7 ms·

Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

136 points by furcyd 3mo ago

cm2012 3mo ago
At-home testing is dead.
- drdaeman 3mo ago
  Just wait a few decades until brain-machine interfaces will become a mass-market thing.
  - noosphr 3mo ago
    Can't wait for the EU brain control bill. We support our citizens right to free will so long as they don't think anything bad.
    - drdaeman 3mo ago
      You jest, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a thing somewhere, it’ll take its toll, and eventually fail from its own flaws. Then, chances are, there will be some lessons learnt - although, most likely, not on the first try. But that’s just a futuristic speculation. My point was, however, that in modern age, where we’re literally on the verge of redefining humanity, we might be forced to redefine “cheating” as well. It’s all surely starting to slowly crack at the seams for the last half a century, and the pace is only increasing. When I was a kid, electronic calculators were banned (but not the slide rule, heh), nowadays, I’ve heard, even programmable ones are becoming accepted.
- Cider9986 3mo ago
  That would be good. https://www.baneproctoring.com/ https://www.baneproctoring.com/
  - martythemaniak 3mo ago
    I clicked expecting Bane Proctoring, where Bane monitors your exam and if he catches you cheating...
    - jimmygrapes 3mo ago
      it would be extremely painful ... I'm sorry I couldn't help it
      - sorum 3mo ago
        …for you (sorry, old Internet forum reflexes activated)
- raddan 3mo ago
  It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back then—they were—but they also had the odd side-effect that, if it was a class you cared about, the test itself could be a learning experience. For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote. The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol, i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases. I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact. I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
  - b112 3mo ago
    But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking. I'm not sure you should think it is shrinking. There are a lot of people in this world that hate to learn, and literally are incredibly apathetic about any topic. To such, learning anything is work, never a joy. Before AI they had to learn to succeed. Now they see a shortcut. You said half showed they were learning, that's not so bad. I think you should be glad it's that high. I am.
- protocolture 3mo ago
  Have you never had a home proctored test before? You cant even sneak paper on to your desk, where do you plan to hide the LLM?
  - drdaeman 3mo ago
    Have you heard the story of Hans Niemann? ;-) (True or not, a story is a story.)
  - cosmic_cheese 3mo ago
    Yeah, I’m enrolled in an online degree program and use of AI in exams would be quite difficult. The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify you. Only one screen is allowed and smartphones and smart watches are banned. A proctor is watching you and you’re being recorded the whole time. I have no idea how one could slip something like AI use past all this.
    - protocolture 3mo ago
      Thats my experience + they are listening the whole time. A loud noise from another room disqualified a coworker of mine.
      - piloto_ciego 3mo ago
        Hell, I got flagged for possible cheating in an online proctored test because I had a whiteboard behind me that had unrelated equations on it or some nonsense. I didn't even look at them lol. The instructor reviewed the footage, laughed, and said, "wow, what a pain in the butt to deal with" and cancelled the alert or whatever. Almost all the classes I've taken online have been way harder for potential cheating than in person classes. I'll say this too, I took a course called something like "applied mathematical methods" online a long time ago. That class's final basically said, "use whatever resources you want except for other people" - ChatGPT would have probably made short work of the exam, but at the time, even with the power of the internet about 10 years ago, there's no way I could have used it to help me. I doubt even teaming up would have helped that much to be honest lol. I had 24 hours to do the test and it was pretty hard to get done in that time. I think it took me something like 5 or 6 hours to do it? Making your tests muderously difficult is one way to handle the temptation to cheat in online courses. I don't know that that's the best solution from a pedagogy standpoint, but hey, I'm not a prof.
- therealdrag0 3mo ago
  How is this even a debate? Before Covid most tests were in person right? Sure some classes had final projects that were take home, but in person tests were very norma. So what’s all the hand wringing about? Just do in person tests and move on?
lapcat 3mo ago
> Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. I stopped reading after the first sentence.
- lifthrasiir 3mo ago
  Hey, a typical person should be intelligent because we human have used ourselves as a de-facto definition of intelligence anyway. That sentence probably means something like "no intellectually disabled person here". Even though we don't normally feel so because higher educations seem "typical" to us.
  - drdaeman 3mo ago
    I think the article used a different colloquial meaning of “intelligent”, more akin to “intellectual” (the noun), as in “well educated”. Either way, an odd statement shouldn’t normally instantly invalidate the whole article.
- otikik 3mo ago
  “Rich”
  - jimt1234 3mo ago
    I didn't attend an Ivy League, but I think I went to a good school. I was very nervous before I left for school - a little intimidated, so I talked to an academic mentor. He told me something I'll never forget: "You're gonna be around a lot of really smart kids. No doubt about it. But, mostly, what you're gonna find is you're surrounded by a lot of rich kids." He was 100% correct. Lots of smart kids, and lots of kids from well-to-do families. I think I met, maybe, 2 other kids that were as broke as my family.
    - raddan 3mo ago
