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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10935 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.

As I've mentioned previously, I'm at a Finnish university right now, doing a new degree (PolSci) since the future in translation is, well, uncertain, and I'm seeing a potential niche in the "political implications of AI" field that could be potentially seized upon.

Since I already have a lot of old studies I've been able to take in to the new degree as credit transfers and since I no longer get subsidies and student loans I have to work while studying, so I haven't taken a lot of "actual" courses. What few I have had seem to be at some sort of a paradigm shift point regarding AI where it's still uncertain how it should be handled; mainly, I've taken two courses of Russian, and it seems to be taken as granted that the students will use AI to look up Russian words and their forms, but there's still a "preferably don't do this, and if you do, at least tell me" instruction for longer tasks. In any case, the Russian courses were pass/fail and otherwise the professors generally indicated that coursework isn't that important and would mostly count for edge cases regarding grading.

The book exams are done at a student's leisure by booking a room at a special exam class without phone and with computers that basically only allow the specific exam software to run and are done as essay questions, which is good compared to the old pen-and-paper exams, since my handwriting is atrocious.

I wonder if AI will make us all polyglots because it’s an incredibly useful tool of language learning or eliminate any learning altogether because it’s also really good at translating. Or perhaps it does both at the same time simultaneously so we have a bunch of conscious smart learners mastering new languages in 6 months and everyone else loses any motivation at all because any digital content they ever encounter is instantly perfectly translated (desire to access broader internet/gaming/tv shows was the reason I got good at English as a teenager, school instruction was useless)

It might do exactly that, yes. Language learning becomes a niche specialist skill, maybe Finns now in elementary school will wonder how the younger generations don't even know any English the same way Millennials wonder how the Zoomers can't even use computers properly.

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