To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain

LLM use is the most demoralizing problem I’ve faced as a college instructor.

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[Green-PEAs]

Seriously, friction does matter. Assuming the goal of education is to "get the grade" is like assuming that when I run 3 miles for exercise, it's because I needed to be where ever the end of that 3 miles was.

This is a remnant from the original “liberal education” purposes of college. You round out a student into a complete thinker and equip them for life, not a career, etc

The problem is that this is completely out of touch with modern priorities and I have become a fatalist about it.

We have to accept that this is not at all the reason the majority of people go to college.

The purpose of college is now to get good grades so you can get into a good career and avoid being mired in poverty and hardship. Almost no one is attending school with the hopes of becoming more well-rounded and more intellectually robust. It is viewed as a necessary step on the ladder to “success” (or the ladder out of blue collar work, at a minimum).

Of course the kids are going to cheat on their philosophy class, their English class, and even the classes relevant to their career goal. Everything is in pursuit of the credential, the END, there is almost zero interest in the means or the journey.

And to be fair to the kids that’s probably valid. I had perhaps two faculty members ever that seemed to care. I got nothing from undergrad except my credential and my grades that I could not have gotten from the library.

We can talk about the fun and games of intellectual growth and how the grades shouldn’t matter, their LEARNING should, when attending college is not a life-altering debt acquisition gamble that is now required for numerous careers that have zero need for a degree requirement.

If students are going to be saddled with non-dischargable debt that will alter their lives forever - to pay for an education they may have zero interest in, that is required for a $40k sales job now - then how can we cry about their lack of intellectual curiosity or absence of effort?

They’re going through the motions to try to not be the last rats drowning on a sinking ship. I’ve read so many articles from teachers like this guy. Great intentions, valid complaints, completely out of touch with the brutality of modern economic reality.

 

[Green-PEAs]

I think we should just look back to how we did this 25 years ago. We all used Sparknotes, and most problems asked by professors were answered in the spark notes. You could literally copy/paste whole sections and just move sentences around and change some words and get a good grade. Fraternities and academic societies have maintained “test banks” for years.

Which is all to say, this is probably not as big a problem as it seems.

One of the most devastating academic disillusionments I experienced came from those test banks.

I was in grad school where ostensibly all of this material is relevant to our ability to perform in our career. I put so much effort into studying for an exam. I’m reading the text, doing practice problems, reviewing lectures, etc etc.

I show up on exam day and there is a little pod of guys I’m friends with reviewing a printout. “What’s that?” “It’s last years exam!”

Every single one of those guys got a 100%. Not a question had been altered. They didn’t study at all, just brute memorization the morning of the test. I got an 85%. And our grades and class rank directly affected our ability to specialize.

One of them had a test bank that basically got the entire group through the first two years of the program at the top of the class. Was it wrong of them to use it? Probably. I consider it “more wrong” that the faculty was repeating the exams verbatim for years. They surely had to notice a disproportionate amount of 100% results!

 

[Green-PEAs]

There's a horrible thing here where education strategy has been based around using methods of assessment that students find extremely difficult to cheat, because you have to trick a significant proportion of students into actually learning something instead of just getting a grade on a certificate.

I cannot help but think that in the age of LLMs being able to defeat a lot of those methods, imperfect as they are, we have to go back as a society to the root of that problem, which is that the students want the grade rather than to learn the stuff. yes some students will always want to actually learn things - probably mostly in their specific preferred subjects - but while there's a significant number of students who don't understand the value and necessity of the learning, this kind of thing will always be a problem.

How we'd actually achieve such a change though... no idea. Not a clue. Especially not in the age of LLMs where their vendors are trying to get companies to accept them as a substitute for employee ability, and company management are largely happy to do that. At least for now.

The problem is so fundamental it will require a total overhaul of our higher education system.

The student cannot see the relation of the material to their career function. If they can cheat the test with AI why can’t they cheat the job itself with an AI? And is that even cheating or is it just being “efficient”?

