4 ms·

If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless. If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a degree

by nkrisc 1y ago

If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless. If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a degree, then it has lost all value as a certificate that the holder has completed some minimum level of education and learning. Institutions that award such degrees will be no different than degree mills of the past. I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth.

ai-christianson 1y ago
Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?
- nkrisc 1y ago
  If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans? Either AI will replace them or employers will realize that they prefer employees who can think. In either case, being a human who specializes in regurgitating AI output seems like a dead end.
  - ai-christianson 1y ago
    Employers are employees too
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    “Prompt Engineer” as a serious job title is very strange to me. I don’t have an explanation as to why it would be a learnable skill—there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Aerroon 1y ago
      It's an experience thing. It's not about knowing what LLMs/diffusion models specifically do, but rather about knowing the pitfalls that the models you use have. It's a bit like an audio engineer setting up your compressors and other filters. It's not difficult to fiddle with the settings, but knowing what numbers to input is not trivial. I think it's a kind of skill that we don't really know how to measure yet.
      - TimorousBestie 1y ago
        When an audio engineer tweaks the pass band of a filter, there’s a direct casual relationship between inputs and outputs. I can imagine an audio engineer learning what different filters and effects sound like. Almost all of them are linear systems, so composing effects is easy to understand. None of this is true of an LLM. I believe there’s a little skill involved, but it’s nothing like tuning the pass band of a filter. LLMs are chaotic systems (they kinda have to be to mimic humans); that’s one of their benefits, but it’s also one of their curses. Now, what a human can definitely do is convince themselves that they can control somewhat the outputs of a chaotic system. Rain prognostication is perhaps a better model of the prompt engineer than the audio mixer.
    - jonfw 1y ago
      > there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does. That's a "black box" problem, and I think they are some of the most interesting problems the world has. Outside of technology- the most interesting jobs in the world operate on a "black box". Sales people, psychologists are trying to work on the human mind. Politicians and market makers are trying to predict the behavior of large populations. Doctors are operating on the human body. Technology has been getting more complicated- and I think that distributed systems and high level frameworks are starting to resemble a "black box" problem. LLMs even more so! I agree that "prompt engineer" is a silly job title- but not because it's not a learnable skill. It's just not accurate to call yourself an engineer when consuming an LLM.
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    > If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans You hire humans to help train AI and when done you fire humans.
- __loam 1y ago
  Would you rather be the guy using AI as a crutch or the guy who actually knows how to do things without it?
- myaccountonhn 1y ago
  Even if you just use AI, you need to know the right prompts to ask.
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    And how to verify the output and think through it. I hear time after time that someone asked something from AI. It came up with something and then when corrected apologized and printed out it was wrong... But how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong...
    - throwaway290 1y ago
      > how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong... You keep human employees and require them to use LLM so that it gets corrected all the time from their input. Then you fire them.
banku_brougham 1y ago
The credentials were never about having become learned.
ryandrake 1y ago
Maybe schools and universities need to stop considering homework to be evidence of subject matter mastery. Grading homework never made sense to me. What are you measuring, really, and how confident are you of that measurement? You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Universities need to accept that AI exists, and adjust their operations accordingly.
- __loam 1y ago
  How do you suggest we measure whether the students have actually learned the stuff then?
  - dghlsakjg 1y ago
    Tests, both oral and written.
    - __loam 1y ago
      Yes that's how we do it lol
  - pona-a 1y ago
    In person, pen and paper exams? They are closer to how most certifications are conducted.
    - jay_kyburz 1y ago
      Also, They don't need to be literally pen and paper exams, they just need to be run on computers without network connectivity, administered by the university. You could sit down at a workstation with all the tools you might need to test your skills. :)
  - downboots 1y ago
    Captcha, of course. \s
- bee_rider 1y ago
tylerflick 1y ago
TBF this problem doesn’t seem that new to me. I was forced to do my lab work in Vim and C via SSH because the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  > the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning Sounds laughably naive now, doesn’t it?
lolinder 1y ago
All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams taken either in class or at the university testing center. For most subjects at the university level graded homework (and graded attendance) has always struck me as somewhat condescending and coddling. Either it serves to pad out grades for students who aren't truly learning the material or it serves to force adult students to follow specific learning strategies that the professor thinks are best rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults. Give students the flexibility to learn however they think is best and then find ways to measure what they've actually learned in environments where cheating is impossible. Cracking down on cheating at homework assignments is just patching over a teaching strategy that has outgrown its usefulness.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  I don’t disagree, but in most cases degrees are handed out based on grades which in turn are based on homework. I agree that something will have to change to avert the current trend.
