The gold standard and AI oral exams

Venu Govindaraju, Distinguished Professor, Chief AI Officer, and Senior Vice President for Research, Innovation and Economic Development at SUNY Buffalo, calls the oral examination “the gold standard of evaluation and assessment” in academic life, as in a doctoral candidate’s dissertation defense. He envisions oral examinations at all levels in university life. And AI, he says, will be able do it. From the Inside Higher Ed podcast The Key , “AI for the Public Good with Govindaraju”:

So all those aspects can a simulated by a AI platform. We could actually have AI platforms simulate the AI committee, ... and this would this scale.... I'm sure in the future we will be able to scale individualized oral exams.... When you come and take an exam, you know, we will have our own AI platform which will engage with you just like a committee engages a Ph.D. student.

Govindaraju envisions AI as making the university “a super marvellous place which will enrich the learning process in ways that we never imagined before.”

The interviewer’s response: “Mmm.”

But it’s not clear what instructors are supposed to do until AI takes over exams. Nor is it clear whether Govindaraju envisions AI replacing a doctoral candidate’s committee — and if not, why not. But even if not, his is still a remarkable proposal: AI makes it impossible to determine what a student knows by administering, say, a written test; therefore, we should use AI to determine by other means what a student knows. And the result will enable “us” to “look at the trajectory of inquisition of the student.” But it’s not clear who will be looking, nor is it clear how that would scale.

To adapt Alex Hirsch’s response to Sam Altman: Why not just talk to your students?

See also a post I wrote during the mania for MOOCs: The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else. An excerpt:

An often-repeated claim among those who insist on educational disruption is that the efficiencies of teaching — one teacher, one room — have stayed the same for too long. But then the efficiencies of, say, cutting hair — one barber, one head — haven’t changed much either. Perhaps there are good reasons why. The great irony for me in the rhetoric of disruption: those who speak it will no doubt seek for their own children what [John] Hennessy [then-president of Standford] calls “the gold standard.” There will always be real college for the few. For everyone else, it may be another story.

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[But also: the AI panel would have to make sure that the students are not ghosts. Maybe facial recognition would help — something Govindaraju worked on years ago.]

Ghost students

Méadhbh McIvor writes about AI and an online asychronous course: “My Students Weren’t Human. They Were Ghosts” (The Chronicle of Higher Education). An excerpt:

Whether or not they had really done the work, I took it for granted that both Jeffrey and Adam were flesh-and-blood human beings — thinking, feeling people with the kinds of busy, unpredictable lives that sometimes prevented them from completing their coursework as conscientiously as their instructors might have hoped.

As it turned out, I was wrong.

I am happy to have missed out on teaching an online asynchronous course.

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[McIvor writes that at Arizona State University, her “relentlessly — and controversially — pro-AI university,” people like her are deemed “Luddites, contrarians, or ornery stuck-in-the-muds.” She, though, says that she’s proud to be all three. More power to her.]

Yes, Cornell is an Ivy League school

From The New York Times (gift link): “Students Skinned a Bear in a Dorm. Cornell Realized It Should Ban That.”

A perfect time to invoke the alligator rule.

Still a diner

[518 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Finally: out of East Williamsburg, and not only are there sidewalks — there’s a diner.

The Kellogg Diner opened in 1928. The photograph captures the installation of a neon sign — a momentous occasion for any concern. (Recall The Best Years of Our Lives, in which returning vet Homer Parrish notices that his uncle’s tavern, Butch’s Place, now has a neon sign: modernity strikes.) Click for the much larger view and you’ll see a wealth of other details. Find the pie. And Irene. And “Boy, it’s a honey.” And the Luckies. But remember: Smoking Is Not Permitted.

The diner, reborn as Kellogg’s Diner, continues at this corner, though the menu is a considerable step up from ordinary diner fare. And the diner now takes reservations.

Some background:

“NYC’s iconic, 95-year-old Kellogg’s Diner goes bankrupt, seeks buyer to fork over hefty $2.5 million” (New York Post ).

“A Star Is Reborn: Kellogg’s Diner Is Revamped as a Tex-Mex Triumph” (BKMAG).

“Everything You Need to Know About the New Kellogg’s Diner” (Resy).

“Kellogg’s Diner Lives On With Jackie Carnesi at the Helm” (The New York Times , gift link).

“My All-Nighter in a Vanishing World: the 24-Hour Diner” (The New York Times, gift link).

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, was for me pretty joyless — difficult in ways that sparked no delight. If you had told me I’d be able to finish it, I would have pointed to 24-A, eleven letters, “Disbeliever’s hyperbole.” But I did finish, and I didn’t say 24-A.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, three letters, “Venerable entertainment threesome.” EMI? NBC? RCA? I took a guess, and it worked.

3-D, nine letters, “Provincial accumulation.” Good grief. I thought of something like TOWNTAXES.

20-A, seven letters, “Chops, these days.” Does the clue mean that “chops” has replaced this seven-letter word? Or that this seven-letter word has replaced “chops”? I can’t decide, because I think chops have been and always will be chops. (I’m writing as a musician with fairly decent chops.)

31-D, nine letters, “Tiki bar cocktail served in a wooden container.” I have shared one tiki bar cocktail in my lifetime — a scorpion bowl, aptly named.

32-D, nine letters, “Key catalyst in America's westward expansion.” Nice misdirection. My first thought was CONESTOGA.

38-A, eight letters, “French restaurant supplier.” Bon sang!

40-A, five letters, “Give in to.” Kinda forced.

42-D, six letters, “Spade topper.” Nice.

52-A, four letters, “She’s featured in Fun in Acapulco.” Okay, but there is a movie of that name, and she’s not in it.

53-A, ten letters, “British brass band mainstays.” Uh, ELGARTUNES?

A low point: 13-D, five letters, “Who succeeded Bob as Sentate Majority Leader (2001).” There’s no reason to have this [redacted] racist’s name in a crossword. Another clue, please.

My favorite in this puzzle: 11-D, five letters, “Not much to add.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

A kiddo’s mondegreen: Now with an explanation of “Barn Sesame Seeds.”

A kiddo’s mondegreen

A song heard at camp, requested at home: “Barn Sesame Seeds.”

Can you figure out the real title? I couldn’t. But my daughter did.

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll reveal the answer later today if no one has it.

*

The song is Terry Gilkyson’s “The Bare Necessities,” from the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book. And who did the arrangement? Van Dyke Parks.

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“A striking reflection”

The New York Times (gift link) has a long article about the blue and the green: “How the Reflecting Pool Came to Mirror Trump’s Washington.” An excerpt:

Many of the details of the saga are reported in this article for the first time. They show that the pool, which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.

Domestic comedy

“Is this the same morning, or a different morning?”

“A different morning, several months later. You were asleep for a couple of months.”

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[Context: I fell asleep during one morning scene in the pleasantly dreadful movie Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and woke up during another.]

Periwinkle blues

[Zits, August 6, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

From today’s Zits. Jeremy’s “blues” (modeled on Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man”) begins

I got a comfortable suburban home, baby.
Daa-daa-da-dumm!
Food in the fridge!
Daa-daa-da-dumm!
My parents are loving and reasonably supportive
    of me, honey.

And so on. Sometimes it’s better to just play.

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