7 ms·

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

49 points by adrianhon 1y ago

adrianhon 1y ago
Archive link: https://archive.is/y705A https://archive.is/y705A
VeritySage 1y ago
Rather than grading polished essays, instructors will use in-class writing sprints and live peer reviews to track idea development in real time
- mistrial9 1y ago
  yes agree - proctored writing assignments are happening now
TrackerFF 1y ago
Every undergrad study is, as of now, possible to pass with AI models. Some of them not only pass, but pass with flying colors. The harsh reality is that academia as a whole needs to be revamped. The easy solution would be to revert back to paper only exams, and physical attendance - but that would also exclude a ton students. A huge number of modern students are online students, or similar programs where you don't need to show up physically. Moreover, I don't think universities / colleges themselves want to revert back, as it would mean hiring more people, spending more on buildings, etc.
- runamuck 1y ago
  I hold remote interviews and I can tell when candidates use AI to answer questions, real time with camera on. They repeat my technical question, pause for a few seconds, their voice drops to a monotone and they quickly recite a bulleted list of low level technical details that sounds like a wikipedia page. I worry that candidates will learn to act more subtle, maybe configure their LLM to return with an anecdote around the tech in question, and practice "selling" their vocal communication.
  - dvh 1y ago
    Students cheat when grades are more valuable than knowledge.
    - Biologist123 1y ago
      Perfect.
    - shinycode 1y ago
      Exactly, the problem is not the students but the amount of efforts the education system has to pour in to change and make it better (and take advantage of LLMs as a learning opportunity )
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      Students cheat when they think grades are more valuable than knowledge. We already have a real-world scourge of tech bros who view learning about other subjects as beneath them and who rate their ignorance as more valuable than experts in that subject. This wonderful new world of AI is only going to exacerbate that problem.
    - esafak 1y ago
      He's talking about graduates. There are people out there trying to hold down multiple remote jobs by cheating through interviews and collecting as many paychecks as possible until they get caught.
    - spacemadness 1y ago
      I would say most technical interviewers cheat as they ask questions they themselves couldn’t solve on the spot.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Grades are how we try to measure knowledge, because knowledge is abstract and hard to measure. Obviously, the measurement of X runs the risk of being optimized as opposed to X - I see this in my job all the time, and we're all professionals. Point is, it's not a problem with academia and it's not easy to solve. If we could just magically peer into people's minds and figure out what they know definitively then we'd solve a lot of world issues. Alas, we must settle for numbers and papers instead.
- SecretDreams 1y ago
  So you gave the easy solution. What's the hard solution? Honestly, the pervasiveness of LLMs looks to really erode the critical thinking of entire future generations. Whatever the solution, we need to be taking these existential threats a lot more seriously than how we treated social media (the plague before this current plague).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - koakuma-chan 1y ago
    Don't forget to ban calculators
    - rescripting 1y ago
      Calculators _are_ banned when students are learning basic arithmetic. They are only allowed once students can do it on their own, because now you have a foundational understanding and the tool just speeds you up.
    - SecretDreams 1y ago
      If we don't get AI correctly regulated, future gens will probably not be able to work a calculator. Calculator producers will then go out of business - so no need to ban 'em. Thanks for the insightful comment!
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      Yes, every single math class I've ever had in my life - primary or second education - banned calculators or (in engineering) required us to perform a full memory reset in front of the TA. Using a machine to do the very thing you are supposed to be demonstrating a proficiency in is cheating and harms the legitimacy of the accreditation of the school.
  - futureshock 1y ago
    I think the hard solution is to massively increase expectations. Think Star Trek where the grade schoolers are learning quantum mechanics. If everyone has access to the oracle of all human knowledge, then you should teach and test to the maximum of what a student could do with all that power. Find the frontier where the AI fails and the human adds value and teach there.
- boerseth 1y ago
  It may get resolved on its own. These days people study to get good grades in order to prove to future gatekeepers (like employers, or higher rungs of academia) that they know the material well. Post AGI, however, the gatekeepers may not be so interested in humans anymore, and we might not need grades at all. Studying anything could become something done exclusively for ones own interest, and the only point of a grade would be to give one-self a goal to achieve. Alternatively, if we still want to cling on to this ritual of measuring the performance of students, you could give each and every one of them oral examinations with AI professors.
  - EGreg 1y ago
    Boom, this. Institutions that prepare people for future jobs have an even harder time to justify what they’re doing than the people who are looking for jobs right now. It’s just inertia at this point. Not to mention that AI can educate the people better by solving Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem. So colleges are obsolete except as four year cruises for entertainment and networking.
  - esafak 1y ago
    We are not post AGI. We still need to hire people who did not cheat their way through school and interviews with chatGPT. Even post AGI, we would want to hire qualified people.
  - spacemadness 1y ago
    Ah yes, the AGI that will happen any day now but we can’t even define. Please buy the stock.
- juujian 1y ago
  Don't even need to go that far. Provide a locked-down computer and have students write essays in a dedicated space. I have personally done that and it was a reasonably good experience.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - m0llusk 1y ago
