Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College - ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

browserbowser · May 7, 2025

The people who run shit want to regulate AI out of the access of the proletariat so do understand articles like this are made to scare certain classes of people into voting for people who will do exactly that, not actually address any problems or to begin dialogue on how the education system can adapt to new technological advancements.

Kendall Motor Oil · May 7, 2025

Konstantinopel Retaker said:
I tried cheating with ChatGPT in a physics assignment and I could easily see that it was pure trash it spewed out. Maybe at a high school level it would be usable, but when it comes to college I would be horrified of trusting it blindly after my first and last experience.
To be fair, this was half a year ago and maybe it has improved since then.

Its gotten a lot better and you may have not prompted it properly. if you're using the free models that's part of the reason you weren't getting good results. Using a better model like o3-mini-high will usually give you better answers.
The "it can't do the most basic problems" is a cope by people who have a bias, don't know how to use it, or are too poor to afford $20/mo on ChatGPT plus.

Positron · May 8, 2025

The OP only contains the first part out of five of this article. Here is the rest:

Before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, cheating had already reached a sort of zenith. At the time, many college students had finished high school remotely, largely unsupervised, and with access to tools like Chegg and Course Hero. These companies advertised themselves as vast online libraries of textbooks and course materials but, in reality, were cheating multi-tools. For $15.95 a month, Chegg promised answers to homework questions in as little as 30 minutes, 24/7, from the 150,000 experts with advanced degrees it employed, mostly in India. When ChatGPT launched, students were primed for a tool that was faster, more capable.

But school administrators were stymied. There would be no way to enforce an all-out ChatGPT ban, so most adopted an ad hoc approach, leaving it up to professors to decide whether to allow students to use AI. Some universities welcomed it, partnering with developers, rolling out their own chatbots to help students register for classes, or launching new classes, certificate programs, and majors focused on generative AI. But regulation remained difficult. How much AI help was acceptable? Should students be able to have a dialogue with AI to get ideas but not ask it to write the actual sentences?

These days, professors will often state their policy on their syllabi — allowing AI, for example, as long as students cite it as if it were any other source, or permitting it for conceptual help only, or requiring students to provide receipts of their dialogue with a chatbot. Students often interpret those instructions as guidelines rather than hard rules. Sometimes they will cheat on their homework without even knowing — or knowing exactly how much — they are violating university policy when they ask a chatbot to clean up a draft or find a relevant study to cite. Wendy, a freshman finance major at one of the city’s top universities, told me that she is against using AI. Or, she clarified, “I’m against copy-and-pasting. I’m against cheating and plagiarism. All of that. It’s against the student handbook.” Then she described, step-by-step, how on a recent Friday at 8 a.m., she called up an AI platform to help her write a four-to-five-page essay due two hours later.

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.” Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot. Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.”

Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a tidy five-page paper at an acceptably tardy 10:17 a.m. When I asked her how she did on the assignment, she said she got a good grade. “I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

___________________________________________________________

Most of the writing professors I spoke to told me that it’s abundantly clear when their students use AI. Sometimes there’s a smoothness to the language, a flattened syntax; other times, it’s clumsy and mechanical. The arguments are too evenhanded — counterpoints tend to be presented just as rigorously as the paper’s central thesis. Words like multifaceted and context pop up more than they might normally. On occasion, the evidence is more obvious, as when last year a teacher reported reading a paper that opened with “As an AI, I have been programmed …” Usually, though, the evidence is more subtle, which makes nailing an AI plagiarist harder than identifying the deed. Some professors have resorted to deploying so-called Trojan horses, sticking strange phrases, in small white text, in between the paragraphs of an essay prompt. (The idea is that this would theoretically prompt ChatGPT to insert a non sequitur into the essay.) Students at Santa Clara recently found the word broccoli hidden in a professor’s assignment. Last fall, a professor at the University of Oklahoma sneaked the phrases “mention Finland” and “mention Dua Lipa” in his. A student discovered his trap and warned her classmates about it on TikTok. “It does work sometimes,” said Jollimore, the Cal State Chico professor. “I’ve used ‘How would Aristotle answer this?’ when we hadn’t read Aristotle. But I’ve also used absurd ones and they didn’t notice that there was this crazy thing in their paper, meaning these are people who not only didn’t write the paper but also didn’t read their own paper before submitting it.”