      The first time I attended a selective school was graduate school. Like you, I was extremely nervous. “They’re all going to be smarter than me. I’m going to feel like an idiot.” And it turned out to be true. Many of the students I went to school with had far better preparation than I did. And not only did I feel like an idiot, another person called me an idiot in front of everyone. Suspicion confirmed. The thing is, once I accepted that, yes, maybe my preparation was worse, and that it was possible that I was admitted by mistake, I found a way forward. After all, if literally everyone is smarter than you, then in a way, you’re the luckiest person there: you’re surrounded by smart people, and almost any conversation you have with your peers will benefit YOU more than it benefits THEM. Over time, I realized that the thing that mattered most was “time on task.” Unlike my peers, who had better instruction, because they went to better schools, had private tutors, etc. I had to work for everything. And I started graduate school late: I turned 30 the year I enrolled. So I was not distracted by social events, finding a romantic partner, or deep questions like “what do I want to do with my life?” I was all-in. I may have started a bit behind, but I finished well ahead of most of my peers. I think it’s easy for students from my kind of background to wither under the pressure of an elite environment. As a faculty member, I’ve seen it happen many times, sadly. But there IS a way through it, and largely, the way forward is to value oneself, to develop one’s internal compass for good work, and to not let the social pressures overwhelm. I don’t mean to make this sound easy, but it IS possible.
avaer 3mo ago
Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability. This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little. Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not. But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1] https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-students-disabled/ https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...
- croes 3mo ago
  > measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability. It still does if the test is in person
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- nkrisc 3mo ago
  You don’t even need to go that far. If they just expelled cheaters instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and ignore it that would go a long way.
  - cliglot 3mo ago
    > If they just expelled cheaters instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and ignore it that would go a long way. You can’t treat paying customers like that. They’ll just go somewhere that will let them cheat!
- tayo42 3mo ago
  >so that there is dignity in the degree again. How far back do you need to go to get to a time when degrees mattered?
- roshin 3mo ago
  Ideas like cheating on a college test should be jailable is why the US leads in number of jailed people
readthenotes1 3mo ago
' “56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,” ' and the rest are lying. (With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)
overgard 3mo ago
This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out. And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.
- piloto_ciego 3mo ago
  The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc. I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something. Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees. Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots. You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again. If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing. How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.
  - piloto_ciego 3mo ago
    replying to my own thread here, but this got me thinking, so thanks OP, but... can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great grades in school. I don't know, I just feel like school was rarely about actually learning / growing and was mostly about vocational work most of my time in undergrad, and I wish we could de-couple that some? But maybe I'm naive here...
wrs 3mo ago
What's even worse than so many students cheating with AI is that I suspect a substantial portion of them don't even think that's "cheating".
dang 3mo ago
Recent and related: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 - June 2026 (728 comments)
iepathos 3mo ago
The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way? Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online. It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.
- mattas 3mo ago
  Why bother learning anything when you can just use AI?
  - MarsIronPI 3mo ago
    So you can call out the AI's mistakes. Everyone seems to be saying that AI is really good, except at their particular field. Make of that what you will.
    - asdfasvea 3mo ago
      But here's the thing, AI will be the source of truth soon. For many it already is. The dumber we (humanity in general) get, the smarter AI appears to the average person. You'll be a heretic or just deemed crazy if you call BS on something AI says in 50 years--regardless.
moi2388 3mo ago
Me: How could he not have seen this coming? Oh.. he’s blind.
OutOfHere 3mo ago
It's laughable to be surprised by cheating on take-home exams. Does the professor have a comparative assessment before AI? Do you think the cheating didn't happen on them before AI? It always happened. It's structural, in the same ways that speeding on the highway is structural, and evading taxes on cash income is structural. And the structural fix is in-class exams.
tmsh 3mo ago
Disallowing the use of AI is basically the modern equivalent of testing based on memorization. It is a laziness to find something more useful to evaluate on or an inability to distinguish real understanding in a field from first level understanding. Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs. If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.
- xboxnolifes 3mo ago
  If your score falls 50% from not using AI, that's not testing memorization. That's testing learning anything on the topic being tested. The quantity of information on college exams is not that much to memorize. At least, personally, failing to remember something was rarely a reason why I failed to answer a question. Almost always it was because I did not fully understand the topic, so I tried to fall back on remembering if I answered the same question before.
- franktankbank 3mo ago
  LLMs don't know anything.
- drtz 3mo ago
  The article clearly lays out that the take-home test was not a test of memorization, but a test of students' understanding of the class material and ability to reason about how different assumptions affect its conclusions.
sometimelurker 3mo ago
I like the quote at the end "we cannot choose to become idiots"

