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Brief fire causes evacuation but no injuries at historic Detroit college building

By The Associated Press

DETROIT (AP) — A fire on Wednesday caused the evacuation of a historic building owned by Wayne State University in Detroit.

Video from TV stations showed thick rolling clouds of black smoke near the top of the 14-story Maccabees Building, a nearly century-old building designed by Albert Kahn, along Woodward Avenue, just north of downtown.

The fire on the 11th floor was contained, Wayne State said on social media, and no injuries were reported. Authorities said it likely began in the heating and cooling system.

Wayne State has owned the building for more than 20 years and has offices there, including the Computer Science Department and African American Studies. But it is not generally known as a place for classes.

The Maccabees was the home of early radio and TV studios, including radio broadcasts of “The Lone Ranger,” starting in the 1930s, and “The Green Hornet.”

Perfect homework, blank stares: Why colleges are turning to oral exams to combat AI

By The Associated Press
The assignment involves no laptop, no chatbot and no technology of any kind. In fact, there's no pen or paper, either. Instead, students in Chris Schaffer’s biomedical engineering class at Cornell University are required to speak directly to an instructor in what he calls an “oral defense.” It's a testing method as old as Socrates and making a comeback in the AI age. A growing number of college professors say they are turning to oral exams, and combining a variety of old-fashioned and cutting-edge techniques, to help address a crisis in higher education. “You won’t be able to AI your way through an oral exam,” says Schaffer, who introduced the oral defense last semester.
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