Still, while professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. One, published in June 2024, used fake student profiles to slip 100 percent AI-generated work into professors’ grading piles at a U.K. university. The professors failed to flag 97 percent. It doesn’t help that since ChatGPT’s launch, AI’s capacity to write human-sounding essays has only gotten better. Which is why universities have enlisted AI detectors like Turnitin, which uses AI to recognize patterns in AI-generated text. After evaluating a block of text, detectors provide a percentage score that indicates the alleged likelihood it was AI-generated. Students talk about professors who are rumored to have certain thresholds (25 percent, say) above which an essay might be flagged as an honor-code violation. But I couldn’t find a single professor — at large state schools or small private schools, elite or otherwise — who admitted to enforcing such a policy. Most seemed resigned to the belief that AI detectors don’t work. It’s true that different AI detectors have vastly different success rates, and there is a lot of conflicting data. While some claim to have less than a one percent false-positive rate, studies have shown they trigger more false positives for essays written by neurodivergent students and students who speak English as a second language. Turnitin’s chief product officer, Annie Chechitelli, told me that the product is tuned to err on the side of caution, more inclined to trigger a false negative than a false positive so that teachers don’t wrongly accuse students of plagiarism. I fed Wendy’s essay through a free AI detector, ZeroGPT, and it came back as 11.74 AI-generated, which seemed low given that AI, at the very least, had generated her central arguments. I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.

There are, of course, plenty of simple ways to fool both professors and detectors. After using AI to produce an essay, students can always rewrite it in their own voice or add typos. Or they can ask AI to do that for them: One student on TikTok said her preferred prompt is “Write it as a college freshman who is a li’l dumb.” Students can also launder AI-generated paragraphs through other AIs, some of which advertise the “authenticity” of their outputs or allow students to upload their past essays to train the AI in their voice. “They’re really good at manipulating the systems. You put a prompt in ChatGPT, then put the output into another AI system, then put it into another AI system. At that point, if you put it into an AI-detection system, it decreases the percentage of AI used every time,” said Eric, a sophomore at Stanford.

Most professors have come to the conclusion that stopping rampant AI abuse would require more than simply policing individual cases and would likely mean overhauling the education system to consider students more holistically. “Cheating correlates with mental health, well-being, sleep exhaustion, anxiety, depression, belonging,” said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford and one of the world’s leading student-engagement researchers.

Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair. In the fall, Sam Williams was a teaching assistant for a writing-intensive class on music and social change at the University of Iowa that, officially, didn’t allow students to use AI at all. Williams enjoyed reading and grading the class’s first assignment: a personal essay that asked the students to write about their own music tastes. Then, on the second assignment, an essay on the New Orleans jazz era (1890 to 1920), many of his students’ writing styles changed drastically. Worse were the ridiculous factual errors. Multiple essays contained entire paragraphs on Elvis Presley (born in 1935). “I literally told my class, ‘Hey, don’t use AI. But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out,’” Williams said.

Williams knew most of the students in this general-education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed. “They’re using AI because it’s a simple solution and it’s an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays. And I get it, because I hated writing essays when I was in school,” Williams said. “But now, whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them.”

By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones. “Every time I brought it up with the professor, I got the sense he was underestimating the power of ChatGPT, and the departmental stance was, ‘Well, it’s a slippery slope, and we can’t really prove they’re using AI,’” Williams said. “I was told to grade based on what the essay would’ve gotten if it were a ‘true attempt at a paper.’ So I was grading people on their ability to use ChatGPT.”

The “true attempt at a paper” policy ruined Williams’s grading scale. If he gave a solid paper that was obviously written with AI a B, what should he give a paper written by someone who actually wrote their own paper but submitted, in his words, “a barely literate essay”? The confusion was enough to sour Williams on education as a whole. By the end of the semester, he was so disillusioned that he decided to drop out of graduate school altogether. “We’re in a new generation, a new time, and I just don’t think that’s what I want to do,” he said.

