This approach does not really solve the core issue. In practice, students often do poorly when evaluation is concentrated in one end of term exam. It also pushes many students to cram at the end of the term instead of learning steadily.

A better approach is to rethink what we assess and how we assess it. Research shows that the design of assessments plays an important role in academic integrity. Assignments that require original thinking and regular engagement can reduce incentives to cheat and improve learning outcomes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...

I got diagnosed with cancer just before finals in the first semester of my senior year. Sure, it kill my chances at graduating Summa Cum Laude, and I didn’t make the Dean’s list that semester even though I worked my ass off, as usual. Frustrating, but that’s life. I should not, however, have failed that semester, which I would have if only the final week’s assignments were counted. People have bad weeks. In most white collar jobs I’d have probably been able to take some time for myself, maybe given someone else my most urgent tasks, and likely been given plenty of leeway. Even doctors, lawyers, etc. People deserve to have bad weeks without losing months of work.

Why not multiple exams? In fact, why not many exams?

Sure, it requires more resources, but it shouldn't require much more:

- We've had multiple exams before AI, and I don't see how AI makes it any harder. Obviously these are closed-book

- Schools should already be banning phones in class (and colleges have insane tuitions, they can afford more exams)

- The students who go out of their way to cheat - as long as they're a minority, let them. Why not? Either they'll fail later in life, or they didn't need to learn the material because they're pathological fakers (even if you won and forced them to learn the material, they'd probably still fake their way out of using it). Then, I doubt you need much proctoring to ensure that most students don't cheat, because most of the smart students are generally smart enough to know that actually learning the material is probably important (or if the material is probably not important, it doesn't matter if the students all cheat...)

Meanwhile, downsides of one exam:

- Disadvantages students who get overly stressed about unrecoverable exams, or have a particularly bad day on the exam

- Many students will blow off the (ungraded) assignments and put off actually learning until the end

- Less graded content (especially if the exam isn't overly long, which would disadvantage some students)

I don't disagree with you that a reasonable way to cope with the current problems is to ensure everything that "counts" is done in a controlled environment, but pedagogy and its goals are vast.

There are things you learn from spending several days structuring a 20-page argument that you will not learn (and cannot assess) from oral examination or a 5-paragraph essay written in a blue book.

Unfortunately this approach is known to be really bad for some students. Continuous assessment is bad for other students.

I was lucky in that my education last millennium was almost entirely make-or-break final exams, which suit me well. I’m bad at routinely completing little assignments, but shine under crazy pressure. Other students are the opposite.

We’ve tried both kinds over time and trend. Neither is perfect.

Why a single test at the end of the semester? Why not allow the student to demonstrate mastery at anytime during the semester when they are ready? Then they can move on to the next objective, or, if they fall short, continue to study until they meet the objectives.

Of course, creating good exams is difficult, but you have to do that either way.

Students are very grade-motivated and unfortunately they rarely do the homework assignments if they are not worth points.

At-home coding projects, writing essays, etc also exercise different skiils than you can test for in a 2 hour written exam. It's unfortunate that due to rampant AI cheating, we can no longer reward the students who put in the work and develop these skills.

Maybe you can call it an interview…

Throw in some oratory presentations as well and that sounds like a curriculum.

The purpose of grades is to punish students, something which they are keenly aware of. Remove grades from the equation and hold students back until they have mastered the material and they will cease cheating.

If someone knows 80% of the topics on an exam like the back of their hand and doesn't know the other 20% they shouldn't get a B, they should pass the subjects they know and be asked to retake and relearn the subjects they don't know.

When people know they can make mistakes and the result is not a perpetual black mark on their record (any grade not an A) but they are given the chance to improve and demonstrate this improvement then perhaps they might be more willing to admit and understand mistakes instead of cheating.

Schools stopped doing that because students largely refuse to prepare. Testing throughout the year is like a CI pipeline and is shown to work better for the median student.

What exactly would the goal of this change be?

Even before LLMs, there was a _lot_ of deception and cheating in university. I -- and I do not say this with pride -- used to write essays for my classmates for money. In my own defense, I needed the money. I also know that in addition to homework for money, many fraternities and sororities kept copies of prior exams and assignments, and getting access to these was one of the perks of membership. Knowing what kind of questions to expect (let alone the exact questions) can easily give someone a few extra IQ points for free.

Personally, I felt that the drive to automate the parts of the professors' workloads that mattered (i.e. teaching and grading and evaluation and research), only so that they can be given work that matters less the more they do it (i.e. publishing slightly different flavors of the same paper, to meet KPIs), was oddly perverse.

The multiple-choice test and the puzzle-solving test and really any standardized test can be exploited by any group that is sufficiently organized. This is also true in corporate interviewing where corporations think (or pretend) that they are interviewing an individual, whereas they are actually interviewing a _network_ of candidates who share details about the interviewers and the questions. I know people who got rejected in spite of getting all the interview questions correct (the theory is that nobody can do that well, so they must have had help from previously rejected/accepted candidates).

The word "trust" shares a root with the word "tree" and "truth" and "druid". Most exams and interviews are trying to speed-run trust-building (note that "verification" is from the latin word that means "true"). If trust and truth are analogous to "tree", then we are trying to speed-run the growth of a tree -- much like the orange tree, in the film, _The Illusionist_. And like the orange tree, it is a near-complete illusion, a ritual meant to keep the legal department and HR department happy.

The LLMs have simply made the corruption of academia accessible to _all_ students with an internet connection (EDIT: and instantaneous and cheap, unlike a human writer).

There has never been a shortcut to building trust. One cannot LLM their way into being a (metaphorical) druid.

I do not look forward to the Voight-Kampff tests that will come to dominate all aspects of online and asynchronous human interaction.

Note that, short of homework/classwork that _can't_ be gamed by an LLM (for some fundamental reason), even the high-quality honest students will be forced to cheat, so as to not be eclipsed by the actual low-quality cheating students[0].

I imagine that we may end up wrapping around to live in-person dialectics, as were standard in the time of Socrates and Parmenides[1]. If so, this should be fun.

[0]: If left unaddressed, we may see a bimodal distribution of great and terrible students graduating college, with those in between dropping out. If college is an attempt to categorize and rank a population, this would be a major fault in that mechanism.

[1]: Not to the exclusion of the other kinds of tests, writing is still important, critical even. But as a kind of verification-step, that should inform how much the academic community should trust the writing (I can imagine that all the writers here are experiencing stage-fright as they are reading these words).

Came here to say the same thing. The AI problem is functionally no different to the paid essay writers. Grade everything at face value, and then have people write essays under exam conditions for grading.

> one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. The resulting grade depends on that, and that alone.

I love this idea. And if a student is having a really bad day, or their dog just died, or they have bad cramps, or they have a hard time dealing with the intense stress of your entire grade being decided in one exam... well, those loser students can just fuck right off.