it is not just US… the VSE - Prague’s university of economics and business has decided to abandon graduation theses, because it is supposedly “impossible to verify” whether they were written by student or AI, and replaced them with “hands-on” graduation project)
well how would you verify wether a thesis was written by AI? Mind that accusations are a serious matter, so “i guess it sorta looks like AI” or a percent number spat out by some unreliable LLM-detection AI isnt going to cut it
well, not sure if it works the same everywhere in the world, but here, you first write the graduation thesis and then you have to publicly defend it.
if the defense committee (or is it an attack committee, since it is the student who is on defense? :D) can’t ask questions in a way to find out whether the student actually wrote the paper and understands the topic, then what fucking pseudo-scientific field is that? (and the answer indeed is - it is economics 😂)
Then the student could just ask the AI to simulate a thesis defense and learn answers to the most likely questions.
The funny thing is, they would actually learn the material this way, through a kind of osmosis. I remember writing cheat sheets in college and finding I didn’t need it by the end.
So there are potential use cases, but not if the university doesn’t acknowledge it and continues asking for work that can be simply automated.
Students are now prompting the AI to make it sound like a student wrote it, or putting it through an AI detector and changing the parts that are detected as being written by AI (adding typos or weird grammar, say). Even kids who write their own papers have to do the latter sometimes.
If the peer review are unable to differentiate between student output and AI output then they are either incompetent or they are inundated with absolute garbage. The latter also suggests the former is true.
I just finished marking student reports. There are some sections clearly written without AI, some that clearly are written by AI, and then some sections where the ideas are correct, the grammar is perfect, and it is on topic, but it doesn’t seem like it is written in the student’s voice. Could be AI, could be a friend editing, could be plagiarism, could be written long before or after the surrounding paragraphs. It is not always obvious, and the edge cases are the problem.
Yeah given the quality of AI outputs they could just read the papers to spot it … you know … do their jobs? I mean there’s a few layers here for thesis review, the supervisor, the professor, the other peer reviewers. They are all supposed to review the paper and at least some of the data that led to its production.
it is not just US… the VSE - Prague’s university of economics and business has decided to abandon graduation theses, because it is supposedly “impossible to verify” whether they were written by student or AI, and replaced them with “hands-on” graduation project)
Does hand-on mean supervised?
no, it means they will try to somehow apply the knowledge they acquired to real life problem. creating a project, instead of writing a text.
well how would you verify wether a thesis was written by AI? Mind that accusations are a serious matter, so “i guess it sorta looks like AI” or a percent number spat out by some unreliable LLM-detection AI isnt going to cut it
well, not sure if it works the same everywhere in the world, but here, you first write the graduation thesis and then you have to publicly defend it.
if the defense committee (or is it an attack committee, since it is the student who is on defense? :D) can’t ask questions in a way to find out whether the student actually wrote the paper and understands the topic, then what fucking pseudo-scientific field is that? (and the answer indeed is - it is economics 😂)
Then the student could just ask the AI to simulate a thesis defense and learn answers to the most likely questions.
The funny thing is, they would actually learn the material this way, through a kind of osmosis. I remember writing cheat sheets in college and finding I didn’t need it by the end.
So there are potential use cases, but not if the university doesn’t acknowledge it and continues asking for work that can be simply automated.
while my opinion of economy as a field is not very high, i still have high enough opinion of any teacher to believe they do outperform shitty ai…
from what ive seen on some reddit posts, they USE AI to accuse the student of writing in AI.
Jesus how bad are their student papers that they can’t tell whether an AI wrote one?!
more like “how bad is the education”?
Well that’s a much better question.
Students are now prompting the AI to make it sound like a student wrote it, or putting it through an AI detector and changing the parts that are detected as being written by AI (adding typos or weird grammar, say). Even kids who write their own papers have to do the latter sometimes.
Perfect grammar and slightly unusual words in a paragraph. Could be a weird formulation from a student’s mind, could be AI. No way to really know.
If the peer review are unable to differentiate between student output and AI output then they are either incompetent or they are inundated with absolute garbage. The latter also suggests the former is true.
I just finished marking student reports. There are some sections clearly written without AI, some that clearly are written by AI, and then some sections where the ideas are correct, the grammar is perfect, and it is on topic, but it doesn’t seem like it is written in the student’s voice. Could be AI, could be a friend editing, could be plagiarism, could be written long before or after the surrounding paragraphs. It is not always obvious, and the edge cases are the problem.
the professors are using AI to sniff out AI.
Yeah given the quality of AI outputs they could just read the papers to spot it … you know … do their jobs? I mean there’s a few layers here for thesis review, the supervisor, the professor, the other peer reviewers. They are all supposed to review the paper and at least some of the data that led to its production.