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Posted by sethbannon 1/2/2026

Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams(www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com)
221 points | 279 commentspage 6
owenbrown 1/2/2026|
+ would be a much better experience for the students.
baq 1/2/2026||
It's dehumanizing to be grilled by AI, whether it is a job interview or a university exam.

...but OTOH if cheating is so easy it's impossible to resist and when everyone cheats honest students are the ones getting all the bad grades, what else can you do?

jimbokun 1/2/2026||
Written exams at a set time and place graded by a human grader.
xboxnolifes 1/2/2026||
What else can you do? Get grilled by another human, not an AI.
agluszak 1/3/2026||
Soo instead of solving the problem that the university supposedly doesn't have the money to have normal oral exams, they enshittified and techbrosified the entire process?

Thank god I had a chance to study in pre-AI times.

neilv 1/2/2026||
Instead of funneling more business/hype to the AI bro industry, to police the AI bro industry that fully expected this effect from their cheating-on-your-homework/plagiarism services (oh, I see this is a business school)...

First, the business school administration and faculty firmly commits, that plagiarism, including with AI, means prompt dismissal.

Then, the first time you have a suspicion of plagiarism, you investigate.

After the first student of a class year is found guilty, and smacked to curb, all the other students will know, and I bet your problem is mostly solved for that class year.

Then, one coked-up nepo baby sociopath will think they are too smart or meritorious to "fail" by getting caught. Bam! Smacked to the curb.

Then one of those two will try sue, and the university PR professionals will laugh at them, for putting their name in the news as someone who got kicked out of business school for cheating. The business school will take this opportunity to bolster their reputation for excellence.

At this point, it will become standard advice for the subsequent class years, that cheating at this school is something only an idiot loser does, not a winner MBA.

andrepd 1/3/2026||
There are phrases that hn loves and "scalable" is one of them. Here, it is particularly inappropriate.

Some people dream that technology (preferably duly packaged by for-profit SV concerns) can and will eventually solve each and every problem in the world; unfortunately what education boils down to is good, old-fashioned teaching. By teachers. Nothing whatsoever replaces a good, talented, and attentive teacher, all the technologies in the world, from planetariums to manim, can only augment a good teacher.

Grading students with LLMs is already tone-deaf, but presenting this trainwreck of a result and framing it as any sort of success... Let's just say it reeks of 2025.

throwaway81523 1/2/2026|
Great, so we'll see chatbots taking the exams that are administered by other chatbots. Sorry but this whole scheme is mega cringe.