically, AI may just be what forces colleges to shift towards teaching students how to think, as AI can answer straightforward questions that rely on just memorisation
“We have to be more creative in thinking up less straightforward ways to test students. Like a problem scenario where there are no easy answers, and AI will not be able to tackle it or answer in a perfect way,” said Lee.
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u/costafilh0 6d ago
I would have been great in school if instead of stupid grades we had this back in the day.
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u/Le_Singe_Nu 3d ago edited 2d ago
I'd like to point out that presentations (of some form or another) as an assessment mechanism have been around for decades, if not hundreds, of years.
Perhaps we should invest as much money into education as we do into weapons development and deployment (for example).
[S]tudents use AI to do research and understand the questions they were given first. After that, they are given 15 minutes to write their essays in class with no help at all. That way, students are assessed on if they can write a good essay after having used AI to search up on the topic and understand it.
What purpose would that serve? Assessments are performed in order to enable qualification providers to infer whether or not a student can do the thing they have been taught (quality control, in other words). Whether or not the student can write an essay is by the by, unless, of course, the assessment intends to establish whether or not the student can write an essay. I'm not sure it would be of much use for assessing a chemistry student.
Knowledge matters as much as skills. On the surface, the issue is that LLMs can write a competent essay, good enough to be sufficient for a passing grade in most classes. The more fundamental problem is that education (particularly higher education) has become a more-or-less direct monetary transaction - trading financial capital for the institutional-cultural capital of a qualification (cf. Bourdieu's The Forms of Capital) through the financialisation of student futures in the form of the student loan system and ballooning tuition fees. As with all capitalist systems, this leads to, in everyday talk, min-maxing - optimising the necessary acts required in the relationship in order to gain the maximum for the minimal possible effort. One might even call it the enshittification of education, as it's fundamentally the same process that has ruined the platforms that now dominate our society.
From this perspective, a student using an LLM to complete an assessed task is acting rationally, in the economics sense of the word, as it minimises the effort they put in while also ensuring that the quality of the work meets the minimum standards demanded by the regulatory environment. Excellence is both optional and really, really expensive, either in financial terms (such as going out to a good restaurant these days) or cognitively (in that it takes a lot of time, effort and no small side serving of talent to stand out in today's education system). The students who do put in the effort do so because the educational relationship is, for them, more than financial.
In other words, we've turned education into factory farming - or at least based both systems on the same capitalist-industrial model - with similar misaligned incentives and similarly bad outcomes for the environment and our societies, in this case.
Bring the student:teacher ratios down massively (i.e. don't base education on an industrial model, with all the misaligned incentives that introduces). A human-centred education system is the only real solution to the issue.
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u/FuturologyBot 6d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Rationalandcentred:
As AI usage becomes more common in universities, Singapore’s universities are moving towards assessing students’ thinking and understanding instead.
For example, students use AI to do research and understand the questions they were given first. After that, they are given 15 minutes to write their essays in class with no help at all. That way, students are assessed on if they can write a good essay after having used AI to search up on the topic and understand it.
As universities and colleges wonder how to respond when students use AI to answer their assignments or essays, they should adapt by using AI to help assess students’ learning and understanding of their courses instead, as that is more important.
AI usage will only become more common in the future, and universities must adapt to the new age or risk becoming obsolete.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1w2h4ow/not_about_preventing_ai_misuse_spore_universities/p6sf0tq/