  - __loam 1y ago
    Most of the college courses I took had the bulk of the grade be based on exams or projects. Homework was usually a small proportion to give students a little buffer and to actually prepare them for the exams. AI might have helped on coding projects but a lot of my grades were based on exams using pencil and paper in a room of 30-200 other people. It also just seems like a waste of your own time and money to avoid the act of learning by skipping all the hard parts with a corporate token generator.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  > rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults I have had so many very frustrating conversations with full grown adults in charge of teaching CS. I have no faith at all that students would be able to choose an appropriate method of study. My issue with the instruction is the very narrow belief in the importance of certain measurable skills. VERY narrow. I won’t go into details, for my own sanity.
echelon 1y ago
> I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth. College students still cram and purge. Nobody forced to sit through OChem remembers their Diels-Alder reaction except the organic chemists. College degrees probably don't have as much value as we've historically ascribed to them. There's a lot of nostalgia and tradition pent up in them. The students who do the best typically fill their schedule with extra-curricular projects and learning that isn't dictated by professors and grading curves.
busyant 1y ago
> If students using AI to cheat on homework This is not related to "AI", but I have an amusing story about online cheating. * I have a nephew who was switched into online college classes at the beginning of the pandemic. * As soon as they switched to online, the class average on the exams shot up, but my nephew initially refused to cheat. * Eventually he relented (because everyone else was doing it) and he pasted a multitude of sticky notes on the wall at the periphery of his computer monitor. * His father walks into his room, looks at all the sticky notes and declares, "You can't do this!!! It'll ruin the wallpaper!"
andoando 1y ago
Good, colleges have staryed far from their purpose
Aerroon 1y ago
At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective then is college itself useful?
- Aurornis 1y ago
  If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful? It’s the same old story with a new set of technology.
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    > If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful? What's your answer? Surely it was proven to be "not useful"? I don't think I ever met a person who benefitted from knowing math now that everyone has a calculator in pocket. Other than maybe playing some games where if you do calculation on the fly you win
    - seb1204 1y ago
      Well, if you don't know math because the calculator does it you would also have no understanding of the concepts e.g. addition, subtraction, whole numbers or fraction etc. so you would not know how to in use or what to do with a calculator. It's a tool that is useful to do something you know how it works faster.
      - throwaway290 1y ago
        But that's very different with LLMs and that stuff. You don't need to know how to write an essay or write a song. That's kind of the point.
        hackable_sand 1y ago
        LLMs don't know how to write an essay or a song. To be able to direct an LLM you would need to know how to do those things yourself.
neom 1y ago
I've been hiring people for the better part for 15 years and I never considered them to be valuable outside of the fact that it appears you're able to do one project for a sustained period of time. My impressions was unless your degree confers something such that you are in a job that human risk can be involved, most degrees are worth very little and most serious people know that.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  It doesn't matter if your boss's policy is to require a degree.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  To be clear, I think that most college degrees were generally low value (even my own), but still had some value. The current trend will be towards zero value unless something changes.
Aurornis 1y ago
> If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless. I suspect the opposite: Known-good college degrees will become more valuable. The best colleges will institute practices that confirm the material was learned, such as emphasizing in-person testing over at-home assignments. Cheating has actually been rampant at the university level for a long time, well before LLMs. One of the key differentiators of the better institutions is that they are harder to cheat to completion. At my local state university (where I have friends on staff) it’s apparently well known among the students that if they pick the right professors and classes they can mostly skate to graduation with enough cheating opportunity to make it an easy ride. The professors who are sticklers about cheating are often avoided or even become the targets of ratings-bombing campaigns
ravenstine 1y ago
Had I known that college degrees from before the 2020s would increase in value, I'd have gotten one. Damn it!
barrenko 1y ago
I've tried re-enrolling in a STEM major last year, after a higher education "pause" of 16-ish years. 85% of the class used GPTs to solve homework, and it was quite obvious most of them haven't even read the assignment. The immediate effect was the distrust of the professors towards most everyone and lots classes felt like some kind of babysitting scheme, which I did not appreciate.
addcommitpush 1y ago
I mean this seems a solved problem: hand-and-paper written onsite exams + blackboard-and-chalk oral onsite exams. If this is too costly (is it? many countries manage), make students take them less often.