    Which raises the issue of what education is for. Is it to know things and solve specific problems in a controlled environment, or is it to work with available tools and resources across a range dynamically changing contexts? Does being at a locked down computer in a dedicated space match likely work settings?
    - stvltvs 1y ago
      This assumes that education's sole goal is to prepare students for work. What would be the impact on democratic systems if voters always turn to an LLM for answers because schools didn't require them to think on their own?
      - m0llusk 1y ago
        This is simply raising one specific case of something education is expected to train for. There is already ample evidence that critical thinking skills are essential for political function and social stability.
    - zerkten 1y ago
      You can be sensitive to both, and good institutions have a duty to check instructors who go strongly in a single direction. I think the point is only to exclude the crutch in contexts where it affects learning. Being prepared for work is only one element of education. Its weight varies by course, institution, and many other factors. Further, there are likely situations where the participants avail of AI to different extents based on how they feel about the situation (cf. different degrees of doping in athletics), and students will sometimes be limited by their means in use of AI tools.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  There’s a huge volume of revenue coming from remote students.
- slightwinder 1y ago
  > The easy solution would be to revert back to paper only exams, and physical attendance - but that would also exclude a ton students. Which students? If it's just about travel-distance, maybe schools could organize themselves to offer local test-centers where students could attend exams under observation. Reusing existing facilities in this way is pretty common in my countries education-system since decades.
- rich_sasha 1y ago
  Exams were never the pinnacle of what a grad can do. They were an efficient test, under severe time constraints, that correlates well with overall ability in humans. That AI can pass these tests doesn't mean it is as smart and capable as a grad. I mean, it might be, or if not today then in a few years, but not because it can pass exams, having digested past exams and sample solutions into its bellows.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Most of the important ones I took had: 1) Written in person exams that were most of the grade (this includes "blue book" exams where you have to sit in front of the professor and write an essay on whatever topic he writes on the board that morning as well as your typical math/algorithms tests on paper.) 2) Written homework where you have to essentially have a satisfactory discussion on the topic (no word range, you get graded on creative interpretation of the course subject matter.) Language models could maybe help you with 2 but will actually kill your ability to handle 1 if you're cheating on homework with them. If anything language models will mean the end of those retarded make-work cookie cutter graded homework assignments that got in the way of actually studying and learning.
- Balgair 1y ago
  The cheap version of learning is dead, and AI killed it. Not that we were learning all that much to begin with. I mean, walk into any sorority and ask to see the test bank. The students and Profs were phoning it in for a while, by and large. Not all of them were though, and good on yah. But now that the fig leaf is torn away, we're left with the Oxbridge model and not much else - small classes, under 10, likely under 5, with a grad level tutor, social pressure making sure you've done the work. The great thing about this though is that you'll have an AI listening in all the time and helping out, streamlining the busywork and allowing the group to get down to business. But that version is very expensive. You're looking at ~$50k / student year [0] at a baseline Oxbridge model in secondary school on up - ~$400k / student from 9th to university graduation. Assume a 6% loan rate for 30 years (a mortgage, essentially), and you've got ~$2,300 monthly payments for all your working life, ~$46k/year down the drain. How in the hell are you going to manage student loans like that and then try to live a life without a really good job? How the hell is a nation going to be expected to pay for that per kid if you make school free for them? Cheap learning wasn't good, but it sufficed. The new models of education must answer to the fundamental question of education: How much does it cost? [0] 2 hours 3x a week per class; 4 classes per tutor per week. Assume $100k/tutor and 5 students/tutor. So $5k / student / tutor. 4 classes / student. So $20k / student in just raw tutors. At least double that for overhead if not triple.
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  You're greatly exaggerating the problem. Literally any requirement can exclude students. Establishment of a trusted proctor network for administering exams is how you solve this problem. If you're an online student, you'll have to show up a few days per year to prove your knowledge in person. I believe this is how many remote study programs already work, because AI is just the latest way to cheat. You could always pay people to do your work for you before AI, and the solution is the same.
- beAbU 1y ago
  A renowned South African university, UNISA, has done remote learning for decades. Students had to mail in their work every month, and they would set up exam centres all over the country where students can take their tests. This is not an unsolvable problem if handwritten work becomes a requirement.
atonse 1y ago
Even though I majored in CompSci, I still remember my college essay class and learning about primary and secondary sources and their relative quality, how to craft an argument, and how to articulate your argument to be persuasive. Outside of just writing, those skills have been useful in other scenarios too (like when subconsciously evaluating someone else's argument) Of course, I still treated it like a lazy college student: I did it in 2.1 or 2.2 line spacing to hit the page requirements, and flipped my thesis because it was easier to research (I started out arguing against the US invading Iraq, but found it way easier to find sources that supported an invasion... well, we all know how reliable those sources were).
- elmean 1y ago
