This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out.
But education is almost worthless now already. Nowadays pretty much everyone has a degree and then couldn't find a job and lucking real skills and experience. Ai is not a cause, it will simply speed up the degradation of the system.
The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc.
I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something.
Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees.
Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots.
You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again.
If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing.
How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.
replying to my own thread here, but this got me thinking, so thanks OP, but...
can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great grades in school. I don't know, I just feel like school was rarely about actually learning / growing and was mostly about vocational work most of my time in undergrad, and I wish we could de-couple that some? But maybe I'm naive here...
Make education free. I'd love to study something like philosophy or art history but there's just no return on that investment. Unless you're already wealthy, it doesn't make sense to drop five or six figures on a degree unless it's likely to pay for itself.
Which is even becoming less likely with STEM, as we hit a confluence of higher education costs, fewer job openings, and AI as a competitor for work.
Another thing we can add is sealing grades. If you can’t use your grades as a credential, the incentive to cheat is reduced. This won’t solve the relation between getting a job and living - that’s a job for UBI and a comprehensive social security system.
Capitalism:
> an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market
Any semblance of capitalism we have is a shambling corpse barely getting around. Do you know who pulls on all the strings of our economy, gives out student aid loans to kids who just barely graduates high school? Who controls market interest rates, and gives massive multi billion dollar contracts to Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft?
Who approved of the printing of the 50% increase in the dollar supply in the last 5 years?
Take a guess.
I'll give you a hint, if you don't pay them on a yearly basis 30-50% of your paycheck, you go to prison.
While I think there are a lot of problems created by capitalism right now, I would argue that nothing about the current AI industry is actually capitalist at all. These are companies that are surviving despite absolutely bleeding cash because the ultra-rich have decided that things would be so much more convenient for them if they didn't need to deal with employees anymore. This isn't "well, people are doing this because it's profitable". They're doing it DESPITE it being WILDLY unprofitable, mostly based on a weirdly religious faith that it's just going to work out because they really really want it to.
Recently I saw Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) on one of those market shows (CNBC I think? Something like that) and he was upset at Dario's doom trolling. Why was he upset? Because he was worried that the populist rage towards AI was going to result in a wealth tax! And the thing is he's probably right! The thing these people fear the most, socialism, is the thing they're ironically probably going to make popular in the united states by absolutely trying to bleed the population dry.
> I would argue that nothing about the current AI industry is actually capitalist at all.
What? Where do you think all of the capital they are burning to stay afloat comes from? I'll give you a hint, it's from the capitalists.
The ideal of capitalism is that optimizing for profits means growth. But the fundamentals of capitalism means that, since capitalists own the means of productions, they can do whatever they want with it.
Honestly, and this is my "hot take of the decade" but I think we're going to get some sort of AI modulated/managed form of capitalism that will approach socialism in some regards but still allow for people to try to "get rich" or whatever.
What that's going to look like I couldn't begin to imagine, but I think you might onto something about the AI industry not being all that capitalistic presently. Not an economist, but we're definitely in oligopoly territory here? Because there are only like 4-5 serious companies here.
I too may be accused of having the faith that it's "all going to work out" though. I think it will. I think when things start getting weird enough a bunch of creative people will figure out logical solutions that work in the moment and we'll run with those. Barring revolution, that's kind of how things have always been. Things get weird, then we figure out how to fix it or go to blows over it. I think going to blows domestically is pretty unlikely as of yet though despite the "dooooom" narrative that a lot of people tout.
Over my (and many other's) dead body. Don't be so cynical.
edit to add:
I feel like a lot about this negative "ermagerd fascism is imminent" stuff is poisoning the well of discourse. Is it a threat? Yup. Can I envision a scenario where the bad guys win and I get "the wall" after my LLM moderated kangaroo court? Totally. Do I think that's very likely? No. And I think the immediate appeal to "doooooom!" is a thought killing cliche at this point.
You know what we should be doing? We should be figuring out how to create a new system that reflects the realities of the modern world. We should be actively designing new ways of arranging society that makes the world a better place for all. Like, go read about FALC, or read Bookchin or something. But these fear based pithy appeals to doom lead nowhere.
The fascists are real - I recognize that, but let's figure out how to build something better!
Cynical? The press release for the latest Grok version is sitting at the top of the front page. And half the people on this site don't see the problem with that. They'll welcome their roman-saluting overlords with open arms.
> Honestly, and this is my "hot take of the decade" but I think we're going to get some sort of AI modulated/managed form of capitalism that will approach socialism in some regards but still allow for people to try to "get rich" or whatever.
That's optimistic. IMHO, it's more likely the libertarian tech-lords make sure we get some kind of hyper-capitalism, where you're either rich or bone-crushingly poor.
I get that doom sense, but... I can't really see it happening because... well, people that have never truly been hungry are already frantically clacking at their keyboards with the slogan of "eat the rich!"
I don't know what we get? But if this is the rhetoric now, how many Luigis would we expect to see as things got really bad, and the vision you paint is really bad.
The thing with AI and AI-enabled automation is that it may lead to a world where the rich don't need anyone else anymore. I could totally imagine things shaking out where the rich and everything important is so-well defended that even an army of Luigis is impotent.
Also, after a couple assassinations of business leaders I think we'll see gun control laws like the US has never seen.
Took me a while to get rid of the mental image of an army of green moustached Luigis crowding a cartoon palace. But maybe it's not even such a bad image after all. Now where are the Marios when you need them?
Maybe? But I cannot see that as a stable end state. I think we'll get some sort of weird managed capitalism for exactly that reason.
I actually don't really want that sort of outcome, I'd like to see some sort of libertarian socialism arise out of post-scarcity? But what that looks like? I don't know. 20 year old me would have had lots of ideas about how we "ought to be" but now, pushing 40? I am less certain of the things I "know."
Regardless, I don't see the really bad guys winning this one...
Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.
This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.
Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.
But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]
The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way?
Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.
It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.
> whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing ... It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category
It's very clear from the (excellent) article linked by dang [1] what the exams required:
> This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” In this case, Serrano changed some of the model assumptions they had seen in class, and asked students to demonstrate whether certain statements were true or false under the new assumptions.
I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for things that can be prompted. You still need to understand the why behind things, being able to reason about them and choose between options. How will you teach this level of understanding or certify them without exams?
Of course, not all testing is good, but the written exam has survived and proven useful despite the internet age, I'm not sure an even better search engine really changes that.
So you can call out the AI's mistakes. Everyone seems to be saying that AI is really good, except at their particular field. Make of that what you will.
But here's the thing, AI will be the source of truth soon. For many it already is.
The dumber we (humanity in general) get, the smarter AI appears to the average person. You'll be a heretic or just deemed crazy if you call BS on something AI says in 50 years--regardless.
> Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies.
Oh fuck that bullshit. I was a dumbass to believed shit like that in school, and it didn't fucking free me. What happened was I was always calculator-dependent, which made higher-level math harder, because I was always distracting myself by operating the goddamn thing, and I never developed a very good intuition for arithmetic.
I have a few thoughts related to this, and maybe I can get them out and ties them back together at the end.
1a. Yes, college isn’t right for everyone, and testing the traditional way with paper and pencil certainly disadvantages some students who would be star performers in a real world setting but are not a good fit for college classes. Think “Good Will Hunting” type people. They do exist.
1b. However, there are certainly more people who only imagine themselves as Will Hunting type people and that they are just too smart for college, but the reality is that they are dumb, or didn’t learn the material. For every person who fails a test because they’re a genius who is a bad fit in the system, there are at least 10 idiots who imagine themselves geniuses, and they would have passed the class if only that PhD professor with all his book smarts had actually written the right kind of exam. Traditional schooling and testing doesn’t work for the extreme upper tail of intelligence, but it exists because it did quite well at educating and sorting the masses to support the Industrial Revolution.
1c. If college were only about the knowledge, you could learn most of it with internet access and a library card for much cheaper. The vast majority of people are in college for the credential, and the institution has to protect the signal of the credential.
2a. Most college assignments and exams are not a good reflection of full time employment. College credentials serve mainly as a networking aid and a signal to employers that you are compliant and competent enough to follow a professor’s instructions, and will likely be a compliant and competent employee, although the instructions might be different. If it is the AI who is the one who followed the professor’s instructions you water the signal down, and employers don’t want that. It is irrelevant that a student can copy and paste things into ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT can get the answer right on this test. That isn’t what college is supposed to signal.
2b. A problem is that I literally can’t write a test in most subjects now that I would expect a student to complete that can’t be completed by ChatGPT better and faster. I teach undergraduate math and a while ago we thought that since GPT-4o could get a C in calculus that we’d just raise the standard. Now Fable and GPT-5.5 can cruise to an A in literally every math course in our catalog, and they can also catch every tiny issue in an exam written by a human. But I have to teach these undergraduate subjects so that some students can go on to PhD studies so they can contribute to the field. If we just stop teaching undergraduate subjects then PhD production and novel research grinds to a halt and only a few fields will progress where an AI is capable of self improvement.
2c. I’ve seen that my best students know how to do do something by hand and use a computer to complement/increase their capabilities, not to cover over entire gaps. When you have literally zero skill in an area, you can’t spot when you got a totally bad output from the AI (these days usually because of a lack of context or bad prompting because the student didn’t understand the material, not because the AI wasn’t capable). Somehow I have to incentivize students to learn the material on their own, so that they can be a better user of AI in the future. And a really effective way to do that is a graded test in which AI is not available to help them.
So to try to tie it together, is that there is still some value to a college degree, at least until something better comes along. But that college degree is only useful when it is a signal about the person and not some other tool. And although AI is getting very capable, somehow we have to teach the lower stuff to build up to the higher stuff, so we do need to restrict the use of AI in some educational settings so that we can build a good foundation for future learning.
As to the point about old paper sources being considered more reliable than an internet site, I agree. I am of the generation that wasn’t allowed to cite Wikipedia and it frustrated me. We’ll eventually figure out how to permit proper AI use, much like how many professors now allow you to use Wikipedia to start researching a topic.
It's worth noting that even though you say people could just go online and start reading, college may be the last time most people ever read a textbook ever again. There's something tough about knowing that you want to do something but then somehow your daily instincts fight you.
It's also why you can't just throw kids in front of Khan Academy.
It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back then—they were—but they also had the odd side-effect that, if it was a class you cared about, the test itself could be a learning experience.
For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote.
The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol,
i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases.
I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact.
I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
My experience as a student has always been that most of the class will cheat given the chance. I remember in high school being one of maybe a dozen in a grade of over 200 who actually read the assigned novels. Everyone else used cliff/spark notes not just to familiarise themselves but also to plagiarise essays.
The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago. People were like this a few decades ago as well when I got my degree. I didn't have consistently great classmates until honors and accelerated grad courses in my 3rd and 4th year, along with various domain specific student orgs like groups for hardware hacking, computer security, etc.
Obviously this can't happen without some structural change (virtually impossible in the US due to its political ossification and indefinite deadlock) because a degree is now just a way of gatekeeping the middle class, but dull and incurious minds made ideal manual laborers in the past, and, at some point, we lost sight of that and started rotting our corporate world out with them.
> The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago
As long as this allows them to provide for themselves and their families, buying homes, and retiring the same way as someone who goes to college.
Going to college should not be something people do to escape abject poverty, but something you want to do to enrich your life and make yourself a better person.
> The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college
Seems obvious now that this is the solution. Unfortunately, universities would never agree to downsize, not due to politics or any US-specific problems.
