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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16207 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.

I have a hobby of listening to university lecture courses off youtube or whatever a few times a year. I try to keep up with the reading as I listen to each lecture. When I've talked about this with people, they've often asked if I really get anything out of it. And, having attended classes at some similar schools, I can say: compared to the students in the class, I'd probably be in about the middle third. Obviously there are advantages to in person attendance, there are advantages to being able to ask questions, there are advantages to talking about it with my classmates, etc. But even at a top school, the bottom third of students on any given day didn't (really) do the reading, or they are hungover, or they are worried about something else, and they never participate in class or talk to other students about the material. I don't "go to class" until all those things are good. The top third are at least doing the reading and chatting about it, maybe asking questions occasionally, maybe the best of them are going to office hours; I miss out on that. But I'm comfortably that I get about as much out of watching an old Yale lecture series on Ukrainian History as a mediocre student at Yale did in that year.

Now I might need to update that assessment. I might be a top 10% student just by doing the readings and paying attention.

Classes at elite universities have long abandoned the idea that they actually teach skills and knowledge, in favor of the idea that they pre-selected the best kids, made sure they could pass basic tests, and then certify them to other users (employers, professional organizations, other universities), and assume that graduates will have obtained the skills to learn whatever they need to learn later. This pre-selection effect is where you get comedy like dropping out of Stanford after the first day of classes, eventually it will simply be that you get accepted but don't go.

And there's a paradox at work here: at selective schools the student qualifications over time have gone nuclear, while the actual work done at the schools has cratered. The vast majority of my friends report that with their scores and qualifications of the time, they never would have gotten into their alma maters. (Though one can debate how standards behind the numbers have disappeared).

Classes at elite universities have long abandoned the idea that they actually teach skills and knowledge, in favor of the idea that they pre-selected the best kids, made sure they could pass basic tests, and then certify them to other users

There's an old quip about how the only way to flunk out of Harvard is to die of a heroin overdose. It's at least as old as the 90s. Google is crippled and won't show me.

What are some of your favorite classes? I'm interested in learning more.

Consider https://youtube.com/@mathmajor for undergrad-level (and math major focus, as it says on the tin) math. I've really only dug into two series there so far, but for the topic I'm already familiar with I'm not noticing any mistakes or omissions, and for the topic I'm only half-familiar with the exposition is clear enough that I'm improving.

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