AI for Teachers, An Open Textbook: Edition 1

Artificial Intelligence, homework, exams and so forth

A favourite argument to promise Artificial Intelligence a bright future in education is that AI can take care of exams for us.
At this point (December 2022) these are some of the ways by which Artificial Intelligence can "help" a teacher with exams:
  1. Automatic text evaluation:
  2. Controlling student activities during the exam. This is called proctoring. Webcams and other sensors are supposed to check what is happening. During COVID, companies proposing this type of service have flourished. But the use of e-proctoring is controversial, and some authors have put forward that such technologies can be intrusive, lead to racial discrimination, and more generally do not work1,2.
  3. Plagiarism control. There are tools available online which will compare an essay with a very large bank of essays. Even if most of the effort is not AI, there are a number of tools aiming to find near plagiarism, ie situations where the essay has been partially rewritten. A typical tool is Turnitin. Many Universities use it -or a similar tool. In a number of cases the University will adopt a policy as to how it should be used and the student's rights in the matter.
  4. Automatic setting of individualised questions. this has been done for a long time now and can be found in popular learning management systems like Moodle3.
Homework obeys to at least 3 logics4:
  1. In some cases it is a form of summative assessment: the grades are given depending on a combination of results and it is felt by some teachers that asking the pupils to work at home, at their own rhythm, may be less stressful. It often is the case that the teacher doesn't have enough time to cover the curriculum unless evaluation is taken outside the classroom time.
  2. In other cases the homework is there to add another layer to the knowledge built in classroom.
  3. In the third case an exam is to happen next week and the pupil is to study to prepare this exam. Sometime some exercises and activities are provided to do this, in others a memorization effort is asked.
There have of course been many opinions given with regards to homework. As they vary from culture to culture, we will not express them here.
But it is important to note one constant: when the goal of the homework is not clear for the pupil, and if there is a way to get around the homework, they will.

When the homework involves handing in the result of this homework, a number of ways of "cheating" exist, and in each case Artificial Intelligence tools have been developed:Our goal here is not to be exhaustive: new articles seem to be written on these topics every day. There is no ready to use solution.
Or goal is to create awareness and allow communities of practice to start thinking about this. Before examining some ideas as how this could happen, let's take a look at how cheating is causing problems in the chess community.

Chess

Chess is a game which has both got to do with education and with artificial intelligence 5. There are schools and even countries who have used chess in education: the type of reasoning involved in chess is good for many reasons and at all ages. Note that this is the other games too and there are initiatives to use the game of Bridge in education too6.
Chess has also provided Artificial intelligence with 2 major landmarks: in 1997 Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue7; and in 2016 Alphazero beat all the best running AI systems by a considerable margin. In the first case it should be noted that the AI did not contain any machine learning and was based on human designed rules. In the second case neural networks and reinforcement learning were essential; a further result was that whereas in 1997 the AI relied on hundreds of thousands of human played games, in 2016 all this human made knowledge was removed and only the rules of the game were provided.
In 2022, Chess is of interest to us because of the many polemics surrounding the question of cheating. During the Covid pandemic, most of the chess competitions took place online, and it was clear that cheating was taking place. In the case of chess, cheating is simple. Too simple. Just use your smartphone to find the move suggested by the AI. This has led to having to solve the following question:"how do we know when a player has cheated?" And how can we be sure? Experts have devised methods involving the comparison of a players moves with those suggested by the AI programs. And since the AI programs are now (much) better than the humans, the conclusion is that a player who plays the moves recommended by an AI will be cheating. To be fairer, the reasoning is much more subtle than that, but at the end of the day, this is to be compared with our own reaction when a mediocre students does particularly well in an exam.

Cheating

In the case of chess, but the examples we have seen in the classroom go in the same direction, two things seem to explain why the player (or the pupil) uses the AI software rather than doing the task on their own.
1. The AI software is simple to use.
2. The AI software is felt to be so much better than the human. The chess player is well aware that the moves suggested by the AI are beyond their skills. But it is difficult to resist. As some teachers have told us: 'even the better pupils will use automatic translation: they will do the homework without it, then check and realize that the AI answer is "better".

But a question remains: is this cheating? If we just go by the 'rules of the game', it is. But suppose one moment that the intended task was to move bricks from one side of the road to the other. And the rules were that you are not allowed to use a wheelbarrow. But there is a wheelbarrow available and you have the feeling that no one is looking. Yes, you are not supposed to use the wheelbarrow, but doesn't it make a lot of sense to make the task shorter and at the same time be more efficient?

Teacher in the loop

From the above we note that the opportunities for cheating are going to be more and more present. And that - at least in this moment - it seems difficult to convince the pupil to not use a tool which is going to be more and more present.
So the crucial question is: are we going to find ways to make a difference between those activities to be done in the classroom and those that will be done at home, and in this second case, are we going to accept that these home activities are done with the help of the AI?
In this article, Arvind Narayanan analyses with a lot of good sense what is happening and suggests some cool ways the teacher can come up with interesting homework in which the “cheating” phenomenon won’t happen.

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1Brown 2020; Brown L. X. Z. (2020),How automated test proctoring software discriminates against disabled students, Center for Democracy & Technology, available at https://cdt.org/insights/how-automated-test-proctoring-software-discriminates-against-disabled-students/.
2Conijn R. et al. (2022), “The fear of big brother: the potential negative side-effects of proctored exams”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, pp. 1-14, available at https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12651.
3Moodle is an open and collaborative project. Many extensions and plug-ins have been built and are shared to help teachers with grading. You can start your search here: https://edwiser.org/blog/grading-in-moodle/.
4 There are a lot of positions about homework to be read on the internet. Some in favour, some against. Furthermore, the different European countries may have different rules concerning these questions. One interesting, but US based, discussion can be found here: https://www.procon.org/headlines/homework-pros-cons-procon-org/.
5 The FIDE is the body in charge of chess worldwide. It has specialists working on the issue of chess in education: https://edu.fide.com/
6 Nukkai is a French AI company whose AI software Nook has beaten, in March 2022, teams of world champions at Bridge. They are also working on a version of Bridge which can teach logics to children. https://nukk.ai/
7 There are many references covering the story of Deep Blue's victory over Gary Kasparov. IBM's view is obviously biased but worth reading as IBM will insist on the computer winning rather than the algorithm. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/deepblue/
 

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