Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

i stopped caring about "academic integrity" when i noticed not only were the TAs using LLMs to make assignments, but somehow my homework load went from 10-20 hours a week to 40-60 hours a week because not only the TA did not understood how much work a question takes anymore, but that now every coding assignment was loaded down with mandatory bullshit reports where you have to explain your code line by line and parameter by parameter.
when you tell people for at least a decade that college degrees are useless, grades are useless, the things they teach you are useless and the only thing higher education is good for is networking and social life, don't be surprised when people start focusing on those areas.

Is it bad that I find this somewhat comforting on a personal level?
I'm half-considering continuing my education mostly to get the STEM degree porky wants, but I worry I'm too stupid for it or won't be able to figure everything out before the test so even if I pass I won't be getting the As, the bare minimum to even have my job applications considered. But if so many people are cheating, then I'm not as inferior as I may think.

Something that is very annoying is that AI is being blamed for the problems that education under capitalism has been facing for decades. Poor reading comprehension has been an issue for decades. We have a system that not only teaches people to hate learning, but where everyone is too tired and time poor to learn, or even teach.
Fuck AI, but don't use technology as a scapegoat for systemic problems, it only amplifies what is already there.
- Technology has been ingrained to the system. Largely due to capitalism. School districts were sold on the idea that every kid needed a chromebook to learn, a decade+ later we are seeing the increase in technology in classrooms hasn't helped. Those additional devices and licenses to use their software aren't cheap and impact class sizes and # of staff that can be hired.

my friend described it as a logical endpoint of the commodification of education, which i think i agree with. degree being seen as simply a visa to the corporate world has been a problem since long before AI proliferation. of course students don't care and just want the piece of paper. the great failing of contemporary liberal education is that it totally fails to instil a love of learning (and often actually instils a dislike of it). undergrads are treated so poorly by institutions it's no surprise most of them usually end up in the mindset of "do as little work as possible, fuck this awful system".
- Said it before, but the porks view education as a problem to be solved. Just like how they view abundant housing, walkable, green cities and towns, and even a working class with the ability to do some consumer spending. This is totally alien to this pig-like society and they needed to solve it as fast as humanly possible.
  If I ever do a master's I have vowed to apply to foreign universities first and GTFO.
- the great failing of contemporary liberal education is that it totally fails to instil a love of learning (and often actually instils a dislike of i
  important to note this failing starts way before college, i think it would be unreasonable to expect universities to be able to fix this when school from 5-18 sucks so much shit in the vast majority of the country
  
  I forgot how much I loved learning, that I only was able to feel it again after almost a decade outside of school. I think the last time I remembered feeling the joys of learning was in 4th or 5th grade when there was a class on astronomy
  
  totally agree!
- I totally agree. I'm very glad that my education and the way I pursued it didn't completely erase my send of why I was learning (to more fully inhabit the world, to live a more examined life, etc etc), but I recognize that I was privileged to have that luxury. The total commodification of education is absolutely the default path forward in this society.

I ain't gonna read all that but some quotes are hilarious
When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
Lee explained to me that by showing the world AI could be used to cheat during a remote job interview, he had pushed the tech industry to evolve the same way AI was forcing higher education to evolve.
AI frontiersman pushing the envelope of technology by building the torment nexus

we can’t really imagine living without it.
It's been like a year or 2 of this shit being this accessible. Like common, Wtf.
- 20% of aware lifetime

I have a hypothesis that college can solve this problem by "inversing" lectures and homework.
edit: sounds like a lot of places do this already so that's cool.
Have your students watch lectures and do reading on their own time. Hell, they can ask ChatGPT to summarize it for them if "it's just a tool" and they want to use it! But everything that gets a grade should be done in class. You will write the essay by hand, you will do the math with no more powerful a calculator than a TI-83, you will give a presentation to show that you understand the material. Book is open, accommodations for special needs are available, and the teacher is here to help and give guidance and clarification, but internet connections are banned.
Buuuuut ~~American colleges would never do this because~~ ensuring that your graduates actually learn things was never the point.
- everything that gets a grade should be done in class
  I'm a language teacher at a European high school, and this is what we've been doing for almost three years now. All graded writing happens at school with limited internet access, and (almost) all verbal assessments are conversation based with no aids. Most subjects have also moved away from homework entirely.
  It takes up a lot of time that could be spent teaching, but I actually think it's more fair to the students than what we did before.
- You will write the essay by hand
  i would have failed out of highschool/college if i was forced to write everything by hand, i think i have some mild form of disgraphia or something like that but it takes me at least 10x as long to write something by hand as it does to type for me, not even just with how fast i can type compared to how i write but it's a fucking nightmare trying to collect my thoughts when im handwriting a paper. also if im making my handwriting actually legible for other people it takes even longer.
  
