Oral Exams

No, Not This Kind of Oral Exam

From the Wall St. Journal and UCOP Daily News Clips:

When the pandemic closed classrooms in March of 2020 and forced remote teaching, a top engineering student at the University of California, San Diego, anxiously expressed concern to a professor that her classmates would cheat, bend the class curve and lower her grade.  Prof. Huihui Qi considered the dilemma and introduced a testing method with a 2,000-year-old record that is today largely ignored: oral exams. “The students were nervous,” Qi said. “None of them had taken exams like this before.”

That initiative led to a three-year research experiment which has now stretched across 7,000 oral exams. It comes as a wave of professors around the world are experimenting with oral exams to improve teaching and learning and to discourage cheating. Qi believes the exams can push students past rote memorization, prompt them to think on their feet and reveal a student’s conceptual understanding of the subject matter better than most written exams. They are also very hard to hack.

The upbeat assessment comes at a perilous moment for the nation’s universities. Nearly two-thirds of college students admitted to cheating before the pandemic, according to the International Center for Academic Integrity, which researches cheating. When the pandemic hit, plagiarism increased, according to Turnitin, a company which sells a plagiarism-detection system. ChatGPT, which became accessible to the public last year, added another variable. This spring, Turnitin found about 4% of papers turned into professors were generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence.*

The trajectory threatens the business model of higher education. In May, the ratings company Moody’s said concerns around cheating and plagiarism tied to artificial intelligence are a credit risk to the sector. If a degree no longer designates legitimate academic achievement it will cease to hold value, said Tricia Bertram Gallant, a director of the academic integrity office at UCSD and a member of the International Center for Academic Integrity...

Full story at https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-colleges-cheating-oral-exams-286e0091.

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*As we have noted in prior posts, UCLA does not use Turnitin for detection of AI cheating because it is not sufficiently reliable.

COVID Aftershock

There are many aftershocks of the pandemic. But here is one close to home and involving UCLA and the Regents. From the LA Times:

The San Diego Bowl Game Assn. is seeking a minimum payment of $3 million in compensatory damages from the Pac-12 Conference and the University of California Regents, stemming from the UCLA football team backing out of the 2021 Holiday Bowl in the hours before kickoff because of a rash of positive COVID-19 tests that depleted the depth of its defensive line. In a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court in San Diego County on Wednesday morning, the SDBGA alleges “a failure of defendants to accept responsibility and accountability for their conduct, which caused substantial damages to plaintiff.”

The SDBGA said in the filing it lost more than $3.6 million in ticket revenue it had to refund as a result of the cancellation and $1.4 million that had to be returned to the game’s title sponsor. The bowl’s total losses approached $8 million. “Despite the Pac-12’s good faith efforts to find an amicable and fair resolution, the Holiday Bowl filed a lawsuit this week seeking to leverage for its own financial gain the global COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the cancellation of the 2021 Holiday Bowl,” said a Pac-12 statement Wednesday. “The Holiday Bowl is now also refusing to pay the fees it owes the Pac-12 for our member institution’s participation in the 2022 Holiday Bowl, in clear breach of our agreement. The Pac-12 plans to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”

The bowl argued in the lawsuit that its obligation to the Pac-12 for the participation of the Oregon Ducks in the December 2022 game against North Carolina was $2.45 million. According to sources familiar with the ongoing discussions between the sides, the SDBGA informed the Pac-12 a week before the payment’s due date in April that it would apply the payment toward what it felt the Pac-12 owed from UCLA’s 2021 cancellation. “This offset was fair, just and equitable,” the filing states.

At issue in the case will be whether the Pac-12 correctly applied the “force majeure” provision of the contract the bowl and the conference signed in 2019 as a reason not to participate that will hold up under law...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/sports/ucla/story/2023-05-31/holiday-bowl-sues-pac-12-uc-regents-ucla.

The Stress Is on Stress

Inside Higher Ed today features a survey of college students on the subject of professorial responsibility for helping students deal with stress. Excerpt:

There remains some debate as to whether and to what degree student stress and mental health concerns are within the faculty purview (which is otherwise expanding).

One professor, who did not want to be identified by name for this story, says that much depends on the institutional context: at small liberal arts colleges, for example, “where class sizes are small, or at other institutions where the culture is specifically this, professors cater to students’ needs. But this is not the culture or educational mission everywhere. Students need to step up and take responsibility as adults.”

