alt Hacker NewsLive exam, perfectly fine. You can use an LLM as support while you study, no problem, as a glorified search engine. On steroids. From the future. Then you prove you understood it.
Writing an essay, or a thesis, with LLM assist, is difficult to avoid in this scenario, though. It would require your prof, TA or examination committee to read the thing fully and understand the topic deeply. For 101 courses, that's doable, but for a PhD, that's so much work, that it'll break the system immediately.
Montaigne originally used essay (from French essayer, to try, attempt) to test hos on knowledge and understanding, his own capability to create new knowledge. In plain English, you test yourself if you can use your brain. That’s why it is so powerful to write a blog post about a topic you have just learned. Obviously, if you just generate the thing with LLM, there’s no point.
Essay is a fairly recent invention and perhaps it was not very good for testing students un the first place, since it kinda was not meant for that originally? So maybe we should test knowledge and understanding in different ways? In STEM-subjects this is not very hard, since basically you either can do the thing or not (like my example of coding above), but I have no idea how one would do this in history or philosophy. Should we go back to having long walks in the garden of the academy, where the professor guide’s you towards knowledge like some 21st Century Socrates? That doesn’t seem doable at this level of university students.
And how would you test PhD -level knowledge? You have to build a nuclear reactor from scratch in front of live audience? Or perhaps the oral examination have to become a real exam, not just a pointless ritual? Anyway, I think my point on using essay as a testing structure still stands. Maybe the examination should be like BJJ belt exam, where you have to show what you actually can do in front of peers and your teachers. A lot more people are likely to fail, but so be it. Maybe having a PhD stop being a joke then.