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Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

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Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/ydJJN

8 comments

  • I've been thinking a lot about this issue, obviously with high quality and cheap generative AI essay writing is meaningless for assessment, which is a shame because crafting an essay is an excellent exercise for thinking through a concept.

    In my undergrad I wrote a lot of essays but also had a lot of small group tutorials where our contribution contributed to our grade. In medical school assessment outside of examination was almost entirely based on interaction with professors and supervisors. I'm also aware of verbal examination where a professor effectively interrogates a student to assess their knowledge which I think in undergrad settings is mostly historical but could make a comeback, oral examination is used extensively in postgraduate medical training.

    For a degree to mean anything assessment needs to be not easily cheated. There are assessment methods that are available although they are less efficient.

    If I were running an undergrad humanities degree I'd have essays be 10-20% of the total grade, have a brief 15-20min oral examination and tutorial participation make up the bulk of the grade. I don't know how else a degree can mean anything.

    • The writing classes I took in college were about MLA formatting and not effective transmission of ideas. It's a real rot in the system, the people who become English professors are the ones who like English class enough to teach it, so English is just a semester of sitting through a pointless middle age woman's pet peeves about grammar and document formatting.

  • I’m in the camp that has used it to summarize my own essays or read chapters. I had it write me bullet points for the weekly chapter discussions that I would then rephrase. It was definitely a weak excuse to use AI, but most of AI-use is weak anyways. To be honest I will go on a long limb to plan my time and finish an assignment without it, be it writing or programming. I think it’s shameful to use any AI tool for that, so I’ve done all writing through manual reading and notetaking, which I think offers my real ideas. So I can say I am proud of myself for doing all (or most) writing myself, with the exception of some of those discussion reply posts. What I think is weird though is how shamelessly people will use it in public. To me GenAI is like pornography- it’s taboo. This geography class I was in had participation polls and this fat kid in front of me would just paste the question into ChatGPT every time, even if it was easy if you thought about it, had paid attention, or looked at the choices. That’s what’s scary to me, is the transition from its use case in anxiety/sleep deprivation/mental health situations to just pure laziness and dependency. It is a reason I really dislike GenAI and try to never rely on it for creative or learning purposes.

    We’ve definitely seen the effects that social media and technology has on us; it’s made us addicted and dependent on online communities rather than speaking to each other, etc. (I’m not arguing anything about this). So it’s not a stretch to say that GenAI is going to affect our ability to think and problem solve to some degree, which is terrifying.

    I think the AI-enabled zoomer has a point too, because LeetCode is pretty fucked up, yet the point is made in a way that interprets the world through a limited and adolescent perspective; we should reform, but AI is not the end-all solution.

8 comments