College is a box to check off because we have lost the ability to support a workforce without college degrees (at least in the US, UK, AU, where I have some experience).
Trades are critical but looked down on. Manufacturing is gone (which isn't in itself a bad thing). The service industry doesn't pay a living wage (thankfully it's reasonable here in AU). Apprenticeships don't pay enough. And pretty much all knowledge work jobs expect a degree from the beginning at a junior level.
We should be planning for a system where <20% of people go to university, instead of expecting >60% to go. Robust minimum wages, good trade schools, apprenticeships that pay enough for a wide range of roles, and changing the culture to not look down on folks that take these paths.
Sounds like you're in AU, I will point out that trades are not looked down on at all in this country. In fact culturally we value chippies and sparkies higher than desk jockeys.
Yeah this was a generalisation across the US/UK/AU. I come from the UK but now live in AU, and know the US a bit.
I think the looking down on trades is not quite as simple as I summarised it as, and I think AU does a lot better at all of the above than the US/UK, but I still see aspects of it. Tradies make good money in all 3 countries due to lack of supply, and yet there are still stereotypes of jobs like lawyers, doctors, (software engineers?) being better in some way.
It's a nuanced problem, but I don't get the impression that trades here are culturally valued higher than a lot of "white collar" work. Compared to ambiguous "desk jockeys" yes, but that's due to negative stereotypes about bullshit jobs, if you actually named a specific job I think you'd find different attitudes. Lawyers, accountants, sales/marketing, various engineering disciplines, IT, I think these are widely considered "better" jobs than trades, even though in most ways that's far from true.
But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
I'm not sure you should think it is shrinking. There are a lot of people in this world that hate to learn, and literally are incredibly apathetic about any topic. To such, learning anything is work, never a joy.
Before AI they had to learn to succeed. Now they see a shortcut. You said half showed they were learning, that's not so bad. I think you should be glad it's that high. I am.
You jest, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a thing somewhere, it’ll take its toll, and eventually fail from its own flaws. Then, chances are, there will be some lessons learnt - although, most likely, not on the first try. But that’s just a futuristic speculation.
My point was, however, that in modern age, where we’re literally on the verge of redefining humanity, we might be forced to redefine “cheating” as well. It’s all surely starting to slowly crack at the seams for the last half a century, and the pace is only increasing. When I was a kid, electronic calculators were banned (but not the slide rule, heh), nowadays, I’ve heard, even programmable ones are becoming accepted.
How is this even a debate? Before Covid most tests were in person right? Sure some classes had final projects that were take home, but in person tests were very norma. So what’s all the hand wringing about? Just do in person tests and move on?
Yeah, I’m enrolled in an online degree program and use of AI in exams would be quite difficult.
The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify you. Only one screen is allowed and smartphones and smart watches are banned. A proctor is watching you and you’re being recorded the whole time. I have no idea how one could slip something like AI use past all this.
Hell, I got flagged for possible cheating in an online proctored test because I had a whiteboard behind me that had unrelated equations on it or some nonsense. I didn't even look at them lol.
The instructor reviewed the footage, laughed, and said, "wow, what a pain in the butt to deal with" and cancelled the alert or whatever. Almost all the classes I've taken online have been way harder for potential cheating than in person classes.
I'll say this too, I took a course called something like "applied mathematical methods" online a long time ago. That class's final basically said, "use whatever resources you want except for other people" - ChatGPT would have probably made short work of the exam, but at the time, even with the power of the internet about 10 years ago, there's no way I could have used it to help me. I doubt even teaming up would have helped that much to be honest lol.
I had 24 hours to do the test and it was pretty hard to get done in that time. I think it took me something like 5 or 6 hours to do it? Making your tests muderously difficult is one way to handle the temptation to cheat in online courses. I don't know that that's the best solution from a pedagogy standpoint, but hey, I'm not a prof.
Disallowing the use of AI is basically the modern equivalent of testing based on memorization. It is a laziness to find something more useful to evaluate on or an inability to distinguish real understanding in a field from first level understanding.
Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs.
If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.
If your score falls 50% from not using AI, that's not testing memorization. That's testing learning anything on the topic being tested. The quantity of information on college exams is not that much to memorize. At least, personally, failing to remember something was rarely a reason why I failed to answer a question. Almost always it was because I did not fully understand the topic, so I tried to fall back on remembering if I answered the same question before.
'
“56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,”
'
and the rest are lying.
(With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)
I’m not sure why that’s controversial - I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way. The only other common characteristic is that they almost always had some form of privilege. Either rich parents, or adults around them who worked very hard to get them to that level.
If you had read the whole sentence, you would have found a few other words, which say “just because you have privilege.”
All men are created equal. Civic duties apply equally to everyone. Once people have met their legal obligations (say, paying taxes and obeying the law), any additional generosity is voluntary, not owed, so having more privilege does not automatically create greater moral obligations.
Say, I am beautiful and you are ugly. That’s my privilege. Do I owe more than you? No. It sucks for you. Sorry but that’s life. Stop whining and keep making the best you have with your God-given privileges (maybe you are say, taller or have more money).
What an odd world view. Of course the priviliged have greater social obligations, because they are greater benefactors of life. We're all equal under the law but that doesn't mean that those with greater means shouldn't have greater impacts on society.
Meritocracy is often a buzzword of the elite to avoid paying their fair share.
If I were to nitpick, I would say that they try to move to a idealised version of the US that never quite existed. This romanticised version has been pervasively depicted in mass consumption media for many decades.
More meaningful perhaps would be to count the immigrants from developed countries and immigrants that earn above the median in their respective countries and/or go to the US and earn above the American median.
