AI-driven cheating “widespread” even at elite schools like Princeton
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
Not thrilled about how this situation will affect the perception of higher education, especially when the "AI" bubble is finally allowed to burst and we all end up having to foot the bill for all this irresponsible nonsense. Turning out a generation (or more) whose ivy league degrees signify that the degree holder only knows how to prompt seems bad.
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Lycanthropos
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Cannot wait for an entire generation of college grads who learned nothing in their Ivy League classes besides how to prompt the best answer. No doubt this will have no long term consequences to previously rigorous fields that really do require intense knowledge of the topic
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You understand that "embracing AI" in colleges means the end of learning, right?
There will be zero value in a college degree if it can obtained by using AI to complete all of the coursework.
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ffs I'm glad you're not in a leadership position (you're not, are you???)
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yes, it probably is.
but there's no way to spin the annihilation of learning into a good thing.
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I can't imagine it took this long for them to start proctoring. Proctoring is a service to the students who wish to achieve on their own merit. Not to mention that it's a competitive school. It's a lose lose situation.
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Hopefully a good deal of cheating will not only be seen by profs, but result in fewer reference letters for cheaters. Or perhaps even letters that share profs’ cheating concerns.
Good grades are one thing, but you won’t get into grad school without faculty support.
Anyway, it’s a huge mess regardless. And that honour code? Sadly it’s breaking down outside of Princeton too.
Good grades are one thing, but you won’t get into grad school without faculty support.
Anyway, it’s a huge mess regardless. And that honour code? Sadly it’s breaking down outside of Princeton too.
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We're in a bleak place that the reporter of cheaters worries about peer-group shaming, not the cheaters themselves.
Fuckin' thing sucks.
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They are learning workload management with AI~ Truly the skills of the future. =]
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Reference letters that increasingly are read only by LLMs, if not also written by them :|
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
Seems like many students are being incentivized to stop learning and start prompting though.
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Stopping this sort of thing is a hard problem. One solution, which unfortunately doesn't scale very well, is to go truly old school and give oral exams. There's definitely a resurgence in hand-written exams as well; good time to own stock in the companies that sell blank blue books....
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People who bring up the old “they said that about calculators and everything was fine” trope know nothing about education.
Most education is practicing reasoning about a set of knowledge (facts, processes, procedures, etc…). It’s graded on whether students can demonstrate this.
LLMs completely destroy the evidence of reasoning used for grading.
Most education is practicing reasoning about a set of knowledge (facts, processes, procedures, etc…). It’s graded on whether students can demonstrate this.
LLMs completely destroy the evidence of reasoning used for grading.
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I dreaded having to do these wrote-memorization type stuff.
So my Prof had an open-book open-class test strategy in some cases. He was all about teamwork and working together because that's what you would be doing in a real job. So, we had the whole block to take the exam (again, open book, working together) but it was pass/fail. Anything wrong and we all lost out.
So, do you do it by yourself, and get graded against each-other and maybe pass but not with 100%.
Or all go in together and lighten the load where you all pass and need to discuss determine truth?
Then do a post-op on the results, of course.
This was 2007 of course. iPhones were just becoming the new hotness and internet was available on Windows CE and Palm Pilots and Blackberry's so cheating was a bit more laborious.
But I do see other Arsians mention that in today's world (mostly sarcastically), is cheating or doing just the bare-minimum considered "wrong" anymore? As long as it gets done, on time, on/under budget with minimal resources then good job!
Unless its "tradition" to do things some-way then that just keeps on keeping-on.
I do like to take pride in my work but maybe I'm an outlier.
So my Prof had an open-book open-class test strategy in some cases. He was all about teamwork and working together because that's what you would be doing in a real job. So, we had the whole block to take the exam (again, open book, working together) but it was pass/fail. Anything wrong and we all lost out.
So, do you do it by yourself, and get graded against each-other and maybe pass but not with 100%.
Or all go in together and lighten the load where you all pass and need to discuss determine truth?
Then do a post-op on the results, of course.
This was 2007 of course. iPhones were just becoming the new hotness and internet was available on Windows CE and Palm Pilots and Blackberry's so cheating was a bit more laborious.