  "but found it way easier to find sources that supported an invasion..." Hahahaha, US Army Psy Ops approves this message
tlhunter 1y ago
An obvious solution is to require the use of Google docs and include the history as part of the assignment. If there is no sign of sentence restructuring then fail the assignment. This is the equivalent of asking students to show their work when they do math problems and that is how we thwarted those evil calculators.
- whiplash451 1y ago
  This is likely easily gamed by asking the LLM to provide a number of intermediate versions of the output. You still have to do some yak shaving in google docs, but nothing too hard.
  - tlhunter 1y ago
    That's true. Ultimately I suppose it's a relatively short game of cat and mouse... Twenty year old calculators can show the work after all.
- tempodox 1y ago
  What, forcing everyone to become a Google user, just so they can study?
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    Vendor lock-in is pretty common in courses at all levels.
    - dontTREATonme 1y ago
      Google docs probably isn’t even the best tool for the job, blackboard or one of the other edu mafia platforms will build some sort of halfway decent app that will check for typing vs just copy pasting as well as other indicators.
  - calebh 1y ago
    I wrote a blog [1] a couple years ago about this solution - it turns out it is possible to use timestamp authority servers in combination with hashing functions to create a verified edit history. Like the other comment said, it merely starts an arms race where the AI side is likely to win, which is why I haven't pursued this further. For something like digital art creation verifying the edit history is much more fruitful since the diffusion process is nothing like how humans create art. [1] https://helbl.ing/Written-Proof-of-Work/ https://helbl.ing/Written-Proof-of-Work/
ilaksh 1y ago
AI isn't destroying anything. Don't blame the technology for what humans do with it. AI should allow every student to have personalized instruction and tutoring. It should be a massive win. If everyone instead of taking advantage of that refuses to do any work and decided to lie and pass the AIs output off as their own, that is not something the AI did. The students did that.
- ImHereToVote 1y ago
  Blame is for small children and God. Moloch will require his sacrifice regardless of whom you choose to blame.
- tempodox 1y ago
  > AI should allow every student to have personalized instruction and tutoring. I admire your optimism. Funny how everyone has their own dream of the miracles that “AI” should perform. It's just the perfect silver screen for everyone to project their wishes on.
  - marcellus23 1y ago
    In the same vein, AI is a boogeyman that people can pin all their fears for the future on.
    - tempodox 1y ago
      Naturally, “perfect silver screen” works for any purpose.
- javier123454321 1y ago
  We turned higher ed into a qualification producing factory subsidized by the government at the expense of the kid's financial future. We overemphasized passing over learning, as the education is about the title, not the knowledge. It's not the student's fault that we created this incentive structure. The students that want to learn can still learn, those that come to higher education with a transactional mindset now can just pay for their degree. The truth is we are at the point where the logic of the commodification of our higher education system is being taken to its logical conclusion which is its own undoing.
Double_a_92 1y ago
In all of my school years, essays were THE WORST kind of exam there was. The grading was highly arbitrary anyway... Good that AI is killing that.
- javier123454321 1y ago
  Essays might not be a great tool for providing consistent grading, but as a tool for learning to think through an idea, learning to structure arguments coherently, to research your point and find counter factual, it is unmatched. Education __should__ optimize for learning, not grading.
Biologist123 1y ago
A college-friend from the Unviersity of Oxford, where students write one or two essays a week, got the top first (best mark) in his history degree. Initially impressed, one day I asked him his exam method - where each student must produce 3 essays in 3 hours (or did then) across about 5 or 6 papers. My friend’s approach was to thoroughly research 12 essay questions and pre-write 16 page essays for each paper, which he would then learn verbatim and trot out word-for-word the best fit to each exam question. This compared to my method of reading widely, learning quotes and ideas and then writing each essay fresh in the exam hall - and I would typically manage about 3-4 pages per essay. (Reader, I did not get a top first). I relate this anecdote as I don’t really see my friend’s method as being much better than using AI. Although I do acknowledge his 16 page essays must have been reasonably good.
- eviks 1y ago
  > friend’s method as being much better than using AI Why not? He wrote all the essays himself, after all, and in a setting that's much more relevant to real life vs. the artificial constraints of a shorter exam. With AI he would've written/learned nothing himself.
  - Biologist123 1y ago
    It’s a fair point, but as a thought experiment, how would you feel about AI writing the essays and simply regurgitating those? Legal but not in the spirit of things I think.
    - scarecrowbob 1y ago
      Yes, a different situation would have a different response. The point is that your friend did all this effort to write those essays, which (supposedly, and I believe it) actually caused them to "learn" the material. We are often changed in the process of doing thing, weather working out or thinking through concepts. Your claim here is about like claiming you get the same workout regardless of if you drive a mile or ran a mile because you have changed positions using either method.
    - 1y ago
compacct27 1y ago
The leverage has been flipped. We all had awful college classes teaching next to nothing, and now that you can get good grades without attending, what's left? "We lost critical thinking!" No, we were barely getting that in the first place. Now, classes need to be more valuable.
- javier123454321 1y ago
  This is exactly it. Are we surprised that civil engineering students forced to take a humanities class satisfied by psych 101 and having to pay thousands of dollars for the 3 credit hours are cheating on their term paper?
