Comment by sn9

Students want the diploma because it has value. It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.

If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.

Consider that there is some in-between.

Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.

I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.

Most people don't go to college to learn for the sake of learning – that would be a very expensive luxury. They go for the opportunities that it opens up. The learning itself helps with that, but so does being able to prove that they've learned it. That what the diploma is meant to be for.

Yes, but piano lessons are not a music degree. Similarly, vocational programs or apprenticeships are not a formal education either.

I find a lot of these comments more disturbing than the concerns about AI.

I don't think that's a good comparison. I went college to learn and was also relieved occasionally when professors canceled class and still had to force myself to study. I'm sure plenty of your piano teachers students don't enjoy practicing the same notes over and over but do so because they want to know how to play piano.

Absolutely. Also, the level of cheating in college, even pre-AI is often overlooked in these articles.

For the exact reasons you state, pre-AI homework was often copied and then individuals just crammed for the tests.

AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many students are only in it for the diploma.

If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment from a classmate or previous grad.

And I imagine the students who really want to learn are still learning because they didn't cheat then, and they aren't letting AI do the thinking for them now.

I'm not sure this is entirely fair. When I was in college I genuinely enjoyed learning and now that I'm out of school I still spend time learning about the subjects of my major and minor in my free time, but this would have described me pretty well in school, "they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class." I love to learn, but something about being forced to do it makes me rebel against it.

In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.

There are jobs that turns you down if you don't have that diploma. No amount of real world experience will get you past that bar. If it's not there, they wont even look at the rest of your application.

Sure, if we can agree that there exist courses for which we can agree that using an LLM to pass is a reasonable thing to do, would we also not agree that the course should be nuked from orbit?

I think several orthogonal concepts are touched in this.

1. Students given bad incentives to be thrown into a system with a completely different purpose than their main goal. Then those jobs turning face to suddenly say "schools teach you nothing" and even refuse to hire the newest generation.

2. Students in general not being stimulated by primary school and given direction and vision on what to do in life. Simply being pushed by parents to "be successful".

3. The crippling reality as of late that a job doesn't even guarantee keeling a roof over your head anymore. Leading to discouragement to even bother trying.

4. Connected to #2, the decline of various apprenticeships, internships (which are now a college recruiting pipeline), and other ways to invest in employees. Even if they complain about new grad output, they are still content outsourcing such training instead of investing in their employees for a career.

There's a lot of systems failing which can arguably cause an entire collapse in the country. Then no one will get an opportunity to properly learn.

> students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas.

You have this option with things like mits open courseware. Some colleges are OK with you just wanting to learn

This is, famously, why nobody gets a degree in fine arts. (/s)

Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.

This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift. Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the primary motivation for going to college was to develop a philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted.

* according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey

An anecdote to add to this:

Me and most of my peers in college had the choice between two courses. Course A was interesting, yet vastly more challenging and therefore time consuming, with the additional downside of lower grade expectation. Course B was boring, a gentle breeze in comparison, yet with an almost guaranteed perfect grade.

Imagine which course most students choose?

Even if a student wants to take on the more interesting course, incentives matter, and the incentive is: better grades qualify for better compensated positions and prestigious degrees. Only students who didn't care about this or were confident enough in their ability did choose Course A. In the end, barely a handful of students out of hundreds went with A.

Well, the credentials defintely help to GET the first job. As a cog in the machine though you are most often valued for skills more than for credentials, at least in the U.S.

There are many issues here. The lack of incentives is probably the most important one. For new professors (in research universities), good teaching is usually just a good thing to have, but it is not a deciding factor for their tenure. When they get their tenure, they probably have enough students, and they need to work hard to apply for funding and keep the students paid. Administrators care most about ranking, and teaching isn't really evaluated in the ranking. They just push the professors to do more research and apply for more funding.

It is also hard to evaluate university teaching because there are no benchmarks for that (compared with high school, for example), and it is hard to judge if teaching is good from student feedback. You can only know if someone fucked up or did really well, which are outliers.

There are other issues as well. Professor IMO is a ridiculous job, you are supposed to be an expert in the field, be a researcher, be a manager, be a teacher, be a salesman, all at the same time. There are people who can excel in all these, but these are probably just outliers. It doesn't help when PhD training doesn't train you to be a proper manager and teacher. While there are some teaching training, I think we are not really held to a high enough standard. E.g. One can pass the teaching course if they just show up and spend some time, even though their teaching is horrible.