Everything is so abstracted

I have to wonder about that, what if you had a friend who took the class and kept his copy of the test? No rule against that (assuming the teacher returns it). Surely just reviewing the prior year's copy of the test isn't in and of itself cheating? If you went to an upperclassman and asked for help and they pulled out their old copy of the test to review that would be fine.

So if reviewing the test is fine, but you knew the questions would be the literal same, what are you going to do? Study it but don't commit any details to memory?

The fact that the questions were unchanged and the professor surely knew what was happening seems like borderline malfeasance on their part.

This was during dental school. There’s a whole background to it that I’ll spare you but we were not supposed to have access to those exams.

To tie it back to the article, I think it’s very very easy to get disillusioned with the educational system while you’re a student and begin to look at it in a cynical and mercenary way.

 

[Green-PEAs]

At the core of all discussions of AI is a question seldom if ever mentioned: what is your life for? "To serve God" may be superstitious nonsense, but it's nonetheless an infinitely better answer than "Profit." Profit comes from getting more than you give. Profit requires dominating other people. Profit's idols are dead-eyed billionaire sociopaths who know nothing but greed, whom we shamefully, secretly envy even as we rightly fear and loathe them. When profit is God, the only prayer is "Dear God, give me everything."

The (deserved) failure of religion has left a vacuum. Our failure to fill it has left us with nothing but "The one who dies with the most toys wins." The current state of the world makes it clear humans can live with very, very little. What we can't live without is purpose. When we don't answer questions like "Why are we here and where are we going?" we are by default allowing someone else to define our existence for their benefit, with no particular regard for us or our lives.

AI will end us, not with killer robots, but by depriving us of any but the most base reasons to exist. A dead intelligence incapable of suffering is incapable of empathy. It will give us whatever we want, and so far, what we want resembles nothing so much as a toddler determined to live on candy. What we'll get is the void.

Why are we here? To pay the rent? Stock options? To level up? For the $100K car that will make us sexually attractive?

We’ve had almost 200 years to address this question at a societal level and we have not progressed beyond Nietzsche. Our proposed answers are twofold so far, science and art, and neither is fulfilling the same spiritual void for the masses; our biological answer- to provide for our children - will always work to some extent, until we stop having children, which we have. I have no idea how to solve the problem on a macro level.

On the individual level it’s manageable. On the societal level you require an institution and that’s not something our society will (or should) embrace.

Now, tell more more about this car that makes me sexually attractive.

 

[Green-PEAs]

I think it's likely that at some point there will be a hard split between people with actual skills and knowledge and the useless distracted that exclusively go through motions because that's all they can do.

It's going to hurt all of us (if it doesn't already) but especially those in category #2.
And fark once one gets labeled as cat #2 how to change that label?
I'm not sure #1 will want to help #2 to join #1.

Look at Maton’s post above yours and the quote in the very article. When higher ed is just a hoop to jump through for a career, many students will not be interested in anything they deem unnecessary for that goal.

There are many students who use the LLM for the coursework they don’t find relevant for their major and then actually use their time to learn the things they find relevant to their career.

Someone who is incompetent will quickly be found out. Someone who cheated their way through the courses they didn’t think were relevant may not be detectable - and maybe they shouldn’t be - outside of demonstrating a moral deficiency.

Well said and well thought out, I agree with pretty much everything.

On the flip side lets not give college professors a clean escape either. In my thoughts, they to bear some of the blame for the current college situation. They teach to a class, not to an individual, nor do they tailor their class to the audience at all, its regurgitation. Take a quick look class by class and see 'oh this semester I've got a lot of Info Tech kids, and education' majors, maybe i should adjust my plans..

I'm not saying you shouldnt learn something from it, nor am i saying that cheating is ok, I wholly appreciate and have used my wide base of knowledge i got from all the college classes i took, even Art. But really, if you have a Finance major who has to take 9 hours of "art, music, drama" and 9 hours of hard science "organic, physics and biology". That is 18hours of course work that they will likely really struggle with at best, and at worst they could do without.

that’s because at traditional universities the professors job is to do research and get published. Teaching is secondary at best. That’s not what dictates their pay.