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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10162 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NYMag)

link-archive link

Article describing what was predictably coming to college campuses since GPT3 got released. The narration follows some particularly annoying Korean-American student trying to make quick bucks from LLM-cheating start-ups and a rather dumb girl who can't follow basic reasoning, which makes the read a bit aggravating and amusing but overall the arch is not surprising. Recommended for a quick read. Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.

Some interesting highlights for me:

  • There is a consensus in the article even shared by the cheating students that writing essays in "Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries" is an important transformative experience and if young adults miss out/cheat on this for 4 years then we must be seriously worried about the next generation.
  • It is not explored much what the students are doing with their time instead of writing these very important essays. There is one throw-away quote from a brain-rot girl about how she scrolls TikTok all day and has no time for essays. Perhaps all the students are getting one-shotted by dopamine addiction algorithms but perhaps they are not and many are socializing or learning actually interesting things instead of writing indigenous studies slop essays. This should be a major question but just left unexplored.
  • None of the journos or the academics quoted in the article can bring themselves to question if these young adults should even be in the university if they are all so eager to cheat (and earlier pandemic-era mass cheating spree is mentioned as well). There is a whole paragraph dedicated to justifying seemingly pointless essays, never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises, and the importance of doing "hard things" (which is apparently writing pointless essays and never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises). But there is not a single example of a "hard thing" students are missing out on because of LLMs in the whole article. Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time. And a bizarre out of place paragraph about the need to "consider students more holistically" with a non-sense blurb from some academic.
  • Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating) and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution, just how universities used to work not that long ago. But obviously this would fail 90%+ of the current university students and likely destroy the entire industry as vast majority of the students providing their income stream are not nearly smart or conscientious enough to pass then.

Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating) and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution, just how universities used to work not that long ago. But obviously this would fail 90%+ of the current university students and likely destroy the entire industry as vast majority of the students providing their income stream are not nearly smart or conscientious enough to pass then.

It would also be a problem because of scale. Back in the day when they had a lot of oral exams they didn't also have 100 person 101 weed out lectures either, and while you can certainly have the in class exams be the entire grade with those you certainly are not doing oral exams. Without large classes its not just that 90% would fail its also that the would either have to hire a lot more professors or cut class sizes (not to mention path dependent legacy issues such as having built a bunch of large lecture halls and fewer 20 person class rooms.

This is a not uncommon lament in current year.

This professor makes largely the same claims. https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today

I've had a similar discussion with a professor at a local community college who sees it everyday.

There's some comfort in knowing to some degree this has been a forever problem On the Miseries of Teachers 1533, Philip Melanchthon.

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

This is so strange to read. Literally half my degree dropped out in our first year because of self-selection and mandatory credit requirements. This was treated as entirely normal and a good thing, as it is obviously a bad thing for people to waste their time and money on degrees they don't like/aren't capable of following.

I can't speak to the demographics of the student population referenced in the article.

Speaking with my friend who teaches at the local community college the students he'd fail would overwhelmingly be from 'disadvantaged' or minority backgrounds and would lead to uncomfortable conversations. I suspect some form of this plays a role in many schools.

This is why we can't have nice things.

As @Pasha said I think the classic Anglo humanities model where you do essays at home for practice (but which count nothing toward your final grade) and then have a combination of (hand)written exams in class and an oral exam seems like the best. That was true even before AI, but it’s especially true now.

In this case there is really no real to use AI to do homework since it doesn’t affect your grade and is pointless as a learning tool (which is not to say AI can’t be a useful learning tool, but ‘write 1200 words on x that I will never read but will email to the TA’ isn’t it).

The Oxbridge tutorial system where the students have to intelligently defend their work orally on a weekly basis wins again. Other places should just copy it, smh

Other places don't generally have the manpower to copy it, since Oxbridge tutorials/supervisions are one-on-1~3. US universities also already heavily rely on undergraduate TAs to keep up their scale, which is not allowed and would probably not be adequate in the Oxbridge model since a good supervisor needs to have more command of the material than a US TA checking against a grading rubric or drip-feeding model solutions.

I saw this article and was saving it to write an effort post, and now you beat me to it. A shame, but I guess I should put the outline to use anyway.

My intent would have been to use this article to highlight my concern about the AI revolution, and share my perspective on a topic I've never really gone into.

I am on record on being a skeptic / doubter on AI singularity fears (or hopes). I broadly think the 'the winner of AI is the winner of all' is overstated due to other required dynamics for such a monopoly of power/influence to occur. I think other technology dynamics matter more in different ways- for example, I think the drone revolution matters more than the AI revolution for shaping geopolitical contexts in the decades to come. I think that AI technologies under human control are more likely to do something irrevocably stupid than AI-controlled technologies deciding to paperclip everything and somehow having the unique ability to compel all other AI to align with that.

I do think it's fine to characterize AI as a significant disruptive technology, even if I think the inherent limits of LLM are more relevant to certain fields (especially anything novel/emerging without substantial successful learning material) than is commonly appreciated. Something doesn't have to be world ending to be a major disruption. I just think it's one of many, many major disruptions in the decade to come, and not even necessarily the worst. (Though disruptions do compound.)

What scares me isn't the AI singularity, but the AI-educated youth.

Specifically, I fear for- and fear from- people who might otherwise have learned critical thinking skills in how to not only search for answers, but organize and retain answers, to things they didn't know at the start. The example in the articles covered people using AI not only in lieu of finding a solution, but even knowing what the solution was. (The students who didn't know their own essay's response.) I don't think AI is bad for students because the answers AI provide are bad, necessarily. Getting an answer from AI isn't that different from getting an answer from a first-few pages search of google. (Even before they were the same thing.) It's more that if you don't even know how to do a tailored good search, or you don't know where other alternative answers are, you can't compare even that result. And if you're not retaining the solution- if you don't understand 'why' the solution is correct- the student is missing the opportunity. What's the point of passing a test if you, the student, haven't learned?

And I think the process of learning is important. In fact, I think learning the process of learning is among the most important things to learn at all. How to find an answer you don't know. How to distinguish good answers from bad answers. How to detect and distinguish bias from error from manipulation. How to generate a new solution to a complex problem when there isn't a proven solution at hand, or if the old solutions aren't accessible because [reasons]. And finally, how to both organize and communicate that in a way that other people can use. 'Knowing' a lot is not enough. 'Communicating' it can be just as important. All of these are skills that have to be practiced to be developed.

AI can compromise critical thinking and skill development. AI can compromise learning how to look for answers. AI can compromise how to retain the answers. AI can compromise the ability of people to respond to unclear situations with incomplete information or no baselines. AI can compromise the ability of people to convey their ideas to other people.

I had a great big screed on how I think AI is ruining youth... and then I looked back to that first mention of google, and asked myself 'what is so different?'

I grew up in an era where the pre-AI internet promised unparalleled information access. An era where seemingly infinite libraries of fiction (fan or otherwise) were open to anyone with an internet, with more to read than a lifetime of book purchases. Access to other people's opinions would break people out of their small-minded closed-worlds. The truth was out there, and the internet would help you reach it. In one of the earlier versions of Civilization, the Internet was considered a world wonder, and would give the civilization that developed it first (eventual) access to any technology that at least two other states knew.

But I also grew up in an era where people bemoaned that google was ruining the ability of people to find anything not on the internet. Documents that were never digitized, people who never wrote down their thoughts, the subtext that comes from investing things in person rather than from a distance. You can think you know how hilly a hike is from reading it, but a picture of it is worth a thousand words, and actually hiking it yourself in the heat and humidity and while carrying dozens of pounds of equipment is something else. It's hard to capture the sublime beauty of nature, and thus understand why people would value nature preservation for its own sake, if you don't go out to it.

(Then again, I did go into it. I also didn't like it. My sympathies were never exactly with anti-industrial environmentalism after that.)

And it's not like the pre-AI google-internet wasn't directly facilitating cheating. Who here was ever introduced to SparkNotes? The best friend of anyone who didn't want to actually do the required reading, but still needs a talking point or essay about a famous book. It advertises itself as a 'study guide' site these days. It condensed hundreds of pages into a few small pages of summary, and that was Good Enough.

Similar points could be made about cheating. I remember when facebook was not only young, but mostly a college student thing. And I remember how schools wrestled with students sharing answer sheets to quizzes, past essays, and so on. Even if I didn't partake, I know people did. Were they getting substantially more critical thinking skills than the modern AI exploiter just because their cheating methods were a bit more taxing on time or effort?

Maybe. But then, what's so different between the pre-AI/post-internet student cheating, and the pre-internet student cheating?

Were cheating circles any less of a thing in eras where colleges had notorious stories of famous historical figures basically fooling around until last-minute cramming? Were those cramming sessions really imparting the value of critical thinking not only to the Great Figures of History, but their less memorable peers?