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    It's not surprising, as there are plenty of technical-minded people who believe they should never have to study anything related to "soft sciences", and will do anything to get out of it. But I don't think that people doing so with AI justifies the idea that civil engineering students should not be taught any humanities.
    - javier123454321 1y ago
      I am not against learning humanities. But I am against forcing students to participate in 101 level courses that are packed with over 100 students, listening to an uninspired lecturer talk at a crowd of disinterested faces on their phone and being FORCED to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on it. Education =/= academia anymore (in the US) and that fault falls squarely on the academia industry.
      - ModernMech 1y ago
        > academia industry Well there's the problem right there. Academia shouldn't be an "industry", it should be a public good. "101 level courses that are packed with over 100 students, listening to an uninspired lecturer talk at a crowd of disinterested faces on their phone and being FORCED to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on it." is an artefact of forcing a public good shaped peg into a capitalism shaped hole. When academia is an industry, students and professors get treated like commodities that have to demonstrate an ROI to be allowed to exist. Humanities don't have a good ROI in our society, therefore they are not funded, therefore positions in humanities are scarce. The end result is overworked lecturers and large class sizes. The alternative is to cut humanities altogether, which honestly is happening; we're headed to a situation where humanities programs in some areas will just cease to exist, and they'll concentrate in places that actually care about education. It's sad but that's where we are.
nickk81 1y ago
Hopefully AI articles and papers can skip things like: Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.”
politician 1y ago
Universities have been criticized for ideological indoctrination. We might be able to quantify this: the increase in use of AI to write essays should result in a weakening of this phenomenon simply due to the lower engagement in the material and reduced critical thinking as was shown recent [1] studies [2]. [1] https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
dagw 1y ago
The question is can a really good student who knows and understands the topic at hand write a better essay with the help of AI, than I student that doesn't know the material and is just relying on AI? I can easily tell code written by a novice programmer naively 'vibe coding' an app from code written by an experienced developer using AI to help him. Can a history professor tell the difference between a purely AI essay from one written by someone who knows what they're talking about, and is assisted by AI to make the essay better?
- jcranmer 1y ago
  > I can easily tell code written by a novice programmer naively 'vibe coding' an app from code written by an experienced developer using AI to help him. Can a history professor tell the difference between a purely AI essay from one written by someone who knows what they're talking about? Yes. That you consider this a question worth asking is a sign of your contempt for the craft of writing an essay. If an AI is that bad at mimicking expertise in your field, why shouldn't it be that bad at mimicking expertise in others' fields?
  - dagw 1y ago
    contempt for the craft of writing an essay I did not mean to disparage the craft of writing, by being imprecise with my own writing. My base assumption was that it should be easy, but if it is this easy, why is everybody freaking out?
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    Then whats the problem? AI users will get bad marks for their essays and non AI users will get better marks. Seems to be working as it should
eviks 1y ago
Interesting illustration of tradition meating modernity: > He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.
Molitor5901 1y ago
The future will be oral examination, and similar to American law schools, students will have to write by hand and pass oral examinations.
danjl 1y ago
What if education became research? If, in the hypothetical future, the AI can answer any question about any book or scientific theory, perhaps the educational system could focus on teaching people how to come up with good ideas to research, and how to do that research effectively? Rather than making the questions about historical information more difficult, or answering them in person or writing them in bluebooks, make the process of learning about how to create new knowledge? Educators would become people who teach you how to learn, how to design questions, and how to research those questions to produce factual answers. We've known lectures have been the worst way to teach for decades. Why maintain that failed system? If the reductionist goal of the college system is a degree that certifies you as an expert in historical knowledge, maybe we can just throw that away since the AI can handle that part now, and instead certify that people know how to ask the right questions of the AI, and how to interpret their answers to create new knowledge for humanity?
pcrh 1y ago
AI is going to increase the value of prestige education over middle-of-the-road education. Middle of the road colleges will not have the resources to ensure that students learn despite AI, whereas the Oxbridges, etc, will retain their tutorial systems and smaller class sizes, where AI is of no use whatsoever. A comparable phenomenon perhaps exists in the news publishing world. It was envisaged that easy access to information would be the death of pay-to-read news. However, the huge volumes of mediocre and politically-driven output that swamped the internet, airwaves, and printing presses instead increased the relative value of thoughtful and well-sourced new and writing, e.g. the FT, Guardian, BBC, etc., even the New Yorker...
bookofjoe 1y ago
https://archive.ph/mdM9e https://archive.ph/mdM9e
drewcoo 1y ago
LLMs can help you fake writing. What can help you actually write? [spoiler: not LLMs] The thing is that most college-educated adults don't really write to one another. Nor do they really read. We're now at the point of expecting college-level texts or Tweets or coffee orders. I know myself. I've seen the beast. No fat double latte please, with which I'll go about my day and forget this digression into my feelings (separate box from children or coffee).

