7 ms·

Everyone is cheating their way through college

118 points by jsheard 1y ago

Leafgreen 1y ago
At 17 years old, I went to my 4-year state university not only for the diploma and education, but also substantially for the social experience that I never had in the previous years of my life.
incomingpain 1y ago
Get healthy and exercise because your next doctor will have cheated with chatgpt.
- stuckinhell 1y ago
  my doctor literally used some kind of official doctorgpt last week. I was flabbergasted.
  - parpfish 1y ago
    I once had a doctor google webmd in front of me at an appointment. It was funny, but then I remembered how often I look stuff up at work and thought it’s a bit unrealistic to expect them to have EVERYTHING memorized. I’d rather have them double check a hunch they have instead of holding back because they’re unsure
    - Tade0 1y ago
      I had this thought the other day: why do we expect an immediate diagnosis? I can't imagine giving a decent answer to any advanced question without research. I understand appointments have a time limit, but perhaps it would be beneficial to batch process this.
    - stuckinhell 1y ago
      You are arguing a strawman: patients unrealistically want doctors to have every fact memorised or to deliver an instant, definitive diagnosis. What I'm really shocked about is that new AI tools are now fast enough—and regulated enough—to be used live at the point of care. So why do I need to pay doctors as much money, when they themselves are using an off the shelf solution?
      - const_cast 1y ago
        Because those off-the-shelf solutions only work for very obvious and basic cases, and you don't know what you don't know. Meaning, if you have a more complex medical situation, you wouldn't be able to tell, so you wouldn't know if the off-the-shelf solution is wrong. Also, we still need doctors to perform physical tasks, like surgery. The doctors diagnosing stuff and the doctors performing surgery aren't different doctors, usually. When I got diagnosed with Testicular cancer, the urologist who felt my balls up and said "yeah, this ain't right" was also the one who removed the testicle. And, he wasn't the first doctor I went to - the other doctor clearly had not felt up enough balls. He said it could be X, could be Y, maybe Z. Not the urologist, he knew right away. So, I think it's more complex.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    It's funny. During tax season this year, I was engaging with several "tax professionals" from H&R Block in order to answer some, hopefully elementary, questions about my tax situation. And you know what, I could never ever get a straight or clear or definitive answer from them! It was infuriating. It seemed that my business was too small or insignificant to them to bother. They missed appointments and most of their branches were closed. I believe that they're a significantly understaffed industry. When I finally got an in-person tête-a-tête, the guy was just Googling stuff -- I mean he was not even looking on IRS.gov, just Google -- and I got so pissed I walked right out. So ironically, the best advice I found, the best distillation of good information, was through Google's Gemini LLM. I asked Gemini many tax questions, and it was able to cogently answer them with correct terminology, and enough correct advice that I was able to navigate the IRS.gov publications and corroborate them from the horse's mouth. So at this point I feel like engaging an LLM in particular topics is far more productive than engaging a human on the front-lines. The humans are poorly trained, underpaid, overworked, and unreliable.
    - geoka9 1y ago
      H&R tax people are on minimum wage plus commission. Also, for a lot of them the work is seasonal: crazy hours for a couple months every year, then barely any work until next tax season.
- anthonyskipper 1y ago
  You don't pay your doctors, insurance does, so I mostly expect insurance will replace doctors with chatbots as soon as its feasible. Sadly in a large percentage of scenarios that would actually be an improved outcome. (yes, not all and those are the ones that will probably kill you... but come on, medicine is such a disaster its should be completley rebooted)
  - cbg0 1y ago
    > Sadly in a large percentage of scenarios that would actually be an improved outcome. Do you have some stats to back that up?
    - esafak 1y ago
      Oh yes, I asked chatGPT.
  - incomingpain 1y ago
    >Sadly in a large percentage of scenarios that would actually be an improved outcome. I predict triage will be converted to AI who will be able to offer minor prescriptions, stuff unavailable to over the counter, without doctor oversight. Like allergies, rashes, insect stuff, fungal or worms. Will likely be able to reduce medical load by treating people who just need to be sent to get over the counter stuff. > but come on, medicine is such a disaster its should be completley rebooted) Agreed, but is AI the right move? Do you really want to be the first one to try it?
    - willcipriano 1y ago
      > offer minor prescriptions, stuff unavailable to over the counter, without doctor oversight. In Europe you can just buy those sort of things outright in many cases. Things like inhalers can just be had without getting a doctor on board. I believe it's a uniquely US thing where the doctor needs to collect a well visit fee on you treating yourself for a common or chronic illness. "You still have asthma? OK, here is permission from my caste to breathe, pay the fee on your way out." Is bonkers when you think about it.
- jsheard 1y ago
  I'll be fine, I take my forklift to the gym three times a week.
  - automatic6131 1y ago
    Some people at my gym wear elastic bands and stuff to lift more weights than they could without them. Very strange!
    - rightbyte 1y ago
      Really? Not like a bandage but like a spring?
  - BuyMyBitcoins 1y ago
    “Forklift certification is the best provision for old age.” -Aristotle, Civilization V (2010)
- DragonStrength 1y ago
  Next? Unprescribed stimulants and test banks from Greek orgs has been the path to med school for generations. I guess we just cut to the chase by prescribing ADHD meds to everyone and making cheating tools openly available.
footy 1y ago
I found this a very depressing read. Worse than the one about how kids at even elite universities can't really read or engage with a book anymore.
- gosub100 1y ago
  Why is it a moral outrage when students do it, but universities cheat students in many ways and we just grumble and accept it as a necessary evil. Just accept cheating as the same, maybe attack financial aid itself instead of the students. Say "this money is disproportionately being siphoned directly into the organizations coffers and very little of it is being used to teach anyone anything whatsoever. Therefore we are restricting access to financial aid, capping it to $X million total" etc. What's the point of a scholarship if there's no "school" being taught?
  - HelloMcFly 1y ago
    The person you responded did not frame this in moral terms, but emotional terms. I'm not here to grandstand about the morality of anyone's behavior, but knowing students can't engage with long-form written content is depressing to me. Knowing that many (most?) will not teach themselves how to engage in critical thinking and work through frustration is also depressing. Part of this is empathy, just knowing they are depriving themselves of skills they don't even realize the importance of. Part of is selfishness, feeling like our next generation of thinkers and creators are potentially self-sabotaging. I don't know, I'm out of the prediction game, I don't really want to get drug into utilitarian arguments about the place of AI, or debates on what was wrong with education, etc. Frankly, I'm out of my league there. I'm just sad to see people lose the ability to think for themselves and struggle through hard problems. Yes, I use generative AI myself, I'm not a luddite or anything.
  - footy 1y ago
    There's a huge leap (a chasm, really) between depressing and moral outrage, and I am not attacking anyone. This comment is a complete non-sequitur from mine.
    - 1y ago
axegon_ 1y ago
For a number of reasons I got my university degree in Spanish(and Spanish speaking country), where very few people spoke English - I was one of two in total as a matter of fact. I always felt like I was cheating my way through cause I had access to infinitely more and better quality resources and all I had to do was translate them into Spanish and I was instantly 10 steps ahead of everyone else. With all the LLM bollocks these days, I'm suddenly feeling a lot less guilty.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  What's there to feel guilty about? It's not like your generation invented cheating.
  - axegon_ 1y ago
    Idk, maybe not cheating but a very unfair advantage - everything I ever did took me a fraction of the time compared to everyone else - while everyone was going nuts last minute, I had long forgotten about anything I had to do and was spending days or even weeks out playing pool in the local pub.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      Life in general is full of unfair advantages or disadvantages form birth. Nobody is ever equal, equality is a made up fiction, and in a competitive environment without strictly enforced rules, cheating is sometimes just the norm. If you don't cheat, you'll be outcompeted by those who do. Statistically, the more unscrupulous people behave, the more likely they are to get ahead in life. Look at politicians, CEOs, big business owners, etc.
      - jgwil2 1y ago
