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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10207 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.

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.

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.

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