49 points by adrianhon 1y ago

Archive link: https://archive.is/y705A https://archive.is/y705A

Rather than grading polished essays, instructors will use in-class writing sprints and live peer reviews to track idea development in real time

mistrial9 1y ago
yes agree - proctored writing assignments are happening now

TrackerFF 1y ago

Every undergrad study is, as of now, possible to pass with AI models. Some of them not only pass, but pass with flying colors. The harsh reality is that academia as a whole needs to be revamped. The easy solution would be to revert back to paper only exams, and physical attendance - but that would also exclude a ton students. A huge number of modern students are online students, or similar programs where you don't need to show up physically. Moreover, I don't think universities / colleges themselves want to revert back, as it would mean hiring more people, spending more on buildings, etc.

runamuck 1y ago
I hold remote interviews and I can tell when candidates use AI to answer questions, real time with camera on. They repeat my technical question, pause for a few seconds, their voice drops to a monotone and they quickly recite a bulleted list of low level technical details that sounds like a wikipedia page. I worry that candidates will learn to act more subtle, maybe configure their LLM to return with an anecdote around the tech in question, and practice "selling" their vocal communication.
- dvh 1y ago
  Students cheat when grades are more valuable than knowledge.
  - Biologist123 1y ago
    Perfect.
  - shinycode 1y ago
    Exactly, the problem is not the students but the amount of efforts the education system has to pour in to change and make it better (and take advantage of LLMs as a learning opportunity )
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    Students cheat when they think grades are more valuable than knowledge. We already have a real-world scourge of tech bros who view learning about other subjects as beneath them and who rate their ignorance as more valuable than experts in that subject. This wonderful new world of AI is only going to exacerbate that problem.
  - esafak 1y ago
    He's talking about graduates. There are people out there trying to hold down multiple remote jobs by cheating through interviews and collecting as many paychecks as possible until they get caught.
  - spacemadness 1y ago
    I would say most technical interviewers cheat as they ask questions they themselves couldn’t solve on the spot.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Grades are how we try to measure knowledge, because knowledge is abstract and hard to measure. Obviously, the measurement of X runs the risk of being optimized as opposed to X - I see this in my job all the time, and we're all professionals. Point is, it's not a problem with academia and it's not easy to solve. If we could just magically peer into people's minds and figure out what they know definitively then we'd solve a lot of world issues. Alas, we must settle for numbers and papers instead.
SecretDreams 1y ago
So you gave the easy solution. What's the hard solution? Honestly, the pervasiveness of LLMs looks to really erode the critical thinking of entire future generations. Whatever the solution, we need to be taking these existential threats a lot more seriously than how we treated social media (the plague before this current plague).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  Don't forget to ban calculators
  - rescripting 1y ago
    Calculators _are_ banned when students are learning basic arithmetic. They are only allowed once students can do it on their own, because now you have a foundational understanding and the tool just speeds you up.
  - SecretDreams 1y ago
    If we don't get AI correctly regulated, future gens will probably not be able to work a calculator. Calculator producers will then go out of business - so no need to ban 'em. Thanks for the insightful comment!
  - Tadpole9181 1y ago
    Yes, every single math class I've ever had in my life - primary or second education - banned calculators or (in engineering) required us to perform a full memory reset in front of the TA. Using a machine to do the very thing you are supposed to be demonstrating a proficiency in is cheating and harms the legitimacy of the accreditation of the school.
- futureshock 1y ago
  I think the hard solution is to massively increase expectations. Think Star Trek where the grade schoolers are learning quantum mechanics. If everyone has access to the oracle of all human knowledge, then you should teach and test to the maximum of what a student could do with all that power. Find the frontier where the AI fails and the human adds value and teach there.
boerseth 1y ago
It may get resolved on its own. These days people study to get good grades in order to prove to future gatekeepers (like employers, or higher rungs of academia) that they know the material well. Post AGI, however, the gatekeepers may not be so interested in humans anymore, and we might not need grades at all. Studying anything could become something done exclusively for ones own interest, and the only point of a grade would be to give one-self a goal to achieve. Alternatively, if we still want to cling on to this ritual of measuring the performance of students, you could give each and every one of them oral examinations with AI professors.
- EGreg 1y ago
  Boom, this. Institutions that prepare people for future jobs have an even harder time to justify what they’re doing than the people who are looking for jobs right now. It’s just inertia at this point. Not to mention that AI can educate the people better by solving Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem. So colleges are obsolete except as four year cruises for entertainment and networking.
- esafak 1y ago
  We are not post AGI. We still need to hire people who did not cheat their way through school and interviews with chatGPT. Even post AGI, we would want to hire qualified people.
- spacemadness 1y ago
  Ah yes, the AGI that will happen any day now but we can’t even define. Please buy the stock.
juujian 1y ago
Don't even need to go that far. Provide a locked-down computer and have students write essays in a dedicated space. I have personally done that and it was a reasonably good experience.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- m0llusk 1y ago