Jollimore, who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving. “Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.” Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis. “The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there’s not really a point in doing this. Maybe the original meaning of these assignments has been lost or is not being communicated to them well.”

He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.) In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”

It’s not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

___________________________________________________________

It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification. This is all especially unnerving if you add in the reality that AI is imperfect — it might rely on something that is factually inaccurate or just make something up entirely — with the ruinous effect social media has had on Gen Z’s ability to tell fact from fiction. The problem may be much larger than generative AI. The so-called Flynn effect refers to the consistent rise in IQ scores from generation to generation going back to at least the 1930s. That rise started to slow, and in some cases reverse, around 2006. “The greatest worry in these times of generative AI is not that it may compromise human creativity or intelligence,” Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell University, told The Guardian, “but that it already has.”

Students are worrying about this, even if they’re not willing or able to give up the chatbots that are making their lives exponentially easier. Daniel, a computer-science major at the University of Florida, told me he remembers the first time he tried ChatGPT vividly. He marched down the hall to his high-school computer-science teacher’s classroom, he said, and whipped out his Chromebook to show him. “I was like, ‘Dude, you have to see this!’ My dad can look back on Steve Jobs’s iPhone keynote and think, Yeah, that was a big moment. That’s what it was like for me, looking at something that I would go on to use every day for the rest of my life.”

AI has made Daniel more curious; he likes that whenever he has a question, he can quickly access a thorough answer. But when he uses AI for homework, he often wonders, If I took the time to learn that, instead of just finding it out, would I have learned a lot more? At school, he asks ChatGPT to make sure his essays are polished and grammatically correct, to write the first few paragraphs of his essays when he’s short on time, to handle the grunt work in his coding classes, to cut basically all cuttable corners. Sometimes, he knows his use of AI is a clear violation of student conduct, but most of the time it feels like he’s in a gray area. “I don’t think anyone calls seeing a tutor cheating, right? But what happens when a tutor starts writing lines of your paper for you?” he said.

Recently, Mark, a freshman math major at the University of Chicago, admitted to a friend that he had used ChatGPT more than usual to help him code one of his assignments. His friend offered a somewhat comforting metaphor: “You can be a contractor building a house and use all these power tools, but at the end of the day, the house won’t be there without you.” Still, Mark said, “it’s just really hard to judge. Is this my work? ” I asked Daniel a hypothetical to try to understand where he thought his work began and AI’s ended: Would he be upset if he caught a romantic partner sending him an AI-generated poem? “I guess the question is what is the value proposition of the thing you’re given? Is it that they created it? Or is the value of the thing itself?” he said. “In the past, giving someone a letter usually did both things.” These days, he sends handwritten notes — after he has drafted them using ChatGPT.

“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” wrote Duke professor Orin Starn in a recent column titled “My Losing Battle Against AI Cheating,” citing a quote often attributed to W. H. Auden. But it’s not just writing that develops critical thinking. “Learning math is working on your ability to systematically go through a process to solve a problem. Even if you’re not going to use algebra or trigonometry or calculus in your career, you’re going to use those skills to keep track of what’s up and what’s down when things don’t make sense,” said Michael Johnson, an associate provost at Texas A&M University.

Adolescents benefit from structured adversity, whether it’s algebra or chores. They build self-esteem and work ethic. It’s why the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued for the importance of children learning to do hard things, something that technology is making infinitely easier to avoid. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has tended to brush off concerns about AI use in academia as shortsighted, describing ChatGPT as merely “a calculator for words” and saying the definition of cheating needs to evolve. “Writing a paper the old-fashioned way is not going to be the thing,” Altman, a Stanford dropout, said last year. But speaking before the Senate’s oversight committee on technology in 2023, he confessed his own reservations: “I worry that as the models get better and better, the users can have sort of less and less of their own discriminating process.” OpenAI hasn’t been shy about marketing to college students. It recently made ChatGPT Plus, normally a $20-per-month subscription, free to them during finals. (OpenAI contends that students and teachers need to be taught how to use it responsibly, pointing to the ChatGPT Edu product it sells to academic institutions.)

