Stephen Joe Jonany

Why we need in-person exams

We established previously that even with AI, humans should likely still need to learn CS 101. Now, we claim that any graded course should have in-person exams. Let’s build the claim step by step!

Grades should reflect unaided ability

Grades should at least partially reflect the students’ ability to compute using the concepts taught in class without the use of AI.

But we have access to AI irl, so why improve unaided ability? One’s unaided ability still matters, even in the age of AI. This is because some flows — like self-driven brainstorming (where you play around with concepts you have a good grasp of) and conversations with other humans — require that some concepts be readily computable without going back and forth with AI.

Aids are more accessible now. Q: Ok sure, unaided ability is important, but that’s already true pre-AI, so why bring this up now? A: Because with AI, the cost of cheating is much lower than in the pre-AI era where you need to have another human to cheat with. You don’t need to incur a social cost — it’s as simple as doing a few keystrokes.

How to grade unaided ability: In-person examination

The current best way to prevent students from using AI for the evaluation process is to do it in-person.

Weak attempts. It’s worth noting that online courses like Harvard CS50 used proctorio, which of course can be bypassed.

What it takes: Sense check. To ensure that students only use their brain to take the exam, and not another brain (another human, or AI), one must ensure that all sense inputs that the student receives don’t contain new information — e.g. no new visual or audio cues that contain information that help the students. Today, the cheapest and most reliable sensor to achieve this is to have the instructor double up as a human proctor.

To conclude! Courses that need to output grades, and want to evaluate the students’ unaided ability, will likely need in-person exams for a long time.

Futuristic brainstorming

As a fun brainstorming exercise, if I have a reasonable budget from the teaching institution, and I am forced to host an exam remotely, I will want to use a combination of the following:

• Student-perspective visual and audio recording. E.g. These glasses cost < $50. This will help detect if the students are cheating using another device.
• Wide-perspective visual and audio recording. Have a wide-view recording using a phone that shows the student’s side profile and the workspace, to show that there is nobody else in the room, and that the student is wearing said glasses.
• Both of these recordings are linked to the exam-taking platform, such that if the platform detects that one of the recordings is malfunctioning, we will pause the exam and tell the student to fix it.

But honestly, if I’m suddenly forced to teach an online class, I would just use an existing platform like proctorio.

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