Or information. If you're getting all your politics from AI, that was pretty dumb. But then, I remember when it was (and still is) a common expression of contempt to dismiss people who watched [bad political TV station], or read [biased partisan news paper], or listened to [objectional radio figure] rather than the other alternatives.

But were the people who were turning into [good political TV station] being any more critical thinking for listening to the 'correct' opinion shows? Or was it just 'my noble voters know I speak truth through their own critical thinking, yours are misled by propaganda that critical thinking would negate'? Were radio listeners decades prior any less mono-tuned for having even fewer alternative stations to listen to? Were regional or municipal newspapers any partisan when there was less competition outside the influence of political machines? Were their readers any more objective critical thinkers when there were fewer easy alternative options?

Has there ever been a golden age of critical thinkers, schooled to think well, untainted by the technology of its era, or the character of its students?

Or has critical thinking been consistent across history, with most students of any era doing the least possible to get through any required courses, and missing the point along the way?

And- by implication- some minority of critical thinkers existing and emerging regardless of the excuses of the era? And often out-competing their contemporaries by the advantages that come with critical thinking?

The more I think of it, the more convinced of the later. Most people in history wouldn't have been great critical thinkers if only they had access to more or even better information. They'd still have taken the easiest way to meet the immediate social pressure. Similarly, I doubt that the Great Critical Thinkers of History would have been ruined by AI. Not as a class, at least. They already had their alternative off-ramps, and didn't.

Critical thinking can always be encouraged, but never forced. The people who do so are the sort of people who are naturally inclined to question, to think, or to recognize the value of critical thinking in a competitive or personal sense. The people who actually do so... they were always a minority. They will probably always be a minority.

So on reflection, my fear about bad students isn't really warranted by AI. There has always been [things degrading critical thinking] that the learners of the era could defer to, or cheat with. If I'd been born generations earlier, I'd have had an equivalent instinct 'warranted' by something else. My fear is/was more about the idea of 'losing' something- an expectation of the critical thinking of others- that probably never existed.

Realizing that made me fear the effects of AI a bit less. As silly as it sounds to put my updated prior in this way, and the sillyness is the point here, there was no golden age of critical thinking and enlightened education that just so happened to be when I was maturing. Just as [current year] wasn't the first time in human history moralistic college students felt ideal social morality was obviously achievable, a downgrade of critical thinking didn't start after I left college either.

So when I read that article about the south korean kid who viewed Ivy League not as a chance to learn in an environment of unparalled access to quality minds and material, but as a change to meet his wife and co-founder of some company, I shouldn't- don't- despair. Instead, I shrug. As it was before, so it shall be again.

Two centuries ago, his mindset would have been right at home in his home country. He would probably only have cared about the material the nominally-meritocratic gwageo civil service exams assessed (including classical literature) to the degree it let out-compete other would-be competitors and join the yangban, a relatively comfortable aristocratic-social class. If he had the ability to cheat at the civil service exam and get away with it, I imagine he would have.

I doubt the social sanctity of meritocrat exams would have bothered him anymore than the espoused value of critical thinking in a progressive academic institution.

What is so different?

Google never just gives you the answers, but instead helps you find human written (at least the old google) articles and resources that may be useful. And depending on the quality of the official course materials, the googled sites may be surprisingly useless.

Yes, cheating has always existed, and if you really want to cheat, instead of using google to find the answers, you can also find the older kid who saved all the homeworks from last year for you to copy from.

So I think in general Google is not cheating unless explicitly banned, and very different from ChatGPT. ChatGPT just does the homeworks and spits out the answer.

As silly as it sounds to put my updated prior in this way, and the sillyness is the point here, there was no golden age of critical thinking and enlightened education that just so happened to be when I was maturing. Just as [current year] wasn't the first time in human history moralistic college students felt ideal social morality was obviously achievable, a downgrade of critical thinking didn't start after I left college either.

When I was in school, I had a few opportunities to glimpse that the standards I was being tested to were lower than those of the past. Primarily, this involved a few experiences where I got to actually see what were actually-given exams from not many years prior. One might temper this a bit, given that I did not see the scores of the prior students who took those exams, but my sense is that the profs in question had been using very similar exams for a decade or two, kept seeing lower and lower scores, and eventually gave up and revamped their curriculum. The entire style and approach was different, and I felt sad that I did not have the opportunity to be exposed to the old way, which I felt was more rigorous.

That said, I think there is a slight confounder as to how exactly we bucket the concepts of "critical thinking", "rigor", etc. It may not necessarily require critical thinking to learn how to repeat enough of the incantations of rigor, but I have the sense that requiring said rigor naturally provides far more opportunities for critical thinking to show its head (or lack thereof).

Perhaps another conceptual bundle in the mix is something like "skills and abilities" or just sheer "knowledge" or something. I think that my experiences also justified that something along these axes was already in decline when I was in school. Yes, yes, a major factor could just be composition effects, but I think that's probably the biggest lingering question - why the standards for rigor/skills and abilities/knowledge seemed to have declined, not that they did so.

If we can do the terrible thing and imagine clustering this conceptual bundle, apart from what might be considered "pure critical thinking", into one continuous time-dependent variable, I do have to think that there was a peak. Obviously, if we go back far enough, there was just nobody with the sort of specialized knowledge/skills and abilities/rigor within my very specialized academic focus. The continuous variable was approximately zero. Given my personal observation that it seems to have had a negative first derivative when I was in school, it would seem to imply that there was a maximum at some point in the past.

Of course, I should mention again that composition effects may be nearly the entire ballgame here. Tyler Cowen preaches the skills/abilities of very young people. There are probably absolutely outstanding ones. Therefore, I'm not sure I have much of an explanation that would fit my perception of generally-declining standards other than composition effects.

It seems interesting to me that standards for finishing school may be lower, but before then they’re actually higher. Math and reading are much more advanced much faster than they used to.

I wonder if this is why everything seems to be graded on a curve these days.

Has there ever been a golden age of critical thinkers, schooled to think well, untainted by the technology of its era, or the character of its students?

Those growing up around 1900-1914 seemed closest, the great flower of our civilization, who died under flowering shrapnel on the French frontier.

I base this belief on reading historical (highschool/Gymnasium/lycée) exams (and submitted answers, with sample bias, of course) and cheat books (with more detail than modern academic treatments of the same... This is how I originally came to this.) They should write poetry on different topics in a certain style (movement or author), find problems in economic or business data, articulate various thinkers' contrasting beliefs about a topic etc. Transposed to modern times, have a student write a memoization macro, calculate some vector angles, write an essay on LaRoche, McKinley and and Teddy Roosevelt's views on tariffs, another on leadership (why the most popular kid's popular and what prevents the writer from taking his place, and to what extent the (chosen group/nation/state/movement) needs good leaders vs. institutions) ...written in Mandarin. The Overton window was far wider in those days, with multiple popular opinions about why x or y state was illegitimate with justifications from Renaissance, Classical and Biblical sources, advocating for paganism/atheism/state controlled religion etc. etc. Unfortunately, the war seemed to invalidate the whole framework and civilization behind this and mass education never recovered.

That's still a far cry from our ideal, but...

That's still a far cry from our ideal, but...

...but the people who led and cultivated the critical thinking of 1900-1914 were also the people who thought throwing the flower of your civilization into flowering shrapnel on the French frontier was a better national policy than not.

And most of the generation raised to be critical thinkers in the 1900-1914 range- which is to say, the generation born in 1890s and before- went along with it, and shamed, ridiculed, or forced others to do so as well. Theirs was a critical thinking shaped by / built upon nationalism, propaganda, imperialist delusions, and various pseudo-sciences racial and otherwise.

And then the people born or with their own formative years between 1900-1914 went on to do it again.

WW1 was a madness born from the civilization it ended, not an external imposition. WW2 was an extension of that turn-of-the-century generation. Any exceptional critical thinkers were despite, not because, of the nature of that era.

And then the people born or with their own formative years between 1900-1914 went on to do it again.

I would argue that WWI killed the enlightenment, and then WWII and the Cold War were struggles over what ideology should replace it.

On the one hand you had Fascism (“screw the enlightenment, let’s go back to premodern barbarism with industrial Revolution characteristics”) and Communism (“We need to just keep pushing the enlightenment as far as it will go. Real enlightenment has never been tried!”). Between 1940 and 1991, both of those proposed successor ideologies failed. It turned out that premodern tribal society with modern technology could get very bloody very fast. And after fifty years of experimentation, it turned out that, counterintuitively, so could enlightenment times ten.

So what that leaves us with is the Bretton Woods ostrich consensus, “let’s uhh... just pretend that whole WWI business never happened and keep muddling on as we were”, where WWII is severed from its connection to war that came before it, and is retroactively portrayed as the enlightenment’s ultimate triumph over the darkness. And as not the obvious result of the enlightenment’s catastrophic failure and collapse. I think it’s no accident that this ostrich consensus came primarily from the United States, the country least affected by either of the two wars.

