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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11643 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 @Pasha said I think the classic Anglo humanities model where you do essays at home for practice (but which count nothing toward your final grade) and then have a combination of (hand)written exams in class and an oral exam seems like the best. That was true even before AI, but it’s especially true now.

In this case there is really no real to use AI to do homework since it doesn’t affect your grade and is pointless as a learning tool (which is not to say AI can’t be a useful learning tool, but ‘write 1200 words on x that I will never read but will email to the TA’ isn’t it).

The Oxbridge tutorial system where the students have to intelligently defend their work orally on a weekly basis wins again. Other places should just copy it, smh

Other places don't generally have the manpower to copy it, since Oxbridge tutorials/supervisions are one-on-1~3. US universities also already heavily rely on undergraduate TAs to keep up their scale, which is not allowed and would probably not be adequate in the Oxbridge model since a good supervisor needs to have more command of the material than a US TA checking against a grading rubric or drip-feeding model solutions.

Going from memory of how a friend described his Oxford classics education to me a while ago, amount of tutoring required per student sounded quite minimal actually. Mostly the students did a gargantuan amount of self-reading and the tutors were there to direct their efforts and thinking rather than do anything particularly time intensive.

Of course this obviously can't be replicated anywhere else except in the most top universities of each country (who already usually have their own separate traditions of elite education) because you need a very impressive student body to sustain this.

It is still one hour per group and week, plus whatever time you need for preparation (tutors do set and grade homework, to anchor the session and give the student feedback). For a large class this amounts to several full-time staff - and you also need a lot of small rooms, which tend to be scarce at universities. (Some supervisions wind up being held at random locations like local coffeeshops, or in the supervisor's private accommodation!)

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