But I do see other Arsians mention that in today's world (mostly sarcastically), is cheating or doing just the bare-minimum considered "wrong" anymore? As long as it gets done, on time, on/under budget with minimal resources then good job!
Unless its "tradition" to do things some-way then that just keeps on keeping-on.
I do like to take pride in my work but maybe I'm an outlier.
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The school’s longstanding pro-cheating policy just screams, “well how else are the legacied trust fund babies going to pass?”
meritocracy my ass
meritocracy my ass
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Eventually, even Social Media will look "not all that bad, actually" next to the release of generative AI to Humanity. It seeds gangrene everywhere.
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credentials are shorthand for "I have learned and i can do work"
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To use a tool well, it's best to understand the underlying physical processes. Obvious example is with 3D physics simulations, anyone can input a geometry and run the program, the point of learning physics is to understand the inputs and outputs, how to test them and recognize a bad output. To understand what level of complexity (or context) is necessary to get a useful result. If you went to Princeton to learn prompt engineering, you really wasted your money and your time. Nobody is saying LLMs are always bad, they are saying it is tool best used if you have already mastered the subject matter, not as a substitute.
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You mistake longevity for ubiquity.
It doesn't matter how smart the models are or how popular they are among those who lack the stuff to get by without them. What matters is if they can make money for the companies offering those models to customers.
They haven't passed that test so far, and there's not a lot of cheating you can do when the VC cash that keeps this spinning plate bullshit from crashing to the ground from a lack of enough paid people to keep the plates spinning runs out. OpenAI is still predicted to go bankrupt by summer next year. And that's now an optimistic prediction.
The small models won't survive if there's no company running them, since a good share of them rely on the updates and even processing of the tokens by the larger companies.
It won't die off, at least not entirely. But what I expect it to do is lose most of the toxic shit, and leave behind the comparatively small amount of useful shit it can do.
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Competition is broadly equivalent to evaluation. If you don't sort by competence in some way, you're going to be sending a shitload of chaff to Princeton, and you're going to have no idea whether somebody coming out the other side is worth a bucket of warm spit.
Just the sort of person I want designing the car I drive or the bridge I drive it over!
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Honor codes are part of this problem. My school didn't have an honor code, but my understanding is that many honor codes discourage turning cheaters in.
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The article, and many of the comments seem to give the impression that “because AI” students are cheating.
Students who cheat are cheaters. It’s their personality. They choose to cheat. Tools to cheat, in many forms have always been available to cheaters.
None of them have to cheat. They choose to cheat. Whether it’s easy to cheat or difficult to cheat is not relevant. They are people who are prone to cheat.
Maybe the value of those diplomas should be cheapened accordingly.
Students who cheat are cheaters. It’s their personality. They choose to cheat. Tools to cheat, in many forms have always been available to cheaters.
None of them have to cheat. They choose to cheat. Whether it’s easy to cheat or difficult to cheat is not relevant. They are people who are prone to cheat.
Maybe the value of those diplomas should be cheapened accordingly.
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there are only so many seats in a classroom or lucrative job openings to fill, so there must be some way to choose who gets the spots. people are competing for the best spots.
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I teach at a university, and so far my only answer to this problem is to not accept any demonstration of knowledge that I cannot certify myself, such as oral examinations or exams with smartphones face down on the desk and lab PCs disconnected from the internet. But AI, in my opinion, has a second very problematic effect, which is that many students have problems assessing their own knowledge, and AI gives them a false sense of understanding the topics; even well-meaning students think they understand something because they saw the AI solve it for them, until they face an examination situation and learn they don't. It is the exact same problem as before, when they copied or received lessons passively from a more knowledgeable student, only now this "genius" student is available to them 24/7.
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Find one. Show me an accredited school’s honor code that discourages turning in cheaters. Just one. I’ll wait.
Just spouting garbage in the forum doesn’t make it true. Based on your comment, I 100% believe you went to a school without an honor code.
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Had a prof in college, his mantra was 'you go to college to learn how to learn'. I have to admit, I've forgotten a lot of what I learned in college, but I still know how to learn.
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The worms won't go back into the can again. Doesn't mean that decreeing the superiority of free range worms is the appropriate response.
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