On the one hand you had Fascism (“screw the enlightenment, let’s go back to premodern barbarism with industrial Revolution characteristics”) and Communism (“We need to just keep pushing the enlightenment as far as it will go. Real enlightenment has never been tried!”).

Fascists observably loved progress, mechanization, modernization and "rational" materialism. Their behavior was not generally recognized as pre-modern barbarism in advance, and its barbarity was not notably distinct in character from that of the Communists. Likewise, the communists were obsessed with both the industrial revolution and what is very easy to describe as "premodern barbarism"; arguably by the 30s, Fascism was pretty clearly the more "civilized" of the two in observable outcomes.

I don’t mean pre-modern barbarism in the sense of living in a mud hut banging together stone axes, or in the sense that “they did a lot of bad things, therefore barbarism”. But a lot of naziism does seem like a conscious attempt to try and return to premodern modes of thinking, where the chief’s or king’s obligation is to Protect the Tribe and there are very loose rules of conduct of what you can do to the out group. Now obviously, both Communists and enlightenment era monarchies did a lot of sketchy things too, but there were a lot more mental gymnastics involved in getting there.

A lot of departments want courses in the core curriculum because it guarantees jobs lecturing. They don't particularly care if the students learn anything or if it provides any value. Forcing students to write papers on indigenous studies is just the easiest path to getting paid to write their own papers on indigenous studies.

So basically everyone involved is a fraud, and it goes forward because we've let colleges control credentialing.

The students just want the credential. The lecturers just want their money.

There's so much money on the table for whomever can convince employers they have a better credential than Ivy League schools. And given the level of corruption and bloat, it probably wouldn't even take that hard a push.

Inertia is powerful, but it's not all powerful.

I have a vague recollection of a podcast. My Google fu isn't good enough. I think it was Conversations With Tyler. I think the guest was someone of means and a track record of disruption (Patrick Collison/Peter Thiel tier). The question came up about disrupting academia. In my continued jumble of vague recollections, the response was some form of, "We looked into it, but the academic cartel is too strong." They have piles upon piles of government subsidies. They have complete control of accreditation. I've seen, for example, a state uni system where the components also leverage control over the other components (one wanted to offer a new grad degree program, and the others cried to the state gov't to force an impossible requirement on them to "prove that there is a need", a la Certificate of Need requirements in the medical industry). If you were news-conscious around a decade ago, you saw the knives out for "for-profit universities". I'm sure there are all sorts of tactics-level games being played and tricks being employed.

They also suffer from a two-sided market. It's not enough to only convince employers; you have to convince prospective students, too. Thrown in here are difficult questions about the relative value of signaling in education. Various folks have various estimates (some quite high) for the amount of value in a degree simply being that the institution chose you and put their stamp on you, because they were able to choose from the best. If there is a significant amount of that, then the students might not actually care all that much whether you're really offering a better education; you just need to offer a better signal. If you're trying to recruit a top-crust student, you have to realize that all of the legacy institutions are already offering them a full ride (maybe even perks hidden as lifestyle amenities) and a time-proven signal. You have to compete with that... somehow. You have to do both these things... simultaneously convince prospective students and employers, because if you don't do both simultaneously, the group that was falsely convinced will quickly realize that they were duped and stop (either top students realize that you haven't convinced employers already and will stop enrolling or top employers realize that you haven't convinced students already and will stop hiring).

@zeke5123a has a plausible idea of just paying students. But again, you're looking for top students; they're already effectively getting paid by the legacy unis. So, you're going to have to front significant cash. Since you can't subsidize this with the donations of wealthy aristocratic alumni, high tuition from a lesser tier student (since this will immediately devalue your budding brand), and piles of government assistance is likely not forthcoming, you will have to burn significant piles of cash for probably a significant number of years before you can start to turn the tide back to even breaking even.

If you're thinking that you could maybe you could stem the bleed by doing the typical thing of having your faculty also chase research grant money, you now have a three-sided market. How many academics out there can stomach the grant-chasing life, succeed at it, and also buy in to give the high levels of effort you're going to require to have super high educational standards? When you find one, they're going to be expensive, because they do just half that work for plenty of money and near infinite job security at a legacy.

Where along the way do you make sure you don't slip into the same mode of operation as the legacies, since you sure seem to be playing their same game now, just without the entrenched endowments? What's your mechanism to ensure that?

I wouldn't be surprised if whoever I vaguely recall on a podcast already went through this exercise. I wouldn't be surprised if they already tried to make an estimate of how much top students are already being effectively paid by legacies. I wouldn't be surprised if, with some reasonable assumptions on how long it would take to build the brand in both directions so that you could start to stop the bleeding, they just computed that it would just be an unreasonable pile of money.

The Thiel Fellowship seems to be an attempt that embraces a reasonably strong prior on the signaling theory, which allowed them to at least just give up on the educating part of the huge pile of money. $100k over two years, and starting with 20-30 students. That's with the Thiel Brand discount and no overt plan for how to turn it from a $2-3M/yr charity project into a revenue-neutral competitor to academia with any sort of scale.

This is not to say that they cannot be disrupted, but the challenge is pretty steep.

I wonder if you could have a new university that initially paid students to come. There is an SAT cut off plus a requirement to have some AP. Three year intensive with only core classes needed (you should be able to do the requisite credit hours in 3 years if you have sufficient AP and a single summer night class). Internships required. After the first couple of classes succeed in getting hired at strong firms, you flip the switch and start charging 50k a year.

You've almost exactly described elite STEM PhD programs!

I wonder if you could have a new university that initially paid students to come.

They would have to pay the first students an amount equivalent to the increase in lifetime earnings from going to a regular university (minus the cost of a regular university). This would be cost prohibitive.

As I've mentioned previously, I'm at a Finnish university right now, doing a new degree (PolSci) since the future in translation is, well, uncertain, and I'm seeing a potential niche in the "political implications of AI" field that could be potentially seized upon.

Since I already have a lot of old studies I've been able to take in to the new degree as credit transfers and since I no longer get subsidies and student loans I have to work while studying, so I haven't taken a lot of "actual" courses. What few I have had seem to be at some sort of a paradigm shift point regarding AI where it's still uncertain how it should be handled; mainly, I've taken two courses of Russian, and it seems to be taken as granted that the students will use AI to look up Russian words and their forms, but there's still a "preferably don't do this, and if you do, at least tell me" instruction for longer tasks. In any case, the Russian courses were pass/fail and otherwise the professors generally indicated that coursework isn't that important and would mostly count for edge cases regarding grading.

The book exams are done at a student's leisure by booking a room at a special exam class without phone and with computers that basically only allow the specific exam software to run and are done as essay questions, which is good compared to the old pen-and-paper exams, since my handwriting is atrocious.

I wonder if AI will make us all polyglots because it’s an incredibly useful tool of language learning or eliminate any learning altogether because it’s also really good at translating. Or perhaps it does both at the same time simultaneously so we have a bunch of conscious smart learners mastering new languages in 6 months and everyone else loses any motivation at all because any digital content they ever encounter is instantly perfectly translated (desire to access broader internet/gaming/tv shows was the reason I got good at English as a teenager, school instruction was useless)

It might do exactly that, yes. Language learning becomes a niche specialist skill, maybe Finns now in elementary school will wonder how the younger generations don't even know any English the same way Millennials wonder how the Zoomers can't even use computers properly.

Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams.

You mean like Oxford and Cambridge were doing back when Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus were alive and never stopped? The lindiest thing ever to lindy (apart from death, taxes, and revivalist movements calling out decadence and corruption in the Cathedral)?

Yes. I believe if you do a proper classics study in those unis even today the experience isn’t that far off according to a friend who did so a while ago. One of the most inspirational uni life stories I have ever come across is Bismarck’s actually. 3.5 years of non-stop drinking and partying and sword dueling topped with insane half a year crunch to graduate. Great recipe to create great men.

I think this is the inevitable result of making college the default path, where most people feel that they need a college degree for the job market even if they have no interest in being there. And the colleges are happy to serve as a diploma mill.

A long time ago I worked as a math tutor for my college, working with freshman who were struggling wtih basic math. And it was pretty clear that most of them had no interest in learning math, they just wanted me to do their homework for them so they could pass the class. I tried to teach them if I could but... it's a lot easier to just do the homework yourself than to teach someone else. So I was basically serving as a "living LLM" in that case.

Forcing students who has absolutely no interest and need to do some mid-level maths courses for half baked pedagogic reasons was one of the biggest cheating incentivizers when I was a student. Remember a hot business studies chick in my dorm slept with half the econometrics track guys to get them to do her maths homework. I guess that is some sort of “preparation for life”…

Remember a hot business studies chick in my dorm slept with half the econometrics track guys to get them to do her maths homework.

