Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Prepare to have your mind blown as we delve into the complexities of relationships, explore the cutting edge of science, and celebrate the bizarre and beautiful absurdity of the world around us. This is The Last Show with David Cooper. Students are using AI to write their assignments in university. And perhaps the best way to fight that, fight AI with AI.
One professor at NYU Stern School of Business ditched essays for AI-run oral exams. That's right, a professor is using AI to force students to think, explain, and prove they actually understand the work. The very thing that Chad GPT allows students to cheat on. I'm here with that professor. His name is Panos Ipirotis. Panos, welcome to the show. Hello, thanks for having me.
So before we talk about the novel way that you've been preventing students from using AI in school, let's talk about the problem, a sort of existential crisis in universities right now, where students are just using large language models to pump out their assignments in seconds, in minutes. Talk to me about the state of things with that.
Yeah, let me start by saying I don't mind students using AI. Actually, in my class, I encourage students to use Ah, AI. However, what we noticed is that they don't yet know how to use it to their advantage. At least a subset of the students don't know how to do that. And they fully outsource their thinking to the machine. And this is something that we don't like.
We want them to, even if they use ChatGPT and LLMs to create their deliverables, we want them to know what they deliver. We want them to know the material. And increasingly what happens is it's very hard to tell whether someone knows the material or not.
It used to be you're getting the exam, the homework, you could tell, oh, this is, they don't know what they're writing about or they know what they're writing about.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do students face with AI in academic assignments?
Increasingly with LLMs, this becomes very hard to do for ETM exams.
I'm not going to admit to cheating, but in undergrad, I'll just say this. My ex-wife was an English literature major and I took one English lit class and somebody helped me with my essay. And I remember the teacher calling me to his office to go through my essay and started asking me questions about it and I couldn't answer them.
Is that kind of the thing you're experiencing when you go through students with their work and then you ask them about it, they don't understand what they wrote?
Yeah, actually the assignments that we had in class, they were not even heavy duty. assignments, they were supposed to prepare students for the discussion that we're going to have in class. And instead of seeing the class being fully prepared for the class discussion, we're getting these very well-polished submissions, but silence in the classroom. And we realize, well, we need to do something.
Otherwise, they will not learn anything by the end of the class.
So when you put a student on the spot and ask them to defend or explain their work, is that what you just observed? Like silence and lack of understanding? Blankly saying, I don't know.
I cannot say anything. Don't worry. Just say with your own words. Very simple. Silence. At that point, we were like, we need to do something.
Okay, so enter the oral exam. This is something that used to happen a lot in schools if we look in the last, I don't know.
Yeah, we still have it. Medical board exams, bar exams, you know. PhD defenses are all oral exams. This is the gold standard.
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Chapter 3: How is a professor using AI to combat student cheating?
I'm no mathematician, but that's 500 mini oral exams. It's just too much work for a professor, isn't it?
It's not even that it should too much work. The logistics of trying to schedule, you know, 50 different half an hour slots that are mutually convenient, just becomes very, very hard.
As the host of a radio show who exactly has to do that every day, I completely empathize with you. Okay, so where did this novel idea of using AI to actually conduct these oral exams, where did this come from?
Yeah, we had a seminar and Brian Zabarian, who will be a new professor at CMU Heinz next year, he talked to us about AI interviews and how companies are hiring people using AI. interviews, which I thought it was mind-boggling. And not only they are doing that, but he realized that AI is actually better in running these interviews than the humans. Humans get tired. Humans get frustrated.
Humans have biases. So AI tends to be a very, very good administrator of knowing, okay, I need to ask these questions. I need to go through this material and they don't get distracted. They get back on topic and so on. So if it worked for 70,000 job interviews, I thought that they would work for 35 oral exams in my classroom.
Now, we're not just talking about conducting the exams and then you grade them later. Are you using AI to actually help you grade? Can I accuse you of doing the very thing the students are doing, AI to do your assignment?
Yeah.
Actually, we had been studying AI grading for quite a while. I think that finally we're reaching a point where AI is really good in not only grading, but actually giving very detailed feedback. To tell you the truth, I have graded every single exam myself before giving it to AI to make sure that everything works. And
Which is what students should be learning. If they're going to do submissions using AI, they should also understand them and go through them manually as well.
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