__________________________________________________________________________

In late March, Columbia suspended Lee after he posted details about his disciplinary hearing on X. He has no plans to go back to school and has no desire to work for a big-tech company, either. Lee explained to me that by showing the world AI could be used to cheat during a remote job interview, he had pushed the tech industry to evolve the same way AI was forcing higher education to evolve. “Every technological innovation has caused humanity to sit back and think about what work is actually useful,” he said. “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.”

Lee has already moved on from hacking interviews. In April, he and Shanmugam launched Cluely, which scans a user’s computer screen and listens to its audio in order to provide AI feedback and answers to questions in real time without prompting. “We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again,” the company’s manifesto reads. This time, Lee attempted a viral launch with a $140,000 scripted advertisement in which a young software engineer, played by Lee, uses Cluely installed on his glasses to lie his way through a first date with an older woman. When the date starts going south, Cluely suggests Lee “reference her art” and provides a script for him to follow. “I saw your profile and the painting with the tulips. You are the most gorgeous girl ever,” Lee reads off his glasses, which rescues his chances with her.

Before launching Cluely, Lee and Shanmugam raised $5.3 million from investors, which allowed them to hire two coders, friends Lee met in community college (no job interviews or LeetCode riddles were necessary), and move to San Francisco. When we spoke a few days after Cluely’s launch, Lee was at his Realtor’s office and about to get the keys to his new workspace. He was running Cluely on his computer as we spoke. While Cluely can’t yet deliver real-time answers through people’s glasses, the idea is that someday soon it’ll run on a wearable device, seeing, hearing, and reacting to everything in your environment. “Then, eventually, it’s just in your brain,” Lee said matter-of-factly. For now, Lee hopes people will use Cluely to continue AI’s siege on education. “We’re going to target the digital LSATs; digital GREs; all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests,” he said. “It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything.”

+++++++++++++++++++++

The reason I knew the OP is incomplete is that it is missing this very telling passage from the article.

Most professors have come to the conclusion that stopping rampant AI abuse would require more than simply policing individual cases and would likely mean overhauling the education system to consider students more holistically. “Cheating correlates with mental health, well-being, sleep exhaustion, anxiety, depression, belonging,” said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford and one of the world’s leading student-engagement researchers.

Yup. Poor poor downtrodden students. They are victims of dar System under which they have no option not to cheat!

Konstantinopel Retaker · May 8, 2025

Kendall Motor Oil said:
Its gotten a lot better and you may have not prompted it properly. if you're using the free models that's part of the reason you weren't getting good results. Using a better model like o3-mini-high will usually give you better answers.
The "it can't do the most basic problems" is a cope by people who have a bias, don't know how to use it, or are too poor to afford $20/mo on ChatGPT plus.

I just used some free, basic model. I also didn't really experiment with it. I got one bad result and I just did the assignment myself. It was because I was lazy, not because I couldn't solve it.
I would argue that if you HAVE to use AI to get a degree, you just shouldn't be there. There's plenty of good jobs you can get without a degree. We already have an Affirmative Action problem, we don't need to add an AI problem to that as well.

TJT · May 8, 2025

Imagine a world where people are so retarded that even basic job tasks are impossible without AI agents present at all times.

That is the world we are building.

Uziel Gal · May 8, 2025

TJT said:
Imagine a world where people are so retarded that even basic job tasks are impossible without AI agents present at all times.

That is the world we are building.

I feel as though it's getting a bit stale to make Idiocracy references, but how on the nose can one get?

FunPosting101 · May 8, 2025

Positron said:
Yup. Poor poor downtrodden students. They are victims of dar System under which they have no option not to cheat!

Realistically speaking, most of them don't have the option. Not everyone is cut out for STEM degrees and not everyone is cut out for the skilled trades. I really don't blame people for behaving this way because there are increasingly limited employment options for average people that aren't working at a fast food joint or an Amazon warehouse.

Meriasek · May 8, 2025

Frederica Bernkastel said:
“It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

I hate start up fags so much.
At least most of the Ivy League start up fags fail, and those who don't burn out and wreck themselves.

ATHKA · May 8, 2025

future doctors will use ChatGPT for your operations. Those doctors will receive Reddit based answers on ChatGPT. This method could help with overpopulation tho.

