Exams And AI

I've come to a few educated conclusions after giving both my major semester exams within the span of a month. Let's discuss those below :-

AI Agents are the biggest gold-diggers

In order to ensure I have a supporter by my side for these exams, I decided to enrol for the free trial for the ChatGPT Plus subscription. Turns out, if it thinks you can afford it, it decides to act really differently with you.

For my theory heavy exams, when I asked it to create notes but couldn't specify how many pages - it was ready to create notes for around 80 pages with good formating. That was more pages than I'm planning to read for all of university.

It wasn't giving me silly answers, didn't interrupt me between my prompts to tell me that my limit is getting over because I'm too poor to deserve more efforts and processing power for its side.

I did feel bad knowing I'm this dependant on GPT for all my exam prep, I was sending it all my PPTs, reminding it to cover everything and be accurate instead of double-checking and verifying on my own - but in my defense, this semester was filled with a few lazy professors, some who weren't willing to teach well and properly, some who don't even check their mails. And I knew it'd take too much time for me to learn things on my own, I'd rather let AI teach me and ask me questions to verify if I remember things and understand concepts properly, which I'll be fair, it was pretty helpful for. But with a major issue, like :-

It Still Hallucinates

The night before my first comprehensive exam, I reminded it twice to ensure proper coverage. After we finished our prep, I decided to ask it if it covered everything and go through the slides once again and let me know in case we didn't.

Well, it gave a long list of concepts we left behind. It was long. But it reminded me that these are "Too Small for the professor to ask about" and aren't "exam likely". 

Then the exam morning rolled upon. Half the questions were from the "too-small-for-the- professor-and-unlikely-for-exam" section. I'm glad I decided to read through them so I had something to answer. Just, something. Not everything, unfortunately. 

But I realized eventually that

A lot of people don't take exams seriously

This can be due to many reasons - either your dad has a business that he's open for you to join - or maybe you're just being too lazy, or can't care enough.

I realized this when I was stressed about performing atleast above average on a non-graded course examination, but people were leaving 30 minutes into the examination. 

To be fair, I finished the paper somewhat early too and decided to ponder really heavily about the one question I couldn't answer. Usually, I'd ask the invigilator, but;

Inviiglators are the comic piece of an examination

And this was one of the only other examinations where the invigilator wasn't our course's professor. But I realized halfway through that she's from Biology background, which somewhat matched with my course. So I decided to ask her.

She unfortunately couldn't help since she didn't know, but she was really kind and decided to ask to send help from the faculty group. When the faculty member arrived, he decided to repeat the same question and leave.

Thanks, I couldn't have read it like how he did and it changed how I saw the question.

For some reason, our last exams, invigilators were being spoonfed (literally). Tea and varieties of Chaat items every day. I didn't know what was more frivolous, the fact that some of them ate it in front of their empty stomach sleep deprived students, or that they had no problem eating that at 9 in the morning.

A really bad concept that for some reason, all institutions follow is the whole "let's collect your signature during examination while you're locked in.", they have enough time to collect it from everyone before distributing papers - they can't convince me they don't do it on purpose.

Additionally, I feel worse since I don't really have a signature, my handwriting is bad enough that it sort of acts like a unique signatory on its own. But it looks bad, so a lot of times I've seen professors give me the "is-he-illiterate?" stare.

But this time, our college was locked in. Three inviiglators in one tiny room? I've seen government banks offer less security to their lockers. 

As much as I don't support copying because of how high-risk-low-reward it is, I do think inviiglators can handle it better. - i hate that whenever they catch or reprehend someone, their first statement is :-

"if anyone else has brought chits or is planning to copy, let us know now itself."

I do agree some students can be really gullible, but not to this extent. I've never understood what their true intent was. It's not like you'll let them go without any consequences if they admit now, so they might as well continue with their plan anyways. They certainly won't raise their hand, stand up and hand over all their copying materials.

One another question that definitely ticks one off is the "how was the paper?" Question, which is fine to answer with the usual "good/fine" if it genuinely went that way. Issue is if it doesn't. Because then, not only does the professor have to deal with my bad answers and handwriting, but also the feeling of having been lied to.

Anyways, can't let go of this blog without discussing Our Holy Assessments

I'm really confident that our class alone may be responsible for freshwater shortage due to AI computing, because of how much pressure We put onto it.

Before exams, we had to sort out our assessments that hold weightage too. But this isn't like school where the assessments are goofy and have negligible impact, because here they hold a decent weightage.

But due to the war, we weren't really meeting each other for any projects and there was a time crunch, and due to sympathetic reasons, we were also working with a few randoms.

So now, we were stuck with people whose workflow we aren't familiar with, along with a timecrunch for deadline. But because almost everyone else, including my friends had opted out of writing exams for this semester as a relief. I had to do something to get the projects going.

So while I prompted everyone to submit original content before time, a few of them prompted their AI agent to do the same. Even though one could smell the AI out of it, I didn't complain since whatever prompt they used, the quality was good.

The lifesaver was a friend of mine, who had this one subscription that'd use AI to format our content into a PPT. Meaning we'd not have to even open PowerPoint to mingle or try to edit any slides. I can't complain since it saved us a lot of time.

I didn't like the times when I suggested him an edit and he'd respond with a "okay give me some time, it' takes up a lot of time to edit these slides it isn't so simple" 

I'd get really mad since it's a project with 10% weightage, not a 200 page big 4 firm's consultancy report.

That's also when the unfortunate realisation hit that the next generation can get away with not learning how to make a PPT on their own.

Anyways, the blog was morely just a rant (because I'm truly running out of content now and can't figure of anything else). But it is a terrifying thought that if today, we plagiarise our work and replace ours using AI, I guess we can't be shocked when employers do the same. But I guess we're too deep into the sinkhole for now.