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Is Everyone Using AI to Cheat Their Way Through College? (msn.com) 140

Posted by EditorDavid from the school-daze dept.
Chungin Lee used ChatGPT to help write the essay that got him into Columbia University — and then "proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment," reports New York magazine's blog Intelligencer: As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: "I'd just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out." By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in. "At the end, I'd put on the finishing touches. I'd just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it," Lee told me recently... 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."
He eventually did meet a co-founder, and after three unpopular apps they found success by creating the "ultimate cheat tool" for remote coding interviews, according to the article. "Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.)" The article ends with Lee and his co-founder raising $5.3 million from investors for one more AI-powered app, and Lee says they'll target the standardized tests used for graduate school admissions, as well as "all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests. It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything."

Somewhere along the way Columbia put him on disciplinary probation — not for cheating in coursework, but for creating the apps. But "Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI." (OpenAI has even made ChatGPT Plus free to college students during finals week, the article points out, with OpenAI saying their goal is just teaching students how to use it responsibly.) Although Columbia's policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities' — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn't know a single student at the school who isn't using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn't think this is a bad thing. "I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating," he said...

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments.
The article points out ChatGPT's monthly visits increased steadily over the last two years — until June, when students went on summer vacation. "College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point," a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.... It isn't as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, "the ceiling has been blown off." Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences?
After using ChatGPT for their final semester of high school, one student says "My grades were amazing. It changed my life." So she continued used it in college, and "Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students' laptops open to ChatGPT."

One ethics professor even says "The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there's not really a point in doing this." (Yes, students are even using AI to cheat in ethics classes...) It's not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students' essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

Is Everyone Using AI to Cheat Their Way Through College? More | Reply

Is Everyone Using AI to Cheat Their Way Through College?

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  • Prof here (Score:5, Informative)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @05:21PM (#65367281) Homepage

    ...and the answer is: only the students who would struggle or fail anyway. It's not hard to catch them, at least, in technical courses.

    Of course, (1) you have to want to catch them, and (2) the administration has to have your back.

    • Re:Prof here (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @06:02PM (#65367401)

      Parent here, with a son graduating high school. ChatGPT is used by everyone he knows in high school. He used it recently to write an essay for a highschool class. But it's not the essay he handed in. More like it wrote out an outline that he used to get started on his essay. Kinda like a first draft, but more just to give him inspiration for him to get started in writing something in his own voice.

      I saw him do it, and told him that it was reasonable so long as he didn't try to submit something that was completely written by AI. He already knew that the AIs are not at all good enough to be trusted for that (yet). But it is a good way to get a start on a paper. Kinda like writing a paper on a topic and reading the Wikipedia page on it first.

      AI is a tool. To be used or misused.

      Teachers can have kids do short tests in person in class to test knowledge, while using projects that allow AI input to test understanding.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Type44Q ( 1233630 )

        But it is a good way to get a start on a paper.

        Sure, if he was never taught that.

        Fail.

      • Teachers can have kids do short tests in person in class to test knowledge, while using projects that allow AI input to test understanding.

        Exactly. The curriculum needs to change as the tools change, and the tests and exams need to change as well. Just like calculators in the classroom were perceived as threats to kids' ability to learn arithmetic, until they were accepted as a useful tool that student would encounter later in life. By the same token, students need to be taught about AI as a tool, and especially its pitfalls.

        • Change is inevitable in the face of swarms of ChatGPT cheats. The solution is to go back to the practices of the early 20th century: no exams or tests at all during the semesters, just lectures you either attend or don't, your choice. At the end of the *degree*, a few weeks of standup (oral) testing one on one with a teacher, with elimination rounds so as not to waste their time.

          This is the right way to minimize the wasted time from continual assessments. The only reason that continuous assessments exist

          • If they want to pass their orals, they could have an AI test them as they go along, using only material up to what has been covered. It is probably as good a teacher on many subjects as the one they are paying for. The new skill they need is knowing what to prompt and how to verify what it is telling them. Especially spotting logical fallacies and unstated assumptions. AI is oddly bad at that. Probably because it was trained on billions of interactions by people who are no longer taught those skills.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by habig ( 12787 )
            College and testing still works that way in much of the world.