There are a lot of desperate people in the world right now who’ll take extreme action to escape their immediate predicaments, such as risking a Mediterranean crossing from Northern Africa to Europe.
also the rich absolutely _do_ owe society at large something: taxes. a thing which, as you get richer, it apparently becomes optional due to financial engineering
citation needed on that last claim. do you have universal healthcare free at point of service? do you have a healthy supply of public housing? do you let children starve, through no fault of their own but the circumstances of their birth? do you engage is ears of choice and murder 100+ innocent children in a primary school on the first day of the conflict?
the answer to some of these questions should be yes, and others should be no, if you're going to make the claim that the United States of America is the "Greatest Country on Earth, Ever".
Why jump on the opportunity to prune reading by rejecting the lot as soon an unrelated premise you disagree with is presented?
Perhaps at that point if you stop reading after the first sentence, you could churn the entire article through AI to summarize it into a single sentence, and see if the invalid premise is core to the message?
> Why jump on the opportunity to prune reading by rejecting the lot as soon an unrelated premise you disagree with is presented?
Ars Technica has already trashed its reputation with the infamous controversy over publishing AI hallucinated quotations.
I couldn't decide whether the opening sentence of the submitted article was so dumb that it had to be written by AI or so dumb that it had to be written by a human, and coming to a conclusion on that question didn't seem worth it.
> you could churn the entire article through AI to summarize it
I agree that they are intelligent, just don't know about the "definition" part. A typical Ivy Leaguer isn't a dumbass. What's wrong with calling one intelligent?
Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average. Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.
Hey, a typical person should be intelligent because we human have used ourselves as a de-facto definition of intelligence anyway. That sentence probably means something like "no intellectually disabled person here". Even though we don't normally feel so because higher educations seem "typical" to us.
I didn't attend an Ivy League, but I think I went to a good school. I was very nervous before I left for school - a little intimidated, so I talked to an academic mentor. He told me something I'll never forget: "You're gonna be around a lot of really smart kids. No doubt about it. But, mostly, what you're gonna find is you're surrounded by a lot of rich kids." He was 100% correct. Lots of smart kids, and lots of kids from well-to-do families. I think I met, maybe, 2 other kids that were as broke as my family.
The first time I attended a selective school was graduate school. Like you, I was extremely nervous. “They’re all going to be smarter than me. I’m going to feel like an idiot.”
And it turned out to be true. Many of the students I went to school with had far better preparation than I did. And not only did I feel like an idiot, another person called me an idiot in front of everyone. Suspicion confirmed.
The thing is, once I accepted that, yes, maybe my preparation was worse, and that it was possible that I was admitted by mistake, I found a way forward. After all, if literally everyone is smarter than you, then in a way, you’re the luckiest person there: you’re surrounded by smart people, and almost any conversation you have with your peers will benefit YOU more than it benefits THEM.
Over time, I realized that the thing that mattered most was “time on task.” Unlike my peers, who had better instruction, because they went to better schools, had private tutors, etc. I had to work for everything. And I started graduate school late: I turned 30 the year I enrolled. So I was not distracted by social events, finding a romantic partner, or deep questions like “what do I want to do with my life?” I was all-in. I may have started a bit behind, but I finished well ahead of most of my peers.
I think it’s easy for students from my kind of background to wither under the pressure of an elite environment. As a faculty member, I’ve seen it happen many times, sadly. But there IS a way through it, and largely, the way forward is to value oneself, to develop one’s internal compass for good work, and to not let the social pressures overwhelm. I don’t mean to make this sound easy, but it IS possible.
It's laughable to be surprised by cheating on take-home exams. Does the professor have a comparative assessment before AI? Do you think the cheating didn't happen on them before AI? It always happened. It's structural, in the same ways that speeding on the highway is structural, and evading taxes on cash income is structural. And the structural fix is in-class exams.
Recent and related:
Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 - June 2026 (728 comments)
This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out.
And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.
But education is almost worthless now already. Nowadays pretty much everyone has a degree and then couldn't find a job and lucking real skills and experience. Ai is not a cause, it will simply speed up the degradation of the system.
Depends. Oral examninations will be more important as a test of skill now.
During my university time, all main exams were oral examinations: One professor, one protocol keeper, and the student. Duration: 1-2 hours.
The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc.
I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something.
Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees.
Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots.
You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again.
If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing.
How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.
replying to my own thread here, but this got me thinking, so thanks OP, but...
can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great grades in school. I don't know, I just feel like school was rarely about actually learning / growing and was mostly about vocational work most of my time in undergrad, and I wish we could de-couple that some? But maybe I'm naive here...
Make education free. I'd love to study something like philosophy or art history but there's just no return on that investment. Unless you're already wealthy, it doesn't make sense to drop five or six figures on a degree unless it's likely to pay for itself.
Which is even becoming less likely with STEM, as we hit a confluence of higher education costs, fewer job openings, and AI as a competitor for work.
I totally agree! And I think you're right! Education should be free.
Another thing we can add is sealing grades. If you can’t use your grades as a credential, the incentive to cheat is reduced. This won’t solve the relation between getting a job and living - that’s a job for UBI and a comprehensive social security system.
Capitalism: > an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market
Any semblance of capitalism we have is a shambling corpse barely getting around. Do you know who pulls on all the strings of our economy, gives out student aid loans to kids who just barely graduates high school? Who controls market interest rates, and gives massive multi billion dollar contracts to Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft? Who approved of the printing of the 50% increase in the dollar supply in the last 5 years?
Take a guess. I'll give you a hint, if you don't pay them on a yearly basis 30-50% of your paycheck, you go to prison.
If that's the case, the capitalism you allude to has never existed. Never.
And that’s good, because it’d be the opposite to democracy.
While I think there are a lot of problems created by capitalism right now, I would argue that nothing about the current AI industry is actually capitalist at all. These are companies that are surviving despite absolutely bleeding cash because the ultra-rich have decided that things would be so much more convenient for them if they didn't need to deal with employees anymore. This isn't "well, people are doing this because it's profitable". They're doing it DESPITE it being WILDLY unprofitable, mostly based on a weirdly religious faith that it's just going to work out because they really really want it to.
