> they expressed a clear preference for written exams
When I was a student, I would have been quite vocal with my clear preferences for all exams being open-book and/or being able to amend my answers after grading for a revised score.
What I'm saying is, "the students would prefer..." isn't automatically case closed on what's best. Obviously the students would prefer a take-home because you can look up everything you can't recall / didn't show up to class to learn, and yes, because you can trivially cheat with AI (with a light rewrite step to mask the "LLM voice").
But in real life, people really will ask you to explain your decisions and to be able to reason about the problem you're supposedly working on. It seems clear from reading the revised prompts that the intent is to force the agent to be much fairer and easier to deal with than this first attempt was, so I don't think this is a bad idea.
Finally, (this part came from my reading of the student feedback quotes in the article) consider that the current cohort of undergrads is accustomed to communicating mainly via texting. To throw in a further complication, they were around 13-17 when COVID hit, decreasing human contact even more. They may be exceedingly nervous about speaking to anyone who isn't a very close friend. I'm sympathetic to them, but helping them overcome this anxiety with relatively low stakes is probably better than just giving up on them being able to communicate verbally.
> being able to amend my answers after grading for a revised score
How do you expect that to work? After the exam, you talk to your friends (and to ChatGPT) and know the correct answers even if you could have never produced them during the exam.
Not the person you're replying to, but I've had some courses in which you received your graded exams and had an opportunity to regain some points by choosing some number of incorrect responses and redoing the work to obtain a correct answer.
This was pre-LLM, but you could cheat back then too. LLMs make it a bit easier by showing you the work to "show" on your corrections.
When I was a student, I would have been quite vocal with my clear preferences for all exams being open-book and/or being able to amend my answers after grading for a revised score.
What I'm saying is, "the students would prefer..." isn't automatically case closed on what's best. Obviously the students would prefer a take-home because you can look up everything you can't recall / didn't show up to class to learn, and yes, because you can trivially cheat with AI (with a light rewrite step to mask the "LLM voice").
But in real life, people really will ask you to explain your decisions and to be able to reason about the problem you're supposedly working on. It seems clear from reading the revised prompts that the intent is to force the agent to be much fairer and easier to deal with than this first attempt was, so I don't think this is a bad idea.
Finally, (this part came from my reading of the student feedback quotes in the article) consider that the current cohort of undergrads is accustomed to communicating mainly via texting. To throw in a further complication, they were around 13-17 when COVID hit, decreasing human contact even more. They may be exceedingly nervous about speaking to anyone who isn't a very close friend. I'm sympathetic to them, but helping them overcome this anxiety with relatively low stakes is probably better than just giving up on them being able to communicate verbally.