by nkrisc 1y ago

ai-christianson 1y ago

Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?

nkrisc 1y ago
If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans? Either AI will replace them or employers will realize that they prefer employees who can think. In either case, being a human who specializes in regurgitating AI output seems like a dead end.
- ai-christianson 1y ago
  Employers are employees too
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  “Prompt Engineer” as a serious job title is very strange to me. I don’t have an explanation as to why it would be a learnable skill—there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aerroon 1y ago
    It's an experience thing. It's not about knowing what LLMs/diffusion models specifically do, but rather about knowing the pitfalls that the models you use have. It's a bit like an audio engineer setting up your compressors and other filters. It's not difficult to fiddle with the settings, but knowing what numbers to input is not trivial. I think it's a kind of skill that we don't really know how to measure yet.
    - TimorousBestie 1y ago
      When an audio engineer tweaks the pass band of a filter, there’s a direct casual relationship between inputs and outputs. I can imagine an audio engineer learning what different filters and effects sound like. Almost all of them are linear systems, so composing effects is easy to understand. None of this is true of an LLM. I believe there’s a little skill involved, but it’s nothing like tuning the pass band of a filter. LLMs are chaotic systems (they kinda have to be to mimic humans); that’s one of their benefits, but it’s also one of their curses. Now, what a human can definitely do is convince themselves that they can control somewhat the outputs of a chaotic system. Rain prognostication is perhaps a better model of the prompt engineer than the audio mixer.
  - jonfw 1y ago
    > there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does. That's a "black box" problem, and I think they are some of the most interesting problems the world has. Outside of technology- the most interesting jobs in the world operate on a "black box". Sales people, psychologists are trying to work on the human mind. Politicians and market makers are trying to predict the behavior of large populations. Doctors are operating on the human body. Technology has been getting more complicated- and I think that distributed systems and high level frameworks are starting to resemble a "black box" problem. LLMs even more so! I agree that "prompt engineer" is a silly job title- but not because it's not a learnable skill. It's just not accurate to call yourself an engineer when consuming an LLM.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  > If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans You hire humans to help train AI and when done you fire humans.
__loam 1y ago
Would you rather be the guy using AI as a crutch or the guy who actually knows how to do things without it?
myaccountonhn 1y ago
Even if you just use AI, you need to know the right prompts to ask.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  And how to verify the output and think through it. I hear time after time that someone asked something from AI. It came up with something and then when corrected apologized and printed out it was wrong... But how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong...
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    > how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong... You keep human employees and require them to use LLM so that it gets corrected all the time from their input. Then you fire them.

banku_brougham 1y ago

The credentials were never about having become learned.

ryandrake 1y ago

Maybe schools and universities need to stop considering homework to be evidence of subject matter mastery. Grading homework never made sense to me. What are you measuring, really, and how confident are you of that measurement? You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Universities need to accept that AI exists, and adjust their operations accordingly.

__loam 1y ago
How do you suggest we measure whether the students have actually learned the stuff then?
- dghlsakjg 1y ago
  Tests, both oral and written.
  - __loam 1y ago
    Yes that's how we do it lol
- pona-a 1y ago
  In person, pen and paper exams? They are closer to how most certifications are conducted.
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    Also, They don't need to be literally pen and paper exams, they just need to be run on computers without network connectivity, administered by the university. You could sit down at a workstation with all the tools you might need to test your skills. :)
- downboots 1y ago
  Captcha, of course. \s
bee_rider 1y ago

tylerflick 1y ago

TBF this problem doesn’t seem that new to me. I was forced to do my lab work in Vim and C via SSH because the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning.

fn-mote 1y ago
> the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning Sounds laughably naive now, doesn’t it?

lolinder 1y ago

All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams taken either in class or at the university testing center. For most subjects at the university level graded homework (and graded attendance) has always struck me as somewhat condescending and coddling. Either it serves to pad out grades for students who aren't truly learning the material or it serves to force adult students to follow specific learning strategies that the professor thinks are best rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults. Give students the flexibility to learn however they think is best and then find ways to measure what they've actually learned in environments where cheating is impossible. Cracking down on cheating at homework assignments is just patching over a teaching strategy that has outgrown its usefulness.