I was good at math! Why did nobody tell me about this opportunity?

Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.

It's not "high quality" if professors are complaining left and right about your shitty slop. If it really were high quality then professors would be happy to get it. I for one would implement a policy of immediate expulsion of anyone who turns in blatant shameless AI slop without even trying to hide it.

From the article

caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

Seriously, just do the dang assignment. Kids are being programmed into using chatgpt for literally no reason. There is no possible way chatgpt can answer this question better than the student himself, while also saving time.

writing essays in "Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries" is an important transformative experience and if young adults miss out/cheat on this for 4 years then we must be seriously worried about the next generation.

The essay you write might not be all that important, but you signed up for it, and cheating is cheating. If you hate the class then take another one; nobody is forcing you to be there. And minmaxxxing your graduation requirements is one of the underrated skills you learn college that transfers to the real world.

If you really can't avoid one or two shitty classes, then just grin and bear it. Getting hazed by some bullshit class that everyone has to take is actually an important transformative experience. You need to learn grit.

never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises

Clearly you didn't like math and didn't give a shit about your calculus class beyond getting an A. But years of math education builds on itself, and if you'd better remember la hospital's rule and delta epsilon and shit if you ever want to take a more advanced math class.

Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time.

Some assignments feel like busy work, but you need 1000 hours of practice on something to get good at it. Why do I need to memorize any calculus formulas when I can just look at the book? Plug and chug 30x actually results in learning ironically enough.

ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams.

Coursework is where the learning happens, exams are just a test. With lazy kids these days, you need a stick to make them actually do it, or else they're gonna blow it all off until the end of the semester, try to cram, and bomb it hard.

Anyways doing coursework is a huge ass chesterton's fence right there. Sure, tear it down, and while you're at it, remove all the other classes and replace them with a single class AI literacy.

Anyways doing coursework is a huge ass chesterton's fence right there.

Pretty sure coursework is the newcomer to the University education scene. I don't think that professors in 17th century Oxford were grading homework.

Professors in the 21st century don’t grade homework in much of the world.

I always get frustrated in conversations like this where so many Americans assume that their rather peculiar system must be the norm everywhere.

Sorry but I get a strong feeling you have never been exposed to any university system other than modern American liberal arts colleges. What I have seen around Europe typically was that learning happens during exam crunch time and coursework is either just recommended or has relatively little effect on your end grade. If you are doing a “hard” degree then for many major exams you are also responsible for subjects of previous semesters as well so you have to stay on top. This works perfectly fine. I don’t think American students are any lazier than their counterparts in continental Europe, I think they just got conditioned heavily by the only education they have ever experienced.

Also no I liked maths a lot and I have an engineering job using a decent amount of trig-calculus level maths regularly. But I also observed how nonsense the maths requirements were for most degrees.

Incidentally I found it amusing you chose the student using chatgpt to write personal introduction for an “ Ethics and Technology class” as a particularly egregious example. I have never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors. Just all around busywork. We were either forced to take such classes because of vague ideas about how it would make us more ethical or something or people did so for easy elective credits. The whole faculty had a jobs-program feeling to it. It would be absolutely my top course to cheat through with an LLM.

What I have seen around Europe typically was that learning happens during exam crunch time and coursework is either just recommended or has relatively little effect on your end grade.

That's exactly my point. The kids will just goof off for 90% of the semester and just cram it all in before the exam. If so when what's the point of even having the rest of the semester.

using chatgpt to write personal introduction

Even if it's busy work, using chatgpt to do something that would take literally 5 minutes is just a retarded move.

Undergrads here are typically 3 years. I remember having 8 crunch periods per year for my degree. 4 quarters with one review exam in the middle and one big one at the end. Besides this, nobody stopped you from taking extra courses to graduate earlier and many did.

By no means continental European university system is great. Most countries have their own pathologies and the Bologna Process makes everything typically shittier but it’s pretty strange to claim students got to goof around because they don’t have constant deadlines to write parroting essays about queer indigenous history.

I fail to see how almost any of my education would had been disrupted by the LLMs the way the New York mag article is describing. The only courses I can imagine are currently swamped with LLM problems are the bunch of liberal arts inspired nonsense courses I had to follow for credits.

That's exactly my point. The kids will just goof off for 90% of the semester and just cram it all in before the exam. If so when what's the point of even having the rest of the semester.

You should look into Western Governor's University and their model. Basically you can finish your degree as fast as you can finish testing for each course.

I remember a well-known poster here (Tracing Woodgrains? Not 100% sure) having the same plan, then they took longer than a traditional degree to graduate because a large part of the university experience is social pressure and the WGU experience doesn't provide that part.

I have never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors. Just all around busywork.

If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review a compare / contrast of ethic courses and frameworks for different professional groups with different stakes in human harm. Even if it's just regulators who enforce safety standards, medical policymakers that shape the standards, and state prosecutors who's job it is to give the people who violated the standards a bad day in court, the overlaps and distinctions in what they base their professional-ethic frameworks upon can be enlightening.

What they emphasize changes as you go from fields where harming anyone is proof of something going wrong and ethics is about avoiding it, to fields where people will be harmed regardless and ethics is about balancing it, to fields where harming people is the point and ethics is about managing it. The later can be all the more interesting for how they have to handle the simpler moral rejections that can suffice for the former.

Few classes / professors will ever frame these for you, which is why it will need to be self-driven. Bad professors can undercut even that. Still.

If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review compare / contrast of ancient human-sacrifice rituals for different religions with different stakes in humans harm. Even if it's just the Aztecs cutting out hearts to prevent the universe from ending, or the Carthaginians burning babies alive in honor of Moloch, the overlaps and distinctions in what they think human sacrifice will accomplish can be enlightening.

And then, once you've read that, presumably you will somehow have changed your mind and believe human sacrifice is a good thing instead of a senseless waste of human life. You will probably even want to sacrifice your own children to Moloch, when the time comes. I know I haven't provided any reason why that should be the case, but apparently that's how this works now.

One thing is for sure, though: I have a higher opinion of the moral and ethical foundations of a Aztec priests cutting the still-beating hearts out of the chests of POWs than I do of the sorts of people who teach ethics classes. At least the Aztecs had the excuse of not having access to better information, something that cannot be said of someone who works in a modern university.

If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review compare / contrast of ancient human-sacrifice rituals for different religions with different stakes in humans harm.

If you had good directions of where to start, I might just do that. It sounds interesting, and I expect some free time later this year. However, it is a bit harder to find structured reviews of them than, say, pointing three distinct but overlapping types of professionals.

Why don't you provide two good sources for the Aztecs and Carthaginians ethics? Good as in effectively and analytically characterizes their ethical systems. A bad work would be one that simply relegates Aztec morality to 'they conducted human sacrifice to keep the world from ending.' Yes, that is a utilitarian justification. It is not an ethical system.

And then, once you've read that, presumably you will somehow have changed your mind and believe human sacrifice is a good thing instead of a senseless waste of human life. You will probably even want to sacrifice your own children to Moloch, when the time comes. I know I haven't provided any reason why that should be the case, but apparently that's how this works now.

If that was what you took away from my post, then congratulations- you demonstrated a point by missing it.

The value of studying different forms of professional ethics isn't to change your own mind on ethics. The value is understanding what others want, or expect, the ethics of a professional to be. This has relevant insights when it comes to dealing with specific professions in isolation, when multiple professions with different professional ethics engage each other, or even how the same profession's ethics across different cultures.

Understanding other people's ethical frameworks has never been endorsement, or required conversion, unless you subscribe to some universal morality theory.

If you think human sacrifice is good, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that. If you think that ethics classes are not "total non-sense taught by dimwit professors" as the above poster claims, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that.

But please don't gesture vaguely in the direction of doing further research to nay-say the value judgements of those who have stronger opinions than you.

There is no amount of research that will convince me that human sacrifice is good. It's not because I'm stubborn or closed-minded, it's because I have a coherent moral worldview. Reading about it may be interesting but it will never change my mind.

If the best argument in favor of university-level ethics classes you can muster up is that I should do more research so that I can discover for myself an argument in favor of their existence, then that suggests that they are truly without any value whatsoever. It's a rare and pitiable thing to see a position so devoid of merit that even its defenders can't bear to speak in its defense. If nothing else the Aztecs were at least capable of making arguments to justify their actions.

If you think human sacrifice is good, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that.

And this exchange gets sillier and sillier.

If you think that ethics classes are not "total non-sense taught by dimwit professors" as the above poster claims, then you should say so outright and explain why you believe that.

I did. (And did not.)

I have made no position on ethics classes taught by dimwit professors. The only educator I have recommended to Pasha is Pasha himself, and I decline to accuse Pasha of being a dimwit. I will even offer a concurrence that bad teachers- dimwit or otherwise- can ruin valid material. Take this as a concession if you'd like.

