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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:
This is a not uncommon lament in current year.
This professor makes largely the same claims. https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
I've had a similar discussion with a professor at a local community college who sees it everyday.
There's some comfort in knowing to some degree this has been a forever problem On the Miseries of Teachers 1533, Philip Melanchthon.
This is so strange to read. Literally half my degree dropped out in our first year because of self-selection and mandatory credit requirements. This was treated as entirely normal and a good thing, as it is obviously a bad thing for people to waste their time and money on degrees they don't like/aren't capable of following.
I'm amazed that it could ever go any other way. Schools that get paid to give out degrees that open career doors have inherited a commons. The rare school that doesn't succumb to pressure to pass everyone is like the fisherman saying no, we've caught enough, while surrounded by competitors pulling fish out of the water by the ton.
I don't think it's a pure commons problem. In fact, I think it's probably just a problem that is inherent in their product, the means of monetization, and game theory of a two-sided market.
Their biggest product is the final credential. The awarded degree after a complete course of study1. But universities get paid on an annual basis. If universities could hold everything else constant, they would prefer that any given degree would take more years to complete, wringing out additional revenue from each successfully acquired customer2. Once a customer is acquired, they obviously want to retain them for as long as possible. If they could magically make the first three years of a program trivially easy, but make the fourth year so difficult that only high-quality students actually get the credential (maintaining their brand for employers), they would obviously love to do this.
...but it's a two-sided market and prospective students get to make choices, too. If they see a program with statistics such that they wring four years of tuition out of 99% of students, but only 20% survive year four and get the credential, they're gonna nope out of that. And since they can't actually just pass everyone (because that's likely to torch their credibility with employers), they have to get more sophisticated in their scheme.
The gov't requires that universities publish graduation rates, but they can hide a lot in unpublished data. This is probably what motivates the creation of "weed-out" courses. My guess is that the rest of the university's portfolio of degree offerings significantly affects when these courses happen. I took what was perhaps the most difficult STEM discipline in my undergrad uni, but they had shaped their first couple years such that they really could manage to put weed out courses in the junior year. I think this was only possible because they were confident that they could steer the vast majority of the failers into their other programs. First, they had these other programs, and they knew they were easier. Second, they already had you for three years of tuition, so they were riding high either way. They shaped their programs so that you could easily slide into one of the others while maybe only burning a semester or at most a year3. Thus, they set up the incentives so that a failer could either drop out entirely, wasting three years and a bunch of money, or agree to their suggestion to just slide into another program. If they can play this game right, they can hide this movement, preserve their stats, and get as much money as possible.
My guess is that programs that have a reasonable "fail down" pathway to other programs, but would require too much additional time (risking the stats) after conversion are likely to move their "weed-out" courses to earlier in the process (when it's less likely to burn as much time). My further guess would be that programs that have no reasonable "fail down" pathway probably just pass basically everyone (counting on employers to realize that those degrees are pretty worthless, but still trusting the signal of their other degrees).
That said, I did know at least one student who didn't get the hint, with barely passing grades. Once they persist past a certain point, then the incentives for the uni are absolutely to graduate them, and the best they can do is give them an atrocious GPA and hope that employers see that and don't hire them.
I imagine that smaller schools with a less expansive set of "fail down" options have to make somewhat different choices.
If you significantly buy a stronger version of signalling theory, there is a lens here in which large unis are primarily filtering/tracking products. On this theory, the actual course material is mostly window dressing; it's mostly a matter of just that some are more difficult and some are less difficult. Students come in, they get filtered down through the programs to their level of competence, and then the "major" on their credential basically tells employers how capable they are. It would be my dream if some economist got their hands on all this internal university data and made a model to test how much of this is real. Moreover, it would be really nifty if they could compare the quality of this filtering against things like just intake SAT or whatever.
This sort of model keeps employers happy, because they can ignore the bad degrees and hire from the good degrees; it keeps the uni's published stats up, because bad students still complete their trash-tier degrees; the only people who get screwed are the students who think they're going to get a valuable, high-tier degree, get thwacked by a weed-out course, then don't realize how the game works, succumb to the sunk cost fallacy thinking that they can still at least get a different degree, not really looking at how much more poor the employment prospects are. The cynical view would be that unis know that SAT is basically going to correlate with what programs the students get filtered down to, but they still 'over-admit' students purely for customer acquisition, trusting that they're likely to to be able to pull this one over on them.
1 - There could be reasons why this might be independent of the signalling v. educating debate. Also, I spent a little time thinking about how 'partial' products could be packaged, and it's kind of bleak at first glance.
2 - There are obviously limits to this, and it is probably a combination of historical, competition, and regulatory reasons for why almost all programs have converged on four years.
3 - Regulation is again important here. Unis generally have to publish statistics along the lines of what percentage of four-year-degree students graduate within six years, so they're happy to string them along for another year or so of tuition, so long as they get into another program and graduate before dinging the stats.
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The difference is that the pond is not shared. A disciplined institution will keep its elite status even if it doesn't make as much money in the short term.
The problem is that of producing management that has an interest in the long term instead of looting the existing status for short term gain.
The temptation is strong, but you'd think universities of all institutions would want to select for those kinds of people. I'm sure, say, pontifical universities don't have the same views on this matter as your local community college.
Why would you assume that? The administrator doesn’t have any long term benefit if the school is in good condition far off in the future but benefits greatly from short term boosted numbers.
Why do people make pro-social sacrifices?
People care (or at least used to care) about legacy. Your name immortalized as a small part of something larger, and possibly echoing in eternity. Either through your children, your people, your fellowship, what have you.
Of course now we're all clumps of cells trying to con the big machine we're stuck in to afford personal material comforts, so the argument that it's sacrilegious to despoil what you've been handed into care and break the chain is much harder to make.
Managerialism will be the death of Universities as institutions, that has seemed clear ever since it captured them. But maybe the endeavor will survive for those who didn't fully embrace this deathly mentality. You never know.
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