  Your accommodation is a typewriter
- You will write the essay by hand,
  oh fuck no. at least give me a selectric
- I think i generally agree with this, although this seems like it basically removes the need to actually look for sources yourself, which feels like it's an important thing to learn to do. That said i don't think i have a better idea so
  
  Ideally I think researching and critically evaluating your sources should be taught and reinforced well before college, but from what I've heard from my friends who went to high school in the States (I'm American but I lucked out in this regard) attending an American High School is like being one of the feral children in Logan's Run.
- I've had a few flipped classes and I've preferred the traditional method.
- My art degree (and AFAIK anywhere else you go) did this. You produce all of your work in class with extra time spent at home to finish (usually 2 hours per hour spent in class). Classes were 3~4 hours each session. It makes it impossible to commission someone else unless you have them also go to your classes for you.
  Also made it rough scheduling multiple studio classes each term. Usually 2 studio classes and 1 or 2 lectures. Every once in a while I'd put 3 studios all on the same days, which meant 12 hour "workdays," a day between to do any homework, but I got 4-day weekends each week with no homework. The real killer was finals where it was like 60 hours worth of projects between 3 classes in a single week, which is the main reason I didn't do this very often.
  Surprised more degree programs don't use this model. I think some of the performing arts do similar class setups along with medical degrees, but that's it.
- That was my immediate thought as well but that's assuming colleges even actually care lol
  Its been the joke that college is just a way to purchase a degree. Now it's literally that. The kids still gotta pay for it, which means for capital there's been zero change
- As someone who struggles with self-discipline for assignments at home I like this
  
  Same. All my classes where I got As were classes like this, or classes where they gave us all the homework at the top and I was able to essentially ignore the lecture and do the work at my own pace during class.
- My university does "flipped" lectures/homework for a lot of the engineering courses and yeah it's pretty dope a lot of the time, it's an efficient way to do things... but it also means some students just don't show up, and the professors tend not to like that (for a synchronous course).
  
  but it also means some students just don’t show up, and the professors tend not to like that
  TBH I hated when attendance was graded in college because I just did the course work instead of going to class most of the time. Engineering schools tend to have the worst teachers.
- Treating homework and quizzes as participation credit and only grading tests is fairly common in US universities. Probably a minority, but still common.
- I had a professor that tried this and didn't work out. To be fair though, one of the issues I had was that it was the only class structured like this so it made it a pain when taking 5 other courses alongside this inverted course
- Buuuuut American colleges would never do this because ensuring that your graduates actually learn things was never the point.
  It starts earlier. What you described is not possible because the system in both collegiate levels and in K-12 has been shrinking educator labor rather than expanding it.
- Flipped classrooms are good and some of the best classes i've ever had were flipped.
- I probably can't write my name without a keyboard, not enough dexterity in the paws, but I agree with the calculators, in fact I'd say no calculators at all, if your test requires logarithms a log table should be provided.
  
  a log table should be provided.
  I did flight school with a slide rule twentyish years ago, so I would be at home with this.

Yeah, you can’t give students a done-at-home essay as an assessment any longer, that’s just asking for AI slop and setting the students up for failure. Students can’t be trusted to avoid the temptation of AI, even the good ones from time to time. Over the past couple of years I’ve had to completely rethink every assessment I give. Essays are useless now. In-class tests and exams are ok, but students struggle with these more than they did a few years ago as they are less practiced at thinking through the written word. In-class presentations work pretty well, if you have a few restrictions. Keeping the time limits short so they stay focused and do not use vague and verbose AI writing helps, limiting the amount of text in slides or number or slides or even just banning slides entirely can also help to reduce slop. But most importantly, have a lengthy question and answer period at the end. This is where the students will actually demonstrate their own understanding as they need to actually know the material themselves to get through even very simple questions. If a student only used AI to write a presentation script even “what did you think about the book?” is a tough question for them. Usually one of the students will try using AI but will very visibly crash and burn in front of the whole class during the Q&A. The public shaming that results usually serves as a good warning to the rest.
- only problem is that public speaking is a skill. kinda sucks to have your skill in public speaking affecting your grade in an unrelated subject.
  
  Any form of assessment has this issue regarding whichever medium happens to be employed. That why you generally need a few different types of assessments and not just one big one.
  