What I did do was suggest for Pasha himself take an opportunity on their own to study a specific sub-set of ethics, professional ethics, with the supporting justification-

What they emphasize changes as you go from fields where harming anyone is proof of something going wrong and ethics is about avoiding it, to fields where people will be harmed regardless and ethics is about balancing it, to fields where harming people is the point and ethics is about managing it. The later can be all the more interesting for how they have to handle the simpler moral rejections that can suffice for the former.

I.e., I believe they should review different professional ethic systems to understand how they differ in what they emphasize. Specifically between fields where one profession accepts human harms that another profession would reject. At the very least, it can be interesting to understand how they do so.

I even restated and clarified it in the post you are responding to, in case it was not clear enough-

The value of studying different forms of professional ethics isn't to change your own mind on ethics. The value is understanding what others want, or expect, the ethics of a professional to be. This has relevant insights when it comes to dealing with specific professions in isolation, when multiple professions with different professional ethics engage each other, or even how the same profession's ethics across different cultures.

I.e., the value of understanding how different ethic systems work, besides that it can be interesting, is that it is useful when professional-ethical systems interact in various ways. This can apply when you are dealing with a professional consensus, potential professional conflicts, or cross-cultural divergences where a consensus might be.

If noting there are implications of potentially clashing ethical systems seems vague and nonsensical to you, this is an excellent indication of why further study on the subject would be beneficial. If you do not trust a professor to be able to help you with it, that would be an excellent reason to educate yourself instead.

But please don't gesture vaguely in the direction of doing further research to nay-say the value judgements of those who have stronger opinions than you.

The only way a suggestion for Pasha teaching himself about ethics violates the value judgement of dimwit professors teaching ethics is if Pasha is a dimwit professor. Again, I decline.

I suspect Pasha may think the subject matter of ethics is itself is [pick your pejorative]. Regardless of the strength of his opinion, I believe it is useful, and recommend he examine it in certain ways to learn the utility for himself, in a way that respects his dismissal of formal instructors of the subject.

I believe they should review different professional ethic systems to understand how they differ in what they emphasize.

Before we continue this discussion, I believe you should read all 7 Harry Potter books. I also believe you should read the Bible and the Torah. I believe you should read the Dead Sea Scrolls. I believe you should have an AI translate all 7 Harry Potter books into Swahili and read them again. Learn Swahili first if you have to, time is apparently no object. I believe you should read every word ever written by Thomas Aquinas. I believe you should re-read them, but this time reinterpret them as the works of Thomas Aquinas's black trans lesbian housekeeper, plagiarized without credit.

I think you're operating under a misconception. You seem to think I disagree with the concept of reading things. I do not. My point of contention with you is that you are not making any actual arguments in favor of your position. Telling people to read more books is not an argument.

It's not that I don't know enough about ethics, or that I haven't considered the possibility that other people might believe different things than me. My point is very simple: If you're here to make an argument, then make it. If you're not here to make an argument then you should at least stop trying to give people homework.

The presumption that the only reason anyone might disagree with you is that they haven't done enough research is not charming.

More comments

Getting hazed by some bullshit class that everyone has to take is actually an important transformative experience.

If this is the point of those classes, shouldn't progressives be forced to write about why capitalism is awesome, and racism (against non-whites) is good, actually? Why do you think certain people get to swim in a sea of affirmation for their creed?

I absolutely think they should be. Now, maybe it's not practical to check each student's individual political preferences and assign bespoke assignments for them on that basis (which could be gamed anyway). Rather, humanities-based courses should test students on their ability to defend a wide variety of different, highly offensive and ideally "dangerous" ideas in whatever topics are at hand, to stimulate actually learning how to think versus what to think.

Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever, without there being any sort of noticeable progress whatsoever. I just know that that was how I was educated, and it seemed to work for me and my classmates (but of course I'd think that, and so my belief that it seemed to work should count for approximately nothing), but even if it did, that doesn't mean that it's generalizable.

Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever

I'm not sure I buy it. "Teaching how to think" may have been a self-congratulatory justification for a while, but people in the past weren't that shy about teaching morals.

Not gonna lie, I do find the idea appealing, but these days I wonder if it's even possible. The whole idea just smells like the pretense of neutrality that liberals emanate, as long as they have ways of ensuring they will always win the argument.

I guess that's why most ethics classes always go back to trolley problems and dying violinists. Nobody really cares but you still have to defend a variety of viewpoints.

Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.

As someone from a university system that isn’t as obsessed with liberal arts, essays and rote work, I say good fucking riddance. Almost nothing of value will be lost.

Based on previous reading of some teaching adjacent subreddits, I expect American ”professors” (iow what would be called just lecturers or teachers elsewhere) to be in hysterics as they can no longer assign massive amounts of pointless drudgework and might have to actually grade based on exam performance.

It's underrated just how much academics hate marking exams, they absolutely loathe the dullness of it and also the bad handwriting of students. Exam meta leans towards writing as fast as physically possible to get more onto the paper, which makes things worse.

So academics come up with group presentations and all kinds of other ways to dodge the effort.

Fortunately, ChatGPT will also allow the professors to dodge: just ask the machine to mark a computer-written exam.

I've found that if I put some work in ahead of time, I can write conceptually-dense questions that only require a handful of lines of math. Students really struggle with it, probably because it's so different from their other classes. But man, you can really tell the students who "get it" versus those who are hoping to skate by with just plugging numbers randomly into some opaque formula that came from magic.

Can confirm, did this myself. There is nothing worse than spending HOURS trying to figure out if a student has a great point that you’re missing because they’re brighter than you and they write floridly, or if they’re bullshitting.

I cherished those moments during my university studies when I could spend half the assignment laying out in detail why I considered it a shitty assignment while also acing it far beyond any reasonable expectations. I suspect doing that every week in one course (edit: due to being familiar with much of the material, not for spending any particular effort) was half the reason said professor later hired me as a research assistant (the other half was that I emailed him about a beyond-state-of-art research topic with ”I have been working on this idea…”).

Couldn’t this be trivially solved by allowing to write the answer in-person on a computer? Such system is already in use here for the national matriculation exams where the students boot the laptop from a provided usb stick that runs a customized Linux distro with only the few apps required and local exam network access.

Or just limit the length of replied. The longest handwritten answer I ever wrote in university was somewhat short of two pages and that was a rare exception. Most were one page or (sometimes much) less. AFAIK I was never marked down for being too short or concise.

A slight side note: I’ve even seen complaints of American coursework for a single course having more writing than my entire masters thesis (officially worth 5-6 months full time work) which the professor absolutely loved and praised to heavens. This indicates that there is something strange going on in the American system when so much emphasis is placed on mechanical drudgework instead of results.

A tumblr post I quite enjoyed:

Certainly! Here is a tumblr post to get rich white champaign socialists riled up:

The reason AI is the Current Thing for libs to get mad at is because it puts the ability to have someone ghostwrite your college essays into the hands of poor people.

I generally agree about your fourth point: More than a decade ago, one of the better professors I had at university was an English teacher; she was young enough and new enough to not have been worn down by the grind yet. A large part of the grade for her class was in the exam portion, where we were given ~4 hours of proctored exam time to (mostly) write several short essays in person by hand, without electronics. We were allowed copies of the literature involved and no other aids, and basically given "choose 3 topics from this list of 10 to write essays about", where the topics were things like "compare [work A]'s [element x] to [Work B's]." etc. I imagine she could simply load more of the final grade on that final exam, and the similar but shorter midterm, rather than homework essays, and still be able to assess/grade students' abilities in the era of ChatGPT.

Instead, it largely seems like universities have mostly tried nothing, and are all out of ideas. The remarkable fatalism I've been seeing about it is amusing.

proctored exam time to (mostly) write several short essays in person by hand, without electronics

I'm really showing my age here, but this is my typical high school and college experience. Tests are maybe an hour long in high school, longer in college. No electronics other than sometimes a scientific calculator. No graphing calculators since they can be programmed with the relevant formulae; including fake screens that say all memory has been just now wiped.

AP English literature, English language and history was lots of hand written essays. Just write a few paragraphs answering some question statement about some short reading.

This is all so obvious and relatively fool proof. Sit and do the work in a room in front of your professor and TAs. If you could wave a magic wand and give young me an amazing hand held device with a super-LLM, it would not have helped me at all for in class final tests. Nothing but pens and paper allowed. Unless your professor is a sadist and makes open book exams. But always no looking at your cell phone.

Even my numerical methods class final was in a computer lab with the professor and TA watching us. Do whatever you want with that base installation of MATLAB, no opening the web browser. No LLMs need apply since only the final exam doc and MATLAB are allowed to be open on that computer. Using the meagerest mental faculties, I memorized the few solution methods they taught me and performed them under my professor's watchful eye. I don't see why now that doesn't equally work. I could have tried to cheat and opened the web browser to Google answers. But I didn't and couldn't given the monitoring. LLMs are not beyond Google in this respect.