Meanwhile at my uni, at Masters, I'm being taught how to create and delete rows in HTML - I wish I wasn't kidding. :(

But that requires professors to do work and give a damn!

The fatal flaw here is that an AI is more like asking a politician. Except maybe it won't gaslight you. It often has no idea what it's talking about, and pushing back may even have it change it's tune.

>And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :)

Society makes people do a lot of things they don't want. I wonder if we're going to hit a breaking point this generation.

Except part of the job involves lifting things in places where forklifts can't fit.

Ooh ranked gaming, too. Also any kind of market activity.

The problem is there is no reliable way to test for LLM usage unlike for doping. There’s no way to police this problem.

Right, but people using LLMs aren't actually getting the mental equivalent of a healthy and good looking physique if they let LLMs do stuff for them.

Well, you could. Most people prefer their pre-processed food over never going to the gym though.

It's because you've mixed him up with Ted Chiang - the article in question is Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art [1]

[1] https://archive.is/kS8NY

LLMs are sometimes wrong, and they don’t know they are wrong, nor do students.

They are the wrong tool for pedagogy.

We will never reduce all class sizes to under 10 people. Large R1 schools are not going to reduce their number of students by a factor of 10 or increase their hiring by a factor of 10.

But the thing you are missing is that one needs a solid foundation of knowledge of the actual work to be able to manage it well.

Someone with years of coding experience is going to be able to laser guide an AI agent to the answer/result than someone who has muddled their way through comp sci 101 using an AI chatbot.

If you need forkloft drivers, don't recruit at the gym and be mad no one is forklift certified there.

This isn't even an opinion on LLMs, it's recruiting 101. You're free to convince the gym to train forklift drivers, but don't be surprised when you're laughed out the room.

> But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover.

If you never learn to research, sure. Otherwise, you should be worried about accuracy, up to date information, opinionated takes, and outright lies/misinformation. The tool you use doesn't change these factors.

I'm teaching faculty at a university and, at least where it comes to lecture courses, I don't find this a bubble. There are definitely plenty of students who would do just fine, if not even better, without the external discipline and structure. And even more those who could do it with something like a MOOC or just a posted curriculum. And to be able to work without an external discipline is IMHO one of the main learning goals of university, and a decent rationale for why a university degree is taken as a signal for recruitment.

I learned programming online and got jobs as a developer (I did later study CS at a university though). In my experience the best developers are those who taught themselves. Admittedly this may have been more the case for my older generation where formal education for programming wasn't that great nor widely available.

>School provides structure, goals, timelines, and deliverables. The value of this cannot be understated.

That _may_ be true for the vast majority, but it's criminal to waste the time of bright young people by putting them though hoops. I would even speculate that that they phoney goals, timelines, and deliverables in school actually damage kids.

It's presumably possible, but I feel like people might underestimate what's required. Mind you, I went to university so maybe I'm biased and don't fully understand, but I feel like the structure given by the university is very important.

If I wanted to learn JavaScript or .NET or CSS or whatever I could easily do so online. But that's different from becoming a software developer. The important thing is that university doesn't focus on one topic, it teaches a variety of topics that they think will be useful for your career. You can do this without uni, but you need to be good at figuring out what to learn, not just how. And of course the discipline to complete your goals by yourself, like you mention.

Although maybe something you could do would be to look at a university's course structure and copy it.

It's really concerning how many thing they can curate their own course curriculum and master it to the equivalent and rigor of a 4 year degree. You don't know what you don' know so that's exactly waht a teacher is for. o help you close gaps and push you a bit further. An athlete wouldn't think they can train as efficiently without a coach, I'm not sure why acedemis is seen any differently. Because people had a bad teacher here and there? Yeah, that's life. Don't typecast an entier population over one bad experience.

Also, do I really need to remind people here of the "resources" used when you struggle and need help while self-guided?

- I probably don't need to rant about StackOverflow. Discord can be incredibly hit or miss, many forum pleas goes uncalled. It can be really hard to get unsuck compared to asking a teacher about their own assignment

- worse than asking quesions, forget getting high quality feedback on your project: getting people to do more than a quick skim takes effort in and of itself. You'd truly find an angelic soul if anyone decided to disect and correc your source code.