Recently I saw Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) on one of those market shows (CNBC I think? Something like that) and he was upset at Dario's doom trolling. Why was he upset? Because he was worried that the populist rage towards AI was going to result in a wealth tax! And the thing is he's probably right! The thing these people fear the most, socialism, is the thing they're ironically probably going to make popular in the united states by absolutely trying to bleed the population dry.
> I would argue that nothing about the current AI industry is actually capitalist at all.
What? Where do you think all of the capital they are burning to stay afloat comes from? I'll give you a hint, it's from the capitalists.
The ideal of capitalism is that optimizing for profits means growth. But the fundamentals of capitalism means that, since capitalists own the means of productions, they can do whatever they want with it.
Honestly, and this is my "hot take of the decade" but I think we're going to get some sort of AI modulated/managed form of capitalism that will approach socialism in some regards but still allow for people to try to "get rich" or whatever.
What that's going to look like I couldn't begin to imagine, but I think you might onto something about the AI industry not being all that capitalistic presently. Not an economist, but we're definitely in oligopoly territory here? Because there are only like 4-5 serious companies here.
I too may be accused of having the faith that it's "all going to work out" though. I think it will. I think when things start getting weird enough a bunch of creative people will figure out logical solutions that work in the moment and we'll run with those. Barring revolution, that's kind of how things have always been. Things get weird, then we figure out how to fix it or go to blows over it. I think going to blows domestically is pretty unlikely as of yet though despite the "dooooom" narrative that a lot of people tout.
Fascism is the more likely outcome.
Over my (and many other's) dead body. Don't be so cynical.
edit to add:
I feel like a lot about this negative "ermagerd fascism is imminent" stuff is poisoning the well of discourse. Is it a threat? Yup. Can I envision a scenario where the bad guys win and I get "the wall" after my LLM moderated kangaroo court? Totally. Do I think that's very likely? No. And I think the immediate appeal to "doooooom!" is a thought killing cliche at this point.
You know what we should be doing? We should be figuring out how to create a new system that reflects the realities of the modern world. We should be actively designing new ways of arranging society that makes the world a better place for all. Like, go read about FALC, or read Bookchin or something. But these fear based pithy appeals to doom lead nowhere.
The fascists are real - I recognize that, but let's figure out how to build something better!
Cynical? The press release for the latest Grok version is sitting at the top of the front page. And half the people on this site don't see the problem with that. They'll welcome their roman-saluting overlords with open arms.
> Honestly, and this is my "hot take of the decade" but I think we're going to get some sort of AI modulated/managed form of capitalism that will approach socialism in some regards but still allow for people to try to "get rich" or whatever.
That's optimistic. IMHO, it's more likely the libertarian tech-lords make sure we get some kind of hyper-capitalism, where you're either rich or bone-crushingly poor.
I get that doom sense, but... I can't really see it happening because... well, people that have never truly been hungry are already frantically clacking at their keyboards with the slogan of "eat the rich!"
I don't know what we get? But if this is the rhetoric now, how many Luigis would we expect to see as things got really bad, and the vision you paint is really bad.
The thing with AI and AI-enabled automation is that it may lead to a world where the rich don't need anyone else anymore. I could totally imagine things shaking out where the rich and everything important is so-well defended that even an army of Luigis is impotent.
Also, after a couple assassinations of business leaders I think we'll see gun control laws like the US has never seen.
Took me a while to get rid of the mental image of an army of green moustached Luigis crowding a cartoon palace. But maybe it's not even such a bad image after all. Now where are the Marios when you need them?
Uh, they are doing that because they think one of them is going to build the monopoly that will rule the rest of the future approximately forever.
Maybe? But I cannot see that as a stable end state. I think we'll get some sort of weird managed capitalism for exactly that reason.
I actually don't really want that sort of outcome, I'd like to see some sort of libertarian socialism arise out of post-scarcity? But what that looks like? I don't know. 20 year old me would have had lots of ideas about how we "ought to be" but now, pushing 40? I am less certain of the things I "know."
Regardless, I don't see the really bad guys winning this one...
Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.
This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.
Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.
But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]
https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...
You don’t even need to go that far. If they just expelled cheaters instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and ignore it that would go a long way.
Ideas like cheating on a college test should be jailable is why the US leads in number of jailed people
>so that there is dignity in the degree again.
How far back do you need to go to get to a time when degrees mattered?
> measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.
It still does if the test is in person
What's even worse than so many students cheating with AI is that I suspect a substantial portion of them don't even think that's "cheating".
The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way?
Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.
It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.
> whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing ... It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category
It's very clear from the (excellent) article linked by dang [1] what the exams required:
> This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” In this case, Serrano changed some of the model assumptions they had seen in class, and asked students to demonstrate whether certain statements were true or false under the new assumptions.
[1] https://english.elpais.com/education/2026-06-28/ai-fraud-at-...
I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for things that can be prompted. You still need to understand the why behind things, being able to reason about them and choose between options. How will you teach this level of understanding or certify them without exams?
Of course, not all testing is good, but the written exam has survived and proven useful despite the internet age, I'm not sure an even better search engine really changes that.
Why bother learning anything when you can just use AI?
So you can call out the AI's mistakes. Everyone seems to be saying that AI is really good, except at their particular field. Make of that what you will.
But here's the thing, AI will be the source of truth soon. For many it already is.
The dumber we (humanity in general) get, the smarter AI appears to the average person. You'll be a heretic or just deemed crazy if you call BS on something AI says in 50 years--regardless.
> Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies.
Oh fuck that bullshit. I was a dumbass to believed shit like that in school, and it didn't fucking free me. What happened was I was always calculator-dependent, which made higher-level math harder, because I was always distracting myself by operating the goddamn thing, and I never developed a very good intuition for arithmetic.