  Yeah and also the question is "what did you think of the book?" Is super subjective. "It was informative I guess? What part of the book do you want me to address?"

The actual problem every one of these articles is whinging about is that AI completely destroys the economy of scale of education. Which I frankly do not care about, schooling has been first on the austerity plan since the apex of the US empire. Larger class sizes, teaching how to pass standardized testing, lack of support for disability, lack of funding, hollowed out curricula, reliance on adjunct faculty, reliance on TA's, etc. This has all been a race to the bottom to make education as cheap as possible without a real regard for quality. Governments and administrators extracted as much labor as possible out of educators, they've thinned their ranks. Along comes this stupid little statistical parrot box and now these morons who have been making this system as fragile and shitty as possible while directing as much money to the top heavy administrators can reap what they've sown.
I care for the educators who will be squeezed to "do something about this", but as a society it's time to pony up or fail at social reproduction over and over again. Smaller class ratios more individualized instruction and assessment, higher standards of proof of work. If the outcome is more teachers, higher pay, and better students it will be good that AI killed these cheap, impersonal, mechanized forms of education.
Kids don't enjoy learning because we put them to work on themselves in a high stress educational assembly line. They're alienated from their own development. And who wouldn't be in a system where your entire first 18 years of life are just prepping you for a choice of how you're going to gamble in the job market? Statistically most of their parents haven't accumulated enough information to make a half way decent bet in that casino. Of course this is happening. This system rewards gambling and scamming your way through life.
Exactly, good education should create a willingness to learn and further ones education by its own merits. Not by scolding or “torturing” kids/YA into it. No, this does not mean there should be no discipline or “just doing what the kids want”.
- GOOD post
- Exactly, good education should create a willingness to learn and further ones education by its own merits. Not by scolding or “torturing” kids/YA into it. No, this does not mean there should be no discipline or "just doing what the kids want".
  Teachers in a capitalist system are there to reinforce that system, not create revolutionary free thinkers.

I think it was on this machine kills, but they talked about the rise of AI use is correlated to the fall of computer literacy. Specifically with big tech rise causing less visibility in how the products we use work and more reliance on ease of use. I think they talked about kids not even knowing how file systems work since everything is an app.
This can be solved when we bring back torrents
- oh god the thing where people don't know what files and folders are is so goddamn frustrating. motherfucker you should not need a youtube video showing you how to drag a file from an archive into a folder to mod a videogame.
  
  But if you've never done it before it isnt as intuitive. My first computer ran dos. If anything, I think in middle school they should start with a really simple os, something resembling the technology in its bare bones. Year after year, learn the systems increased complexity so the understanding of how a computer works is full to its current standard.
  You can't write a dissertation unless you know the alphabet.

Sorry to the teachers. But this is what the US deserves. Just an ouroboros of credential-seeking first-worlder faillchildren future-labor-aristocrats shooting their own brains out until every person working in a technical field in the US is a Russian immigrant.
Let the people defunding education reap what they sow. They'll keep their complacent and uncurious population, but it might have side-effects!

A friend of mine had her boyfriend go in and take an important test in her name when she was badly sick. No one cared or even noticed. College has always been fake. Its basically a paper saying you are wealthy and privileged enough to be hired by a Fortune 500. Lie as much as you can, fleece those shithole companies, say you have 50 degrees when you have none
- Yeah cheating was rampant when I was in school. I remember in my physics class there was a group who had access to each midterm and final exam and would cheat. They wouldn't share with anyone else and sure as shit weren't going to say how they got ahold of the tests. Most of us were irritated because A) we actually did the work of learning the material; B) everything was graded on curve.
  Professor was trying to figure out who they were, but you can't just accuse people of something that could get them expelled just because they got a 91% on a test.
  
  The same thing happened to me. Ironically I was foolish for not trying harder to be included in that "group". When I complained at home, I got the "oh you did it all by your self and didnt need to cheat, be proud of that!" - My own family believes that some magical force will "reward" pure intentions and so keep being "good workers". In the end the people that cheated graduated with honours and now earn more money than me. Life is rarely fair, until we make it so.

They really did it. They made the world worse.