This isn’t an isolated position. But there’s a growing consensus, especially among college mental health researchers and student success advocates, that professors have a role to play in promoting student well-being—and the Student Voice data show that close to half of students agree.

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/health-wellness/2023/06/02/are-professors-responsible-easing-student-stress.

Well, There's Happy - And Then There Is Less Happy

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We'll try to be happy without the discount.

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2Ml9V9A5AA. 

Emeriti Awards Presented Last Night

Bryson, Goldberg, Morris

The 2022-23 Goldberg award for extraordinary service by an emeritus/emerita professor was awarded to Robert Morris (Dept. of Pediatrics) last night at the Faculty Club. At the same ceremony, The 2022-23 Dickson awards for outstanding research, scholarly work, teaching and/or educational service were awarded to Yvonne Bryson (Dept. of Pediatrics) and Carole Goldberg (Law). [An award also went to Sander Goldberg (Classics) who could not be present.]

You can hear an audio recording of the ceremony emceed by Scott Waugh, president of the Emeriti Association, at:

https://archive.org/details/awards-5-31-23-sound-edited. (Yours truly did his best with an online equalizer to reduce background noise.)

Tech Transfer Difficulties

At tomorrow's meeting of the Regents' Special Committee on Innovation Transfer and Entrepreneurship, there will be a segment on a change in federal policy that may make such transfers less attractive to outside firms:

The [presentation] will update the Special Committee on intellectual property provisions implemented in June 2021 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for the purpose of enhancing U.S. competitiveness. Through a Determination of Exceptional Circumstances (DEC), the DOE implemented enhanced U.S. competitiveness provisions requiring domestic manufacturing in patent rights clauses in its grants and cooperative agreements. There is concern that, because the DOE language deviates from the Bayh-Dole Act standard patent rights clauses in several meaningful ways, there may be downstream impacts, including possible chilling effects on licensing DOE-funded inventions. For such inventions that are licensed, UC will need to monitor licensees’ compliance with DOE’s substantial U.S. manufacturing requirements or risk significant penalties, including loss of invention ownership and the retained right to use the UC-generated invention for research and education purposes...

In June 2021, through a Determination of Exceptional Circumstances (DEC), the DOE implemented enhanced U.S. competitiveness provisions requiring domestic manufacturing in patent rights clauses in its grants and cooperative agreements. DOE determined that despite funding many breakthrough technologies over the years, “too often the transition of these technologies has resulted in manufacture being offshored.”

UC campus technology transfer offices (TTOs) are beginning to receive invention disclosures subject to the DOE DEC. TTOs have expressed concern that DOE’s right to impose the above-noted penalties may make such inventions less attractive to potential licensees and investors. For companies willing to engage in the waiver request process, it is not clear how many waivers or modifications to U.S. competitiveness provisions will be granted and what the timeline for the process will be...

Full agenda item at https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/june23/s6.pdf.

New Scholarships

From time to time we like to point to philanthropic contributions to the university that do not involve brick and mortar construction, but rather focus on research and students. A recent contribution goes to students. From the Bruin:

UCLA’s new Affordability Initiative will award four-year scholarships to up to 35 California resident students each year starting in 2024. The $20,000 scholarships, funded by a $15 million donation from UCLA alumnus Peter Merlone, will be distributed to recipients over the course of four years... Around 700 students from California will be eligible to apply for the scholarships produced by this donation.

UCLA spokesperson Barbra Ramos said in an emailed statement that the initiative was created to further the UC and the state of California’s commitment to providing debt-free education for undergraduate students without the need for loans or additional grants. She added that the lack of affordability for a college degree motivated the university to pursue additional funding from outside sources.

“UCLA recognizes that volatility in the U.S. and global economies, the high cost of living in Los Angeles, ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and other factors are creating a college affordability challenge for students and their families,” Ramos said in the statement.

In the statement, she also said the initiative is focused on addressing costs beyond tuition, such as housing, health insurance and transportation. She added that the initiative was created because the university is aware of the educational boundaries that tuition, in addition to economic unease, create for undergraduate students...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2023/05/30/ucla-affordability-initiative-to-provide-20000-scholarships-starting-in-2024.