        > If you don't cheat, you'll be outcompeted by those who do. Not sure why you keep talking about cheating. What OP described doing emphatically and unequivocally is not cheating.
  - deleted 1y ago
pxeger1 1y ago
As usual, this article totally conflates "to help with homework" with "to cheat on homework". If you use it like a better Google, learning from its output rather than directly using the text, that’s definitely not cheating by any definition.
- colonial 1y ago
  It should be qualified that this depends on what you're putting in the prompt box. An actual homework question - in whole or part - is (anecdotally) definitely considered cheating from a policy standpoint. On the other hand, "How do I [atomic thing]" (say, "reverse iterate over a list in Python") seems to be fine.
mystraline 1y ago
ChatGPT and other LLMs just turned the screws on a already broken system. 1. Most people get a degree to pass degree checks in jobs. 2. College is stupid expensive. 3. Unlike with other goods and services, there is no way to get your money back on bad service/goods here 4. Professors can basically do whatever they want 5. Fed student loans are in the same group as criminal judgements of debt. When I look at all of these, logically, you expect a return from the cost. And the return isn't knowledge, but a diploma. And humans being good tool users, use a tool to raise the chances of getting that (half-assed promised but not really) diploma. Hopefully, this will destroy universities as diploma mills, and go back to proper academic rigor and study. But one can be ever hopeful, I guess.
- ransom1538 1y ago
  This. LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work. Recent grads at this point are just a legal/tax (sec 174) liability - a great way to get a law suite. Colleges need to pivot fast.
  - caturopath 1y ago
    A prediction that will prove mostly immune to the change in "this year".
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work. I think the high interest rates, poor consumer economic situation and remote work with outsourcing did way more to damage that jobs market than LLMs right now. I am yet to hear jobs being replaced with LLMs but I hear about jobs moved to cheaper locations all the time. LLMs make workers more efficient at easy, low-stakes repetitive shit but don't fully replace them. Yet. They also don't replace accountability. A lot of times managers/corporations just hire to have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if the shit hits the fan. You can fire and intern for doing something wrong, you can't fire a LLM that fucks up, it's still the user to blame. Couple with the bullwhip effect of too many grads going to University chasing those lucrative white collar jobs from the covid boom days and this is what you get. >Recent grads at this point are just a legal/tax (sec 174) liability Sounds like a US specific self inflicted problem.
DrillShopper 1y ago
> When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” Roy understands society better than most people.
- arp242 1y ago
  Many people understand all these things. They're just not nihilistic assholes who will lie and cheat to any amount to get ahead. That's the difference.
  - DrillShopper 1y ago
    You're on Hacker News - that's what this site advocates. That's what startup culture is.
    - arp242 1y ago
      Startup culture has an aspect of it, and many people here dislike that aspect. Broader hacker culture certainly doesn't have it. You're confusing "hack" with "cheat" in the same way that some YouTube dickheads confuse "prank" with "being a dick for laughs".
      - DrillShopper 1y ago
        Hacker News is a misnomer for this site. It should be Startup News.
- bix6 1y ago
  Roy is gonna go far. Honestly mad respect to him for blowing up leetcode, I’ve never heard a positive word about it.
nortlov 1y ago
https://archive.ph/20250507120041/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html https://archive.ph/20250507120041/https://nymag.com/intellig...
bix6 1y ago
Amazingly, the title could come from any era! When I was an undergrad, multiple of my classes had cheating scandals. If writing is now table stakes with GPT perhaps colleges need to adapt? Nobody can afford to waste time given how hyper-competitive everything is.
cs702 1y ago
The definition of "cheating" will change... because those students are, in fact, learning. They are learning how to accomplish a lot more, a lot faster, with AI. That's a valuable skill -- one of the most valuable skills that students can learn today. It's not the only valuable skill they should learn, but it's certainly one of the most valuable. Educators will have to adapt.
- fzeroracer 1y ago
  Now what will said cheaters do when they don't have access to AI? Like if the internet goes down, or if they work in an environment where they can't access it? Or if the company says no, because it's a security risk?
  - bluecheese452 1y ago
    Wait until the internet comes back up? Work at a different company?
    - fzeroracer 1y ago
      'Sorry boss, I can't work because I don't have internet and don't have access to my AI crutch' isn't exactly a stellar argument. That's someone I would immediately regret hiring.
      - bluecheese452 1y ago
        If your internet is going down regularly enough for this to be an issue you have bigger problems.
      - jameshart 1y ago
        Wait til they argue it’s a mandated disability accommodation.
      - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        If you have an architecture office and the power goes out, do you have your workers give up on using AutoCAD and go to the drafting boards and slide rulers till the power comes back up? What's the point of going backwards with technology? You'll be outcompeted by those who embrace modern technology. I'm not aware of any modern engineering profession that doesn't use electronic crutches regularly. Nobody knows absolutely everything in their heads. We're paid for critical thinking , not to have everything memorized just in case the internet is out. Even before the internet, SW devs had stacks of books on their desks they'd reffer to often. Remember when IBM wanted to pay devs per line of code written? Yeah, exactly. I see the skills being problem solving, not writing code.
twright 1y ago
When I read articles like this I don't know whether to think I have some decent job security or not. On the one hand, people graduating having used LLM's for a significant majority of their work are almost certainly deficient at critically thinking about computer systems and programming them (there's a good quote in the article stating this much better than I am here). On the other, if they're cheating so much to get well-paying jobs will I --without cheating, relying on just the merits and knowledge from my career-- be competitive enough to find work in the future? Been wondering if anyone else feels this way.
- greenie_beans 1y ago
  i think people who learned how to do a skill prior to AI will have an edge. writing will be a valuable skill. same with people who know computer fundamentals.
- phkahler 1y ago
  >> On the other, if they're cheating so much to get well-paying jobs will I --without cheating, relying on just the merits and knowledge from my career-- be competitive enough to find work in the future? Been wondering if anyone else feels this way. You need to find a place that understand the difference between BS and real work. The next 5 years might bankrupt the ones that embrace the BS.
- currymj 1y ago
  a lot of the ChatGPT assignments are so incredibly obvious. in the most egregious cases literally copy and pasted from the browser without reading. laziness is all-pervasive. the problem is an academic cheating penalty can have grievous consequences for someone's life, so to prove it requires almost like a "beyond a reasonable doubt" criminal justice standard. and that's difficult to do. so they get through their classes. "don't hire someone" is a much lower bar. if there are obvious but unprovable ChatGPT vibes in the application, you probably just don't interview them. if there are weird pauses in their conversation during the interview and they sound like they're reading long sentences, don't advance to next round. a lot of these cheaters are going to get filtered hard. there is a smarter way to use it but this still requires some level of thought to disguise your cheating, you have to be able to understand the LLM outputs yourself, and a large portion of the cheaters can't manage that.
koliber 1y ago
The words of Lee in this essay highlight the problem. Paraphrasing: "I didn't do it because I did not feel like doing it, because it felt unimportant/irrelevant/dumb." This is the hubris of youth talking. While this kind of thinking will teach you some practical skills, ultimately you become an operator, and not an engineer. CNC machine designers earn more than CNC machine operators. Car engine designers earn more than car mechanics. Computer chip engineers earn more than people who put computers together. Production line engineers earn more than production line workers. In software development, the titles are unclear, but there is a clear distinction between operators and engineers. Unfortunately we call them all programmers or developers or engineers, as the titles don't truly reflect the kind of work they are doing. When you work with someone though, you know which title they really deserve. It's hard to put it into words, but going forward, the operators will have a harder time finding work as automated AI-based tools will replace them. The only solution is to learn to become engineers, but with the kind of mindset that Lee flaunts in the above article, that is not going to happen. My advice: Learn the fundamentals. Don't cheat. Be curious and strive for deep understanding. It's tempting to cut corners, but already today I see a deluge of people who just don't have what it takes to engineer software.
