Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

Oxford and Cambridge have a "tutorial" system that is a lot closer to what I would choose in an ideal world. You write an essay at home, over the course of a week, but then you have to read it to your professor, one on one, and they interrupt you as you go, asking clarifying questions, giving suggestions, etc. (This at least is how it worked for history tutorials when I was a visiting student at an Oxford college back in 2004-5 - not sure if it's still like that). It was by far the best education I ever had because you could get realtime expert feedback on your writing in an iterative process. And it is basically AI proof, because the moment they start getting quizzed on their thinking behind a sentence or claim in an essay, anyone who used ChatGPT to write it for them will be outed.

Faking intelligence with AI only works in an online-exclusive modality, and there’s a lot of real world circumstances where being able to speak, reason, and interpret on the fly without resorting to a handheld teleprompter is necessary if you want to be viewed positively. I think a lot of people are going to be enraged when they discover that dependency on AI is unattractive once AI is universally accessible. “But I benefited from that advantage! How dare they hold that against me!”

Because I was demonstrating that I understood the material intrinsically, not just knew how to use tools to answer it.

Making them open book + AI would just mean you need “larger” questions to be as effective a test, so you’re adding work for the graders for basically no reason.

For that, the student must have internalized certain concepts, ideas, connections. This is what has to be tested in a connectivity-free environment.

I have no idea what you're trying to express in your comment, so who's using vibes?*

Were you triggered by the word "caring?" A waiter usually cares that the people they're serving have an enjoyable meal. It doesn't mean that they love them, it means that they think the work of feeding people is purposeful and honest (and theirs.)

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[*] It's certainly not in the words; I don't know what made you angry about "joy," I don't know why you think the author does not teach writing skills in "communications," I don't know why the fact that you went through multiple drafts in writing school papers is relevant or different than anyone else's experience. Maybe that's over now. Maybe I actually don't care if you use AI for your second and further drafts, if I know you can write a first draft.

I guess what I'm asking is, how did AI shift the status quo for in class exams over, say, Safari?

Why replace a system that generally works well with one that introduces additional potential problems?

These are the absolute worst.

You're taking people out of their comfort zone (highly customized IDE like JetBrains / VSCode / Vim) which cause them to lose shortcuts and decently working intellisense. Yes, my TypeScript in my projects is configured in such a way that I get way more information from the compiler than the standard config. After all, you're testing my ability as a software engineer, not a code monkey, right?

In this very uncomfortable place there is no way of asking questions. Yes, sometimes stuff is ambiguous. I rather have someone who asks questions vs someone who guesses and gets it right.

The testing setup is horrible too. No feedback as to what part of the tests fail, just... fail.

No debugger. No way of adding log messages. When was the last time you've been in that situation at your workplace?

All under the pressure of time, and additional stress from the person that they really NEED a new job.

Oh, and when you use compiled languages, they're way slower than say TypeScript due to the compilation phase.

And then even when your score (comprised of x passed tests and y failed tests) is of passing grade there is a manager out there looking at how many times someone tabbed outside of the window/tab?

Where am I supposed to look up stuff? Do you know all of this information by heart: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BTreeMap.ht...

Which reminded me that one time I used a function recently stabilized, but the Rust version used was about 8 versions behind. With that slow compilation cycle.

/sigh.

I've never seen anyone attempt blue books for anything else.

It's long been known that a longer essay answer is more likely to get a higher grade. And yeah, having been a student and a stressed out grad student, after about the 20th exam, only length is the real signal of grade.

Other comments point out that with the prices of tuition these days, students should be expecting a lot higher quality of feedback (grading) than what they are getting at any random R1.

It really does seem that the University system (as opposed to the college-esque system) is broken and that the additional AI fears are just another log on the already collapsed bridge. We're getting over the wrong thing.

I did it in three passes - which might be all in one session or might be broken into smaller sessions. First, skim them all for spelling & grammar mistakes, with a red pen. Second, read them all (but not too deeply) to identify where they make key points, with a green pen. At this point you have a really good handle on the general level of accomplishment. Third, take a blue pen and comment them and grade them.

First, its interesting to see a situation where a new technology INCREASED the cost of something.

    Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience.
    When I had 200 linear algebra exams to grade at once

We're probably not going to get that, though, and instead the cost increases, the funding stays the same, so the quality will decline to compensate.

So it goes...

https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends-College-P...

Published tuition has gone up, but grant aid has matched it, making the net cost at 4-year public institutions to be flat, or even down slightly over the 10 year period. The same applies at private 4-year institutions, large increase in nameplate price, matched by large increase in grant aid, actual net tuition flat.

Expenditure data also show that they are not spending significantly more. See the chart at the end of this page, which gives expenditures in real, per-student dollars. They are up, a little less than 20% over 10 years, but half of that is increases in hospital costs of their associated health care systems, which have nothing to do with tuition. The rest is a mix of various activities of universities, much of which are not tuition-funded.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.a...