  Which raises the issue of what education is for. Is it to know things and solve specific problems in a controlled environment, or is it to work with available tools and resources across a range dynamically changing contexts? Does being at a locked down computer in a dedicated space match likely work settings?
  - stvltvs 1y ago
    This assumes that education's sole goal is to prepare students for work. What would be the impact on democratic systems if voters always turn to an LLM for answers because schools didn't require them to think on their own?
    - m0llusk 1y ago
      This is simply raising one specific case of something education is expected to train for. There is already ample evidence that critical thinking skills are essential for political function and social stability.
  - zerkten 1y ago
    You can be sensitive to both, and good institutions have a duty to check instructors who go strongly in a single direction. I think the point is only to exclude the crutch in contexts where it affects learning. Being prepared for work is only one element of education. Its weight varies by course, institution, and many other factors. Further, there are likely situations where the participants avail of AI to different extents based on how they feel about the situation (cf. different degrees of doping in athletics), and students will sometimes be limited by their means in use of AI tools.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
There’s a huge volume of revenue coming from remote students.
slightwinder 1y ago
> The easy solution would be to revert back to paper only exams, and physical attendance - but that would also exclude a ton students. Which students? If it's just about travel-distance, maybe schools could organize themselves to offer local test-centers where students could attend exams under observation. Reusing existing facilities in this way is pretty common in my countries education-system since decades.
rich_sasha 1y ago
Exams were never the pinnacle of what a grad can do. They were an efficient test, under severe time constraints, that correlates well with overall ability in humans. That AI can pass these tests doesn't mean it is as smart and capable as a grad. I mean, it might be, or if not today then in a few years, but not because it can pass exams, having digested past exams and sample solutions into its bellows.
msgodel 1y ago
Most of the important ones I took had: 1) Written in person exams that were most of the grade (this includes "blue book" exams where you have to sit in front of the professor and write an essay on whatever topic he writes on the board that morning as well as your typical math/algorithms tests on paper.) 2) Written homework where you have to essentially have a satisfactory discussion on the topic (no word range, you get graded on creative interpretation of the course subject matter.) Language models could maybe help you with 2 but will actually kill your ability to handle 1 if you're cheating on homework with them. If anything language models will mean the end of those retarded make-work cookie cutter graded homework assignments that got in the way of actually studying and learning.
Balgair 1y ago
The cheap version of learning is dead, and AI killed it. Not that we were learning all that much to begin with. I mean, walk into any sorority and ask to see the test bank. The students and Profs were phoning it in for a while, by and large. Not all of them were though, and good on yah. But now that the fig leaf is torn away, we're left with the Oxbridge model and not much else - small classes, under 10, likely under 5, with a grad level tutor, social pressure making sure you've done the work. The great thing about this though is that you'll have an AI listening in all the time and helping out, streamlining the busywork and allowing the group to get down to business. But that version is very expensive. You're looking at ~$50k / student year [0] at a baseline Oxbridge model in secondary school on up - ~$400k / student from 9th to university graduation. Assume a 6% loan rate for 30 years (a mortgage, essentially), and you've got ~$2,300 monthly payments for all your working life, ~$46k/year down the drain. How in the hell are you going to manage student loans like that and then try to live a life without a really good job? How the hell is a nation going to be expected to pay for that per kid if you make school free for them? Cheap learning wasn't good, but it sufficed. The new models of education must answer to the fundamental question of education: How much does it cost? [0] 2 hours 3x a week per class; 4 classes per tutor per week. Assume $100k/tutor and 5 students/tutor. So $5k / student / tutor. 4 classes / student. So $20k / student in just raw tutors. At least double that for overhead if not triple.
wakawaka28 1y ago
You're greatly exaggerating the problem. Literally any requirement can exclude students. Establishment of a trusted proctor network for administering exams is how you solve this problem. If you're an online student, you'll have to show up a few days per year to prove your knowledge in person. I believe this is how many remote study programs already work, because AI is just the latest way to cheat. You could always pay people to do your work for you before AI, and the solution is the same.
beAbU 1y ago
A renowned South African university, UNISA, has done remote learning for decades. Students had to mail in their work every month, and they would set up exam centres all over the country where students can take their tests. This is not an unsolvable problem if handwritten work becomes a requirement.

atonse 1y ago

Even though I majored in CompSci, I still remember my college essay class and learning about primary and secondary sources and their relative quality, how to craft an argument, and how to articulate your argument to be persuasive. Outside of just writing, those skills have been useful in other scenarios too (like when subconsciously evaluating someone else's argument) Of course, I still treated it like a lazy college student: I did it in 2.1 or 2.2 line spacing to hit the page requirements, and flipped my thesis because it was easier to research (I started out arguing against the US invading Iraq, but found it way easier to find sources that supported an invasion... well, we all know how reliable those sources were).