- indymike 1y ago
  > This is the hubris of youth talking. Maybe. Or maybe Every example you give, there are 1000s and 10000s of workers to every designer... and the road to a real engineering job is something that frankly, most people going to college could not complete.
- cloudripper 1y ago
  I agree. Also, this is the kind of crystal clear thinking and analysis that we need more of (and why I come to HN). Thank you for cutting though the BS and highlighting the underlying lessons.
- bluecheese452 1y ago
  Engineers need to be in the top 5%* of intelligence, operators don’t. Expecting the average person to become an engineer is a non solution. *With hard work and a good environment maybe we can extend this to 15%. Certainly not 50%.
emorning3 1y ago
Just look at the assholes that run this country. They set the standards. They lie and cheat their asses off every day. You can't reasonably expect that people WONT lie and cheat their asses off.
- arp242 1y ago
  If you look at countries with a lot of corruption, then there's this sense that "everyone uses corruption to get ahead, and I'd be a fool not to". This view is not entirely wrong. I don't envy students here; aside from the shining examples meritocracy, hard work, and accountability that you mentioned, you're also left with a feeling of "well, everyone else is using ChatGPT, and I'd be a fool not to". I don't entirely blame them, as the choice is between "use ChatGPT for one hour and get a passing grade" and "do my own work for six hours and get a passing grade". Of course the outcomes are not the same as there is value in doing the work yourself as it will give you a much better understanding of things, but taking delayed gratification in account has never been a top quality of young people.
  - emorning3 1y ago
    I would be concerned that I'd get out of school and not get a job because I don't actually know anything. But I wouldn't blame students if they're not preparing for interviews and jobs. Because in this world having a job seems like a recipe for being poor. Instead, maybe students are just going to prepare to get ahead, in any way possible. And they'll go to a university to network and such. Personally I doubt that's gonna work out well, but I'm old what do I know.
    - cestith 1y ago
      I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years who had degrees and didn’t know much about their field. I’m sure that’s not new, but it may become even more prevalent.
evanjrowley 1y ago
Consider that college tuition is often equal to what an employer would pay you to do similar levels of work. The opportunity cost for attending college is therefore 2x the tuition. The system is exploiting students who need a paper to get a job, so why shouldn’t students exploit it too? * Mostly applies to degrees where "learning on the job" would have resulted in equivelant knowledge and skills.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  The students are still playing along and paying into the system. They might even do more education and get higher degrees than before with LLMs doing the heavy lifting. Everyone wins!
mark4 1y ago
Getting schooled by AI, colleges must evolve (March, 2023) https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/03/getting-schooled-by-ai-colleges-must.html https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/03/getting-schooled-b...
MaxPock 1y ago
I'm from Kenya, and a significant portion of our GDP comes from jobless graduates doing assignments for American students.
redczar 1y ago
Last semester I gave my students a take home final exam. I told them they could use AI. I just asked that they document their usage of external sources. This was precalculus class. The first problem was a graph x(t) and y(t). The component functions of a parametric curve. The question was: Estimate the times the particle is at the origin. I got an email from a student: I put problem 1 into ChatGPT and it couldn’t answer it. What are we supposed to do then? My response: Think! Students have mostly been trained that anything that can’t immediately be solved is too hard. They have no academic grit. It’s bad.
- chneu 1y ago
  This will sound boomer, but I've noticed this with a lot of people: absolutely no determination to figure things out. It isn't just young people. It really seems like people's determination has just gone to shit. I'm an engineer and teach people a lot. The first thing I have to do is determine what kind of learner people are, and my gosh, it's frustrating. People give up so fast.
  - km144 1y ago
    Well as a member of gen-z, I'll happily agree with you if that makes you feel like less of a boomer. And I think it mostly has to do with attention. The capacity for focused attention has been deteriorating at a societal level for quite a long time. It's not a generational thing either—we are all facing similar pressures with the sheer amount of information we've been forced to process on a daily basis. That loss of attentional capacity seems to be affecting really important faculties like learning, creativity, and deep work. I see this in myself all the time but I find a lot of people my age are quite aware of what is happening to us while many older people are stuck blaming the kids—hell, there are times in public when I see older folks more glued to their screen than your average teenager. It's not just young people. The path forward isn't very clear.
    - chneu 1y ago
      Oh yeah don't think I was saying "I've only noticed this in young people" I know a lot of older folks who are horrible about this. It's a problem across the board. Thanks for being civil about it. This is a topic that many people get very upset about when you mention it.
sage76 1y ago
So many professors in college are detached and tone-deaf about their syllabus, their approach to teaching, and their workload, that the smart students adapt. One of those adaptations is cheating. I have seen really hardwokring students in grad school finally resort to cheating because the workload was insane, and they realized everyone else was cheating.
TuringNYC 1y ago
Controversial opinion - perhaps getting free tutoring from LLMs is a good thing? Some thoughts: 0. Rich kids (not me) got expensive tutoring. Now that is available to everyone. How is this not great? Was it cheating when rich people paid for it also? 1. At my undergrad (Cornell) about 20% of TAs couldnt speak english (or did not want to.) Some of the group office hours would tangent off into other languages. This was terrible to those who only understood the standard language of the school (English.) ChatGPT is available to everyone. 3. You dont even need to pay exorbitant tuition to get the same level of support as everyone in the world, this is a great democratizer. Isnt this what people have always wanted?
- getnormality 1y ago
  I think these points resonate most with a worldview where college is just a status competition, where it doesn't matter if you actually learn anything. By analogy, we could replace the human players of a sport with identical robots and it would level the playing field, but it would also completely defeat the purpose of sport. It is an activity done by humans for the benefit and enjoyment of humans. Rich students have long cheated themselves out of an education by using expensive tutors to do their homework. Now that's available to everyone, yes, and that somewhat levels the playing field, yes, but it's not a good thing if you care about education. It's more like, narcotics used to be only for rich people, but now we have powerful cheap ones that everyone can get easily.
  - TuringNYC 1y ago
    >> Rich students have long cheated themselves out of an education by using expensive tutors to do their homework. Students in a crunch or those who are short-sighted use it to do homework. There have always been ways to cheat. Students who want to learn use it for guidance, insight, examples, detail. There have not always been ways to do this unless you were wealthy. So much of education is just mediocre. You are lucky (or rich) if you get access to great education.
    - getnormality 1y ago
GenZ_RiseUp 1y ago
ChatGPT hit the mainstream market in my final year of undergrad. I was indeed guilty of using it for one assignment wholesale, and a sizable portion of my final practicum. However, in the article it mentions something lightly that teachers use to distinguish LLM work from human work, which also rubbed me the wrong way. The arguments and counterarguments were given equal weighting, unless a command were to be given to the LLM to spit out partiality to one, whereby it is overwhelming in substance (if not in language) towards that thesis. Now, finalizing my grad school time, I've not used it, and have actively discouraged group members from using it, as I feel there is an advantage in searching painstakingly for new, obscure ideas - where LLMs tend to give the same advice for recommendations to anyone who sets them the same problem. I used to do the same thing with Bing, in lieu of Google search, for more 'quirky' ideas to implement in my arguments. There, I believe, lies an advantage for the semi-industrious knowledge student. Travel not the beaten path, but the one that takes slightly more effort for proportionally greater rewards.
throwup238 1y ago
> “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.” Kids, this is why you need to go to school.