136 points by furcyd 3mo ago

cm2012 3mo ago

At-home testing is dead.

drdaeman 3mo ago
Just wait a few decades until brain-machine interfaces will become a mass-market thing.
- noosphr 3mo ago
  Can't wait for the EU brain control bill. We support our citizens right to free will so long as they don't think anything bad.
  - drdaeman 3mo ago
    You jest, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a thing somewhere, it’ll take its toll, and eventually fail from its own flaws. Then, chances are, there will be some lessons learnt - although, most likely, not on the first try. But that’s just a futuristic speculation. My point was, however, that in modern age, where we’re literally on the verge of redefining humanity, we might be forced to redefine “cheating” as well. It’s all surely starting to slowly crack at the seams for the last half a century, and the pace is only increasing. When I was a kid, electronic calculators were banned (but not the slide rule, heh), nowadays, I’ve heard, even programmable ones are becoming accepted.
Cider9986 3mo ago
That would be good. https://www.baneproctoring.com/ https://www.baneproctoring.com/
- martythemaniak 3mo ago
  I clicked expecting Bane Proctoring, where Bane monitors your exam and if he catches you cheating...
  - jimmygrapes 3mo ago
    it would be extremely painful ... I'm sorry I couldn't help it
    - sorum 3mo ago
      …for you (sorry, old Internet forum reflexes activated)
raddan 3mo ago
It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back then—they were—but they also had the odd side-effect that, if it was a class you cared about, the test itself could be a learning experience. For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote. The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol, i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases. I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact. I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
- b112 3mo ago
  But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking. I'm not sure you should think it is shrinking. There are a lot of people in this world that hate to learn, and literally are incredibly apathetic about any topic. To such, learning anything is work, never a joy. Before AI they had to learn to succeed. Now they see a shortcut. You said half showed they were learning, that's not so bad. I think you should be glad it's that high. I am.
protocolture 3mo ago
Have you never had a home proctored test before? You cant even sneak paper on to your desk, where do you plan to hide the LLM?
- drdaeman 3mo ago
  Have you heard the story of Hans Niemann? ;-) (True or not, a story is a story.)
- cosmic_cheese 3mo ago
  Yeah, I’m enrolled in an online degree program and use of AI in exams would be quite difficult. The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify you. Only one screen is allowed and smartphones and smart watches are banned. A proctor is watching you and you’re being recorded the whole time. I have no idea how one could slip something like AI use past all this.
  - protocolture 3mo ago
    Thats my experience + they are listening the whole time. A loud noise from another room disqualified a coworker of mine.
    - piloto_ciego 3mo ago
      Hell, I got flagged for possible cheating in an online proctored test because I had a whiteboard behind me that had unrelated equations on it or some nonsense. I didn't even look at them lol. The instructor reviewed the footage, laughed, and said, "wow, what a pain in the butt to deal with" and cancelled the alert or whatever. Almost all the classes I've taken online have been way harder for potential cheating than in person classes. I'll say this too, I took a course called something like "applied mathematical methods" online a long time ago. That class's final basically said, "use whatever resources you want except for other people" - ChatGPT would have probably made short work of the exam, but at the time, even with the power of the internet about 10 years ago, there's no way I could have used it to help me. I doubt even teaming up would have helped that much to be honest lol. I had 24 hours to do the test and it was pretty hard to get done in that time. I think it took me something like 5 or 6 hours to do it? Making your tests muderously difficult is one way to handle the temptation to cheat in online courses. I don't know that that's the best solution from a pedagogy standpoint, but hey, I'm not a prof.
therealdrag0 3mo ago
How is this even a debate? Before Covid most tests were in person right? Sure some classes had final projects that were take home, but in person tests were very norma. So what’s all the hand wringing about? Just do in person tests and move on?

lapcat 3mo ago

> Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. I stopped reading after the first sentence.