Skeletron Prime · May 8, 2025

Having just basically graduated my program at school and using ChatGPT extensively in my last year because the quality of the instruction was EXTREMELY poor, this is a problem for institutions to figure out and for students to keep doing.

Colleges (read: diploma mills) in Canada are absolutely chock full of international students with piss poor English and no idea what they're doing on a good day. ChatGPT fills that gap but if you don't have an understanding of what you're doing in the first place, it's just going to give you bad info and hallucinations, and any teacher worth their salt can tell, but they're absolutely struggling with what to do about it due to the vagaries its introduced. It can't be guaranteed anymore that students are doing their own work - but that was always the case. International students used to use services like essay writers and the like to get through school.

The main issues I have with LLMs are that they seem to pick up old documentation rather than recent, which can fuck things up. Even for my homelab stuff I have to be careful because it's misled me on a variety of things, but then it's trying to figure out context with an almost alien way of trying to fill the gaps. It's like that friend that will make up shit to seem smarter than he is. Ownership of data is another sore point - it's fine for me to do personal stuff on it, but I would never feed it data from a job I was working unless it was vague and stripped of PRI, or set up in-house. The final issue is more broad: Google-Fu is becoming a less useful skill because Google has extensively fucked up their search algorithm and the results lead you nowhere. It's much more useful in the skill marketplace now to be able to leverage AI, so long as you're not a complete fucking moron and trust it implicitly.

The Punished Mitch · May 8, 2025

If you create a system where you need an advanced degree to even be considered for a job interview as a shoe salesman you can't pretend to be shocked that people will use whatever means necessary to game your bullshit. A very significant amount of jobs that require a degree could just as easily be performed by moderately intelligent teenagers after no more than a few weeks of on the job training.

Spooky Dogwood · May 8, 2025

The Punished Mitch said:
If you create a system where you need an advanced degree to even be considered for a job interview as a shoe salesman you can't pretend to be shocked that people will use whatever means necessary to game your bullshit. A very significant amount of jobs that require a degree could just as easily be performed by moderately intelligent teenagers after no more than a few weeks of on the job training.

I remember watching an interview of a guy born in the 1900s, and he started his career just by walking into general electric and being offered a job. It's unreal what we've been forced to deal with because corporations were given an excuse not to train anyone.

Kendall Motor Oil · May 8, 2025

Konstantinopel Retaker said:
I just used some free, basic model. I also didn't really experiment with it. I got one bad result and I just did the assignment myself. It was because I was lazy, not because I couldn't solve it.
I would argue that if you HAVE to use AI to get a degree, you just shouldn't be there. There's plenty of good jobs you can get without a degree. We already have an Affirmative Action problem, we don't need to add an AI problem to that as well.

Everyone in the STEM degree track I was in used Wolfram to help with their homework for thermodynamics 2. If you don't use it(like me), you end up getting an extremely low grade since some professors grade on a curve. If they didn't cheat, it would show the entire class is struggling but everyone wants that A, especially the honors students.
It can be extremely useful explaining parts of problems you don't quite understand. It can be really good as a conversational educator if you double check what its saying.

Lovely Kin · May 8, 2025

This really took off around my last year and when I graduated, but I remember some wouldn't check their ai or edit it slightly and would have wrong answers for essays which was hilarious. What I did not appreciate was being accused of using ai by one of my professors because of my "writing style" until I proved her wrong showing my other research, and that I actually knew the material.

If you keep forcing people to take bullshit classes like Black History, Gender Studies, etc. for electives, why would you be surprised they rather cheat? I didn't bother trying in my electives because they had nothing to do with what I was studying or learning. I don't blame them for using the ai or getting outside help. Then when we were locked down, the professors weren't taking it seriously to teach us through online, so why did the students? Assigning a textbook assignment where you had to do a certain amount of concepts, and using the same questions from the textbook for your weekly quizzes isn't learning, and since she obviously didn't give a shit on teaching us, I didn't give a shit.

Skeletron Prime said:
Having just basically graduated my program at school and using ChatGPT extensively in my last year because the quality of the instruction was EXTREMELY poor, this is a problem for institutions to figure out and for students to keep doing.