ModernMech 1y ago
I feel a large part of this is the definition of "cheating". For example, I give take home exams and I allow students to use whatever resources they want. They can use chat GPT, the textbook, Stack Overflow, etc. as much as they want for as much time as they need. Access to these resources during an exam is typically considered "cheating" because using them would confer an unfair advantage, since tests are designed without them in mind. So then just give them access to the resources and make the test harder. Instead of a question like: "Here is some code find the bug", ask them to implement a large system and to document the bugs they encounter along the way, and how they used ChatGPT to fix them. Instead of "what's the definition of TCP" ask them to measure TCP vs. UDP using iperf. If all the students are cheating, then you're not testing the right thing. Make the test fit better to the current information landscape, and professors / students alike will have a better time. Stop testing information recall, start testing for information literacy, analysis, and integration. Stop asking students to answer multiple choice questions, start asking them to build systems.
vianarafael 1y ago
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dghughes 1y ago
You can be given every answer but that's not knowing. Cheating only cheats yourself of knowledge.
hackeraccount 1y ago
How do you cheat with AI on in class test?
damnesian 1y ago
This is why it is vitally important to provide a rich, varied educational experience. If it is possible to pass a course using AI, it's partially the student's fault. But it is just as much the EDUCATOR's fault. get these students into groups. Make them spontaneously interact. Use gamification principles. Count these interactions in grading. Prove you have internalized this material. individual attention and personalized instruction were a vital part of my own education (college in the 80s and 90s). There are a thousand excuses why schools think they can't provide it. It often reduces to budget shortfalls. But this can be done with existing tools and personnel. It's more a matter of teaching more engagingly, more creatively.
sbohacek 1y ago
I tell my students to cheat all they want. Their managers will need to hit their URA targets. More seriously, students have been cheating for a long time. Chegg.com was used solely for cheating. It is easier to detect LLMs than Chegg. Chegg provided solutions from other students or the solution set. LLMs are sometimes so bad (e.g., because an "accidental" typo in the question) that I can eventually detect who cheats and give no mercy when grading the in-person exams. Disclosure: I use LLMs to grade and give my personal touch at scale.
thimkerbell 1y ago
Overall we've seemed kind of quiet, about how to handle the hollowing-out of education.
strangeloops85 1y ago
At least for many engineering and science disciplines a solution remains to force students to actually try to learn the material: in-class, closed book exams. Nothing is ideal, but this does force students to actually engage with the material and problems. They are welcome to use LLMs all they want to help them study (though they should be careful given how often I catch them making horrible mistakes in my discipline). But the assessment will be of them and their brain.
lesser-shadow 1y ago
Today, my course instructor told me that I work on my Javascript assignments too slowly. He suggested that I use ChatGPT like everyone else instead of writing code by hand. ... Mind you, we didn't have any Javascript courses before, and we started with nodeJS head-first.
lostmsu 1y ago
I graduated from a top Russian university 13 years ago. I absolutely cheated on a few exams I considered non-essential for whatever I imagined my future would be, including some that are directly part of CS/AM major like stats, after minimal studying effort (for humanitarian requirements, I would not even flinch with 0 effort beyond typing an assignment into the chatbox). Thinking about it, I would do it again with ChatGPT today if for some reason I had to go and pass them again because employment requires a formal diploma. This is because I know my responsibilities would not involve stats, they know it, I don't enjoy stats, and I feel confident in my ability to learn if the need arises with the rest of the math as the basis, but the university requires stats for a diploma. To solve the problem, universities just need to streamline the requirements in their programs. Or find another way to accommodate for slightly more focused people.
- relaxing 1y ago
  Fucking hell, once you get beyond basic trig, prob & stats is like the most useful math there is. (Unless you work in a physics or engineering field that makes regular use of calc.)
  - lostmsu 1y ago
    Maybe basic stats, but we are not talking basics here. In the course knowing the proof of the law of large numbers for Markov chains was mandatory for example. I am in systems programming and LLM research (as in worked on improving attention mechanism). And even in the latter the stats are only relevant because attention softmax looks like a probability distribution, and, surprise, attention works just fine without it, so even that relevance is questionable.
Molitor5901 1y ago
My university had rampant cheating. Students attending for others was a big one, especially for the exams in rooms with 90 students. Finding someone to write papers for you was super easy, but CS cheating was cut throat. Guard your code because people will steal it, will break into the professors office after hours, and will try to hack your computer, just to name some incidents that happened. Granted I'm now 10 years out of uni but even back then, students felt more entitled to the degree, and were willing to color outside the lines if that is what it took to get it.
creer 1y ago
Does it matter? I mean yes it does because students potentially cheating themselves out of an education and gross waste of time and money. But do any employers still seriously rely on degrees to select their employees? Many still rely on degree to filter before interviews - but even here, we have only ourselves to blame for this, right? This is one thing we (businesses, employers) have complete control on. It does mean we now need to interview on more things. Like 2nd language, general reading comprehension, or basic numeracy. But didn't we already get to the point where we had to do that? Where we can't even trust that whoever is interviewing is the person seeking hiring? So from a point of view of hiring, perhaps it doesn't matter anymore. The article itself emphasizes one point where it matters: college as ethics training is on indefinite leave. And interviews will have to test for ethics. A tough one.
plutoh28 1y ago
My take as a current uni student. This is all absolutely true. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t use chat. Some people use it as a personal tutor, most use it as a shortcut to finish assignments. Regardless, everyone is using it. LLM’s are great when used as a tool. Bouncing ideas and asking conceptual questions is a great way to learn (it really is as valuable as talking to a professor for a lot of questions). But how do you convince students to use LLMs as a learning tool instead of a cheating tool? I think the solution is simple. Most people are short cutting with LLMs because they want a good grade, and they want it easy. So, stop with grading. The primary incentive for going to a class should be to pickup some new knowledge and skills, not to pickup a good grade.
- sien 1y ago
  As you say 'Uni' student are you in the UK or Australia ? Also, do you do math courses ? Are the math courses still based on 60% plus performance in exams ? Are they far less impacted than other courses ? It seems like one answer to the LLM thing is that all Uni grades become mostly dependent on exams written in person and that all essays and assignments are given a considerably lower weight.
Balgair 1y ago
> When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” Like, dude, I wonder why that is? I get that the students see University as mostly a path to a degree/middle-class-union-card and that the college you go to as mostly a vetting process/sorting hat. Sure, I was 18 once too and didn't care about much past my nose too. But, like, the reason it's a good place to meet people is because those people are attracted by the college itself. Honestly, this is on the admin. They know the kids are all 'cheating' their asses off. I guess until some other feedback mechanism comes in, they aren't going to rock the boat.
- basch 1y ago
  Access to an elite social network has long been the distinguishing factor of college. When people are taking out student loans, they may not understand or fully grasp that that's what they are buying into, and if they arent taking advantage of it, they are essentially buying something but not using it. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/jfks-very-revealing-harvard-application-essay/281699/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/jfks-v...
  - Balgair 1y ago
    Well yes, but the question is: Why is that school an elite school to begin with? Like, country clubs exist; it's not just about being drunk around other rich people. The profiled dude in the article only sees the elite nature and not the thing that got the school there. Like, why does Coke advertise still? For the same reason that plane don't turn off the engines when you get to 30,000 feet.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bookofjoe 1y ago
https://archive.ph/fiP8K https://archive.ph/fiP8K

