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What a travesty. Why even go to school, then? Are getting good marks that much more valuable than the actual education you would receive if you didn’t cheat?

What a travesty. Why even go to school, then? Are getting good marks that much more valuable than the actual education you would receive if you didn’t cheat? Any institution that produces this outcome has its priorities completely out of whack. And any student who willingly and energetically participates in such a system must be completely vapid, short-sighted and materialistic. It would be a real shame for your country if this kind of behavior were common throughout. It would surely result in a situation where the most powerful and highly esteemed are without integrity.

t0suj4 3y ago
From talking to a handful of people it is usually to fulfill someone else's expectations. If the goals aren't aligned ethics don't matter, the student doesn't want to be in that school anyway. Cheating is the easy way to get away from that situation. And if the student is behind, it's the only way.
zamadatix 3y ago
Especially with low level degrees, fewer associate going to college with bettering oneself as much as meeting a checklist for a job interview or a parent's requirement for continued financial support. Many of these jobs don't inherently require being educated it's more a "well, why wouldn't we hire the person with the degree if we can" kind of situation and jobs tend to drive the family requirement more than the "fluffier" stuff about education. In these cases going to college is seen as an required obstacle by the student, not an opportunity. Any way to get out of as much of it as possible is valued more than going to learn. After all, the interest was in meeting some external requirement, not getting educated. Not to mention, for a great deal of people (by volume) getting a degree at all is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task. Getting one and having high grades to stand out can be seen as having more reward given by society than genuinely getting a degree and having poor grades. It's not great by any means, obviously more people interested in educating themselves is better. At the same time, it shouldn't be a mystery. It, particularly, shouldn't be something one assumes is related to a particular country/culture rather than an everywhere thing. That's not to say there won't be variance between location, rather that it's a pretty common outlook everywhere.
- lisper 3y ago
  Also, the ability to appropriate someone else's work to further your own goals is actually a very useful life skill. It is arguably the foundation of capitalism.
  - simonh 3y ago
    In liberal economies you buy someone else’s work. In communism it is appropriated by the state. Source: I have family who grew up and lived in a non-capitalist worker’s utopia.
    - lisper 3y ago
      Sure. But people pay to use GPT, and people pay to have others do their homework for them. Compensation is orthogonal to the question of whether someone else did the work.
      - zdragnar 3y ago
        The word "appropriate" as a verb in colloquial American English most often implies without permission or compensation. Certain domains, such as budgeting, use it as a synonym for "allocate" but given the context it was first used in your comment it definitely implied "taking without consent".
        lisper 3y ago
        Yes, I know. The point I'm trying to make is that there is no salient difference between an employer hiring an employee to do the work and a student doing the same. Students typically do not actually steal the work that they pass off as their own, they usually pay for it. But for some reason, when a student does it it's considered underhanded whereas when an employer does it it's considered a normal business transaction.
        zamadatix 3y ago
renewiltord 3y ago
Why? Presumably it's the gate to the job they want. And they want the job so they have to cross the gate.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Are getting good marks that much more valuable than the actual education you would receive if you didn’t cheat? The problem here is the incentive structure. The nature of grades is that some people will get As and some people will get Cs. If you get Cs, you might like to get As, but maybe you can't for some reason, from lack of intelligence to other time commitments to alcoholism. Then your choice is to get a C on your own or maybe get a B+ by cheating. Given the same amount of learning, getting a better grade is better, so the only real incentive not to do it is the risk of getting caught. Some of the old methods for this were pretty unambiguous. If you submit the exact same essay as another student, or one that has been on the internet for ten years, what other explanation is there? Rich kids would avoid this by paying someone else to do it for them. That has always been a problem. But now the cost of getting "someone else" to do it is approaching zero when the someone else is AI, so the problem spreads. But attempting to detect it with methods that have false positives is worthless. On the other hand, testing students on their ability to do something that ChatGPT can do just as well? Maybe that's worthless too, because that's no longer a marketable skill when your future boss can get ChatGPT to do it too. So what they need to do is change the test to test for the thing the student is expected to be able to do better than the AI.
- andai 3y ago
  >what they need to do is change the test to test for the thing the student is expected to be able to do better than the AI Do such expectations still exist? Are they expected to remain for very long?
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Clearly they do. Have you taken some time to play with these things? Try the biggest LLaMA model that will fit in RAM on your computer. (128GB of DDR4 is around $200 and will just fit the big one without quantizing, though it won't be super fast.) There are things they're good at. Search engine-like tasks in particular, if you're willing verify the output. They're great at providing hints for further reading. Now try to get it to develop a new kind of battery with a longer service lifetime or lower manufacturing cost per unit energy storage. Ask it to write code to do something complex and uncommon instead of something similar to what it was trained on a thousand examples of. Have it describe a new class of security concern, like Spectre or rainbow tables before they were known. People can do those things, and have done, and those are some of the best things we can teach people how to do because they're incredibly useful. Maybe writing minor variants on common existing boilerplate code isn't something we need people to spend a lot of time on anymore, and so isn't the thing we should be testing if they know how to do.