I fucking hate calculators in math classes.
I have a few thoughts related to this, and maybe I can get them out and ties them back together at the end.
1a. Yes, college isn’t right for everyone, and testing the traditional way with paper and pencil certainly disadvantages some students who would be star performers in a real world setting but are not a good fit for college classes. Think “Good Will Hunting” type people. They do exist.
1b. However, there are certainly more people who only imagine themselves as Will Hunting type people and that they are just too smart for college, but the reality is that they are dumb, or didn’t learn the material. For every person who fails a test because they’re a genius who is a bad fit in the system, there are at least 10 idiots who imagine themselves geniuses, and they would have passed the class if only that PhD professor with all his book smarts had actually written the right kind of exam. Traditional schooling and testing doesn’t work for the extreme upper tail of intelligence, but it exists because it did quite well at educating and sorting the masses to support the Industrial Revolution.
1c. If college were only about the knowledge, you could learn most of it with internet access and a library card for much cheaper. The vast majority of people are in college for the credential, and the institution has to protect the signal of the credential.
2a. Most college assignments and exams are not a good reflection of full time employment. College credentials serve mainly as a networking aid and a signal to employers that you are compliant and competent enough to follow a professor’s instructions, and will likely be a compliant and competent employee, although the instructions might be different. If it is the AI who is the one who followed the professor’s instructions you water the signal down, and employers don’t want that. It is irrelevant that a student can copy and paste things into ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT can get the answer right on this test. That isn’t what college is supposed to signal.
2b. A problem is that I literally can’t write a test in most subjects now that I would expect a student to complete that can’t be completed by ChatGPT better and faster. I teach undergraduate math and a while ago we thought that since GPT-4o could get a C in calculus that we’d just raise the standard. Now Fable and GPT-5.5 can cruise to an A in literally every math course in our catalog, and they can also catch every tiny issue in an exam written by a human. But I have to teach these undergraduate subjects so that some students can go on to PhD studies so they can contribute to the field. If we just stop teaching undergraduate subjects then PhD production and novel research grinds to a halt and only a few fields will progress where an AI is capable of self improvement.
2c. I’ve seen that my best students know how to do do something by hand and use a computer to complement/increase their capabilities, not to cover over entire gaps. When you have literally zero skill in an area, you can’t spot when you got a totally bad output from the AI (these days usually because of a lack of context or bad prompting because the student didn’t understand the material, not because the AI wasn’t capable). Somehow I have to incentivize students to learn the material on their own, so that they can be a better user of AI in the future. And a really effective way to do that is a graded test in which AI is not available to help them.
So to try to tie it together, is that there is still some value to a college degree, at least until something better comes along. But that college degree is only useful when it is a signal about the person and not some other tool. And although AI is getting very capable, somehow we have to teach the lower stuff to build up to the higher stuff, so we do need to restrict the use of AI in some educational settings so that we can build a good foundation for future learning.
As to the point about old paper sources being considered more reliable than an internet site, I agree. I am of the generation that wasn’t allowed to cite Wikipedia and it frustrated me. We’ll eventually figure out how to permit proper AI use, much like how many professors now allow you to use Wikipedia to start researching a topic.
It's worth noting that even though you say people could just go online and start reading, college may be the last time most people ever read a textbook ever again. There's something tough about knowing that you want to do something but then somehow your daily instincts fight you.
It's also why you can't just throw kids in front of Khan Academy.
At-home testing is dead.
It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back then—they were—but they also had the odd side-effect that, if it was a class you cared about, the test itself could be a learning experience.
For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote.
The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol, i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases.
I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact.
I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
My experience as a student has always been that most of the class will cheat given the chance. I remember in high school being one of maybe a dozen in a grade of over 200 who actually read the assigned novels. Everyone else used cliff/spark notes not just to familiarise themselves but also to plagiarise essays.
For most people, college is a box to check off. And individual classes are even more so.
The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago. People were like this a few decades ago as well when I got my degree. I didn't have consistently great classmates until honors and accelerated grad courses in my 3rd and 4th year, along with various domain specific student orgs like groups for hardware hacking, computer security, etc.
Obviously this can't happen without some structural change (virtually impossible in the US due to its political ossification and indefinite deadlock) because a degree is now just a way of gatekeeping the middle class, but dull and incurious minds made ideal manual laborers in the past, and, at some point, we lost sight of that and started rotting our corporate world out with them.
> The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago
As long as this allows them to provide for themselves and their families, buying homes, and retiring the same way as someone who goes to college.
Going to college should not be something people do to escape abject poverty, but something you want to do to enrich your life and make yourself a better person.
> The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college
Seems obvious now that this is the solution. Unfortunately, universities would never agree to downsize, not due to politics or any US-specific problems.
College is a box to check off because we have lost the ability to support a workforce without college degrees (at least in the US, UK, AU, where I have some experience).
Trades are critical but looked down on. Manufacturing is gone (which isn't in itself a bad thing). The service industry doesn't pay a living wage (thankfully it's reasonable here in AU). Apprenticeships don't pay enough. And pretty much all knowledge work jobs expect a degree from the beginning at a junior level.
We should be planning for a system where <20% of people go to university, instead of expecting >60% to go. Robust minimum wages, good trade schools, apprenticeships that pay enough for a wide range of roles, and changing the culture to not look down on folks that take these paths.
Sounds like you're in AU, I will point out that trades are not looked down on at all in this country. In fact culturally we value chippies and sparkies higher than desk jockeys.
Yeah this was a generalisation across the US/UK/AU. I come from the UK but now live in AU, and know the US a bit.
I think the looking down on trades is not quite as simple as I summarised it as, and I think AU does a lot better at all of the above than the US/UK, but I still see aspects of it. Tradies make good money in all 3 countries due to lack of supply, and yet there are still stereotypes of jobs like lawyers, doctors, (software engineers?) being better in some way.