Reading this thread I see more a problem in instructor will and discipline than LLMs. In class, no cellphones, no laptops, write down your answers tests. Problem fucking solved, like they were for me 20ish years ago.

No electronics other than sometimes a scientific calculator. No graphing calculators since they can be programmed with the relevant formulae; including fake screens that say all memory has been just now wiped.

Hot take: calculators are for experimental physics exams. In mathematics, they should not be required. If the exam is about multiplying five digit integers, then a calculator would defeat the purpose of the task. If the exam is about integration, then you can easily make sure that there will not be a lot of five digit integers to multiply.

Granted, some math classes are mostly to enable students to use calculators for their science classes. So sure, if the point is to learn to calculate logarithms with a calculator, you require a calculator -- no point in having students learn to use a slide rule. Likewise, for basic probability theory, a calculator will make a lot more practical applications accessible.

For my last two years of high school, Texas Instruments had somehow convinced my school board that their graphic calculators were great and educational. Our final tests featured tasks such as "determine the approximate root of this function with the graphical calculator". We did not cover a lot of math in these two years. I like to hope that graphical calculators are not a thing any more (a smartphone can do anything such a calculator can do, but much better), but if they still are, I would implore any school board deluded enough to think they would help teach math to at least make it a priority that the devices they mandate come with a decent programming language (LISP, Python, Haskell, Perl, whatever) so that kids do not have to waste two years programming in TI BASIC instead of paying attention to class.

I agree wholeheartedly with your comment if the assessment is at that undergraduate level. Any knowledge, of, say a work they should have read should be available to them via their brains. At most allow outlines.

When the assignment is research -based it's more difficult. In the days of which you speak, and before (e.g. in my day) to do research you went physically to the library and looked through the damn card catalog and microfiche, and the achingly slow interlibrary loan system. Even ten years ago for research you were online trolling through Google Scholar. The worst you had to fear was if a student plagiarized some other essayist, and thus sites like Turnitin.com sprouted up.

Now to let a student online is to risk them simply composing a prompt and asking their Chatbot to do literally everything.

I am currently editing a conference proceedings. Out of the 20 or so submissions, around four clearly used an LLM to create chunks of text and all the references. Sorry to say this is still easily detected--xxxx instead of DOI information information in citations, for example. t's shocking because these are either Masters level or in one case a doctoral candidate. They don't even bother reading through what they're submitting, it sometimes seems.

It wouldn’t eliminate the problem, but the proctored exams could filter out many of the people who wouldn’t be able to hack it but for cheating.

Or maybe even force them to learn how not to cheat.

That’s obviously a much real problem than what the article is complaining about. But I can’t help myself from thinking that it might be good if this leads to the destruction of the extremely time consuming rituals around academic publishing. So much word salad academese jargon. LLMs are clearly extremely good at transforming relatively simple sentences into correctly worded monstrosities so none of that can act as a smartness proxy anymore. So maybe real humans writing clearly and to the point will make a comeback?

Oh, believe me I wish it could be so. I am very anti-jargon. But jargon has a way of cropping up everywhere. Even here.

Ah, I vaguely remember that!

If you're keeping notes / a running version, it'd be interesting to see an update at the end of this year or so and see you reflect on what changed in the political slang discourse.

I was a PhD student heavily involved in TAing at a US university until a few years ago, and I could see the in-class assessment solution getting beaten out of us in real time. It started with greater and greater fractions of students demanding special arrangements (extra time, open-notes, retries (with new questions that we had to design) if they didn't like the outcome) with the backing of the disability office, and culminated around the COVID years with students sending us open letters with change.org petitions attached to them about how [blob of slick therapy-speak] meant that in-person exams were discriminatory and inequitable. I recall a multiple-evening all-hands emergency session where the TAs helped our beleaguered principal instructor thread the needle and craft a response that minimised the likelihood of him getting dragged through the town square following the spirit of the times, and around then the remaining holdouts I knew of gave up and switched to homework-only scoring. Many academics, especially at the high-profile US schools, like teaching; few of them like it so much that they would jeopardise their research career to take a stand on how it is done.

I find all of what those kids did so distasteful. It’s weaponized empathy. Sorry but being able to handle stress is part of the test. Learning disabilities suck but so too does having a lower IQ. Life isn’t fair. Why is cosmic fairness the standard?

The disabilities weren’t real, and everyone knew it. It’s pure gpa minmaxing.

Even before ChatGPT many humanities students were super-lazy and didn't bother to do even a very dumbed down amount of work. Nor were they prepared to put even a mild effort into pretending they'd done so. If they ask you to read a huge amount of text, you can just read some of it looking for a question based on that info to ask, ask the question and it'll seem like you've done the reading. But there were many who couldn't even be bothered with that, even when the lecturer tacitly encouraged us to do it.

It was quite awkward when someone from outside uni came in as a guest teacher and expected students to actually do significant amounts of reading for a course.

People go to university as a cultural ritual, I only really learned anything from one unusually hard course.

If they ask you to read a huge amount of text, you can just read some of it looking for a question based on that info to ask, ask the question and it'll seem like you've done the reading. ... the lecturer tacitly encouraged us to do it.

That's a skill too and that's the intended way of completing the assignment. Hardcore skimming will help you a lot later in life.

It's not and it won't.

It's one of the many really poor habits that formal education engrains in you.

With all due respect, I think you're being quite Panglossian about the education you received.

As someone who totally picked up this habit from my education, totally agree with you. I almost always learned tremendously more when I actually got myself to read the whole thing, except when it was badly written, and often it unfortunately was. I really hate the justification of poor educational practices with "corporate life also sucks, this prepares you for it". You don't need to pay for a degree to teach you basic life hacks. You can pick up the ability to realize a text is not important and skim through it in a couple weeks into any corporate job. The college degree was supposed to teach you to read deeply with high quality sources.

I wonder how many billions of dollars (and how many lives) have been lost due to a "eh, I skimmed it and got the gist" approach to analysis fostered by forcing students to read large quantities of horribly overwritten, low content academic work.

It is and it does

Look, if I was suddenly able to rewrite federal laws- universities accepting federal funds(including for loans) would be allowed to house students in conditions no better than those junior enlisted in the army experience(food would have to be absolutely identical down to coming in boxes labeled 'not suitable for prison use'). All classes with writing components would require in-class handwritten essays, and if the professor can't read your writing too damn bad(I say this as someone who would, probably, have failed out of middle school without accommodations for my terrible handwriting). Federal student loans have to go through underwriting and the underwriter can cut you off at any time. Everyone involved is exempted from federal antidiscrimination laws, and all jobs connected to the diversity industrial complex are now ended, with the people involved permanently barred from any work in the education system other than janitorial.

But that's not happening. Any solution which doesn't allow the vast majority of women to get college degrees in partial literacy and not fucking up too too bad isn't going to happen. This is a dumb societal waste of resources but it's not going anywhere- and I don't see how letting them have artificial stupidity write their essays in whatever retarded nonsense we're pretending is a course of study for them hurts anyone but themselves. Indeed, it's probably a societal net positive to have them waste less effort on this crap.

food would have to be absolutely identical down to coming in boxes labeled 'not suitable for prison’

Apparently tons of people have seen these yet there’s zero pictures of them on the internet. A ton of those same military folks say it’s because if food might have bones the prisons don’t want to take a chance on it.

Look, if I was suddenly able to rewrite federal laws- universities accepting federal funds(including for loans) would be allowed to house students in conditions no better than those junior enlisted in the army experience(food would have to be absolutely identical down to coming in boxes labeled 'not suitable for prison use').

US navy nuke school has single dorm rooms. So does Sandhurst. It looks like the bits of the military that do academically rigorous training appreciate that students need more creature comforts than soldiers in boot camp. Per @pbmonster below, in (American) boot camp the cruelty is the point - the drills perform sadism deliberately, they weren't all born that way.

Infantry privates don’t sleep in barracks on base either, not in the U.S. military. They live in dorms that aren’t as nice as on college campuses but are pretty similar to conditions for 90’s dorm rooms.

I have a hunch for the Navy Nukes it's less about creature comforts, and more about ensuring they can have undisturbed rest and privacy for better studying.

Absolutely - and the same should apply for the new austere Harvard for the same reasons.

would be allowed to house students in conditions no better than those junior enlisted in the army experience(food would have to be absolutely identical down to coming in boxes labeled 'not suitable for prison use')

Why? Is the cruelty actually the point this time? Because I see absolutely no gain here.