      • I saw him do it, and told him that it was reasonable so long as he didn't try to submit something that was completely written by AI.

        Actually I think that is a bad way to use AI.Having it write an outline that you then flesh out is backwards compared to what we call "AI" can do and while you may be able to get away with that in less technical subjects, it is much less likely to work in the sciences, particularly the hard sciences.

        Current AI is nothing more than a text prediction algorithm. It does not understand concepts. This makes it a very poor choice to write outlines since it will miss details, get concepts wrong or even just ha

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        And what will happen to the brat when he finally graduates and has learned how to cheat his way through but that employer really expected real work (assuming he even gets that far)?

        So I hope you keep his room as he liked it because if he ever graduates from college or high school and attempts the work force, he'll fail and come back to live with you.

      • I'm curious - would you also support it if he ordered a paper from one of the mills and used *that* as an "outline"?

    • They are the same people who will get caught once employed, exaggerating their knowledge, skills and experience. 100% frauds. You really can't fake it until you make it in a skilled position. Marketing sure. Technical not a chance. You will be caught.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        You really can't fake it until you make it in a skilled position.

        Get the bot to write code that does 90% of what you need, maybe with a few small issues left. Ask senior devs for help, they tell you how to fix those. You pass that to the bot, which fixes the bugs. Now you get the credit for delivering a feature.

        There is no intrinsic difference between legacy programming (telling the computer what to do using a programming language) and LLM-based programming (telling the computer what to do using English). The problem of getting it to do exactly what you want as opposed t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kertaamo ( 16100 )

          There is a huge intrinsic difference between programming and getting the LLM to do what you want in English. Let's say the purpose of your study is to learn how the Fast Fourier Transform works, and learn it well enough that you can implement it in C from scratch. Well, if you ask the LLM to copy paste FFT implementation from the net which you hand in as homework, then you may get top grade but you have learned nothing. (I just tried that, works fine)

          Now, as you say, one could learn how the FFT works and th

      • Marketing is a skilled position you can't really fake either. We've all seen good marketing and bad marketing and if you've worked with good people there is definitely a skill there in terms of knowing how to cohesively market a brand and a product and having a strategy there. You have budgets to spend and results to get just the same as anyone technical and you're on the front lines of the executives crosshairs too. If they believe the technical team has a good product and it's not moving they're side-e

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by clovis ( 4684 )

          AI doesn't help with mixed martial arts either.
          Or, more specifically, it doesn't help against opponents who learned MMA the old-fashioned way.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by larwe ( 858929 )
          Yes, and marketing (and sales) are both very VERY easy to measure quantifiably. Engineering productivity is murky and basically all the ways of measuring it are terrible in different ways. Sales and marketing performance show up in the quarterly financials for all to see.

      • They are the same people who will get caught once employed, exaggerating their knowledge, skills and experience. 100% frauds. You really can't fake it until you make it in a skilled position. Marketing sure. Technical not a chance. You will be caught.

        Who said anything about being employed doing technical work?

        The article ends with Lee and his co-founder raising $5.3 million from investors for one more AI-powered app

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      So many jobs put a degree as a requirement, even if they don't actually need one and pay minimum wage. The stuff learned on the course rarely has anything to do with the work. It's just got to the point where people need that bit of paper, and it doesn't matter how they got it.

    • Maybe there should be an age limit, 25 or so, before you could start university. At that age, people might be more mature and interested in the actual subject they study and real knowledge about it, not just a diploma or degree, and therefore have the inner motivation to not cheat/actually study?

  • Yes (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It is so easy, nobody can resist it.

    Besides, as we see from the many comments here, being shameless about having "AI" generate garbage instead of you is a valuable ability.

    In a decade, the population of the "developed world" won't be able to read, write or do arithmetic.

