Group items tagged

"Researchers at the University of Reading fooled their own professors by secretly submitting AI-generated exam answers that went undetected and got better grades than real students. The project created fake student identities to submit unedited answers generated by ChatGPT-4 in take-home online assessments for undergraduate courses. The university's markers - who were not told about the project - flagged only one of the 33 entries, with the remaining AI answers receiving higher than average grades than the students."

"The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren't Happy About It Students call it hypocritical. A senior at Northeastern University demanded her tuition back. But instructors say generative A.I. tools make them better at their jobs."

"I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated"

"We typically begin the semester by asking students to reflect on the formulas they've learned in the past and to consider how those shape their writing. We now ask those same reflection questions about AI outputs. Student responses, as Jennifer has written elsewhere, are revealing: The kind of writing that Chat does, it's what our teachers try to get us to do. It's like five-paragraph essays, and perfect paragraph[s] that don't have any personality, which we were taught in high school. It does what school has trained us to do. Like write a perfectly formatted essay that is based on some random people's ideas."

"Big Chinese tech companies appear to have turned off some AI functions to prevent cheating during the country's highly competitive university entrance exams. More than 13.3 million students are sitting the four-day gaokao exams, which began on Saturday and determine if and where students can secure a limited place at university. This year, students hoping to get some assistance from increasingly advanced AI tools have been stymied."

"Pearson is apparently monitoring social media, to detect signs of cheating during exams. That's insanely creepy, and a horrible violation. "And for those who think "Well, its Twitter, its public", remember this: So is walking down the street. But is it OK for the government to monitor us with street surveillance cameras and send us fines for not crossing with the crosswalk?" via Pearson Caught Spying On Students. Big Brother Is Here. "

"A school in Poland has been fined €4,600 ($5,200) for breaching Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) after it was found to be processing students' fingerprint data to verify whether they had paid for school lunch. The news comes as biometric data harnessing programs around the world spark significant privacy concerns."

"More than two-thirds (68.7%) of the addicts had trouble sleeping, compared with 57.1% of those who were not addicted to their device. Students who used their phone after midnight or for four or more hours a day were most likely to be at high risk of displaying addictive use of their device."

"The university presidents' council said this morning that the security of its central admissions system has been upgraded after the personal data of around 23,000 students was advertised for sale on the dark web. The university presidents' council insisted that the leaked admissions data, which included personal information and examination results, was only current through last May after anger erupted over the data breach. #BanTCAS was surging on Thai Twitter this morning in reference to the Thai University Central Admission System, or TCAS."

"Revealed: Thousands of UK university students caught cheating using AI Guardian investigation finds almost 7,000 proven cases of cheating - and experts says these are tip of the iceberg"

"The blackouts coincided with exams for secondary and high-school students and were implemented as the ultimate step in the country's battle to stop students cheating using smuggled mobile phones and internet-connected devices in exam halls. While attempting to ban mobile phones from exams or setting up local jamming equipment might be a less draconian measure, shutting off the internet is undoubtedly efficient. However, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government, causing human rights campaigners, including Access Now, to condemn the move."

"The family of a California design student killed in November's terror attacks in Paris have sued Twitter Inc, Google and Facebook Inc, claiming the social media companies provide "material support" to the militant group Islamic State."

"If students want a verified certificate for their online course, they can pay a fee of $30-90 (approximately £17-54) for the Signature Track service. They will be asked to submit a webcam photo and identification card to check their identity. "

"Eck said machine learning, a powerful form of AI, will be integrated into how humans communicate with each other. He raised the idea of "assistive writing" in the future with Google Docs, the company's online word processing software. This may be based on Google's upcoming Smart Compose technology that suggests words and phrases based on what's being typed. Teachers used to worry about whether students used Wikipedia for their homework. Now they may wonder what part of the work the students wrote themselves, Eck said."

"After a successful phishing attack that captured over 50 accounts, hackers stole 500,000 records from the San Diego Unified School District, for staff, current students, and past students going all the way back to 2008; including SSNs, home addresses and phone numbers, disciplinary files, health information, emergency contact details, health benefits and payroll info, pay information, financial data for direct deposits."

"That was apparently the result of the US government's probing of visa applicants' social media profiles. After the search, an officer questioned the 17-year-old, who got a scholarship to study in the US, about his friends' social media activity and told him she'd found some "posting political points of view that oppose the US," the student paper noted. Despite Ajjawi's protests, the officer denied the student's entry and let him call his parents."

"Prolific digital rights activism organization Fight for the Future has partnered with the group Students for Sensible Drug Policy to stop facial recognition technology from coming to college campuses. "

""Even though mobile phones are intertwined with our lives, they do not belong in the classroom," education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf said. "Students need to be able to concentrate and need to be given the opportunity to study well. Mobile phones are a disturbance, scientific research shows. We need to protect students against this.""

"Students on online courses report insufficient interaction and familiarity with their instructors and a lack of motivation. Feedback in one study included: "I want a real teacher", "I prefer a course taught by a human" and "There is no instructor personality interjected into the course". So, how do instructors overcome this perception and ensure students view them as "present" in online courses? "

"The tablets are scheduled to be introduced next year, and by 2028, teachers are supposed to be using these AI textbooks for all subjects except music, art, physical education and ethics. The government hasn't shared many details about how it will all work, except that the material is supposed to be customized for different speeds of learning, with teachers using dashboards to monitor how students are doing. In response, more than 50,000 parents have signed a petition demanding that the government focus less on new tech and more on students' overall well-being: "We, as parents, are already encountering many issues at unprecedented levels arising from [our children's] exposure to digital devices." Lee Sun-youn, a mother of two, told FT, "I am worried that too much usage of digital devices could negatively affect their brain development, concentration span and ability to solve problems - they already use smartphones and tablets too much.""