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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10081 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.

It's not "high quality" if professors are complaining left and right about your shitty slop. If it really were high quality then professors would be happy to get it. I for one would implement a policy of immediate expulsion of anyone who turns in blatant shameless AI slop without even trying to hide it.

From the article

caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

Seriously, just do the dang assignment. Kids are being programmed into using chatgpt for literally no reason. There is no possible way chatgpt can answer this question better than the student himself, while also saving time.

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.

The essay you write might not be all that important, but you signed up for it, and cheating is cheating. If you hate the class then take another one; nobody is forcing you to be there. And minmaxxxing your graduation requirements is one of the underrated skills you learn college that transfers to the real world.

If you really can't avoid one or two shitty classes, then just grin and bear it. Getting hazed by some bullshit class that everyone has to take is actually an important transformative experience. You need to learn grit.

never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises

Clearly you didn't like math and didn't give a shit about your calculus class beyond getting an A. But years of math education builds on itself, and if you'd better remember la hospital's rule and delta epsilon and shit if you ever want to take a more advanced math class.

Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time.

Some assignments feel like busy work, but you need 1000 hours of practice on something to get good at it. Why do I need to memorize any calculus formulas when I can just look at the book? Plug and chug 30x actually results in learning ironically enough.

ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams.

Coursework is where the learning happens, exams are just a test. With lazy kids these days, you need a stick to make them actually do it, or else they're gonna blow it all off until the end of the semester, try to cram, and bomb it hard.

Anyways doing coursework is a huge ass chesterton's fence right there. Sure, tear it down, and while you're at it, remove all the other classes and replace them with a single class AI literacy.

Getting hazed by some bullshit class that everyone has to take is actually an important transformative experience.

If this is the point of those classes, shouldn't progressives be forced to write about why capitalism is awesome, and racism (against non-whites) is good, actually? Why do you think certain people get to swim in a sea of affirmation for their creed?

I absolutely think they should be. Now, maybe it's not practical to check each student's individual political preferences and assign bespoke assignments for them on that basis (which could be gamed anyway). Rather, humanities-based courses should test students on their ability to defend a wide variety of different, highly offensive and ideally "dangerous" ideas in whatever topics are at hand, to stimulate actually learning how to think versus what to think.

Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever, without there being any sort of noticeable progress whatsoever. I just know that that was how I was educated, and it seemed to work for me and my classmates (but of course I'd think that, and so my belief that it seemed to work should count for approximately nothing), but even if it did, that doesn't mean that it's generalizable.

Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever

I'm not sure I buy it. "Teaching how to think" may have been a self-congratulatory justification for a while, but people in the past weren't that shy about teaching morals.

Not gonna lie, I do find the idea appealing, but these days I wonder if it's even possible. The whole idea just smells like the pretense of neutrality that liberals emanate, as long as they have ways of ensuring they will always win the argument.

I guess that's why most ethics classes always go back to trolley problems and dying violinists. Nobody really cares but you still have to defend a variety of viewpoints.

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