118 points by jsheard 1y ago

At 17 years old, I went to my 4-year state university not only for the diploma and education, but also substantially for the social experience that I never had in the previous years of my life.

incomingpain 1y ago

Get healthy and exercise because your next doctor will have cheated with chatgpt.

stuckinhell 1y ago
my doctor literally used some kind of official doctorgpt last week. I was flabbergasted.
- parpfish 1y ago
  I once had a doctor google webmd in front of me at an appointment. It was funny, but then I remembered how often I look stuff up at work and thought it’s a bit unrealistic to expect them to have EVERYTHING memorized. I’d rather have them double check a hunch they have instead of holding back because they’re unsure
  - Tade0 1y ago
    I had this thought the other day: why do we expect an immediate diagnosis? I can't imagine giving a decent answer to any advanced question without research. I understand appointments have a time limit, but perhaps it would be beneficial to batch process this.
  - stuckinhell 1y ago
    You are arguing a strawman: patients unrealistically want doctors to have every fact memorised or to deliver an instant, definitive diagnosis. What I'm really shocked about is that new AI tools are now fast enough—and regulated enough—to be used live at the point of care. So why do I need to pay doctors as much money, when they themselves are using an off the shelf solution?
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Because those off-the-shelf solutions only work for very obvious and basic cases, and you don't know what you don't know. Meaning, if you have a more complex medical situation, you wouldn't be able to tell, so you wouldn't know if the off-the-shelf solution is wrong. Also, we still need doctors to perform physical tasks, like surgery. The doctors diagnosing stuff and the doctors performing surgery aren't different doctors, usually. When I got diagnosed with Testicular cancer, the urologist who felt my balls up and said "yeah, this ain't right" was also the one who removed the testicle. And, he wasn't the first doctor I went to - the other doctor clearly had not felt up enough balls. He said it could be X, could be Y, maybe Z. Not the urologist, he knew right away. So, I think it's more complex.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  It's funny. During tax season this year, I was engaging with several "tax professionals" from H&R Block in order to answer some, hopefully elementary, questions about my tax situation. And you know what, I could never ever get a straight or clear or definitive answer from them! It was infuriating. It seemed that my business was too small or insignificant to them to bother. They missed appointments and most of their branches were closed. I believe that they're a significantly understaffed industry. When I finally got an in-person tête-a-tête, the guy was just Googling stuff -- I mean he was not even looking on IRS.gov, just Google -- and I got so pissed I walked right out. So ironically, the best advice I found, the best distillation of good information, was through Google's Gemini LLM. I asked Gemini many tax questions, and it was able to cogently answer them with correct terminology, and enough correct advice that I was able to navigate the IRS.gov publications and corroborate them from the horse's mouth. So at this point I feel like engaging an LLM in particular topics is far more productive than engaging a human on the front-lines. The humans are poorly trained, underpaid, overworked, and unreliable.
  - geoka9 1y ago
    H&R tax people are on minimum wage plus commission. Also, for a lot of them the work is seasonal: crazy hours for a couple months every year, then barely any work until next tax season.
anthonyskipper 1y ago
You don't pay your doctors, insurance does, so I mostly expect insurance will replace doctors with chatbots as soon as its feasible. Sadly in a large percentage of scenarios that would actually be an improved outcome. (yes, not all and those are the ones that will probably kill you... but come on, medicine is such a disaster its should be completley rebooted)
- cbg0 1y ago
  > Sadly in a large percentage of scenarios that would actually be an improved outcome. Do you have some stats to back that up?
  - esafak 1y ago
    Oh yes, I asked chatGPT.
- incomingpain 1y ago
  >Sadly in a large percentage of scenarios that would actually be an improved outcome. I predict triage will be converted to AI who will be able to offer minor prescriptions, stuff unavailable to over the counter, without doctor oversight. Like allergies, rashes, insect stuff, fungal or worms. Will likely be able to reduce medical load by treating people who just need to be sent to get over the counter stuff. > but come on, medicine is such a disaster its should be completley rebooted) Agreed, but is AI the right move? Do you really want to be the first one to try it?
  - willcipriano 1y ago
    > offer minor prescriptions, stuff unavailable to over the counter, without doctor oversight. In Europe you can just buy those sort of things outright in many cases. Things like inhalers can just be had without getting a doctor on board. I believe it's a uniquely US thing where the doctor needs to collect a well visit fee on you treating yourself for a common or chronic illness. "You still have asthma? OK, here is permission from my caste to breathe, pay the fee on your way out." Is bonkers when you think about it.
jsheard 1y ago
I'll be fine, I take my forklift to the gym three times a week.
- automatic6131 1y ago
  Some people at my gym wear elastic bands and stuff to lift more weights than they could without them. Very strange!
  - rightbyte 1y ago
    Really? Not like a bandage but like a spring?
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y ago
  “Forklift certification is the best provision for old age.” -Aristotle, Civilization V (2010)
DragonStrength 1y ago
Next? Unprescribed stimulants and test banks from Greek orgs has been the path to med school for generations. I guess we just cut to the chase by prescribing ADHD meds to everyone and making cheating tools openly available.

footy 1y ago

I found this a very depressing read. Worse than the one about how kids at even elite universities can't really read or engage with a book anymore.

gosub100 1y ago
Why is it a moral outrage when students do it, but universities cheat students in many ways and we just grumble and accept it as a necessary evil. Just accept cheating as the same, maybe attack financial aid itself instead of the students. Say "this money is disproportionately being siphoned directly into the organizations coffers and very little of it is being used to teach anyone anything whatsoever. Therefore we are restricting access to financial aid, capping it to $X million total" etc. What's the point of a scholarship if there's no "school" being taught?
- HelloMcFly 1y ago
  The person you responded did not frame this in moral terms, but emotional terms. I'm not here to grandstand about the morality of anyone's behavior, but knowing students can't engage with long-form written content is depressing to me. Knowing that many (most?) will not teach themselves how to engage in critical thinking and work through frustration is also depressing. Part of this is empathy, just knowing they are depriving themselves of skills they don't even realize the importance of. Part of is selfishness, feeling like our next generation of thinkers and creators are potentially self-sabotaging. I don't know, I'm out of the prediction game, I don't really want to get drug into utilitarian arguments about the place of AI, or debates on what was wrong with education, etc. Frankly, I'm out of my league there. I'm just sad to see people lose the ability to think for themselves and struggle through hard problems. Yes, I use generative AI myself, I'm not a luddite or anything.
- footy 1y ago
  There's a huge leap (a chasm, really) between depressing and moral outrage, and I am not attacking anyone. This comment is a complete non-sequitur from mine.
  - 1y ago

axegon_ 1y ago

For a number of reasons I got my university degree in Spanish(and Spanish speaking country), where very few people spoke English - I was one of two in total as a matter of fact. I always felt like I was cheating my way through cause I had access to infinitely more and better quality resources and all I had to do was translate them into Spanish and I was instantly 10 steps ahead of everyone else. With all the LLM bollocks these days, I'm suddenly feeling a lot less guilty.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
What's there to feel guilty about? It's not like your generation invented cheating.
- axegon_ 1y ago
  Idk, maybe not cheating but a very unfair advantage - everything I ever did took me a fraction of the time compared to everyone else - while everyone was going nuts last minute, I had long forgotten about anything I had to do and was spending days or even weeks out playing pool in the local pub.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    Life in general is full of unfair advantages or disadvantages form birth. Nobody is ever equal, equality is a made up fiction, and in a competitive environment without strictly enforced rules, cheating is sometimes just the norm. If you don't cheat, you'll be outcompeted by those who do. Statistically, the more unscrupulous people behave, the more likely they are to get ahead in life. Look at politicians, CEOs, big business owners, etc.
    - jgwil2 1y ago
      > If you don't cheat, you'll be outcompeted by those who do. Not sure why you keep talking about cheating. What OP described doing emphatically and unequivocally is not cheating.
- deleted 1y ago

pxeger1 1y ago

As usual, this article totally conflates "to help with homework" with "to cheat on homework". If you use it like a better Google, learning from its output rather than directly using the text, that’s definitely not cheating by any definition.

