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ecshaferyesterday at 6:45 PM2 repliesview on HN

In my CS undergrad I had Doug Lea as a professor, really fantastic professor (best teacher I have ever had, bar none). He had a really novel way to handle homework hand ins, you had to demo the project. So you got him to sit down with you, you ran the code, he would ask you to put some inputs in (that were highly likely to be edge cases to break it). Once that was sufficient, he would ask you how you did different things, and to walk him through your code. Then when you were done he told you to email the code to him, and he would grade it. I am not sure how much of this was an anti-cheating device, but it required that you knew the code you wrote and why you did it for the project.

I think that AI has the possibility of weakening some aspects of education but I agree with Karpathy here. In class work, in person defenses of work, verbal tests. These were corner stones of education for thousands of years and have been cut out over the last 50 years or so outside of a few niche cases (Thesis defense) and it might be a good thing that these come back.


Replies

mercaconayesterday at 6:56 PM

Yep, it's easy to shortcut AI plagiarism, but you need time. In most of the universities around the world (online universities especially), the number of students is way too big, while professors get more and more pressure on publishing and bureaucracy.

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SirMasteryesterday at 6:50 PM

So we are screwed once we get brain-computer interfaces?