Gotta wonder what is gonna happen to these people when ChatGPT shuts down after investors pull out to salvage what's left of their principal
- They still get diploma and connect, they would be just the most boring cogs imaginable
  
  No, I mean they've offloaded so much of their thinking onto this thing I genuinely think they will struggle to function
- ChatGPT is just one of many models. There's lots of other free commercial ones people can use like Claude and Gemini. But beyond that, people can now run AI locally and the really small but worse models (shorter memory, less training material) can run on lower end hardware. The genie is out of the bottle.
- I think the probable answer is it won't shut down. As more people depend on it more money will get thrown at it. It would be like the equivalent of the internet shutting down. Probably will get bailed out by the government

critical support to LLMs in the war on pointless bullshit homework

Makes sense, we're an empire in decline. American capital is stripping the copper out of the wires. Child labor is coming back. Slavery is coming back (and never really went away). For what purpose do you need an educated populace as a capitalist. AI being the last possible new market is way more important to them

Wild that Frank Herbert actually nailed the meta commentary of the Butlerian Jihad, the man was actually cooking with that premise
Of course this doesn't actually "unravel the entire academic project" simply unravels the concept of homework and online schooling

I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.
Turns out the Bible was the word of God handed down to man, it’s just that God is the AI bot running our simulation.
This says to me that our leadership is only going to get worse and worse. The meritocracy will be full of people with degrees from the right universities but with zero ability to think dynamically. Thus novel situations will be handled with AI slop only further exacerbating the “constantly trying to fight the last war” problem (metaphorically speaking).
- I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.
  it'd be pretty funny if it's just picking up on the fact the text is a mishmash from different authors writing for different purposes
  
  After seeing this I was curious so I took a chunk of fanfiction that I wrote myself, then had ChatGPT write a second chapter, fed both into it, and it was extremely inaccurate. It rated my chapter at 20% AI and the ChatGPT chapter at 40%, which is a bit of a correlation but both the false positive and false negative rates are way too high to use this tool for anything.

If your coursework can be solved by a plagiarism markov chain-ish machine that is more of an indictment of your course than the students.
- Eh I dunno about that, the plagiarism machine would probably also be good for, for example, undergrad math or compsci because the work is usually fairly simple but necessary to get into the deeper stuff. This kind of cheating on an industrial scale seems dangerous.
  
  I think it's probably pretty bad at both of those things when it comes to what should actually be evaluated, which is students' understanding of concepts, not just recall. If you ask for the complexity of some algorithm, an LLM will try to find some pattern that matches the kinds of answers it has already seen before. It might get the answer right because it has digested 100 examples like it before and matched the input to it. But if you ask students to actually explain their reasoning and walk through it step by step, and throw in a modification to the algorithm that impacts the answer, the LLM is likely to fail in some way.
  Though really, what should be graded is evaluations like tests. Homework should be for learning and practice, not a grade.
- i haven't done long division by hand in years but it was still important to learn how math works even though we all carry a calculator around.
  the basics are basic, extremely well understood, and covered in great detail, of course a stochastic parrot can regurgitate them.
  
  Yes, of course
- It's not actually being solved, an imitation of a solution is being presented. Kids using AI sludge is the same as if their parents did all their work for them. Changing the coursework to ensure their parents or machine sludge aren't doing it for them is going to turn schoolwork more and more into multiple choice exams with linear thinking.
  
  100%. By solved I really mean graded with a high score. Also, rampant cheating on homework is also basically the same as using an LLM. I have seen a very large number of college students share homrqork answers. But I don't think homework should be scored for a grade anyways. Homework should be for learning and for the teacher to know how well the class is going. If students understand this, that homework is a participation grade, and that the evaluations like tests are what determine grades, then cheating, LLMs, and getting parents' doing all the homework will be solely detrimental to grades, i.e. will no longer have any incentive. A win-win for pedagogy.
- The whole point is that A) the goal of school assignments isn't to get the right answer it's to learn to understand the surrounding concepts and how to get the right answer in a more generalizable way and B) the students aren't learning anything if its copy pasted from an AI. And C) frankly the LLM doesn't usually "solve" it. Its outputs are often easily distinguishable, poor answers, that just look good enough at first glance to hit submit.
  What about an LLM producing plausible output (the one thing it's built to do) in response to a prompt (the question/assignment) actually means the coursework is poorly designed?
  I genuinely want to know your thought process here. Is it just that teachers should be expected to outpace cheating technology or that you genuinely think anything that can convincingly be done by an LLM isn't worth having a human do it?
  Writing an essay on a topic is not just a way of assessing your knowledge of the topic, it's great practice for communicating your ideas in a coherent polished form in general. Just because an LLM can write something that sometimes passes for a human-written essay doesn't mean that essays are useless now...
  