It's a nuanced problem, but I don't get the impression that trades here are culturally valued higher than a lot of "white collar" work. Compared to ambiguous "desk jockeys" yes, but that's due to negative stereotypes about bullshit jobs, if you actually named a specific job I think you'd find different attitudes. Lawyers, accountants, sales/marketing, various engineering disciplines, IT, I think these are widely considered "better" jobs than trades, even though in most ways that's far from true.
As a non-Australian I just have to know what “chippies” and “sparkies” are!
Chippy = carpenter (from wood chips)
Sparky = electrician
But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
I'm not sure you should think it is shrinking. There are a lot of people in this world that hate to learn, and literally are incredibly apathetic about any topic. To such, learning anything is work, never a joy.
Before AI they had to learn to succeed. Now they see a shortcut. You said half showed they were learning, that's not so bad. I think you should be glad it's that high. I am.
That would be good.
https://www.baneproctoring.com/
I clicked expecting Bane Proctoring, where Bane monitors your exam and if he catches you cheating...
it would be extremely painful
... I'm sorry I couldn't help it
…for you
(sorry, old Internet forum reflexes activated)
Just wait a few decades until brain-machine interfaces will become a mass-market thing.
Can't wait for the EU brain control bill.
We support our citizens right to free will so long as they don't think anything bad.
You jest, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a thing somewhere, it’ll take its toll, and eventually fail from its own flaws. Then, chances are, there will be some lessons learnt - although, most likely, not on the first try. But that’s just a futuristic speculation.
My point was, however, that in modern age, where we’re literally on the verge of redefining humanity, we might be forced to redefine “cheating” as well. It’s all surely starting to slowly crack at the seams for the last half a century, and the pace is only increasing. When I was a kid, electronic calculators were banned (but not the slide rule, heh), nowadays, I’ve heard, even programmable ones are becoming accepted.
How is this even a debate? Before Covid most tests were in person right? Sure some classes had final projects that were take home, but in person tests were very norma. So what’s all the hand wringing about? Just do in person tests and move on?
Have you never had a home proctored test before?
You cant even sneak paper on to your desk, where do you plan to hide the LLM?
Yeah, I’m enrolled in an online degree program and use of AI in exams would be quite difficult.
The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify you. Only one screen is allowed and smartphones and smart watches are banned. A proctor is watching you and you’re being recorded the whole time. I have no idea how one could slip something like AI use past all this.
Thats my experience + they are listening the whole time. A loud noise from another room disqualified a coworker of mine.
Hell, I got flagged for possible cheating in an online proctored test because I had a whiteboard behind me that had unrelated equations on it or some nonsense. I didn't even look at them lol.
The instructor reviewed the footage, laughed, and said, "wow, what a pain in the butt to deal with" and cancelled the alert or whatever. Almost all the classes I've taken online have been way harder for potential cheating than in person classes.
I'll say this too, I took a course called something like "applied mathematical methods" online a long time ago. That class's final basically said, "use whatever resources you want except for other people" - ChatGPT would have probably made short work of the exam, but at the time, even with the power of the internet about 10 years ago, there's no way I could have used it to help me. I doubt even teaming up would have helped that much to be honest lol.
I had 24 hours to do the test and it was pretty hard to get done in that time. I think it took me something like 5 or 6 hours to do it? Making your tests muderously difficult is one way to handle the temptation to cheat in online courses. I don't know that that's the best solution from a pedagogy standpoint, but hey, I'm not a prof.
Have you heard the story of Hans Niemann? ;-)
(True or not, a story is a story.)
Disallowing the use of AI is basically the modern equivalent of testing based on memorization. It is a laziness to find something more useful to evaluate on or an inability to distinguish real understanding in a field from first level understanding.
Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs.
If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.
If your score falls 50% from not using AI, that's not testing memorization. That's testing learning anything on the topic being tested. The quantity of information on college exams is not that much to memorize. At least, personally, failing to remember something was rarely a reason why I failed to answer a question. Almost always it was because I did not fully understand the topic, so I tried to fall back on remembering if I answered the same question before.
Me: How could he not have seen this coming?
Oh.. he’s blind.
' “56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,” '
and the rest are lying.
(With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)
> Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent.
I stopped reading after the first sentence.
I’m not sure why that’s controversial - I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way. The only other common characteristic is that they almost always had some form of privilege. Either rich parents, or adults around them who worked very hard to get them to that level.
> I’m not sure why that’s controversial
Do you know what "by definition" means?
> I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way.
You probably wouldn't meet the dumb ones, because they're probaly not in your social class:
> rich parents
If you have privilege, don’t be ashamed. USE IT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE!
It’s yours anyway. You don’t owe society anything just because you have privilege.
Everyone else, put on a helmet! Welcome to life.
You owe society more than nothing, otherwise you end up with a sick society.
If you had read the whole sentence, you would have found a few other words, which say “just because you have privilege.”
All men are created equal. Civic duties apply equally to everyone. Once people have met their legal obligations (say, paying taxes and obeying the law), any additional generosity is voluntary, not owed, so having more privilege does not automatically create greater moral obligations.
Say, I am beautiful and you are ugly. That’s my privilege. Do I owe more than you? No. It sucks for you. Sorry but that’s life. Stop whining and keep making the best you have with your God-given privileges (maybe you are say, taller or have more money).
- And remember, Peter, with great power comes great responsibility
- No. It sucks for you. Sorry but that's life
(Uncle Ben dies sad)
What an odd world view. Of course the priviliged have greater social obligations, because they are greater benefactors of life. We're all equal under the law but that doesn't mean that those with greater means shouldn't have greater impacts on society.
Meritocracy is often a buzzword of the elite to avoid paying their fair share.
They do have the opportunity to make greater impact. They just don’t owe you anything.
