Cheating themselves out of education.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Computer science is going to be q commodity job. Prediction of three tiers:
- Tier 1: No education requirement. I write code and build things. Large percentage of developers.
- Tier 3: Science based, high education working on algorithms, physics, and other elements requiring an understanding of matters in deeper education
- Tier 2: Right in between 1 and 3, may require formal education, but definitely experience. Will understand applications of high science, and can both program well and manage teams. Will replace current nontechnical middle management, because who needs that when the market is flooded
We've been headed this way for years, AI is just speeding it up.
I mean college is cheating them out of 200k plus of money so do you blame them?
Only in the USA
That's always been my issue. I worked full time and went to school full time when I was in college and still had to take out some loans. I did have some scholarship money that covered about half of it, but they only covered four years. My degree path didn't have any free electives meaning in every assignment, test, and class I only had a single shot. Failing would likely mean having to retake a class and push graduating out to a year which would have doubled the amount of debt I came out with. All just to get a piece of paper that would allow me to do the job that I knew I would be good at and enjoy.
The entire course of my life was at the mercy of some bad teachers and worse bureaucracy. I get that my profession shouldn't just hire people without any kind of training and hope for the best, and there were things I learned that had value, but the stakes and imbalance of power is so high I can't really be mad at some one "cheating" when they themselves are getting royally fucked.
If you're only doing university for a piece of paper, you done gone screwed up.
University is to learn how academia works so that you can continue your development independently afterwards. You become capable of researching topics, reading the papers and solving a problem you've never faced before.
Nobody ever tells you this, but your first degree is more about developing you than developing your knowledge. If you just askGPT the whole time you're cheating yourself.
That's great, but if they want to make that the goal then they should structure it in a way that is more conducive to that goal. When failure without dire consequences isn't an option, then they have fucked up.
Academia is a universe unlike anything else in the world. Academics will not prepare you for a job in the real world; it will prepare you to climb the academic ladder
make education stupider and less important, put AI assistants in front of everyone, automate as much as possible, and allow the proletariat class to enjoy decreasing levels of control over society
It’s almost as if college isn’t about bettering yourself but paying a racket so you can check off a mandatory box on your resume for the pleasure of your corporate liege-lords…
When I look at the quality of prominent Americans who went to ivy league schools, I don't think cheating your way through college will make much difference.
Pete hegseth graduated from princeton without the use of AI and he is one dumb fucking cunt, for example
He used money instead, way better than AI.
It’s always been possible to cheat your way through school but as more and more people start cheating it just is going to further worsen the quality of college graduates
It's pretty easy to be both dumb and well educated, I do it every day
Not just Americans, the British political class has similar issues.
While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort.
Lee goes on to claim everyone cheats. (He's also that AI Amazon Leetcode interview person.)
Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat.
Well duh, what other kind of people would he know.
A thief is someone that thinks everyone steals.
Always have been, as I've seen during my UCLA days of people buying exam answers from previous weekends and paying for papers, etc.. I'm glad I never bothered, mostly because of dignity but what because I was poor (although those correlate). Rich people have plenty of ways to game the system, though.
Papers are being disrupted. Exams will become more relevant. Can't use AI with only a pencil and paper
Very easy to tell if someone knows what they wrote about in a two minute conversation. My wife grades/t.a's at a university, it's obvious when someone doesn't know the information in person (and she's very understanding towards people who cannot verbalize the information but still know it). The old professors aren't very keen to it, but the graders can very easily smell the bullshit.
And if you know the information well enough, but send it through gpt for editing/refinement, that's usually accepted, unless you're in a class that grades on composition.
Even back around 2006, my biology teacher did exams on paper only, with questions that are free response only. Even AI and cheating aside, people get way too lucky with multiple choice exams
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I feel like one of the more important things to take away from this is the wildly different degrees to which various students use ai. Yes, 90% may use it, but there is a huge difference between "check following paper for grammar errors: ..." and "write me a paper on the ethics of generative AI," though an argument could be made that both are cheating. But there are things like "explain Taylor series to me in an intuitive way." Like someone else here pointed out, a 1-2 minute conversation would be a very easy way for professors to find people who cheated. There seems to be a more common view (I see it a LOT on Lemmy) that all AI is completely evil and anything with a neural network is made by Satan. Nuance exists.
This. Especially in the humanities, the essay is the preferred form of assessment. I don't have a birds eye view of all colleges, but I know that some of those courses should not have had essay exams. It's as if teachers forget that other forms of examination exist.
Nuance?! On THE INTERNET?!
ABSURD!!!
I'd appreciate calls for nuance more if most of the time the people doing it weren't just excusing hypocrisy and crimes against humanity.
College courses have long been structured to incentivize rote memorization and regurgitation over actual critical thinking and understanding. When i was in college the "honors" students literally had filling cabinets with a decade of old tests for every class in their dormatory. I'll admit llms have probably made it even worse, but the slide of colleges into worthless degree mills has been inexorably progressing for like 40 years at this point.
The term bulimia learning has been used for well over a decade now to describe that cramming before an exam only to immediately forget all of it afterwards too. Testing in education is fundamentally broken and has been for a long time.
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I seen students put no work into changing the output text from chatgpt. Like, not even trying to hide it. Shm.
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Why are you borrowing like $3,000 a credit hour to use ChatGPT? Take some fucking humanities courses so you don’t grow up to be like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk challenging each other to an MMA match. This might be your last chance in life to be surrounded by experts and hot people having discussions.
Being able to use software everyone uses isn’t a marketable skill. Learn some shit. You’re an adult now.
"This might be your last chance in life to be surrounded by experts and hot people having discussions."
The things that really matter.
I caught my middle schooler googling her math homework problems. I can hardly blame her, I just completed a work training on Measles the same way. I told her I understand the urge, but you have to put in the work in order to earn taking the easy way out because otherwise you won't know when the machines are lying to you. So anyway yeah we're fucked.
I definitely have a hangup on students I teach saying something along the lines of "I don't know how to get started on this, I asked GPT and...". To be clear: We're talking about higher-level university courses here, where GPT is, from my experience, unreliable at best and useless or misleading at worst. It makes me want to yell "What do you think?!?" I've been teaching at a University for some years, and there's a huge shift in the past couple years regarding how willing students are to smack their head repeatedly against a problem until they figure it out. It seems like their first instinct when they don't know something is to ask an LLM, and if that doesn't work, to give up.
I honestly want shake a physical book at them (and sometimes do), and try to help them understand that actually looking up what they need in a reliable resource is an option. (Note: I'm not in the US, you get second hand course books for like 40 USD here that are absolutely great, to the point that I have a bunch myself that I use to look stuff up in my research).
Of course, the above doesn't apply to all students, but there's definitely been a major shift in the past couple years.
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Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat.
How far do you have to be into the AI shit bubble to think everyone is cheating with AI? Some people are always going to cheat, but that's been true since long before AI tools existed. Most people have some level of integrity and desire to actually learn from the classes they're paying thousands to attend.
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it really shows too because hiring people sucks these days nobody knows anything
What is that supposed to mean?
"I don't understand that inexperienced people are inexperienced."
Assuming they are referring to new graduates.
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