  A) the goal of school assignments isn't to get the right answer it's to learn to understand the surrounding concepts and how to get the right answer in a more generalizable way
  where are you from this is not how schools operate in the US
  
  If homework and other at home assignments are graded (not just scored for learning), the teacher is already following bad practice. As you suggest, homework is for practice and learning. So it doesn't need to be graded, just scored so that students know what to improve on. It is evakuations like tests that should be graded. Tests aren't foolable by "AI" so long as they arw done in person.
  Also, as you mention, the better demonstration of learning is synthesis, to apply concepts in new situations (teaching is even better for demonstrating knowledge, but this is rarely evaluated). LLMs don't understand concepts, they are bad at any actual synthesis questions. They can merge vocabularies and patterns, ape narrative structures, etc, but are very bad at combining actual reasoning concepts. If a teacher's test grading (let's say it's online) is fooled by an LLM it is unlikely to be synthesis questions. More likely recall and patterns.

This sounds like they made up a young person to get mad at tbh. I don't think most students use AI to that extent.
In all honesty though, the whole way we teach needs to be overhauled. So much of these classes amounts to busywork and teaching stuff that isn't relevant. But the biggest problem of all are these classes are rushed and that results in students being dumped with a continuous stream of too much information, all of which they can't realistically remember in a short amount of time. That, and due to pressure on teachers to teach the entirety of a subject in a stupidly short amount of time, we are increasingly seeing teachers basically tell students to teach themselves.
If students do resort to chatgpt, which I think is rare, it's because the quality of teaching has gone down the tubes. Not the teachers fault, just the stupid way the whole thing is structured.
- This sounds like they made up a young person to get mad at tbh. I don't think most students use AI to that extent.
  you clearly haven't been in a school recently. they absolutely do lol.
  source: my sister teaches science to 10 year olds in an elementary school and has spent the last 3-4 years getting into arguments with parents about their child's clear use of ChatGPT for their science fair projects. One kid submitted a classic 'will the same amount of mentos & coke erupt higher than a baking soda & vinegar volcano?' project (mind you, this was one of the suggestions my sister gave to the class as a 'if you can't think of anything else, you can do something like this') and his hypothesis/conclusion/etc he'd printed out onto his poster board was literally shit like "The mixture of Baking Soda (NaHCO₃) + Vinegar (CH₃COOH) turns into CO₂ (gas) + Water + Sodium Acetate." and "Further testing could introduce a motorized volcano using a servo"
  What 10 year old knows what a servo is? What 10 year old is going to bother to look up the chemical formulas for shit like Baking Soda and then type it out like that? Maybe a very smart one - but my sister would give all of them the benefit of the doubt and let them get all the way to the actual science fair demonstrations & inevitably every time they'd be like "um...uh..." when asked any questions about their project/presentation that weren't already answered via their print outs glued to their boards.
  And what's sad is that half the parents she's confronted over the last few years about this have been like "oh, yeah I told Jimmy to just use ChatGPT to help them with their project what's the issue?"
  I have a few friends who are middle/high school teachers as well and they've all reported the same shit in the last 3-4 years. Students submitting homework that still has the "Okay, here's a better version of what you're asking" prompt responses pasted in the middle of a paragraph, etc etc.
  There is no way that it isn't a rampant issue in colleges/universities, especially given how much graded classwork outside of tests are usually submitted online.
  
  Oh, that sucks.
  Maybe it's a problem with younger people, I'm a mature student at University and most of my peers express disgust towards AI for the environmental toll. Mind you I am doing an ecology degree so that might be why.
  I have had professors encourage us to use AI though, which is weird.
  It is sad that parents are encouraging it too. No one has the time to parent their children, so no wonder.
- I'm a professor. They do
  
  oh no
- my sister said every single person in her undergrad is using it and you're just falling behind on doing menial assignments as efficiently if you don't
  
  That's why I tend to see this as a problem with how our system handles education. Either the tests are assignments are in fact menial or the professors aren't communicating their importance.

I used to work for a company that would write papers for students. A lot of them were like composition 101 level 500 word essays but I also did a few grad school assignments lol. Like I did a master's thesis in health admin, one in art history, and one in nursing education.
I guess I'm out of a job though since now chatgpt will do this for free
- I have a very good friend who totally ghostwrote the master's thesis of a Russian oligarch's failson when we were all in grad school. My friend and I were doing PhDs in topics pretty closely related to the failson's master's (my friend's dissertation topic was pretty much bang-on). The guy paid my friend a low four figures amount for him to do it; the topic was an obscure technical field, and the guy was clearly just getting the credential to pad his CV. This kind of thing has always been around--ChatGPT has just sort of democratized it.
  I'm honestly more worried about the increasing number of people who are using ChatGPT as a substitute for friends or soft skills. The people who are using it to do their essays probably wouldn't have written particularly scintillating essays even if they didn't have it (or would have found some other way to cheat). Lots and lots of ordinary people are using it as a socialization outlet, though, and we don't know what effect that's having.
  