elmean 1y ago
"but found it way easier to find sources that supported an invasion..." Hahahaha, US Army Psy Ops approves this message

tlhunter 1y ago

An obvious solution is to require the use of Google docs and include the history as part of the assignment. If there is no sign of sentence restructuring then fail the assignment. This is the equivalent of asking students to show their work when they do math problems and that is how we thwarted those evil calculators.

whiplash451 1y ago
This is likely easily gamed by asking the LLM to provide a number of intermediate versions of the output. You still have to do some yak shaving in google docs, but nothing too hard.
- tlhunter 1y ago
  That's true. Ultimately I suppose it's a relatively short game of cat and mouse... Twenty year old calculators can show the work after all.
tempodox 1y ago
What, forcing everyone to become a Google user, just so they can study?
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  Vendor lock-in is pretty common in courses at all levels.
  - dontTREATonme 1y ago
    Google docs probably isn’t even the best tool for the job, blackboard or one of the other edu mafia platforms will build some sort of halfway decent app that will check for typing vs just copy pasting as well as other indicators.
- calebh 1y ago
  I wrote a blog [1] a couple years ago about this solution - it turns out it is possible to use timestamp authority servers in combination with hashing functions to create a verified edit history. Like the other comment said, it merely starts an arms race where the AI side is likely to win, which is why I haven't pursued this further. For something like digital art creation verifying the edit history is much more fruitful since the diffusion process is nothing like how humans create art. [1] https://helbl.ing/Written-Proof-of-Work/ https://helbl.ing/Written-Proof-of-Work/

ilaksh 1y ago

AI isn't destroying anything. Don't blame the technology for what humans do with it. AI should allow every student to have personalized instruction and tutoring. It should be a massive win. If everyone instead of taking advantage of that refuses to do any work and decided to lie and pass the AIs output off as their own, that is not something the AI did. The students did that.

ImHereToVote 1y ago
Blame is for small children and God. Moloch will require his sacrifice regardless of whom you choose to blame.
tempodox 1y ago
> AI should allow every student to have personalized instruction and tutoring. I admire your optimism. Funny how everyone has their own dream of the miracles that “AI” should perform. It's just the perfect silver screen for everyone to project their wishes on.
- marcellus23 1y ago
  In the same vein, AI is a boogeyman that people can pin all their fears for the future on.
  - tempodox 1y ago
    Naturally, “perfect silver screen” works for any purpose.
javier123454321 1y ago
We turned higher ed into a qualification producing factory subsidized by the government at the expense of the kid's financial future. We overemphasized passing over learning, as the education is about the title, not the knowledge. It's not the student's fault that we created this incentive structure. The students that want to learn can still learn, those that come to higher education with a transactional mindset now can just pay for their degree. The truth is we are at the point where the logic of the commodification of our higher education system is being taken to its logical conclusion which is its own undoing.

Double_a_92 1y ago

In all of my school years, essays were THE WORST kind of exam there was. The grading was highly arbitrary anyway... Good that AI is killing that.

javier123454321 1y ago
Essays might not be a great tool for providing consistent grading, but as a tool for learning to think through an idea, learning to structure arguments coherently, to research your point and find counter factual, it is unmatched. Education __should__ optimize for learning, not grading.

Biologist123 1y ago

A college-friend from the Unviersity of Oxford, where students write one or two essays a week, got the top first (best mark) in his history degree. Initially impressed, one day I asked him his exam method - where each student must produce 3 essays in 3 hours (or did then) across about 5 or 6 papers. My friend’s approach was to thoroughly research 12 essay questions and pre-write 16 page essays for each paper, which he would then learn verbatim and trot out word-for-word the best fit to each exam question. This compared to my method of reading widely, learning quotes and ideas and then writing each essay fresh in the exam hall - and I would typically manage about 3-4 pages per essay. (Reader, I did not get a top first). I relate this anecdote as I don’t really see my friend’s method as being much better than using AI. Although I do acknowledge his 16 page essays must have been reasonably good.

eviks 1y ago
> friend’s method as being much better than using AI Why not? He wrote all the essays himself, after all, and in a setting that's much more relevant to real life vs. the artificial constraints of a shorter exam. With AI he would've written/learned nothing himself.
- Biologist123 1y ago
  It’s a fair point, but as a thought experiment, how would you feel about AI writing the essays and simply regurgitating those? Legal but not in the spirit of things I think.
  - scarecrowbob 1y ago
    Yes, a different situation would have a different response. The point is that your friend did all this effort to write those essays, which (supposedly, and I believe it) actually caused them to "learn" the material. We are often changed in the process of doing thing, weather working out or thinking through concepts. Your claim here is about like claiming you get the same workout regardless of if you drive a mile or ran a mile because you have changed positions using either method.
  - 1y ago

compacct27 1y ago

The leverage has been flipped. We all had awful college classes teaching next to nothing, and now that you can get good grades without attending, what's left? "We lost critical thinking!" No, we were barely getting that in the first place. Now, classes need to be more valuable.