Palatable meals (produced at scale at a stable location) are not expensive, especially not when compared to education. Barracks bunk beds might benefit unit cohesion, instill obedience/submission and be easier to supervise/police, but that's far less necessary for the next generation of academics, and the trade-off in privacy and independence is absolutely not worth the price difference.

I'd go the other way. Kill mandatory "all-you-can-eat" meal plans (also makes the "freshman twenty" less of a thing) and mandatory on-campus dorm life. Have private businesses operate the dorms and cafeterias (plural, they need to compete) and let students live off-campus the moment they want.

And if you want to safe money, start cutting at the admin building.

Because college has turned into a four year vacation to get a certificate of completion at taxpayer expense, not an institute of higher learning. The goal here is to drive out people who just want taxpayer backed loans to be taken care of while doing nothing productive.

Privates in the army don’t live in conditions that are that bad anyways- I’ll flip the question on you, why do college kids need the one star resorts they live in?

hurts anyone but themselves.

Well it doesnt hurt them at all, otherwise it wouldn't be cheating. The injured parties are non-cheating competitors (although good luck finding one in these majors methinks), and society, which is ostensibly being tricked into thinking they are looking at a slip of paper that shows this woman can do a lot of mind numbing gruntwork, but in fact just scrolls tictok all day.

Well it doesnt hurt them at all, otherwise it wouldn't be cheating.

??? It's completely possible to cheat ineffectively and harm yourself in the process. Just look at exercising: you can use bad form to inflate your numbers, but that increases injury risk and decreases gains. It both hurts them and is cheating. Is the same true of academic dishonesty? Maybe.

I’ve always found it amazing just how out of touch the intellectuals in university are about what their institution actually means for students. To be blunt, college hasn’t been about education for a very long time, and it strikes me as hilarious that anyone who attended one writes these sorts of handwringing articles bemoaning the decline of education in college. 99% of students who were ever in university (perhaps with the exception of tge leisure class) have ever gone to college seeking the education for the sake of education. For most of us, it’s about getting job skills, getting a diploma, padding a resume, etc. if learning happens on the side, fine, but most people are looking at college as a diploma that will hopefully unlock the gates to a good paying job.

In the 1990s kids were caught cheating, and many before computers outsourced those slop essays to grad students or upperclassman. Every kids knows how to find old exams and cajole the exam topics out of the TA. Which is to say, except for this being done with LLM bots, it’s not even unusual. And civilization has not fallen because students cheat on tests. Mostly because the things tge students are cheating on — slop writing assignments in non major classes and generally covering topics that most people would only use on Jeopardy— it doesn’t matter if they know it or master it. History, sociology, psychology, X studies, and philosophy can certainly be interesting classes. But I don’t think most of them are valuable to most people, so again, the cheating not only isn’t harming them, but it’s beneficial, both because they’re saving time so they can focus on the courses that matter, but because they’re getting hands on experience using a technology that will be more important to their future than whatever essay they’re not writing on their own.

Of course the professors of these courses tend to have exaggerated notions of their importance and the importance of the subject matter they are teaching, not just for the current crop of twenty year olds who are forced into their classrooms by the college itself, but to the world at large. I enjoy philosophy and history. I like reading about it, thinking about it, and so on. But I also understand that unless you’re going to work in a university teaching the subject to students and writing research papers about it, it’s not going to be valuable for the students. They love to bemoan the decline of students, that they don’t read the material, or they use chatbots or they scroll during class time. But they don’t ever ask why it’s happening to them and not in engineering classes or CS classes.

I’ve always found it amazing just how out of touch the intellectuals in university are about what their institution actually means for students. To be blunt, college hasn’t been about education for a very long time, and it strikes me as hilarious that anyone who attended one writes these sorts of handwringing articles bemoaning the decline of education in college. 99% of students who were ever in university (perhaps with the exception of tge leisure class) have ever gone to college seeking the education for the sake of education. For most of us, it’s about getting job skills, getting a diploma, padding a resume, etc. if learning happens on the side, fine, but most people are looking at college as a diploma that will hopefully unlock the gates to a good paying job.

I would think these kind of essays, which a genre older than I am, are defensive in nature. Lets be honest, the more an institution is a skinsuit, the more defensive it is going to be of itself. If Harvard was a bunch of white boys from Boston's upper class playing squash for bragging rights against Yale and their rich New Yorkers they would feel no reason to pen such an essay. But since universities have been transformed into giant apparatuses whose purpose is hoovering up federal funding, they will be very defensive.

o be blunt, college hasn’t been about education for a very long time, and it strikes me as hilarious that anyone who attended one writes these sorts of handwringing articles bemoaning the decline of education in college. 99% of students who were ever in university (perhaps with the exception of tge leisure class) have ever gone to college seeking the education for the sake of education. For most of us, it’s about getting job skills, getting a diploma, padding a resume, etc.

These people don't believe that. They're simply using a very different definition of 'education' than you are, one centering around having appropriate credentials rather than knowing things/how to do things. This isn't totally new, either- much as grievance studies are particularly blatant, lots of psych and ed research is just polished turds too, and the people getting these degrees don't really seem to care. Like the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy says about itself- well then reality is the one that's got it wrong.

I don’t think most of them are valuable to most people

Not vastly in a purely economic sense, but personally I think the way I interact with information, ideas and the world generally is incomparably better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism. Maybe it isn't the most rational use of national resources, but either way I think it's still one of the developed world's greatest achievements that so many people get the opportunity to have their internal world enriched forever, even if a lot of them don't take it up when they're there.

better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism.

As someone who majored in engineering, I've come across a few largely-self-taught coworkers. Some of them are quite talented, but most seem to have more trouble than the degreed folks when we get into the deeper parts of the subject that aren't quite as fun to study (linear algebra, complex analysis, there is probably part of this in any field). I think there is real value to an engineering curriculum that makes us study the useful but un-fun parts that puts tools in the tool belt to solve real-world problems.

I've seen analogous outcomes from home-school students that were allowed to focus near-exclusively on their interests, and, even while otherwise bright, can't have a coherent conversation about some reasonably-part-of-the-curriculum topics -- for example, "the Spanish-American war and its consequences".

While homeschooling had wide variances, I genuinely wonder how many public school educated kids could hold a coherent conversation about the Spanish American war.

Good question. But it's at least part of the formal curriculum for AP US History, so the answer is hopefully nonzero even if some have forgotten since.

There is some advantage to knowing what (shared) curriculum can be pointed to. Even here, we have a somewhat understood corpus of "things I can refer to and expect readers to understand", but there is always some context dependence.

I definitely remember being taught about the Spanish American war, but I think most of my classmates, if asked today, would say something like ‘well, Cuba attacked Maine, so we had to go to war’ on the high end of historical knowledge. There’s only so much class time to go around, especially when a full 70% of it has to be dedicated to the civil war/slavery and WWII/the Holocaust.

Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like if universities were actually calibrated for that purpose.

writing indigenous studies slop essays

If you are at an elite-ish university like Columbia and you are writing 'slop' essays that is almost certainly entirely your own fault, or at least a failure in your own imagination. Even in the most modish areas the questions they are grappling with are almost always interesting and important, even if one disagrees with the way those questions are presented and the assumptions within them (incidentally, there is nothing examiners love more, no matter their outlook, than answers which 'interrogate' the question set). I doubt there is a single humanities essay/coursework/examination question at Columbia to which an intelligent and engaged student could not engage with in an enriching and interesting way.

If a student wrote a "based" indigenous studies essay, would that help them pass the class to get the degree they're paying two hundred thousand dollars for?

Of course, there's the opportunity to write and think about things that aren't either kind of slop. But I'm very skeptical that equal standards would be applied. Though I would say it's unlikely for any student to actually flunk out of Columbia for the content of their essays (or the quality of them, or anything really).

It’s not hard to find very intelligent right wingers that went to Ivy League schools recently enough for this to be a concern. They do not, generally, express things in a maximally based way- they use more nuanced phrasing to express a broader point.

Even today, bright right-leaning politicians come out of left-wing institutions. Vance graduated from Yale Law in 2013, and multiple Republican-appointed SCOTUS and other justices have come out of Harvard.

I think the academics would consider a "based" take (I'm assuming you mean yeschad.jpg to colonization) to be a very facile response to an actually hard topic. A better response might be to examine the incoherence of the progressive views on the subject: "Can well-meaning maybe-benevolent (government) intervention improve lives? The Spanish missionaries in the New World certainly thought they were doing so, and there are some 'based' examples of them ending human sacrifice, for example."

Though I would say it's unlikely for any student to actually flunk out of Columbia for the content of their essays

Making an organised group of wokestupid shrieking harpies mad enough at you is probably the least unlikely way to flunk out of an Ivy League university nowadays. But in general selective universities don't flunk people for academic underperformance - they give them a grade (2:2 at selective British institutions, as far as I can see a 3.9 GPA at a top US non-engineering university is now a concealed fail) that signals to any employer paying attention not to hire this guy for cognitive ability.

