Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

Re:Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots by mnw21cam on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @09:48AM (#46692351)

I teach at MSc level. My students are scattered around the country and world. This makes hand-written exams tricky. Luckily, the nature of the questions they are asked to solve in the essay I give them following their coursework are that chatbots produce appalling bad submissions.

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Re:Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots by eks391 on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @11:42AM (#46694013)

This is great. Do you have advice on making questions that LLMs are bad at answering?

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Re:Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots by red-iron-pine on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @01:13PM (#46695594)

for most of the low hanging fruit it's as easy as copy-pasting the question into multiple LLMs and logging the output

do it again from a different IP or two.

there will be some pretty obvious patterns in responses. the smart kids will do minor prompt engineering "explain like you're Peter Griffin from Family Guy" or whatever, but even then there will be some core similarities.

or follow the example of someone here and post a question with hidden characters that will show up differently when copy-pasted.

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Re:Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots by n4r9 on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @06:30AM (#46704156)

They don't work very well with large numbers. Try asking Claude to find the prime factors of 83521.

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Re:Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots by mnw21cam on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @11:24AM (#46707837)

In my case, I set some course-work, where they have to log in to a Linux server in the university and process a load of data, get the results, and then write the essay about the process. Because the LLM hasn't been able to log in and see the data or indeed the results, it doesn't have a clue what it's meant to talk about.

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