  The people who are using it to do their essays probably wouldn't have written particularly scintillating essays
  tbf, i would imagine that most students weren't writing particularly scintillating essays anyway even before AI—almost all of my papers were started the night before they were due, and i only started my fucking masters thesis the week before it was due lmao, and i know a fair chunk of my year was similar (although maybe not to quite the same degree). i still scored well, because it was never about being considered or clever or what have you, it was about being able to sound like you understand the fundemental science and hitting the rubric. none of the essays were actually pleasant or insightful to read.
  hell it even applies before university; i went to a hardcore nerd school and they didn't teach us any of the material particularly hard, they went over that once, but then all the study sessions and exam prep and drills were about teaching us the mark scheme. thats what matters and an AI can probably do the same thing pretty easily if you set up properly.

Pour one out for all the adjuncts who have to read a thousand first year chatgpt papers
- They'll probably just get chatgpt to read and grade the papers for them
  We're so cooked lol

actual for real no-foolin' new dark age

yea i graduated just before the proliferation (although in my final year everyone was cheating in more old-school ways, as we were in online college due to covid). my sister is finishing her teaching undergrad currently and she says everyone uses it, you're just falling behind in efficiency with menial assignments (lesson plans, etc.) if you don't.
- she says everyone uses it, you’re just falling behind in efficiency with menial assignments (lesson plans, etc.) if you don’t.
  I went to an engineering school and in undergrad people who had the same opinion typically just did their assignments as a group and copied each other. The reality is that they didn't want to put in the 10 hours-ish a day that the job of being a student technically entails, each 4 credit course is supposed to be ~12-16 hours. a week. Some places it's longer/shorted depending on the school/curriculum. If you're taking a full semester which is typically 16 credits at many places, that's 48-64 hours a week.
  It's a lot of time. I feel for people who struggle with it because they have to work, I did as well, but a lot of kids just wanted to party.

Is there a certain segment of society that this applies to or is it widespread throughout? Because there must be some people who know this is bad right?
- I'm seeing a lot of normalization of this (and other bad things) in high schoolers. They weren't really paying attention to the wider world until a few years ago so anything older than a year or so has basically been around forever and doesn't need to be questioned. Some will learn to question it as they grow and mature, but few have really yet at their age.
  Basically they seem to take at face value that it produces worthwhile output and is useful and intelligent. tbf this applies to many adults too, but I hate the conflation of "parrots sometimes-relevant, sometimes-real material" with intelligence just because it sounds confident doing it, and I see it constantly
  
  Coincidentally every level of management at my job is totally in love with the concept of Ai, except for the 60 year old guy in charge of my tiny department. Although the higher levels of management are trying to convert him by sending him on various technical courses, all of which are trying to make him use AI, but the guy is to technologically incapable that he just gives up immediately. The big danger in my department is the 36 year old tech-enthusiast that recently got promoted to assistant manager (no idea what the actual title is, but he is the 2nd in command of our small 20 person office).
  
  Bleak.

It is literally everyone. I do not know a student that does not use AI. It is so hard to find the motivation to struggle through my work when I know my peers have it so much easier.
- do what you gotta do, but ultimately if you are in a position where you care at all about what you are learning and feel it is actually being taught, not just slop assignments shoveled your way for no reason, then IMO you will come out of it glad that you actually learned your field rather than becoming a middling prompt engineer
- i know i don't and i'm pretty sure a lot (most?) of the people i know don't either, but then again i don't think my degree has amazing job prospects (so it seems to be largely people interested it) and it also doesn't cost american sums of money, so maybe that doesn't say that much.

"No you can't use a calculator! You won't always have one in your pocket." ~ '90s math teachers.
- The critical thinking part is understanding why the answer became to be.
  It is still important to understand why the numbers worked out the way they did, so that in real life you have the ability to use them with math properly and get the correct answers. Even if in your real life situation, it's to just plug the equation into the calculator in the the proper way, to get a correct answer.
  The why is critical thinking

Wtf its only been useful to these schmucks for like two years