t0suj4 3y ago

From talking to a handful of people it is usually to fulfill someone else's expectations. If the goals aren't aligned ethics don't matter, the student doesn't want to be in that school anyway. Cheating is the easy way to get away from that situation. And if the student is behind, it's the only way.

zamadatix 3y ago

Especially with low level degrees, fewer associate going to college with bettering oneself as much as meeting a checklist for a job interview or a parent's requirement for continued financial support. Many of these jobs don't inherently require being educated it's more a "well, why wouldn't we hire the person with the degree if we can" kind of situation and jobs tend to drive the family requirement more than the "fluffier" stuff about education. In these cases going to college is seen as an required obstacle by the student, not an opportunity. Any way to get out of as much of it as possible is valued more than going to learn. After all, the interest was in meeting some external requirement, not getting educated. Not to mention, for a great deal of people (by volume) getting a degree at all is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task. Getting one and having high grades to stand out can be seen as having more reward given by society than genuinely getting a degree and having poor grades. It's not great by any means, obviously more people interested in educating themselves is better. At the same time, it shouldn't be a mystery. It, particularly, shouldn't be something one assumes is related to a particular country/culture rather than an everywhere thing. That's not to say there won't be variance between location, rather that it's a pretty common outlook everywhere.

lisper 3y ago
Also, the ability to appropriate someone else's work to further your own goals is actually a very useful life skill. It is arguably the foundation of capitalism.
- simonh 3y ago
  In liberal economies you buy someone else’s work. In communism it is appropriated by the state. Source: I have family who grew up and lived in a non-capitalist worker’s utopia.
  - lisper 3y ago
    Sure. But people pay to use GPT, and people pay to have others do their homework for them. Compensation is orthogonal to the question of whether someone else did the work.
    - zdragnar 3y ago
      The word "appropriate" as a verb in colloquial American English most often implies without permission or compensation. Certain domains, such as budgeting, use it as a synonym for "allocate" but given the context it was first used in your comment it definitely implied "taking without consent".
      - lisper 3y ago
        Yes, I know. The point I'm trying to make is that there is no salient difference between an employer hiring an employee to do the work and a student doing the same. Students typically do not actually steal the work that they pass off as their own, they usually pay for it. But for some reason, when a student does it it's considered underhanded whereas when an employer does it it's considered a normal business transaction.
        zamadatix 3y ago

renewiltord 3y ago

Why? Presumably it's the gate to the job they want. And they want the job so they have to cross the gate.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> Are getting good marks that much more valuable than the actual education you would receive if you didn’t cheat? The problem here is the incentive structure. The nature of grades is that some people will get As and some people will get Cs. If you get Cs, you might like to get As, but maybe you can't for some reason, from lack of intelligence to other time commitments to alcoholism. Then your choice is to get a C on your own or maybe get a B+ by cheating. Given the same amount of learning, getting a better grade is better, so the only real incentive not to do it is the risk of getting caught. Some of the old methods for this were pretty unambiguous. If you submit the exact same essay as another student, or one that has been on the internet for ten years, what other explanation is there? Rich kids would avoid this by paying someone else to do it for them. That has always been a problem. But now the cost of getting "someone else" to do it is approaching zero when the someone else is AI, so the problem spreads. But attempting to detect it with methods that have false positives is worthless. On the other hand, testing students on their ability to do something that ChatGPT can do just as well? Maybe that's worthless too, because that's no longer a marketable skill when your future boss can get ChatGPT to do it too. So what they need to do is change the test to test for the thing the student is expected to be able to do better than the AI.

andai 3y ago
>what they need to do is change the test to test for the thing the student is expected to be able to do better than the AI Do such expectations still exist? Are they expected to remain for very long?
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Clearly they do. Have you taken some time to play with these things? Try the biggest LLaMA model that will fit in RAM on your computer. (128GB of DDR4 is around $200 and will just fit the big one without quantizing, though it won't be super fast.) There are things they're good at. Search engine-like tasks in particular, if you're willing verify the output. They're great at providing hints for further reading. Now try to get it to develop a new kind of battery with a longer service lifetime or lower manufacturing cost per unit energy storage. Ask it to write code to do something complex and uncommon instead of something similar to what it was trained on a thousand examples of. Have it describe a new class of security concern, like Spectre or rainbow tables before they were known. People can do those things, and have done, and those are some of the best things we can teach people how to do because they're incredibly useful. Maybe writing minor variants on common existing boilerplate code isn't something we need people to spend a lot of time on anymore, and so isn't the thing we should be testing if they know how to do.