Viva VIVA!

AI can reinforce what's important to humans.

As you may have heard, we’ve created this nifty tool in connection with Caltech that we’re calling “VIVA”. We think it has broad implications. Now that we’ve gotten through the first round of submissions, we can catch our breath and provide more context as to how this tool came to be.

The success(ful pilot) of VIVA is the result of responding to several trends.

1) First, ChatGPT. Most teachers and professors seem to underestimate the extent of students’ reliance upon ChatGPT. Similarly, many admissions officers don’t want to (publicly) admit that application essays have been rendered practically useless given how proficient ChatGPT is at shortening the “personal essay” writing process. There needs to be new ways of demonstrating learning now that ChatGPT and other foundation LLMs can easily produce content that used to be used as evidence of student learning and their authentic voice.

We saw the impact of ChatGPT on our own two sons. One was a senior in high school when ChatGPT came out, so he—generally speaking—received the intended educational benefit of his public high school’s IB program. His younger brother, however, was a junior when ChatGPT came out, and we’re convinced that his IB experience was “powered by ChatGPT”. And (unfortunately) his grades were fine!

Those of us who went to school long ago remember how we struggled with writing and labored over papers—and hopefully we now see those struggles as critical to developing critical thinking and communication skills. ChatGPT makes those important “micro struggles” go away, but at the same time, it seems as though high schools are powerless to do anything about it. Students—like all of us—don’t like hard work and can easily rationalize taking the easy approach, even if deep down they know they’re not learning the material or developing skills. Imploring teenagers to forego ChatGPT because of its negative impact on “traditional learning” is as pollyannish as believing that an American teenager (or really any American?) will see the harms of sugar and then forgo sweets.

The response by the educational world to ChatGPT has focused on using AI detection tools, but their efficacy or usefulness continues to be debated. However, these debates miss the point: A new learning paradigm has arrived, and tools need to adjust in a way that helps develop human-centered skills. Learning and mastery must still be demonstrated, but in a way that is more “human” than just stringing words together in a way that makes sense probabilistically, which is what today’s LLM models do. This leads us to point number two.

2) The Overriding, Lifelong Importance of Effective Oral Communication: The second trend is more of a realization: Everyone knows that being able to communicate effectively with an adult is a critical skill. After all, adults are the decision makers with all of the resources, so it’s not an understatement to say that a student’s ability to get “buy-in” from the adults they interact with is the most important skill they can hone. It’s much more important than one’s ability to take tests or memorize answers.

Here’s a talk by an MIT professor that encapsulates this realization:

We all intuitively know this! The problem is that there’s never been a great way to have students practice these skills at scale, so instead they develop those skills throughout the hurly-burly of high school and college. But that ability has taken a beating in recent years thanks to another phenomenon . . .

3) The Overhang of COVID Continues to Impact Students’ Willingness to Engage: We keep hearing from teachers that students are getting worse at the ability to communicate. Post-COVID, presentation opportunities have decreased, class discussion has diminished, and students see public speaking as an anxiety-inducing experience to be avoided at all costs. To make matters worse, a fraught political atmosphere combined with a plethora of always accessible online entertainment creates an environment where students are incentivized to avoid engaging with anyone (or, as Jonathan Haidt says in his book, we have to acknowledge the problematic trend of “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world”. But wait, there’s still more going on:

4) The Booming Industry Offering “Research: Opportunities to College Applicants: We know that more and more students are submitting “research” as part of their college application. This trend is facilitated by many companies that provide research opportunities to students for a hefty fee. It’s widely known that many of these opportunities are of dubious value academically, and admissions offices will admit that they are not able to evaluate effectively the value of a student’s purported research. In case you can’t tell, the value of written materials in the application process is being undermined from multiple directions. So how does anyone authentically demonstrate their learning or motivations?

5) Video Can Preserve Authenticity: Video is what is going to preserve authenticity in the admissions process. We’ve seen this for years with InitialView’s interviews for international applicants: Our unscripted, recorded conversations show how a student is ready to thrive both in the classroom and in a residential community.

Without them, it’s hard for admissions officers to know what’s real in the application. Admissions offices have felt for years that the essays were declining in value as more students hired application coaches, and then ChatGPT was the final nail in the coffin. If there’s no authenticity in the process, then admissions officers are just admitting avatars, not real 17-year-olds.

All of this has led to VIVA.

How it works: A student uploads their research/project/paper to our system, which in turn asks them customized questions based on the research itself. The student responds on the fly, demonstrating both mastery and providing confirmation that they did the work.

If the student did the work, VIVA is an easy process. In fact, we see students excited for the chance to talk about an impactful academic experience. (If they didn’t do the work? Then it is evident in how they are not able to answer the questions. In practice, this means that most don’t send a VIVA they struggled through to admissions offices, and they second-guess the value in including their research on their college application at all.)

Fittingly, the name “VIVA” comes from the “viva voce”, which is the traditional final oral examination at Oxford and Cambridge that students must go through before receiving their degree.

Demo: Here’s a teacher at our pilot high school (Episcopal Academy; more below) giving it a shot using his old master’s dissertation: https://initialview.com/viva/review-student/?v=Y48Bgq55QsYTMtABSxsnWZwvPesthdsD7TJPgYYa

With VIVA, admissions offices can literally see proof on video of a student’s academic chops. As with all of our products, students pay one price—$22, in the case of VIVA—which allows them to send their VIVA anywhere. Fee waivers are broadly and easily available. Admissions officers, through Slate, can receive the annotated VIVA video along with a copy of the research itself.

Interest in VIVA is coming from all directions. Episcopal Academy outside of Philly is already piloting its use in curriculum (write a paper; hand it in with a VIVA); scholarship competitions and honors programs are drawn to VIVA as a better tool to make decisions (instead of using an arbitrary test score cutoff, why not see if recipients can communicate effectively before you give them your campus’s most prestigious scholarship?).

Best of all, VIVA emphasizes what will matter in a post-AI world: Communicating complex ideas with others in a succinct and engaging way. Viva VIVA!