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> The common thinking is that everyone is using ChatGPT, therefore you’ll be left behind if you don’t cheat. So true. I am aware of classes where everyone w

> The common thinking is that everyone is using ChatGPT, therefore you’ll be left behind if you don’t cheat. So true. I am aware of classes where everyone who didn't use AI cheated. The simple reality is that if AI makes better answers than a student, and exam scores are normalized, then students who don't use it will fail as soon as a decent proportion of students do use it.

dns_snek 10mo ago
> and exam scores are normalized This never should've been done to begin with. Education isn't supposed to be a competition.
- corndoge 10mo ago
  I think the intent is to calibrate for instruction quality
  - cherryteastain 10mo ago
    When I was grading labs as a TA, the intent was communicated to me rather as "per university teaching guidelines we mustn't have too many students get the top grade but we also mustn't have too many students fail"
    - throw-the-towel 10mo ago
      Reminds me of "stack ranking" in performance reviews.
      - kelseyfrog 10mo ago
        The purpose of normalized grades is to habituate future workers to this so that by the time they find it in the real world they don't resist. It's part of reproducing the labor-captial relationship.
        gus_massa 10mo ago
        It also helps to avoid populist teachers that give everyone a A+++ to avoid students complains, and also idiots that give everyone a C because only God is A and only the teacher is B. (We don't use that method here, we use other method to try to avoid both problems.)
        DiggyJohnson 10mo ago
        Where is the incentive for test makers in academia to accommodate this outcome? It sounds nice but I don’t think jaded professors or overworked, inexperienced, and stressed TAs have a reason to do this. It sounds nice but it doesn’t actually seem connected.
- observationist 10mo ago
  If the purpose of a system is what it does, what is the purpose of this education system that seems to uniformly and spectacularly fail to educate children? It's not supposed to be a competition, but there should be incentives and oversight and controls and all the features you'd want to be able to reward outliers and foster excellence and all the good things while minimizing the bad. What we have is tragic and absurd.
  - huhkerrf 10mo ago
    https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
CamperBob2 10mo ago
An even-simpler reality is that, to the extent AI helps you cheat on your professional exams, you're about to enter a dead-end profession that will no longer exist a few years from now.
- patrickdavey 10mo ago
  Interesting thought. I feel currently AI is most useful to those who have a decent understanding of the subject material and can critique any output. To wholesale trust the output of AI and remove any human in the loop, well, it needs to be really correct all the time. Exams are a different beast and really a subset of a range of common problems. Still, I'm very curious what happens when people who have just cheated their way through college, or these kinds of professional exams, meet the real world? Will they all get fired a few months down the track?
  - jimnotgym 10mo ago
    I lot of people who took those exams on paper are no good at actual finance jobs. It is more about gatekeeping than anything else
  - CamperBob2 10mo ago
    Still, I'm very curious what happens when people who have just cheated their way through college, or these kinds of professional exams, meet the real world? Will they all get fired a few months down the track? They will continue to use AI to do their jobs. Eventually, the people who pay their salaries will ask themselves why they continue to pay them. To wholesale trust the output of AI and remove any human in the loop, well, it needs to be really correct all the time. It's not now, but it will be. Accounting is what you might call an exact science, one where creativity isn't rewarded and where hallucinations by one model can be detected and corrected by others. There is no need for humans to do this type of work.
    - Qem 10mo ago
      > Accounting is what you might call an exact science, one where creativity isn't rewarded Not sure of this. Corporations pull a lot of creative accounting all the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_accounting

dns_snek 10mo ago

> and exam scores are normalized This never should've been done to begin with. Education isn't supposed to be a competition.

corndoge 10mo ago
I think the intent is to calibrate for instruction quality
- cherryteastain 10mo ago
  When I was grading labs as a TA, the intent was communicated to me rather as "per university teaching guidelines we mustn't have too many students get the top grade but we also mustn't have too many students fail"
  - throw-the-towel 10mo ago
    Reminds me of "stack ranking" in performance reviews.
    - kelseyfrog 10mo ago
      The purpose of normalized grades is to habituate future workers to this so that by the time they find it in the real world they don't resist. It's part of reproducing the labor-captial relationship.
      - gus_massa 10mo ago
        It also helps to avoid populist teachers that give everyone a A+++ to avoid students complains, and also idiots that give everyone a C because only God is A and only the teacher is B. (We don't use that method here, we use other method to try to avoid both problems.)
      - DiggyJohnson 10mo ago
        Where is the incentive for test makers in academia to accommodate this outcome? It sounds nice but I don’t think jaded professors or overworked, inexperienced, and stressed TAs have a reason to do this. It sounds nice but it doesn’t actually seem connected.
observationist 10mo ago
If the purpose of a system is what it does, what is the purpose of this education system that seems to uniformly and spectacularly fail to educate children? It's not supposed to be a competition, but there should be incentives and oversight and controls and all the features you'd want to be able to reward outliers and foster excellence and all the good things while minimizing the bad. What we have is tragic and absurd.
- huhkerrf 10mo ago
  https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

CamperBob2 10mo ago

An even-simpler reality is that, to the extent AI helps you cheat on your professional exams, you're about to enter a dead-end profession that will no longer exist a few years from now.

patrickdavey 10mo ago
Interesting thought. I feel currently AI is most useful to those who have a decent understanding of the subject material and can critique any output. To wholesale trust the output of AI and remove any human in the loop, well, it needs to be really correct all the time. Exams are a different beast and really a subset of a range of common problems. Still, I'm very curious what happens when people who have just cheated their way through college, or these kinds of professional exams, meet the real world? Will they all get fired a few months down the track?
- jimnotgym 10mo ago
  I lot of people who took those exams on paper are no good at actual finance jobs. It is more about gatekeeping than anything else
- CamperBob2 10mo ago
  Still, I'm very curious what happens when people who have just cheated their way through college, or these kinds of professional exams, meet the real world? Will they all get fired a few months down the track? They will continue to use AI to do their jobs. Eventually, the people who pay their salaries will ask themselves why they continue to pay them. To wholesale trust the output of AI and remove any human in the loop, well, it needs to be really correct all the time. It's not now, but it will be. Accounting is what you might call an exact science, one where creativity isn't rewarded and where hallucinations by one model can be detected and corrected by others. There is no need for humans to do this type of work.
  - Qem 10mo ago
    > Accounting is what you might call an exact science, one where creativity isn't rewarded Not sure of this. Corporations pull a lot of creative accounting all the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_accounting