colonial 1y ago
It should be qualified that this depends on what you're putting in the prompt box. An actual homework question - in whole or part - is (anecdotally) definitely considered cheating from a policy standpoint. On the other hand, "How do I [atomic thing]" (say, "reverse iterate over a list in Python") seems to be fine.

mystraline 1y ago

ChatGPT and other LLMs just turned the screws on a already broken system. 1. Most people get a degree to pass degree checks in jobs. 2. College is stupid expensive. 3. Unlike with other goods and services, there is no way to get your money back on bad service/goods here 4. Professors can basically do whatever they want 5. Fed student loans are in the same group as criminal judgements of debt. When I look at all of these, logically, you expect a return from the cost. And the return isn't knowledge, but a diploma. And humans being good tool users, use a tool to raise the chances of getting that (half-assed promised but not really) diploma. Hopefully, this will destroy universities as diploma mills, and go back to proper academic rigor and study. But one can be ever hopeful, I guess.

ransom1538 1y ago
This. LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work. Recent grads at this point are just a legal/tax (sec 174) liability - a great way to get a law suite. Colleges need to pivot fast.
- caturopath 1y ago
  A prediction that will prove mostly immune to the change in "this year".
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work. I think the high interest rates, poor consumer economic situation and remote work with outsourcing did way more to damage that jobs market than LLMs right now. I am yet to hear jobs being replaced with LLMs but I hear about jobs moved to cheaper locations all the time. LLMs make workers more efficient at easy, low-stakes repetitive shit but don't fully replace them. Yet. They also don't replace accountability. A lot of times managers/corporations just hire to have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if the shit hits the fan. You can fire and intern for doing something wrong, you can't fire a LLM that fucks up, it's still the user to blame. Couple with the bullwhip effect of too many grads going to University chasing those lucrative white collar jobs from the covid boom days and this is what you get. >Recent grads at this point are just a legal/tax (sec 174) liability Sounds like a US specific self inflicted problem.

DrillShopper 1y ago

arp242 1y ago
Many people understand all these things. They're just not nihilistic assholes who will lie and cheat to any amount to get ahead. That's the difference.
- DrillShopper 1y ago
  You're on Hacker News - that's what this site advocates. That's what startup culture is.
  - arp242 1y ago
    Startup culture has an aspect of it, and many people here dislike that aspect. Broader hacker culture certainly doesn't have it. You're confusing "hack" with "cheat" in the same way that some YouTube dickheads confuse "prank" with "being a dick for laughs".
    - DrillShopper 1y ago
      Hacker News is a misnomer for this site. It should be Startup News.
bix6 1y ago
Roy is gonna go far. Honestly mad respect to him for blowing up leetcode, I’ve never heard a positive word about it.

nortlov 1y ago

https://archive.ph/20250507120041/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html https://archive.ph/20250507120041/https://nymag.com/intellig...

bix6 1y ago

Amazingly, the title could come from any era! When I was an undergrad, multiple of my classes had cheating scandals. If writing is now table stakes with GPT perhaps colleges need to adapt? Nobody can afford to waste time given how hyper-competitive everything is.

cs702 1y ago

The definition of "cheating" will change... because those students are, in fact, learning. They are learning how to accomplish a lot more, a lot faster, with AI. That's a valuable skill -- one of the most valuable skills that students can learn today. It's not the only valuable skill they should learn, but it's certainly one of the most valuable. Educators will have to adapt.

fzeroracer 1y ago
Now what will said cheaters do when they don't have access to AI? Like if the internet goes down, or if they work in an environment where they can't access it? Or if the company says no, because it's a security risk?
- bluecheese452 1y ago
  Wait until the internet comes back up? Work at a different company?
  - fzeroracer 1y ago
    'Sorry boss, I can't work because I don't have internet and don't have access to my AI crutch' isn't exactly a stellar argument. That's someone I would immediately regret hiring.
    - bluecheese452 1y ago
      If your internet is going down regularly enough for this to be an issue you have bigger problems.
    - jameshart 1y ago
      Wait til they argue it’s a mandated disability accommodation.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      If you have an architecture office and the power goes out, do you have your workers give up on using AutoCAD and go to the drafting boards and slide rulers till the power comes back up? What's the point of going backwards with technology? You'll be outcompeted by those who embrace modern technology. I'm not aware of any modern engineering profession that doesn't use electronic crutches regularly. Nobody knows absolutely everything in their heads. We're paid for critical thinking , not to have everything memorized just in case the internet is out. Even before the internet, SW devs had stacks of books on their desks they'd reffer to often. Remember when IBM wanted to pay devs per line of code written? Yeah, exactly. I see the skills being problem solving, not writing code.

twright 1y ago

When I read articles like this I don't know whether to think I have some decent job security or not. On the one hand, people graduating having used LLM's for a significant majority of their work are almost certainly deficient at critically thinking about computer systems and programming them (there's a good quote in the article stating this much better than I am here). On the other, if they're cheating so much to get well-paying jobs will I --without cheating, relying on just the merits and knowledge from my career-- be competitive enough to find work in the future? Been wondering if anyone else feels this way.

greenie_beans 1y ago
i think people who learned how to do a skill prior to AI will have an edge. writing will be a valuable skill. same with people who know computer fundamentals.
phkahler 1y ago
>> On the other, if they're cheating so much to get well-paying jobs will I --without cheating, relying on just the merits and knowledge from my career-- be competitive enough to find work in the future? Been wondering if anyone else feels this way. You need to find a place that understand the difference between BS and real work. The next 5 years might bankrupt the ones that embrace the BS.
currymj 1y ago
a lot of the ChatGPT assignments are so incredibly obvious. in the most egregious cases literally copy and pasted from the browser without reading. laziness is all-pervasive. the problem is an academic cheating penalty can have grievous consequences for someone's life, so to prove it requires almost like a "beyond a reasonable doubt" criminal justice standard. and that's difficult to do. so they get through their classes. "don't hire someone" is a much lower bar. if there are obvious but unprovable ChatGPT vibes in the application, you probably just don't interview them. if there are weird pauses in their conversation during the interview and they sound like they're reading long sentences, don't advance to next round. a lot of these cheaters are going to get filtered hard. there is a smarter way to use it but this still requires some level of thought to disguise your cheating, you have to be able to understand the LLM outputs yourself, and a large portion of the cheaters can't manage that.

koliber 1y ago

The words of Lee in this essay highlight the problem. Paraphrasing: "I didn't do it because I did not feel like doing it, because it felt unimportant/irrelevant/dumb." This is the hubris of youth talking. While this kind of thinking will teach you some practical skills, ultimately you become an operator, and not an engineer. CNC machine designers earn more than CNC machine operators. Car engine designers earn more than car mechanics. Computer chip engineers earn more than people who put computers together. Production line engineers earn more than production line workers. In software development, the titles are unclear, but there is a clear distinction between operators and engineers. Unfortunately we call them all programmers or developers or engineers, as the titles don't truly reflect the kind of work they are doing. When you work with someone though, you know which title they really deserve. It's hard to put it into words, but going forward, the operators will have a harder time finding work as automated AI-based tools will replace them. The only solution is to learn to become engineers, but with the kind of mindset that Lee flaunts in the above article, that is not going to happen. My advice: Learn the fundamentals. Don't cheat. Be curious and strive for deep understanding. It's tempting to cut corners, but already today I see a deluge of people who just don't have what it takes to engineer software.

