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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9453 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.

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).

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.

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