Before ChatGPT really took off, I had to use outside resources for one of my math classes because I had a jeet professor who spoke extremely fast, thick accent, and would speed through the power point and would erase just as fast despite the class telling him to slow down. I had to teach myself and resorted to using other methods to solve his assignments because I genuinely could not learn if 90% of class was him speaking super fast and rushing through everything. I don't know if chatGPT is still bad at advanced mathematics like it was earlier on, but I know there are many ai models that can understand it.

The Punished Mitch said:
If you create a system where you need an advanced degree to even be considered for a job interview as a shoe salesman you can't pretend to be shocked that people will use whatever means necessary to game your bullshit. A very significant amount of jobs that require a degree could just as easily be performed by moderately intelligent teenagers after no more than a few weeks of on the job training.

It's bullshit that the job I currently have, wouldn't have considered me if I didn't have a four year degree. Anyone can do this, while it doesn't pay the best, it has extremely good benefits. The job market is a current hellscape, you either get ghosted, do bullshit personality tests that have nothing to do with the job then get ghosted, etc. Or if it's anything like me before I got this job, I had to wait months to get hired. It demotivates many as well when you prioritize others especially for diversity purposes, or military service. I wouldn't have gotten it if someone in the military applied at the same time I did.

No wonder everyone is so fucking burned out.

Disdainer of the Plebs · May 8, 2025

I can’t make up my mind on this one, I’m glad that technology is felting the university system, which is basically an industry that rips off midwits and fills their heads with Marxist drivel, but gpt is going to end up allowing said midwits to get away with never trying, and this is going to result in an entire class of people who are not capable of basically anything other than putting the fries in the bag. This will become a problem once they automate putting the fries in the bag.

Industries that deal with high concept knowledge work are already seeing the effects: in my firm the college kids they’re hiring are simultaneously more impressive on paper than ever before and more useless than ever before. Why hire someone who is just going to do shit with gpt when you already have gpt and have the knowledge base to use it more effectively?

Kiwis, I think we live in idiocracy.

The Hardest R · May 8, 2025

My scorching hot take is that this is not a bad thing.

This shows how old I am but I was in undergrad when the internet was getting ubiquitous and I remember some cranky professors who talked like doing research online was the end of the world and your ass better get into a library and research that way. Or get your news from The New York Times or The Washington Post, any online news source was an automatic zero. I get a lot of the same impression here.

I think AI is a great way to double check homework, tighten things up, and should be a tool to assist you. If you depend entirely on it and you’re able to breeze on by, that’s on the school. If you use AI and flunk the exams, well, that’s on you. The AI detection programs are worthless because there’s never a smoking gun. It’s just an idle threat.

TBH I just don’t see it as being anything worse than transitioning to using Excel to do statistics or researching journals online, things considered standard fare today but 25 years ago was considered taboo in academia.

Hunter Hearst Helmsley · May 8, 2025

If you are training people for jobs, then you essentially need to have the students do the jobs. So if it's a shop class you have them build something as a test. If AI can do the job they are being trained for well enough to surpass your human students, then it isn't going to be a job for much longer...or if it is the human will need to know how to work with the AI. So honestly this isn't really a problem for anybody training somebody for a job that is actually doing a good job on their end.

But that gets us to the real crisis. Huge swaths of the university are not doing actual job training. They are doing a whole load of bullshit. For example, a psych class in which the only evaluation is online unmonitored multiple choice tests and maybe one research paper that you can bomb and still have a passing grade for the course overall. There are a lot of subjects where that is the class format, and it's worthless. Insanely expensive and worthless. That's the problem.

Any class that AI is ruining is a class that should be cut from the curriculum because it isn't training anyone for a post-graduation job.

Vaclav · May 8, 2025

Soda Can said:
My nephew dealt with this recently. Had an argument with a professor about chatgpt. His argument was "If a free program can mimic everything you are, everything I'm paying for, then either you aren't as smart as you think you are or you are that smart but your methods and knowledge are outmoded. Either way I'm clearly overpaying."