- there's also so, so, so many domains to explore. How will you specialize without knowing they exist? And if you've dug deep into any domain, you know that this is where the publicly free knowledge truly dries up. You won't find a nifty course on low level optimization hacks, nor network architecture (beej gets close, but only touches the surface), nor modern rendering techniques. You'll find some 300 level material, but 400 level stuff will likely require a mix of cobbling project ideas together that's within your reach but also pushing you. Scoping is always hard to do, and nearly impossible while still a student.

And Software is one of the easier domains to self learn. Good luck with the lab based STEM, getting proper feedback in art while learning theory, taste testing as a cook, using power tools in any given blue collar work, etc.

It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeability. University degrees cover all three.

But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want to build more housing because that will undermine the equity growth of homeowners.

We are a society of ladder-pullers.

My tuition was $35k a year 25 years ago. Just checked, and now it is $60k a year. Before room and board.

Broken? Saddling individuals with a quarter million in debt when they are just starting life is absolutely broken. That they must indenture to be a modern professional (and buy hope for at least a middle class landing) is broken.

The notion that everything must return a (generally, near-term) accounting profit is on its face stupid.

Sure, the system is broken but what's the alternative? Employers have a surplus of applicants for entry-level technical positions. They need to filter the applicant pool down to those with some level of competence and discipline. Possession of a college degree is a reasonably accurate proxy for those attributes: lots of false negatives but good enough from the employer's perspective.

Ideally maybe employers ought to rely on more targeted selection mechanisms. But this would be extremely expensive (and potentially legally risky due to equal opportunity laws) so most don't bother.

> I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken.

Meh, academic degrees don't come for free, someone has to pay for universities, staff and other expenses. In the US it's everyone for themselves by student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcies, in Europe it's the tax payers.

The problem is, the ones profiting from the gatekeeping (aka employers) aren't the ones paying for it in either system. If employers had to pay, say, 10.000$ for each job listing that requires an academic degree without an actual valid reason, guess how fast that incentive would lead to employers not requiring academic degrees for paper-pusher bullshit jobs.

Heck my degree was in biochemistry, and now I’m a programmer, but I still feel like I am constantly using skills I developed in school. The scientific method and good test design transcend all sciences.

I honestly don’t know anybody who does what they went to undergrad for, unless that undergrad was preparation for a higher credential (premed/prelaw).

>Would you hire someone without a degree?

Yes.

A person is a idiot if he/she takes someone's competence at face value because of a degree. ( jobs aside - don't assume your doctor is competent because he has MD, it will cost you your life)

I am generally education blind. Mostly I would say graduate school experience has been a net negative on my teams overall, if anything.

Speaking personally, yes, very much so.

I see your point, but the issue is that it's quite futile to shame students for playing the game that people in the industry has set up. It doesn't help that in the past, college degrees were in fact more relevant than today, especially before the era of the internet and wikipedia, so if older people who are currently in charge of hiring aren't aware of these changes, they might just apply their outdated personal experience and just assume college degrees hold the same weight as they did in the past.

I'm pretty certain when kids these days eventually become responsible for hiring decisions, they probably will handle things differently since their experiences are different.

This seems to be the general feeling of students right now.

Academia put itself as a gateway and barrier to the middle class. Why would we be surprised when people with no interest in anything but the goal are not enthralled by the process?

>The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce.

I don’t know how generalizable this is. I remember reading a few studies trying to assess if Ivy League education was really more valuable that a state school. The result (IIRC) was that it only matters for students who came from the lowest economic strata; the authors presumed it was due to the network effect. But that also means the network effect was negligible for the majority of students.

"A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own."

I think you underestimate how bad some high schools really are.

>That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time.

Citation needed. There's great books out there that provide a lot of guidance down a particular path. I'd say a lot of them do, and I can't imagine online learning sources would be worse. There's online communities for learners for specific subjects that are full of people offering good advice.

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ChatGPT and the like are in a weird position at the moment. It's usually pretty clear that you have written it using an LLM, but it's hard to PROVE. And you need to be able to prove it (to some degree, which varies depending on the institution) to reliably count off for it, otherwise the student will challenge your finding that they cheated and the Honor Court (or administrator, or other equivalent) will tell you that you can't do that.

So, you can usually get away with it if there is not some way the professor/TA can prove it.

As things change, this will change, but that's the situation the author of the original article finds themself in, because it's the current situation.

> If we take the original article at face value, no you can't do that. ChatGPT will apparently produce something that is obviously ChatGPT produced and fail to fool even the most absent minded of instructors that you have read the material.

