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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8527 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.

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.

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

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