    And that's how it'll stop to be a "developed" world.

    • The goal is to learn to not generate garbage.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The goal is, as aptly put in the TFS, to get laid, to get a "co-founder" with good connections to free money and to get fuck-you money early.

        How you do it is beside the point, as the president of the US is demonstrating daily.

    • In a decade, the population of the "developed world" won't be able to read, write or do arithmetic.

      Only if we do absolutely nothing about this. An easy solution would be to have more work done in controlled settings. Using AI to cheat on homework won't get kids very far if the bulk of their grades are dependant on their performance accomplishing things in classroom where they can't use it.

      That's going to be trickier for some majors more than others but not impossible

      • It's tests, baby, all the way down! Midterms! Quarterlies! Weekly quizzes! Your grade is now 10% attendance and 90% exams! Good luck! Just be thankful they aren't oral.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by skam240 ( 789197 )

          It'll suck for people with test anxiety but I can't think of any other way for kids to prove they are learning how to think for themselves rather than just letting AI do things for them.

        • Back in the '80s there were classes with three tests that added up to 100% of your grade. The final was 50%.

          Did it change since?

          • I remember those in the 70's too. Fortunately, I am an excellent test taker. I found you needed just the right amount of anxiousness. Too much, fogs the brain. Too little, not enough adrenaline to propel you thru the exam.

          • Oh, you've no idea. Returning to college to finish my associates, 60% of my grade in all my classes has been homework with infinite tries. I'll study for a midterm, if I do well, I can basically sleep through the final, take a 70% of it and walk out of the entire class with 90.01%, which is an A that gets just as much credit as 100%.

            It's a joke. Math, sociology, python, network/security+, etc. At least several of my classes have industry certs that you have to go do outside of the college. The classes are g

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kiliani ( 816330 )

      The problem is: what should you learn? How do you learn it? How do you know what is "right", "true", etc.

      I consider myself lucky. I was schooled before the WWW became a thing, I remember the "invention" of the PC. I am used to books and reading. To me, that is a massive advantage.

      As a result, "AI" becomes a useful tool. I use it to save time, or to occasionally get new ideas. But I am very aware that it is a problematic, faulty tool. Younger generations have it much harder here ...

      The bigger problem may w

  • Here, Iâ(TM)m going to hand you money for a piece of paper which I will give to someone else who will give me a job where I pretend to do work, and they give me money. In order to prove that I have earned this piece of paper that I will give to someone else so they give money, I will have to do work to prove I know stuff which is what the paper says on it. But instead of learning stuff Iâ(TM)ll use a computer to generate all my work for me, and then having used the AI to do my coursework, Iâ(
    • If you didn't learn anything in college, that's a problem with YOU.

      It takes a startling amount of incompetence to take four years worth of classes and not learn anything.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        I learned a lot in college, but I've learned a heck of lot more since college from just life and experience. Actually I've learned more from some great youtube channels about a variety of topics, some CS-related, some not, than I did in many of my college courses. That's not the fault of the college courses, nor is it my fault.

        Uni did teach me some vital skills, though. Like how to reason about complexity, and how algorithms work. I also learned vital skills of how to ask the right questions and how to

        • I learned a lot in college, but I've learned a heck of lot more since college from just life and experience. Actually I've learned more from some great youtube channels about a variety of topics, some CS-related, some not, than I did in many of my college courses.

          That's great, you learned more in the many years since college than you did in the four short years of college. It means you've continued to learn, good job.

          • This. Above all, college teaches you how to learn. Because you're going to be doing it for the rest of your life.

  • They took our jerbs!!!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Smonster ( 2884001 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @05:31PM (#65367309)
    When I was in school I would sell my essays to underclassmen who would then rewrite it in their voice and likely sell it to another student after they were done with the class. This is just technology removing that economy. The bots are taking the jobs of poor college students.

    • Re:They took our jerbs!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @05:35PM (#65367317)

      An old piece of shit defends the new pieces of shit.

