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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10148 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.

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.

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