javier123454321 1y ago
This is exactly it. Are we surprised that civil engineering students forced to take a humanities class satisfied by psych 101 and having to pay thousands of dollars for the 3 credit hours are cheating on their term paper?
- ModernMech 1y ago
  It's not surprising, as there are plenty of technical-minded people who believe they should never have to study anything related to "soft sciences", and will do anything to get out of it. But I don't think that people doing so with AI justifies the idea that civil engineering students should not be taught any humanities.
  - javier123454321 1y ago
    I am not against learning humanities. But I am against forcing students to participate in 101 level courses that are packed with over 100 students, listening to an uninspired lecturer talk at a crowd of disinterested faces on their phone and being FORCED to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on it. Education =/= academia anymore (in the US) and that fault falls squarely on the academia industry.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      > academia industry Well there's the problem right there. Academia shouldn't be an "industry", it should be a public good. "101 level courses that are packed with over 100 students, listening to an uninspired lecturer talk at a crowd of disinterested faces on their phone and being FORCED to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on it." is an artefact of forcing a public good shaped peg into a capitalism shaped hole. When academia is an industry, students and professors get treated like commodities that have to demonstrate an ROI to be allowed to exist. Humanities don't have a good ROI in our society, therefore they are not funded, therefore positions in humanities are scarce. The end result is overworked lecturers and large class sizes. The alternative is to cut humanities altogether, which honestly is happening; we're headed to a situation where humanities programs in some areas will just cease to exist, and they'll concentrate in places that actually care about education. It's sad but that's where we are.

nickk81 1y ago

Hopefully AI articles and papers can skip things like: Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.”

politician 1y ago

Universities have been criticized for ideological indoctrination. We might be able to quantify this: the increase in use of AI to write essays should result in a weakening of this phenomenon simply due to the lower engagement in the material and reduced critical thinking as was shown recent [1] studies [2]. [1] https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

dagw 1y ago

The question is can a really good student who knows and understands the topic at hand write a better essay with the help of AI, than I student that doesn't know the material and is just relying on AI? I can easily tell code written by a novice programmer naively 'vibe coding' an app from code written by an experienced developer using AI to help him. Can a history professor tell the difference between a purely AI essay from one written by someone who knows what they're talking about, and is assisted by AI to make the essay better?

jcranmer 1y ago
> I can easily tell code written by a novice programmer naively 'vibe coding' an app from code written by an experienced developer using AI to help him. Can a history professor tell the difference between a purely AI essay from one written by someone who knows what they're talking about? Yes. That you consider this a question worth asking is a sign of your contempt for the craft of writing an essay. If an AI is that bad at mimicking expertise in your field, why shouldn't it be that bad at mimicking expertise in others' fields?
- dagw 1y ago
  contempt for the craft of writing an essay I did not mean to disparage the craft of writing, by being imprecise with my own writing. My base assumption was that it should be easy, but if it is this easy, why is everybody freaking out?
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  Then whats the problem? AI users will get bad marks for their essays and non AI users will get better marks. Seems to be working as it should

eviks 1y ago

Interesting illustration of tradition meating modernity: > He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.

Molitor5901 1y ago

The future will be oral examination, and similar to American law schools, students will have to write by hand and pass oral examinations.

danjl 1y ago

What if education became research? If, in the hypothetical future, the AI can answer any question about any book or scientific theory, perhaps the educational system could focus on teaching people how to come up with good ideas to research, and how to do that research effectively? Rather than making the questions about historical information more difficult, or answering them in person or writing them in bluebooks, make the process of learning about how to create new knowledge? Educators would become people who teach you how to learn, how to design questions, and how to research those questions to produce factual answers. We've known lectures have been the worst way to teach for decades. Why maintain that failed system? If the reductionist goal of the college system is a degree that certifies you as an expert in historical knowledge, maybe we can just throw that away since the AI can handle that part now, and instead certify that people know how to ask the right questions of the AI, and how to interpret their answers to create new knowledge for humanity?

pcrh 1y ago

AI is going to increase the value of prestige education over middle-of-the-road education. Middle of the road colleges will not have the resources to ensure that students learn despite AI, whereas the Oxbridges, etc, will retain their tutorial systems and smaller class sizes, where AI is of no use whatsoever. A comparable phenomenon perhaps exists in the news publishing world. It was envisaged that easy access to information would be the death of pay-to-read news. However, the huge volumes of mediocre and politically-driven output that swamped the internet, airwaves, and printing presses instead increased the relative value of thoughtful and well-sourced new and writing, e.g. the FT, Guardian, BBC, etc., even the New Yorker...

bookofjoe 1y ago

https://archive.ph/mdM9e https://archive.ph/mdM9e

drewcoo 1y ago

LLMs can help you fake writing. What can help you actually write? [spoiler: not LLMs] The thing is that most college-educated adults don't really write to one another. Nor do they really read. We're now at the point of expecting college-level texts or Tweets or coffee orders. I know myself. I've seen the beast. No fat double latte please, with which I'll go about my day and forget this digression into my feelings (separate box from children or coffee).