    • When I was in college, I made extra money by typing papers for other students, who had hand-written them because they didn't know how to type. It was the 1980s, and the price was $1 per double-spaced typewritten page. The personal computer took THAT job away, and AI had nothing to do with it.

      Yes, I'm ignoring the obvious cheating you used for profit. The point is, technology has been taking people's jobs for centuries.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cpurdy ( 4838085 )
      I'm pretty sure this "cheat AI" that the article is about is the one that some huckster has been spamming the Internet with for a while now. Thousands of posts across reddit, for example. New generation, new huckster.

    • When I was in school I would sell my essays to underclassmen who would then rewrite it in their voice and likely sell it to another student after they were done with the class. This is just technology removing that economy. The bots are taking the jobs of poor college students.

      I graded essays (and other assignments) when I was a grad student. It wasn't hard to find assignments written by people like you and your co-conspirators.

      When I encountered such assignments (that were eerily similar but with different word-choices) I would distribute the grade evenly amongst the similar assignments. So, if there were two such essays worth 80 out of 100, each copy would get 40.

  • Employers will have to sort out the cheats (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HuskyDog ( 143220 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @05:46PM (#65367355) Homepage

    At the end of the day it all comes down to employers. If everyone - or at least practically everyone - is getting AI to do all their college work for them then the college degree basically becomes worthless because it is no longer any measure of knowledge or ability in whatever subject it is supposed to represent. If employers wish to identify capably potential employees for any job other than operating AI then they need to test the candidates themselves. Further more they need to physically do this in person by bringing candidates in and testing them face to face with no phones allowed.

    Presumably this will lead to an "In the land of the blind the one eyed man is King" scenario where most candidates know practically nothing about their professed subject and any student who has done even a modicum of actual real study will appear to shine!

    If colleges want to retain any real purpose at all in education then they need to adopt the same approach and only award degrees to students who can sit in a real physical room with their lecturers and provide cogent answers to questions asked!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by unrtst ( 777550 )

      At the end of the day it all comes down to employers.

      OK... I'll hear this out.

      If everyone - or at least practically everyone - is getting AI to do all their college work for them then the college degree basically becomes worthless because it is no longer any measure of knowledge ...

      Was it ever a measure of knowledge (IE: facts)? It's supposed to give you the tools to get the results you're after. It's not there to help you memorize the encyclopedia.

      ... or ability in whatever subject it is supposed to represent.

      Please explain. IMO, ability in a subject sounds like your talking about results based valuation - can this person do this thing well enough for the role in the real world? If they've figured out a way to do that and it leverages new/different tools (eg. LLMs), and the results are as good or better than graduates f

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ukoda ( 537183 )
        While you may be right it kind if sounds like you think that a college's only function is to teach students how to use AI. I'm guessing that is not what you meant, it was just the way I read what you said.

        If AI usage skills are all you are expected to come out of college with then I guess it doesn't need to be years of learning. It also begs the question why bother employing anyone if all they are going to do is feed your tasks to an AI, why not cut out the middleman and not employ those people?

        Also
        • Ah, you applied what I refer to as the smell test. If the result is nonsensical it is wrong and now you must figure out what you did wrong in the detailed calc. But to know it is nonsensical, you have to have a rudimentary understanding of what the result must be.

    • I don't think that students who have done real work will shine. Probably the opposite. What's more likely to happen is that employers will realise that AI can provide good enough answers, and work, and then replace qualified jobs with lower paying AI prompting jobs. The people who get those will be the people who had more direct experience with AI.

      This will end up making colleges pointless. Sure, there will be research jobs will might require actual study, but they will also largely supplemented by AI. The

  • The Real Cheats. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @05:47PM (#65367363)

    "I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,"

    One might also argue that we’re but years or months away from labeling a college graduate as nothing more than someone who hopes their $60K+ investment in a Bachelors of Artful Scamming is going to be valued outside of a college campus marketing bubble.