lifthrasiir 3mo ago
Hey, a typical person should be intelligent because we human have used ourselves as a de-facto definition of intelligence anyway. That sentence probably means something like "no intellectually disabled person here". Even though we don't normally feel so because higher educations seem "typical" to us.
- drdaeman 3mo ago
  I think the article used a different colloquial meaning of “intelligent”, more akin to “intellectual” (the noun), as in “well educated”. Either way, an odd statement shouldn’t normally instantly invalidate the whole article.
otikik 3mo ago
“Rich”
- jimt1234 3mo ago
  I didn't attend an Ivy League, but I think I went to a good school. I was very nervous before I left for school - a little intimidated, so I talked to an academic mentor. He told me something I'll never forget: "You're gonna be around a lot of really smart kids. No doubt about it. But, mostly, what you're gonna find is you're surrounded by a lot of rich kids." He was 100% correct. Lots of smart kids, and lots of kids from well-to-do families. I think I met, maybe, 2 other kids that were as broke as my family.
  - raddan 3mo ago
    The first time I attended a selective school was graduate school. Like you, I was extremely nervous. “They’re all going to be smarter than me. I’m going to feel like an idiot.” And it turned out to be true. Many of the students I went to school with had far better preparation than I did. And not only did I feel like an idiot, another person called me an idiot in front of everyone. Suspicion confirmed. The thing is, once I accepted that, yes, maybe my preparation was worse, and that it was possible that I was admitted by mistake, I found a way forward. After all, if literally everyone is smarter than you, then in a way, you’re the luckiest person there: you’re surrounded by smart people, and almost any conversation you have with your peers will benefit YOU more than it benefits THEM. Over time, I realized that the thing that mattered most was “time on task.” Unlike my peers, who had better instruction, because they went to better schools, had private tutors, etc. I had to work for everything. And I started graduate school late: I turned 30 the year I enrolled. So I was not distracted by social events, finding a romantic partner, or deep questions like “what do I want to do with my life?” I was all-in. I may have started a bit behind, but I finished well ahead of most of my peers. I think it’s easy for students from my kind of background to wither under the pressure of an elite environment. As a faculty member, I’ve seen it happen many times, sadly. But there IS a way through it, and largely, the way forward is to value oneself, to develop one’s internal compass for good work, and to not let the social pressures overwhelm. I don’t mean to make this sound easy, but it IS possible.

avaer 3mo ago

Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability. This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little. Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not. But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1] https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-students-disabled/ https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...

croes 3mo ago
> measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability. It still does if the test is in person
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
nkrisc 3mo ago
You don’t even need to go that far. If they just expelled cheaters instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and ignore it that would go a long way.
- cliglot 3mo ago
  > If they just expelled cheaters instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and ignore it that would go a long way. You can’t treat paying customers like that. They’ll just go somewhere that will let them cheat!
tayo42 3mo ago
>so that there is dignity in the degree again. How far back do you need to go to get to a time when degrees mattered?
roshin 3mo ago
Ideas like cheating on a college test should be jailable is why the US leads in number of jailed people

readthenotes1 3mo ago

' “56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,” ' and the rest are lying. (With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)

overgard 3mo ago

This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out. And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.

piloto_ciego 3mo ago
The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc. I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something. Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees. Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots. You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again. If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing. How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.
- piloto_ciego 3mo ago
  replying to my own thread here, but this got me thinking, so thanks OP, but... can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great grades in school. I don't know, I just feel like school was rarely about actually learning / growing and was mostly about vocational work most of my time in undergrad, and I wish we could de-couple that some? But maybe I'm naive here...

wrs 3mo ago

What's even worse than so many students cheating with AI is that I suspect a substantial portion of them don't even think that's "cheating".

dang 3mo ago

Recent and related: Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 - June 2026 (728 comments)

iepathos 3mo ago

The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way? Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online. It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.

mattas 3mo ago
Why bother learning anything when you can just use AI?
- MarsIronPI 3mo ago
  So you can call out the AI's mistakes. Everyone seems to be saying that AI is really good, except at their particular field. Make of that what you will.
  - asdfasvea 3mo ago
    But here's the thing, AI will be the source of truth soon. For many it already is. The dumber we (humanity in general) get, the smarter AI appears to the average person. You'll be a heretic or just deemed crazy if you call BS on something AI says in 50 years--regardless.

moi2388 3mo ago

Me: How could he not have seen this coming? Oh.. he’s blind.

OutOfHere 3mo ago

It's laughable to be surprised by cheating on take-home exams. Does the professor have a comparative assessment before AI? Do you think the cheating didn't happen on them before AI? It always happened. It's structural, in the same ways that speeding on the highway is structural, and evading taxes on cash income is structural. And the structural fix is in-class exams.

tmsh 3mo ago

Disallowing the use of AI is basically the modern equivalent of testing based on memorization. It is a laziness to find something more useful to evaluate on or an inability to distinguish real understanding in a field from first level understanding. Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs. If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.

xboxnolifes 3mo ago
If your score falls 50% from not using AI, that's not testing memorization. That's testing learning anything on the topic being tested. The quantity of information on college exams is not that much to memorize. At least, personally, failing to remember something was rarely a reason why I failed to answer a question. Almost always it was because I did not fully understand the topic, so I tried to fall back on remembering if I answered the same question before.
franktankbank 3mo ago
LLMs don't know anything.
drtz 3mo ago
The article clearly lays out that the take-home test was not a test of memorization, but a test of students' understanding of the class material and ability to reason about how different assumptions affect its conclusions.

sometimelurker 3mo ago

I like the quote at the end "we cannot choose to become idiots"