Honestly, I think the article does itself a disservice by not breaking the problem down into the two major but separate issues, detailed below. Instead it bounces between the two in an effort to provide an engaging article, but it's very important to realize that these two problems are largely separable problems. They both involve AI, but that's the extent of the overlap.

Problem One: Scientific research clearly indicates that the difficulty and engagement with a task is directly proportional to learning. The neuroscience points out that different parts of the brain are activated when asked to perform "recall" instead of mere "recognition." Unfortunately many students are unable to recognize the difference! Recall is something like: "tell me something about this" and you work from scratch, recognition might be a looking at your notes or a nice summary and going "oh yeah that makes sense", or answering a multiple-choice question where you have plenty of cues to work with. Some have even argued that it's possible to create in-class notes that are too good at their purpose, thus "offloading" the work to an external knowledge storage device, in a sense. The key point however is this: not only is recall far more potent than recognition in terms of how likely the information is to make it into long-term memory in the first place, it's also worth stating that the more connections that are made during the learning process, the more likely the brain is to be able to retrieve that information from long-term memory as well.

ChatGPT in its most common use case, entirely "short-circuits" this process, depriving a student from forming connections, and developing a kind of "base knowledge" that could be helpful on less foundational topics later. This does not necessarily have to be the case - a good prompter might use ChatGPT to self-quiz, or ask smart follow-up questions, or give deeper explanations that trigger more connections (ignoring hallucinations for now). I think this kind of advanced usage is a small minority of college users, though. In short, this is the most serious problem for AI in college.

Problem Two: How important are essays, anyways? We can't really escape the classic "calculator problem": remember plaintively asking your math teachers why you needed to learn this if a calculator or graphing software could do it just fine? Obviously that's a complicated question, and this one is too; a certain level of familiarity with numbers and how they work is critical if you go into any kind of later applied math, not knowing your times tables can cripple the ability to engage with algebra, but frankly there were absolutely some questions that were designed to be deliberately difficult rather than to emulate any kind of real-world situation. So, essays. What good is an essay? Honestly I think the evidence has always been a little hand-wavy and weak for essays. Not only did virtually all humanities professors go way overboard on being strict about formatting in a misguided attempt to help students (I've seen some horror stories where well-written essays get absolutely demolished due to stupid rules like "you must exactly rephrase your thesis at the start of the conclusion") but it's hard to see if the act of writing essays noticeably improves vague notions like "thinking critically". Now, I might be behind the times on this particular area of research (if it even meaningfully exists), but it has always seemed to me that essays were more crude attempts at prompting students to do plenty of recall via independent research and synthesis. Thus increasing learning. But this was always an artifact of how difficult the task of assembling an essay from scratch is, something clearly no longer difficult with AI.

Thus, the essay must die. Perhaps professors should ask for a wider variety of writing formats, more applicable to life. Perhaps the standards should shift to the end-result of the writing - is it enjoyable to read and factual and the right length/complexity? Perhaps live or oral assessments should be more prominent. Or maybe professors should focus on teaching smaller and more broadly useful writing tips, about the writing itself, or even consider teaching tips about how to best prompt an AI for assembling a piece of writing. Is there any evidence writing essays actually increases the capacity or ability to wield "critical thought"? I say no, if you want to teach critical thinking, you might as well attempt to do so directly and not default to weak proxies like essays.

What good is an essay?

When you wanted to explain an idea you had to people you don't know, you sat down and wrote this essay. Maybe that's the joke, but in all seriousness, this is the good of an essay. It's a way of conveying your thoughts in a timeless and self-contained fashion.

They are also a way of helping yourself think. Have you read Paul Graham on essays? https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

Unless you are defining essays very strictly as 'five part theses of twenty pages as written by humanities students'. I am quite prepared to believe that essay writing is taught badly.

Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time.

The credentialist thesis is that the function of college in society is to demonstrate the ability of a person to perservere doing boring work and run to completion a program that requires multiple years of effort. Both of which are important capacities for an employee.

I recall that psychometrics can't find a way to measure someone's industriousness and ability to perservere doing hard work except by asking them, or by actually observing their behavior over a long period of time. We don't have a "hard-worker" test the way we have an IQ test. So college operates as the best thing we have to attest to a person's capacity for sustained effort, and it throws in an IQ-loaded element and the ability for young people with little experience to make connections with people who have lots of knowledge or experience in a specific field.

and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution

I disagree; I think uprooting and firing 90%+ of the current academic apparatus (it won't be economically viable to sustain them with 1/10th of the current enrollment rate) is very much a revolutionary idea, in the political sense.

Is that reform needed, considering how much money the education-managerial complex costs society? Sure, but as far as what it's going to actually give way to is completely unknown especially considering what demographic a complete collapse of that as a job will disproportionately affect (it might legitimately still be better for the young if the child sacrifice is permitted to continue).

None of the journos or the academics quoted in the article can bring themselves to question if these young adults should even be in the university

Indeed- it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.

what demographic a complete collapse of that as a job will disproportionately affect

Women?

I'm not being obtuse. That's the best I can come up with. What's wrong with a worse job market for women with no specific skills? It's probably better for society on the whole.

It's probably better for society on the whole.

Why, exactly? I've read you making these sorts of statements before, where you suggest that educating women is a mistake. Frankly, it baffles me, as it seems such a broad generalization that does not account for the multitudes of contexts women face, where typically your posts are very well-thought-out and articulated. Now i't possible you've thought this out as well, but I'm not getting the line of reasoning here.

Possibilities: It's not that you don't want women working jobs or getting educated. You want them well-educated and able to do jobs well, and jobs that they are capable of doing. (What that looks like to you I am not sure and I don't want to put words in your keyboard.) Or maybe you think women shouldn't be working at all but staying home, raising kids, taking care of hearth and home. Surely not all women can/will do this, though--what about an unmarried nulliparous woman of 40? Or any number of women who do not fit into that box?

I'm just making things up now, though.

I actually wrote a long comment with my reasons for holding a similar opinion before: https://www.themotte.org/post/970/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-21/206072?context=8#context

edit: I have just realized this comment was a response to you actually

Women who aren’t passionate about some specific field of study or career in a for real way should just get married and have babies instead of worrying about pretending to care about a career field.

Obviously I’m not talking about nurses here, or even teachers. That cat is out of the bag. But there is a massive proliferation of pink collar jobs in modern western societies which just don’t do anything except 1) raise the female employment rate and 2) generate more bullshit for everyone else to process. We shouldn’t have more administrators than we did back in the days before copying machines and all that.

And a high female employment rate has externalities- industrial societies work much better when men have, on average, much better economic opportunities than women, because it drives up the marriage rate. In the US you can see this in towns built around the military and extractive industry, particularly the former where soldiers are directly economically incentivized to just buy the ring already. I think we can fairly point to behavioral issues with unmarried women as well, such as high rates of debt and getting way too into social justice.

None of this is blaming individual women for going to college and getting a job. She’s gotta eat, 18 year old girls are kinda impressionable, yachta yachta yachta. But the mentality of society overall on the issue is not healthy- housewives should be higher status than girlbosses, and a lot of both the degrees and the careers involved are, at best, a waste of resources. Bachelors in psychology in America really don’t involve much actual learning.

The reason housewives aren't higher status is because they have no money and they do unpaid work. They have no independent ability to take care of themselves and make life decisions either, and are financially dependent on someone else. Unless that changes (due to AGI/UBI), things will remain the same.

Women being associated with very high status men causes them to gain in status, though. There’s clearly a parallel status ladder.

In Japan motherhood is still revered, and many girls see it as a definite goal, though the having-it-all delusion seems to have a certain foothold here as well. I appreciate your response in any case. Arguably many males also work absolute bullshit jobs as well. More to say but I gotta sleep.

No, it’s bad because it takes women out of the home and pushes them into the workforce.

Did you read my post? I said a worse job market for women.

Yeah my mistake.

A worse job market for women does just the opposite.

ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams

Copying this from a post I made a few weeks ago: I had a college history class (ancient near eastern history from the earliest written history up to about the time of Alexander the Great) where all our exams were essays that had to be written in the school's testing center within a time limit. Sucked majorly but I learned more in that class than any other. For the essay we were given a prompt as well as a list of historical ideas, people, events, etc. that we had to tie into our essay in an intelligible way (or rather we had to tie a significant amount of them, something like 80%, into our essay).

This was the most I learned in any college course ever. If all my classes had been like this college would have been a lot fewer video games and a lot more studying (or I would have have flunked out) but college would be much closer to its intended purpose of teaching people. Instead of the 4 year state and parent subsidized booze drug and sex fest it currently is.

This is how engineering, science, and law are already tested at all decent universities. It's only the humanities that don't grade this way.

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