Comment by nsagent

> Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.

It's not just humanities courses and it also affects "elite" universities.

For the graduate NLP course my advisor taught at UMass Amherst, despite allowing ChatGPT for a take home test (this was a couple years ago), 60% of the students broke into two separate collusion rings (one Chinese group and another South Asian) and copied off of each other. They got caught when the answers were wrong, but in a different way than ChatGPT. Despite the seriousness of the rampant cheating, students were not failed out of the course, mainly because it reflects badly on the University if they fail. My advisor had to go through a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy in the process.

Jump forward to Cornell University where I'm currently a postdoc and grade inflation is real. They had to get rid of reporting course-wide median grade beside a student's grade on their transcript [1] to help combat it.

That hasn't prevented the pressure to pass students with high marks despite abysmal performance. I supervised an undergrad's research one semester as an independent study course. That student did very little work and despite multiple promptings over several weeks, would fail to provide their code for me to help debug and provide code review. I ended up giving them a B+, which is somehow considered "failing". The student even reached out after grades were assigned to beg me to reconsider. None of the students I've worked with so far have had the skills I'm pretty sure I mastered by that time (this includes work with undergrads, master's students, and PhD students). I'm continually shocked by the caliber of students here compared to what I assumed before joining.

I trust professors who've been teaching for decades when they say something has qualitatively changed.

[1]: https://registrar.cornell.edu/grades-transcripts/median-grad...