Ask an examiner from 20 years ago the risk of allowing people to take exams in their own home. They would have said 'cheating', even with no concept of AI.<p>Here is what happened. ACCA, one of several accountancy bodies in the UK, charge their students extraordinary sums of money to take their exams. When I took accountancy exams there were 9of 3 hour written exams, in a real building, with real invigilators. All of the bodies at the same time realised that they could charge the same amount, pay Pearson to administer an electronic test and make more money out of their students. It was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now
My wife is a teacher of physics and math for an online highschool. Its very common for kids to go into the in person exam with a mark in the 80s and 90s and get a failing grade on the exam.<p>The web wasn't alwasy that useful for cheating on timed exams as it was essentially like being able to bring in a formula sheet.<p>LLM's changed this such that you can type in the question and get a fully correct answer in a lot of cases.<p>The only solution that I see in education is that in person exams start to represent a larger and larger portion of a students grade such that the mid term and final will be more than 50% of a students grade for most classes going forward due to the gratuitous use of llms by students.
This was going on long before LLMs.<p>When I took quantum mechanics in grad school, I struggled through the weekly (and intense) homework sets. My TA was a hardass, I’d spend hours on some problem, several few pages of math work just for one problem, and make some dumb mistake in an integral somewhere, being off by a factor of 2 at the end and only getting 2 of 4 points.<p>It was painful, and I felt like a dumbass seeing the other kids regularly getting perfect scores.<p>Then the midterm came and I blew them all out of the water. I hadn’t realised they somehow had the solutions manual so just got perfect scores all along but clearly didn’t learn the material like I did.
This isn't just about AI, the exams were only moved to remote for COVID.<p>There will be a lot of COVID-era qualifications that are treated with a hint of suspicion in the future.<p>Take a look at A-level scores: <a href="https://schoolsweek.co.uk/a-level-results-2024-future-exams-will-be-pegged-to-more-generous-2023-baseline/" rel="nofollow">https://schoolsweek.co.uk/a-level-results-2024-future-exams-...</a><p>( direct link to graph: <a href="https://schoolsweek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Overall-A-level-data-970x855.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://schoolsweek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Overall...</a> )<p>It's unfortunate for those affected either way. It was a difficult time when drastic measures needed to be taken at short notice.<p>It's right to go back to in-person testing if there is a problem keeping remote exams fair.
> outpacing... safeguards<p>Calculations must be getting accurate now. Not only questions about vocabulary or domain concepts.
Until quite recently, it was trivial to cheat on remotely proctored exams. All you had to do is spin up a VM, take the exam inside the VM, and use the host system to look up answers. I believe the main proctoring services now have crude VM checks. You can probably still use a KVM switch or a DP splitter and a buddy...
"We are doing what we can to hang on to relevancy as gatekeepers who already held way too much authority over a field". They are going to use AI on the job anyway.<p>This also applies to universities. The world has changed but they have not and they will make sure to try and stay relevant as much as they can to continue to take money.<p>Edit: looks like it will take a while for some people to accept that we are not going back from this. The cat is out of the bag and your certificates are increasingly irrelevant. Sorry if you spent a lot of money and time to get it.
I don’t think it will be too long before the pendulum swings back towards “real people who actually know the subject”. At that point, I might feel bad for everyone who coasted on AI.
Get back to me when AI is actually reliably correct about any technical field.<p>Accounting exams are gatekeeping, yes. The good kind of gatekeeping where you make sure the people doing the job are actually capable. And you have avenues to punish those who fail their clients.<p>> This also applies to universities<p>Eh. I’d say the actual academics are about 1/3 of the university experience. The rest is networking and teaching you how to think and solve problems on a more abstract level. I’d say the people who farm that (and particularly the abstract thinking part) out to AI are going to be the ones left at disadvantage in the future. You’re completely replaceable.
I've had no end of problems with accountants regardless of their certifications, they operate in a domain with an incoherent body of contradictory and highly subjective rules yet make it out to be a science.<p>My conclusion as a whole is that accountancy as a profession rarely delivers any actual value to their customers, where much of the job is compliance theater at best.