    If cheating is that prevalent across the board, guess we better prepare for job interviews/interrogations that last four fucking days. Not like a degree is going to imply educated anymore.

    • Re:The Real Cheats. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timholman ( 71886 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @07:17PM (#65367547)

      One might also argue that we're but years or months away from labeling a college graduate as nothing more than someone who hopes their $60K+ investment in a Bachelors of Artful Scamming is going to be valued outside of a college campus marketing bubble.

      As an engineering professor, my prediction is that the economic value of a liberal arts degree is going to fall nearly to zero by 2033 at the latest.

      My reasoning: the kids who started using ChatGPT to cheat on everything are currently in 8th or 9th grade. Give them 7 or 8 more years, and they'll be graduating from top tier colleges with reading, writing, and reasoning skills that have barely advanced past elementary school. Then companies are going to interview (or hire) them, and the jig will be up, so to speak.

      It will be an apocalypse for liberal arts education everywhere. Ivy League universities will find that no one wants to hire their functionally illiterate graduates. And in fact, it will make more sense to just use an AI that by 2033 will be far more capable than most college graduates.

      The end isn't quite as close for engineering. No amount of ChatGPT cheating will help a student pass an exam in (for example) circuit analysis right now. But in the long run, no degree program is safe.

      • The better course moving forward is to go to a decent trade school. Get certified as a plumber, electrician, welder, or CNC machinist. Jobs that require a combination of technical thought, creative thought, and physical labor will be safe from automation for longer.

      • As an engineering professor, my prediction is that the economic value of a liberal arts degree is going to fall nearly to zero by 2033 at the latest.

        As a physics professor I'd say you do not need to predict anything - I think we are already there but for slightly different reasons. It's not that using AI to cheat has rendered such degrees worthless (although I agree that is happening too), it is more that AI itself has rendered such degrees useless because most of the skills you learn from a liberal arts degree vs. a STEM degree are those that AI is now replacing.

        But in the long run, no degree program is safe.

        That's always a safe bet given technological progress but I do not see current "AI" techn

        • I do not see current "AI" technology as being much of a threat to STEM fields because ultimately our fields concentrate on understanding concepts and using that knowledge to do things that nobody has done before or apply those concepts to new situations.

          I wouldn't be so sure of that, given the impact that AI has already had on computer science. I think it's already impacting CS enrollment.

          Current "AI" does not understand concepts at all, it is a predictive text engine who can parrot its training data to ma

      • One might also argue that we're but years or months away from labeling a college graduate as nothing more than someone who hopes their $60K+ investment in a Bachelors of Artful Scamming is going to be valued outside of a college campus marketing bubble.

        As an engineering professor, my prediction is that the economic value of a liberal arts degree is going to fall nearly to zero by 2033 at the latest.

        My reasoning: the kids who started using ChatGPT to cheat on everything are currently in 8th or 9th grade. Give them 7 or 8 more years, and they'll be graduating from top tier colleges with reading, writing, and reasoning skills that have barely advanced past elementary school. Then companies are going to interview (or hire) them, and the jig will be up, so to speak.

        That, already happened. When we left No Child Behind in the classroom, and reduced that education down to the lowest denominator intellectually.

        My reasoning: A trillion dollars of education debt and the absolute mental incompetence that has represented liberal left-leaning leadership in America for the last four years. Those “kids” you speak of are called voters in America now. Which was quite obvious given the blind momentum that grew behind the undeniable incompetence represented in the las

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ukoda ( 537183 )

      If cheating is that prevalent across the board, guess we better prepare for job interviews/interrogations that last four fucking days.

      You won't need four days. Talk to them about their claimed learning face to face. Get them give some answers on a whiteboard. Without falling back on a computer it should only take 10 to 15 minutes to see if they bothered actually learning anything.

  • He happens to have a company selling a cheating app. No surprise his story is “I cheated through college you can be like me”. IRL for first tier schools, at least 75 percent of the grade is in person exams where its practically impossible to cheat. This is a very smart, very academically strong guy making a sales pitch.

