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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15116 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.

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.

What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

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.

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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