indymike 1y ago
> This is the hubris of youth talking. Maybe. Or maybe Every example you give, there are 1000s and 10000s of workers to every designer... and the road to a real engineering job is something that frankly, most people going to college could not complete.
cloudripper 1y ago
I agree. Also, this is the kind of crystal clear thinking and analysis that we need more of (and why I come to HN). Thank you for cutting though the BS and highlighting the underlying lessons.
bluecheese452 1y ago
Engineers need to be in the top 5%* of intelligence, operators don’t. Expecting the average person to become an engineer is a non solution. *With hard work and a good environment maybe we can extend this to 15%. Certainly not 50%.

emorning3 1y ago

Just look at the assholes that run this country. They set the standards. They lie and cheat their asses off every day. You can't reasonably expect that people WONT lie and cheat their asses off.

arp242 1y ago
If you look at countries with a lot of corruption, then there's this sense that "everyone uses corruption to get ahead, and I'd be a fool not to". This view is not entirely wrong. I don't envy students here; aside from the shining examples meritocracy, hard work, and accountability that you mentioned, you're also left with a feeling of "well, everyone else is using ChatGPT, and I'd be a fool not to". I don't entirely blame them, as the choice is between "use ChatGPT for one hour and get a passing grade" and "do my own work for six hours and get a passing grade". Of course the outcomes are not the same as there is value in doing the work yourself as it will give you a much better understanding of things, but taking delayed gratification in account has never been a top quality of young people.
- emorning3 1y ago
  I would be concerned that I'd get out of school and not get a job because I don't actually know anything. But I wouldn't blame students if they're not preparing for interviews and jobs. Because in this world having a job seems like a recipe for being poor. Instead, maybe students are just going to prepare to get ahead, in any way possible. And they'll go to a university to network and such. Personally I doubt that's gonna work out well, but I'm old what do I know.
  - cestith 1y ago
    I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years who had degrees and didn’t know much about their field. I’m sure that’s not new, but it may become even more prevalent.

evanjrowley 1y ago

Consider that college tuition is often equal to what an employer would pay you to do similar levels of work. The opportunity cost for attending college is therefore 2x the tuition. The system is exploiting students who need a paper to get a job, so why shouldn’t students exploit it too? * Mostly applies to degrees where "learning on the job" would have resulted in equivelant knowledge and skills.

HPsquared 1y ago
The students are still playing along and paying into the system. They might even do more education and get higher degrees than before with LLMs doing the heavy lifting. Everyone wins!

mark4 1y ago

Getting schooled by AI, colleges must evolve (March, 2023) https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/03/getting-schooled-by-ai-colleges-must.html https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/03/getting-schooled-b...

MaxPock 1y ago

I'm from Kenya, and a significant portion of our GDP comes from jobless graduates doing assignments for American students.

redczar 1y ago

Last semester I gave my students a take home final exam. I told them they could use AI. I just asked that they document their usage of external sources. This was precalculus class. The first problem was a graph x(t) and y(t). The component functions of a parametric curve. The question was: Estimate the times the particle is at the origin. I got an email from a student: I put problem 1 into ChatGPT and it couldn’t answer it. What are we supposed to do then? My response: Think! Students have mostly been trained that anything that can’t immediately be solved is too hard. They have no academic grit. It’s bad.

chneu 1y ago
This will sound boomer, but I've noticed this with a lot of people: absolutely no determination to figure things out. It isn't just young people. It really seems like people's determination has just gone to shit. I'm an engineer and teach people a lot. The first thing I have to do is determine what kind of learner people are, and my gosh, it's frustrating. People give up so fast.
- km144 1y ago
  Well as a member of gen-z, I'll happily agree with you if that makes you feel like less of a boomer. And I think it mostly has to do with attention. The capacity for focused attention has been deteriorating at a societal level for quite a long time. It's not a generational thing either—we are all facing similar pressures with the sheer amount of information we've been forced to process on a daily basis. That loss of attentional capacity seems to be affecting really important faculties like learning, creativity, and deep work. I see this in myself all the time but I find a lot of people my age are quite aware of what is happening to us while many older people are stuck blaming the kids—hell, there are times in public when I see older folks more glued to their screen than your average teenager. It's not just young people. The path forward isn't very clear.
  - chneu 1y ago
    Oh yeah don't think I was saying "I've only noticed this in young people" I know a lot of older folks who are horrible about this. It's a problem across the board. Thanks for being civil about it. This is a topic that many people get very upset about when you mention it.

sage76 1y ago

So many professors in college are detached and tone-deaf about their syllabus, their approach to teaching, and their workload, that the smart students adapt. One of those adaptations is cheating. I have seen really hardwokring students in grad school finally resort to cheating because the workload was insane, and they realized everyone else was cheating.

TuringNYC 1y ago

Controversial opinion - perhaps getting free tutoring from LLMs is a good thing? Some thoughts: 0. Rich kids (not me) got expensive tutoring. Now that is available to everyone. How is this not great? Was it cheating when rich people paid for it also? 1. At my undergrad (Cornell) about 20% of TAs couldnt speak english (or did not want to.) Some of the group office hours would tangent off into other languages. This was terrible to those who only understood the standard language of the school (English.) ChatGPT is available to everyone. 3. You dont even need to pay exorbitant tuition to get the same level of support as everyone in the world, this is a great democratizer. Isnt this what people have always wanted?

getnormality 1y ago
I think these points resonate most with a worldview where college is just a status competition, where it doesn't matter if you actually learn anything. By analogy, we could replace the human players of a sport with identical robots and it would level the playing field, but it would also completely defeat the purpose of sport. It is an activity done by humans for the benefit and enjoyment of humans. Rich students have long cheated themselves out of an education by using expensive tutors to do their homework. Now that's available to everyone, yes, and that somewhat levels the playing field, yes, but it's not a good thing if you care about education. It's more like, narcotics used to be only for rich people, but now we have powerful cheap ones that everyone can get easily.
- TuringNYC 1y ago
  >> Rich students have long cheated themselves out of an education by using expensive tutors to do their homework. Students in a crunch or those who are short-sighted use it to do homework. There have always been ways to cheat. Students who want to learn use it for guidance, insight, examples, detail. There have not always been ways to do this unless you were wealthy. So much of education is just mediocre. You are lucky (or rich) if you get access to great education.
  - getnormality 1y ago

GenZ_RiseUp 1y ago

ChatGPT hit the mainstream market in my final year of undergrad. I was indeed guilty of using it for one assignment wholesale, and a sizable portion of my final practicum. However, in the article it mentions something lightly that teachers use to distinguish LLM work from human work, which also rubbed me the wrong way. The arguments and counterarguments were given equal weighting, unless a command were to be given to the LLM to spit out partiality to one, whereby it is overwhelming in substance (if not in language) towards that thesis. Now, finalizing my grad school time, I've not used it, and have actively discouraged group members from using it, as I feel there is an advantage in searching painstakingly for new, obscure ideas - where LLMs tend to give the same advice for recommendations to anyone who sets them the same problem. I used to do the same thing with Bing, in lieu of Google search, for more 'quirky' ideas to implement in my arguments. There, I believe, lies an advantage for the semi-industrious knowledge student. Travel not the beaten path, but the one that takes slightly more effort for proportionally greater rewards.

throwup238 1y ago

> “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.” Kids, this is why you need to go to school.

