Spring semester is over. It worked. The oral portion runs about ten minutes per student. They pick one problem from their written work and walk me through it. Why mesh and not nodal. What the time constant tells you about the circuit. Where the negative sign came from. I learn more about what a student actually understands in that ten minutes than I used to learn from a semester of graded homework.
A new Lumina Foundation-Gallup study says 57% of US college students use AI in their coursework at least weekly, and one in five use it every day. At the same time, 53% say their school discourages or prohibits it. Daily use is highest among men and among business, tech, and engineering students. The students avoiding AI mostly cite ethical concerns and school policy, so the ones following the rules are falling behind on a tool they will use the rest of their careers.
My position on AI in education is simple. If we are preparing students for the jobs they are about to take, AI has to be in every class. Every engineering job they walk into will expect them to use these tools well. A program that prohibits AI is training students for a job market that no longer exists. The work is not to keep AI out of the classroom. The work is to teach students how to use it, where it fails, and when to check it against first principles.
That still leaves the assessment problem. If students use AI on everything, how do you know what they understand? You change how you measure them. Oral exams catch what written work cannot. In-class paper problems catch it. Hands-on labs, where a student wires a circuit on a breadboard, takes scope measurements, and explains what they are seeing, catch it cold. Take-home essays graded on polish do not catch anything anymore.
The AI can solve the circuit. It cannot explain why this student chose the loop they chose, and it cannot wire the breadboard when the lab is due at five. That is what we should be assessing, and that is the work employers are hiring for.
1 comment:
Hey Dr. Snyder I appreciate you sharing this on LinkedIn. I am the maintainer of my school’s internal tool called 24/7 Office Hours.com (which is spinning out of the Uni as a for profit) I am curious if you could try it out for free, next time you do an assessment. Because it was a workflow in it where the student has to chat with an AI Assessment Scale ver. 2.0 chatbot. Where you can evaluate the student’s interaction with a chatbot grounded in the HW problem. I hadn’t thought about the student uploading their work and convincing a chatbot they know what they are doing. But might be a way for you to pseudo-automate this oral exam process. Let me know if you are interested, I might add that workflow in. Granted the student can still commit fraud, even if they self certify, but I had students chatting with an AIAS chatbot on a take home exam and I was able to discover the same things you mention in this article. Since the goal is to determine if they know what they are talking about. I read all the transcripts between the student and the bot when grading them. The tool just streamlines it. Let me know your thoughts or if you want to connect: bkihei@kennesaw.edu
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