    • Re:I dont believe this guys story (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ihadafivedigituid ( 8391795 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @06:08PM (#65367419)
      Are you sure about your impression of the current situation in "first tier schools"? Things have changed rapidly.

      A Stanford grad friend of mine has a son who dropped out of a very good university after one year because it was obviously a scam by everyone involved. He's getting into plumbing now, with my friend's encouragement. His other son is presently at Stanford and feels the same way as his older brother but is intent on beating the system some other way.

      My own son "accidentally" got an associate's degree in mathematics the Olde Fashioned Way ("linear algebra is fun!") but he's in disbelief at what's going on around him at the community college level. He doesn't think it will be much different after transferring to a top University of California campus, either. I'm trying to keep my daughter from just completely giving up before her senior year of a hybrid high school/college program: she thinks the whole thing is bullshit on every side.

      • Geeze. This is a seriously jaded family.

        • Seriously jaded generation! My late teen Zoomer kids' friends are all on board with these attitudes. It's disheartening.

          What's more, the Gen Alpha kids my wife is teaching in elementary school appear to be even worse off.

          • My kids and the kids I teach are going to eat your kids for lunch in our glorious future.

            • What utopia do you live in, pray tell?

              My son started college at age 14 and "accidentally" earned an associate's degree in fucking mathematics at age 18. He's even better at software, better than me--and I say this as the guy that gets called in as the fixer when no one else can make shit work. He has a shot at Caltech, but might "settle" for Cal etc. Your little brats aren't eating anything.

              And I'm gonna make a wild guess that you have few to zero Stanford or other Ivy League kids in that group, eithe

      • son who dropped out of a very good university after one year because it was obviously a scam by everyone involved.

        I think it depends a lot on the subject. I do not see much evidence that the STEM fields have lost value much at all in top universities, at least in Canada but also from interactions with colleagues in the US and UK. Certainly the content is new (science has advanced considerably) and we are all dealing with lower educational standards in schools meaning incoming students are less prepared but ultimately, at least in physics but also in many other technical STEM subjects, I do not see any evidence that go

        • You're leaving out the cost. The son who dropped out was looking at the $80k/year his parents were spending and not seeing the value. This was a year before the AI crisis described in TFA. It's a complete shitshow now.

          Also, how on Earth could anyone progress in high school fast enough to be in a linear algebra class? It typically follows third semester calculus in college, or in some engineering programs it follows upper division "engineering mathematics" which includes differential equations. Year-long

          • Hmm, I was fortunate to go to public charter school and graduated in 2001. My school was setup more like community college, where one semester you took 4 classes and the next semester, an entirely different set of 4 classes.

            I hated high school, so I went to my counselor about 3 months into freshmen fall semester, and said, stream-line my classes I want out. Got all the course work done in 3 years and was off to community college at 17.

            So if someone was pushed at a young age, I could see getting past Calculu

          • You're leaving out the cost. The son who dropped out was looking at the $80k/year his parents were spending and not seeing the value.

            The cost of university in Canada is typically under $10k/year for tuition...and those are Canadian dollars.

            Also, how on Earth could anyone progress in high school fast enough to be in a linear algebra class?

            I went throught the UK system and left secondary school (high school) having done linear algebra, second order ODEs and even very basic contour integration. UK standards have dropped since (they were dropping even when I was at school) but go look up maths and further maths A'level papers from the late 1980's and you can see what was covered. We did specialize to just 3-4 subjects in the last two yea

  • Congratulations, Mr. Lee. "Innovators' like you are helping to turn America's higher ed system "degrees" into the fancy toilet paper that a typical degree from Belarus or Congo would be worth.

    Colleges will likely have to turn to extreme measures to survive. Don't be surprised that if by 2030, all college exams will be done with pencils and paper, in Faraday cages.) Maybe now's a good time to invest in Bic or Dixon Ticonderoga?