ModernMech 1y ago

I feel a large part of this is the definition of "cheating". For example, I give take home exams and I allow students to use whatever resources they want. They can use chat GPT, the textbook, Stack Overflow, etc. as much as they want for as much time as they need. Access to these resources during an exam is typically considered "cheating" because using them would confer an unfair advantage, since tests are designed without them in mind. So then just give them access to the resources and make the test harder. Instead of a question like: "Here is some code find the bug", ask them to implement a large system and to document the bugs they encounter along the way, and how they used ChatGPT to fix them. Instead of "what's the definition of TCP" ask them to measure TCP vs. UDP using iperf. If all the students are cheating, then you're not testing the right thing. Make the test fit better to the current information landscape, and professors / students alike will have a better time. Stop testing information recall, start testing for information literacy, analysis, and integration. Stop asking students to answer multiple choice questions, start asking them to build systems.

vianarafael 1y ago

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dghughes 1y ago

You can be given every answer but that's not knowing. Cheating only cheats yourself of knowledge.

hackeraccount 1y ago

How do you cheat with AI on in class test?

damnesian 1y ago

This is why it is vitally important to provide a rich, varied educational experience. If it is possible to pass a course using AI, it's partially the student's fault. But it is just as much the EDUCATOR's fault. get these students into groups. Make them spontaneously interact. Use gamification principles. Count these interactions in grading. Prove you have internalized this material. individual attention and personalized instruction were a vital part of my own education (college in the 80s and 90s). There are a thousand excuses why schools think they can't provide it. It often reduces to budget shortfalls. But this can be done with existing tools and personnel. It's more a matter of teaching more engagingly, more creatively.

sbohacek 1y ago

I tell my students to cheat all they want. Their managers will need to hit their URA targets. More seriously, students have been cheating for a long time. Chegg.com was used solely for cheating. It is easier to detect LLMs than Chegg. Chegg provided solutions from other students or the solution set. LLMs are sometimes so bad (e.g., because an "accidental" typo in the question) that I can eventually detect who cheats and give no mercy when grading the in-person exams. Disclosure: I use LLMs to grade and give my personal touch at scale.

thimkerbell 1y ago

Overall we've seemed kind of quiet, about how to handle the hollowing-out of education.

strangeloops85 1y ago

At least for many engineering and science disciplines a solution remains to force students to actually try to learn the material: in-class, closed book exams. Nothing is ideal, but this does force students to actually engage with the material and problems. They are welcome to use LLMs all they want to help them study (though they should be careful given how often I catch them making horrible mistakes in my discipline). But the assessment will be of them and their brain.

lesser-shadow 1y ago

Today, my course instructor told me that I work on my Javascript assignments too slowly. He suggested that I use ChatGPT like everyone else instead of writing code by hand. ... Mind you, we didn't have any Javascript courses before, and we started with nodeJS head-first.

lostmsu 1y ago

I graduated from a top Russian university 13 years ago. I absolutely cheated on a few exams I considered non-essential for whatever I imagined my future would be, including some that are directly part of CS/AM major like stats, after minimal studying effort (for humanitarian requirements, I would not even flinch with 0 effort beyond typing an assignment into the chatbox). Thinking about it, I would do it again with ChatGPT today if for some reason I had to go and pass them again because employment requires a formal diploma. This is because I know my responsibilities would not involve stats, they know it, I don't enjoy stats, and I feel confident in my ability to learn if the need arises with the rest of the math as the basis, but the university requires stats for a diploma. To solve the problem, universities just need to streamline the requirements in their programs. Or find another way to accommodate for slightly more focused people.

relaxing 1y ago
Fucking hell, once you get beyond basic trig, prob & stats is like the most useful math there is. (Unless you work in a physics or engineering field that makes regular use of calc.)
- lostmsu 1y ago
  Maybe basic stats, but we are not talking basics here. In the course knowing the proof of the law of large numbers for Markov chains was mandatory for example. I am in systems programming and LLM research (as in worked on improving attention mechanism). And even in the latter the stats are only relevant because attention softmax looks like a probability distribution, and, surprise, attention works just fine without it, so even that relevance is questionable.

Molitor5901 1y ago

My university had rampant cheating. Students attending for others was a big one, especially for the exams in rooms with 90 students. Finding someone to write papers for you was super easy, but CS cheating was cut throat. Guard your code because people will steal it, will break into the professors office after hours, and will try to hack your computer, just to name some incidents that happened. Granted I'm now 10 years out of uni but even back then, students felt more entitled to the degree, and were willing to color outside the lines if that is what it took to get it.

creer 1y ago

Does it matter? I mean yes it does because students potentially cheating themselves out of an education and gross waste of time and money. But do any employers still seriously rely on degrees to select their employees? Many still rely on degree to filter before interviews - but even here, we have only ourselves to blame for this, right? This is one thing we (businesses, employers) have complete control on. It does mean we now need to interview on more things. Like 2nd language, general reading comprehension, or basic numeracy. But didn't we already get to the point where we had to do that? Where we can't even trust that whoever is interviewing is the person seeking hiring? So from a point of view of hiring, perhaps it doesn't matter anymore. The article itself emphasizes one point where it matters: college as ethics training is on indefinite leave. And interviews will have to test for ethics. A tough one.

plutoh28 1y ago

My take as a current uni student. This is all absolutely true. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t use chat. Some people use it as a personal tutor, most use it as a shortcut to finish assignments. Regardless, everyone is using it. LLM’s are great when used as a tool. Bouncing ideas and asking conceptual questions is a great way to learn (it really is as valuable as talking to a professor for a lot of questions). But how do you convince students to use LLMs as a learning tool instead of a cheating tool? I think the solution is simple. Most people are short cutting with LLMs because they want a good grade, and they want it easy. So, stop with grading. The primary incentive for going to a class should be to pickup some new knowledge and skills, not to pickup a good grade.

sien 1y ago
As you say 'Uni' student are you in the UK or Australia ? Also, do you do math courses ? Are the math courses still based on 60% plus performance in exams ? Are they far less impacted than other courses ? It seems like one answer to the LLM thing is that all Uni grades become mostly dependent on exams written in person and that all essays and assignments are given a considerably lower weight.

Balgair 1y ago

> When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” Like, dude, I wonder why that is? I get that the students see University as mostly a path to a degree/middle-class-union-card and that the college you go to as mostly a vetting process/sorting hat. Sure, I was 18 once too and didn't care about much past my nose too. But, like, the reason it's a good place to meet people is because those people are attracted by the college itself. Honestly, this is on the admin. They know the kids are all 'cheating' their asses off. I guess until some other feedback mechanism comes in, they aren't going to rock the boat.

basch 1y ago
Access to an elite social network has long been the distinguishing factor of college. When people are taking out student loans, they may not understand or fully grasp that that's what they are buying into, and if they arent taking advantage of it, they are essentially buying something but not using it. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/jfks-very-revealing-harvard-application-essay/281699/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/jfks-v...
- Balgair 1y ago
  Well yes, but the question is: Why is that school an elite school to begin with? Like, country clubs exist; it's not just about being drunk around other rich people. The profiled dude in the article only sees the elite nature and not the thing that got the school there. Like, why does Coke advertise still? For the same reason that plane don't turn off the engines when you get to 30,000 feet.

deleted 1y ago

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bookofjoe 1y ago

https://archive.ph/fiP8K https://archive.ph/fiP8K