nkrisc 1y ago
I don’t disagree, but in most cases degrees are handed out based on grades which in turn are based on homework. I agree that something will have to change to avert the current trend.
- __loam 1y ago
  Most of the college courses I took had the bulk of the grade be based on exams or projects. Homework was usually a small proportion to give students a little buffer and to actually prepare them for the exams. AI might have helped on coding projects but a lot of my grades were based on exams using pencil and paper in a room of 30-200 other people. It also just seems like a waste of your own time and money to avoid the act of learning by skipping all the hard parts with a corporate token generator.
fn-mote 1y ago
> rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults I have had so many very frustrating conversations with full grown adults in charge of teaching CS. I have no faith at all that students would be able to choose an appropriate method of study. My issue with the instruction is the very narrow belief in the importance of certain measurable skills. VERY narrow. I won’t go into details, for my own sanity.

echelon 1y ago

> I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth. College students still cram and purge. Nobody forced to sit through OChem remembers their Diels-Alder reaction except the organic chemists. College degrees probably don't have as much value as we've historically ascribed to them. There's a lot of nostalgia and tradition pent up in them. The students who do the best typically fill their schedule with extra-curricular projects and learning that isn't dictated by professors and grading curves.

busyant 1y ago

> If students using AI to cheat on homework This is not related to "AI", but I have an amusing story about online cheating. * I have a nephew who was switched into online college classes at the beginning of the pandemic. * As soon as they switched to online, the class average on the exams shot up, but my nephew initially refused to cheat. * Eventually he relented (because everyone else was doing it) and he pasted a multitude of sticky notes on the wall at the periphery of his computer monitor. * His father walks into his room, looks at all the sticky notes and declares, "You can't do this!!! It'll ruin the wallpaper!"

andoando 1y ago

Good, colleges have staryed far from their purpose

Aerroon 1y ago

At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective then is college itself useful?

Aurornis 1y ago
If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful? It’s the same old story with a new set of technology.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  > If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful? What's your answer? Surely it was proven to be "not useful"? I don't think I ever met a person who benefitted from knowing math now that everyone has a calculator in pocket. Other than maybe playing some games where if you do calculation on the fly you win
  - seb1204 1y ago
    Well, if you don't know math because the calculator does it you would also have no understanding of the concepts e.g. addition, subtraction, whole numbers or fraction etc. so you would not know how to in use or what to do with a calculator. It's a tool that is useful to do something you know how it works faster.
    - throwaway290 1y ago
      But that's very different with LLMs and that stuff. You don't need to know how to write an essay or write a song. That's kind of the point.
      - hackable_sand 1y ago
        LLMs don't know how to write an essay or a song. To be able to direct an LLM you would need to know how to do those things yourself.

neom 1y ago

I've been hiring people for the better part for 15 years and I never considered them to be valuable outside of the fact that it appears you're able to do one project for a sustained period of time. My impressions was unless your degree confers something such that you are in a job that human risk can be involved, most degrees are worth very little and most serious people know that.

throwaway290 1y ago
It doesn't matter if your boss's policy is to require a degree.
nkrisc 1y ago
To be clear, I think that most college degrees were generally low value (even my own), but still had some value. The current trend will be towards zero value unless something changes.

Aurornis 1y ago

> If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless. I suspect the opposite: Known-good college degrees will become more valuable. The best colleges will institute practices that confirm the material was learned, such as emphasizing in-person testing over at-home assignments. Cheating has actually been rampant at the university level for a long time, well before LLMs. One of the key differentiators of the better institutions is that they are harder to cheat to completion. At my local state university (where I have friends on staff) it’s apparently well known among the students that if they pick the right professors and classes they can mostly skate to graduation with enough cheating opportunity to make it an easy ride. The professors who are sticklers about cheating are often avoided or even become the targets of ratings-bombing campaigns

ravenstine 1y ago

Had I known that college degrees from before the 2020s would increase in value, I'd have gotten one. Damn it!

barrenko 1y ago

I've tried re-enrolling in a STEM major last year, after a higher education "pause" of 16-ish years. 85% of the class used GPTs to solve homework, and it was quite obvious most of them haven't even read the assignment. The immediate effect was the distrust of the professors towards most everyone and lots classes felt like some kind of babysitting scheme, which I did not appreciate.

addcommitpush 1y ago

I mean this seems a solved problem: hand-and-paper written onsite exams + blackboard-and-chalk oral onsite exams. If this is too costly (is it? many countries manage), make students take them less often.