  • Cheating? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RossCWilliams ( 5513152 ) on Saturday May 10, 2025 @07:44PM (#65367593)

    How does someone "cheat" in college? The answer is that college education has turned into a diploma mill that produces a credential. And the person cheats to get a better credential. Who are they cheating? The person they provide the credential to and employers don't actually use the credential to evaluate people for very long. Those straight A's don't matter much if you can't produce results.

    So the danger of "cheating" to get a better credential is if by cheating you fail to develop the tools you need to be a productive employee. In that case, you are cheating only yourself.

    Colleges don't really "teach" any content of value any more. The information is out there for the taking. What they do is provide opportunities for people to develop, practice and polish their learning skills. And coaches to help people do that in a focused way for the skills needed in their field(s) of study. The whole diploma mill, including tests etc, is just a distraction. So if by cheating you can waste less time on the diploma mill tasks then you come out ahead.

  • What goes around comes around. The brain surgeons, oncologists, and heart specialists these kids will depend on are doing the same thing and will know as much about medicine as the gardener.
  • You're going to get tested and then you're going to fail the tests and you won't get to move on. Also most degrees now do various forms of on the job training and unless you've actually learned the material you're going to fail there too.

    You might be able to use it to just barely keep ahead of the grind, the workload in a modern school is orders of magnitude larger than what anyone over 45 has experienced. They basically added a shitload of requirements and then forced you into various job training prog

  • OpenAI has even made ChatGPT Plus free to college students during finals week, the article points out, with OpenAI saying their goal is just teaching students how to use it responsibly.

    Sure, use it responsibly, just like alcohol commercials want you to enjoy a case of beer every night responsibly.

  • And this includes teachers.

  • I did a STEM degree at a UK university. Every course was assessed with in-person, proctored exams - didn't matter if the course was remote or not. Even the final dissertation included a proctored exam to confirm that the work was actually mine.

    LLMs haven't created a new problem, they've just democratised an old one. Rich students have been outsourcing essays for years; now anyone with a browser can do the same.

    The cat’s out of the bag with AI. If universities are serious about academic integrity, th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. This can be solved. And I guess the insitutions that do not solve it will just become less and less relevant. Personally, I do exams using the "you may bring any amount of paper" approach and recommend the students do summaries of the lecture by themselves and bring that. Then I ask questions that require a bit of thinking on top. Works pretty well. For graded labs, I talk to the participants afterwards and warn them that if they have no clue what they did, they will not pass. Yes, that takes effort

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by habig ( 12787 )

      Physics prof in the US here. I do give tests in person with pencil and paper.

      Students have homework and in class work to learn how to solve the problems. Some fraction of them cheat their way through these practice assignments to farm the ~10% of their grade they're worth.

      Those that cheat then get mulched on the test. And then bitterly complain on their student evaluations that they're being tested on stuff that wasn't in the class: because they have no idea what was in the class bits they cut-n-paste or

  • Going down the rabbit hole....... Do you end up cheating the rest of your life cause you have no skills or actual knowledge on your own ? Eventually get exposed and nobody wants you !

  • There's no point in better tests to ferret out AI users, as they will reflect nothing in the real world. Succeeding without AI isn't an advantage, because people will use AI in their jobs. Jobs will change to accommodate this. Sure, it will change the nature of jobs and the results of these jobs somewhat, but when someone using AI will be pitted against someone who's not using AI, the person using AI will likely produce a result much more quickly and the result will be more detailed.

    Learning anything academ

  • But I guess that is sooo yesterday now. Obviously, the cheaters turn themselves into a new underclass of "workers" that are exceptionally easy to replace. The paper you get at the end of college is not worth much anyways (unless that particular college makes sure the AI approach does not work), hence your skills will be evaluated in other ways. And suddenly, the ones that do crap like this look pathetic.

  • In the USA engineering disciplines like mechanical, chemical, electrical, and civil can take a fundamentals of engineering exam as a precondition of professional licensure. NCEES offers one for software engineering too. Perhaps itâ(TM)s time to require it, if only to prove that applicants donâ(TM)t cheat their way through school.

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