You are just either jealous or privilege shaming, or just want to perpetuate victimhood.
Either way, self-interest is the greatest force on earth. That’s why America is the Greatest Country on Earth, ever.
> That’s why America is the Greatest Country on Earth, ever
You forgot the sarcasm tag.
Well, it’s the country that most people who leave their country risk their lives to move to. So at least most immigrants on earth agree with me.
If I were to nitpick, I would say that they try to move to a idealised version of the US that never quite existed. This romanticised version has been pervasively depicted in mass consumption media for many decades.
More meaningful perhaps would be to count the immigrants from developed countries and immigrants that earn above the median in their respective countries and/or go to the US and earn above the American median.
There are a lot of desperate people in the world right now who’ll take extreme action to escape their immediate predicaments, such as risking a Mediterranean crossing from Northern Africa to Europe.
also the rich absolutely _do_ owe society at large something: taxes. a thing which, as you get richer, it apparently becomes optional due to financial engineering
There is a tax book. If you don’t take advantage of every possible option allowed by the thick book, then you are just dumb.
But if you are feeling more patriotic than you usually feel, may I remind you Uncle Sam accepts gifts at:
https://fiscal.treasury.gov/financing/gifts-to-government
> That’s why America is the Greatest Country on Earth, ever.
hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahhahahhahahahahahahahhaahah
citation needed on that last claim. do you have universal healthcare free at point of service? do you have a healthy supply of public housing? do you let children starve, through no fault of their own but the circumstances of their birth? do you engage is ears of choice and murder 100+ innocent children in a primary school on the first day of the conflict?
the answer to some of these questions should be yes, and others should be no, if you're going to make the claim that the United States of America is the "Greatest Country on Earth, Ever".
The greatest country on earth ever is that which most people of the world, if given a free plane ticket and permission to live in, would go to.
I don’t know how you find it controversial. It’s just a fact.
>America is the Greatest Country on Earth
Yeah ok mate. Have a good one.
Thanks. If you think some other country is, then tell us.
Why jump on the opportunity to prune reading by rejecting the lot as soon an unrelated premise you disagree with is presented?
Perhaps at that point if you stop reading after the first sentence, you could churn the entire article through AI to summarize it into a single sentence, and see if the invalid premise is core to the message?
> Why jump on the opportunity to prune reading by rejecting the lot as soon an unrelated premise you disagree with is presented?
Ars Technica has already trashed its reputation with the infamous controversy over publishing AI hallucinated quotations.
I couldn't decide whether the opening sentence of the submitted article was so dumb that it had to be written by AI or so dumb that it had to be written by a human, and coming to a conclusion on that question didn't seem worth it.
> you could churn the entire article through AI to summarize it
I don't do AI summaries, ever.
I agree that they are intelligent, just don't know about the "definition" part. A typical Ivy Leaguer isn't a dumbass. What's wrong with calling one intelligent?
Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average. Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.
> just don't know about the "definition" part
Yes, that's the point.
> A typical Ivy Leaguer isn't a dumbass.
But that's not what the quoted sentence said.
> Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average.
I've been to Walmart. Does that make me average? (You say literally anyone.) Do you think that Ivy Leaguers never go to Walmart?
> Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.
You say this in the same paragraph where you rip on Walmart customers.
Ars Technica has gotten very bad over the years. IMHO not worth reading for many, many years now.
Hey, a typical person should be intelligent because we human have used ourselves as a de-facto definition of intelligence anyway. That sentence probably means something like "no intellectually disabled person here". Even though we don't normally feel so because higher educations seem "typical" to us.
I think the article used a different colloquial meaning of “intelligent”, more akin to “intellectual” (the noun), as in “well educated”.
Either way, an odd statement shouldn’t normally instantly invalidate the whole article.
technically, they invented the IQ to test their IQs so, this mighe be strictly correcg.
“Rich”
I didn't attend an Ivy League, but I think I went to a good school. I was very nervous before I left for school - a little intimidated, so I talked to an academic mentor. He told me something I'll never forget: "You're gonna be around a lot of really smart kids. No doubt about it. But, mostly, what you're gonna find is you're surrounded by a lot of rich kids." He was 100% correct. Lots of smart kids, and lots of kids from well-to-do families. I think I met, maybe, 2 other kids that were as broke as my family.
The first time I attended a selective school was graduate school. Like you, I was extremely nervous. “They’re all going to be smarter than me. I’m going to feel like an idiot.”
And it turned out to be true. Many of the students I went to school with had far better preparation than I did. And not only did I feel like an idiot, another person called me an idiot in front of everyone. Suspicion confirmed.
The thing is, once I accepted that, yes, maybe my preparation was worse, and that it was possible that I was admitted by mistake, I found a way forward. After all, if literally everyone is smarter than you, then in a way, you’re the luckiest person there: you’re surrounded by smart people, and almost any conversation you have with your peers will benefit YOU more than it benefits THEM.
Over time, I realized that the thing that mattered most was “time on task.” Unlike my peers, who had better instruction, because they went to better schools, had private tutors, etc. I had to work for everything. And I started graduate school late: I turned 30 the year I enrolled. So I was not distracted by social events, finding a romantic partner, or deep questions like “what do I want to do with my life?” I was all-in. I may have started a bit behind, but I finished well ahead of most of my peers.
I think it’s easy for students from my kind of background to wither under the pressure of an elite environment. As a faculty member, I’ve seen it happen many times, sadly. But there IS a way through it, and largely, the way forward is to value oneself, to develop one’s internal compass for good work, and to not let the social pressures overwhelm. I don’t mean to make this sound easy, but it IS possible.
It's laughable to be surprised by cheating on take-home exams. Does the professor have a comparative assessment before AI? Do you think the cheating didn't happen on them before AI? It always happened. It's structural, in the same ways that speeding on the highway is structural, and evading taxes on cash income is structural. And the structural fix is in-class exams.