Universities have made their bed with their current system to churn through as many students as possible for maximum profit. They use as much automation as possible, most teaching is done by sharecropper adjunct faculty instead of actual professors and most writing assignments are just solicitations of left-wing talking points to verify a student's level of brainwashing. The most effective educational model is a seminar discussion setting, which goes all the way back to the old Greek schools, but that's unprofitable. Schools chose to morph into something that a language model can pass.

Uncle Tom's Condo · May 8, 2025

Does all this AI shit work in not-English? My uni had the right to write exams and papers in not-English, so how would that impact things? I just assume Wang Chung and Ghandi Curry are cheating either way...

For content: I ran a quick Grok query about a niche part of my job and it came back with stuff 30 years out of date and the next query missed about 15 of 30 answers to a question that has a legally codified answer.

Party Hat Wurmple · May 8, 2025

Disdainer of the Plebs said:
I can’t make up my mind on this one, I’m glad that technology is felting the university system, which is basically an industry that rips off midwits and fills their heads with Marxist drivel, but gpt is going to end up allowing said midwits to get away with never trying, and this is going to result in an entire class of people who are not capable of basically anything other than putting the fries in the bag.

My counterpoint is this:

I graduated from college a long time ago but not too long ago that I don't remember what it was like. The reality is, my essays could 1010% be written by AI and there's no reason I couldn't or shouldn't do it. If AI existed in college I would've never written a single fucking paper and there's an extremely good reason why.

Why? Simple, writing academic papers is a virtually useless endeavor if you aren't doing an experiment or study. I'm NOT ALLOWED to write my own ideas or interpretations of a topic and back them up with facts. We were taught that our essays were to contain ZERO of our own thoughts and opinions. Every literal fucking sentence had to have a works cited.**** So if my job is to simply read studies, copy and paste quotes, and throw it into an essay, and do that for 50 pages, why on God's green earth should I not be using AI? What reason is there for me to not briskly glance over the 20 studies I use to write my essay, throw it into AI and let it spurge out whatever we get? If I'm not allowed to put any opinions or personal interpretations into the paper, then what difference is there whether I write it or an AI did? My essays, which I got all As on, were structured as follow:

Quote from study 1
Works cited
Requote in a slightly different wording
Quote from study 4
Works cited
Requote
Quote from study 3
Works cited
Requote
Conclusion summary
Ad nauseum.

This is how every class in my college demanded their essays be structured. Did that make me a better author? No. Did it make me smarter? Fuck no, I can't remember a quarter of what I wrote. Heck I reused multiple papers for multiple classes. Did it make me any better at my job? Not really, no. Reading was interesting sometimes, but I'd still be doing that if AI was writing the essay anyway. So I ask all of you Kiwis, if Academia is going to grind human elements and interpretation out of college essays, then why does it matter if students use robots to write them?

The only counterpoint could be to make students grind but life teaches you working hard is not the way to get what you want. Working smarter is. They took every human element out of this. Writing a college essay isn't an exercise of writing anymore. They turned it into a puzzle. A puzzle of putting quotes from other studies together in a digestible manner.

****On a side note, this is why you have so many faggots constantly screaming SAUCE and why you have Vaush saying "There's nothing I say that isn't backed up scientific studies". Academia teaches midwits to do this and that their own thoughts are taboo and they're only allowed to say ideas backed up by science.

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College - ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

browserbowser

Based "mark all replies as read" user.

Kendall Motor Oil

Positron

Blue is the color of Cherenkov radiation.

Konstantinopel Retaker

TJT

Uziel Gal

FunPosting101

Ebin Bosdings only! No ober bosds allowed! : DDDD

Meriasek

ATHKA

Skeletron Prime

And what do I get? And what do you want?

The Punished Mitch

#FreeKeesH

Spooky Dogwood

Kendall Motor Oil

Lovely Kin

I'm riding on your rhythm through the solar system

Disdainer of the Plebs

Degenerates like you belong on a cross

The Hardest R

Dem Oppressive Ceiling Birds

Hunter Hearst Helmsley

The 100% true one and only real HHH of Kiwi Farms

Vaclav

Guato Pride World Wide!

Uncle Tom's Condo

Party Hat Wurmple

Winner of the Gender Wars