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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10938 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.

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.

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.

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