Only if you don't have any custom instructions about style and don't proofread it afterwards. All the usual "tells" of ChatGPT are very obvious to scrub out, and you don't have to use OpenAI's chat wrapper to begin with.

> Using LLM to learn quickly a new programming language + being productive is best method ever. If you pay attention, you acquire rapidly new skill and knowledge, and those that are relevant to your job.

I tend to disgree. maybe for you, but my mind does not work that way.

As a teacher at a university I come to see that students "learn" by asking an LLM, but they forget to understand the content the LLM produces because the LLM actually solves the assignment (mostly) for them. One may say that's the teachers task to produce better questions, but the thing I most "struggle" with that getting educated as a student seems to just be a play of "gaming the system". Yes, it was similar during my time (learning how to reach your goal with as less effort as possible is a good part of the "education" at a university IMHO), but we actually had to think and understand while today just seems like prompt-and-copy.

Hehe, it's fine, at least it proves that the post was written by human. ;)

And yeah, and revisiting the OP we're on the same track.

Agreed, my bad choice of words. I really meant 'stupid' from a slightly ironic, competitive point of view. It's like the pressure to cheat in professional sport is obviously so intense, I'm sure a lot of a cheat's motivation is to remain competitive because their colleagues are cheating so they feel they have to as well, otherwise they lose.

> Were people before LLMs stupid for not asking smarter classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve the homework for them?

In American universities where your GPA from your in-class assessments forms part of your final grade? Yes, absolutely.

Where I came from you do your learning in class and your assessment in a small, short set of exams (and perhaps one graded essay) at the end of each year. That seems far more conducive to learning things without having to juggle two competing objectives the whole time.

O3 actually came up with a good blueprint for an 'AI-centric teaching guide'. Impressive.

It seems to me that the little sister is acting rationally. Yes it's a bit lazy but then: when was the last time you used a calculator for a calculation that you could have done in your head? Do you actually need to be able to do mental arithmetic, do you actually really need to be able to work out what 24 + 7 is in your head?

I don't know what the answer is. I'm old school, if it was up to me I'd bring back slide rules and log tables, because that's such a visual and tactile way of getting to know mathematics and numbers.

It's interesting to consider how AI is affecting humans' cognition skills. Is it going to make us stupid or free us up to use our mental capacities for higher level activities? Or both?

Why isn't both a valid option, can't one be at a university to both learn and get a degree+GPA showing they did well at doing so? In any case, why does a student selecting that they are there to learn negate the responsibility of the university to provide the best curricula for students to do so with?

Universities do not provide knowledge, this is a romanticization of an ideal. They are about getting a passing grade and a certificate so that you can enter the workforce. The idea that you go to college to get an education is just a polite fiction to appease students and their parents

For almost everyone in the world, the answer is the latter.

But what was the point then?

During the final exam, a national exam (all the students did it at the same time in the country) you were given blank pieces of paper, a pen, 10 different topics to choose from, and 6 hours.

You pick a topic, write a draft, then write the essay. ~700 words.

Bonus points if you use relevant literature or science quotes in it. Quotes you had to memorize, without knowing the topics.

None of the topics resonated with you? Tough luck, buddy.

Don't have any 'novel' ideas? Figure something out!

Cited something the reader didn't know about? Should've known better!

Quoted someone the person grading doesn't know? Better hope they're in a good mood!

There's a reason they got rid of this style of exam a few years later. Doesn't change that this one thing dominated my native language and literature classes.

My biggest takeaway from it is how much I hate my native language class and literature class, but that might've happened even without the essay.

Bingo! I agree with where you’re going with this line of thinking.

Yes, I too enjoy that universities never send students to pointless filler courses. I really enjoyed writing long essays about ethics in software engineering for people who'd barely even read them. I especially benefited from being told that "tell your boss, tell HR, then make a police report and quit if that didn't fix it" is not an appropriate response to being asked to break the law at work.

While we're talking about things we're grateful for, I am so glad that we've structured the education and employment systems such that not having a degree puts you at significant risk of unemployment, prevents you from ever immigrating anywhere for the first decade of your working life, and generally marks you as a failure.

If you want the certificate, it must be issued by the certificate authority.

If you want to make your own certificates, good luck getting them on the trusted list.

School isn't a place for smart people, Morty.

Lately I've been saying often the phrase "the process is the product." When you outsource the process, then the product will be fundamentally different from what you would have delivered on your own. In my own case of knowledge work, the value of the reports I write is not in the report itself (nobody ever reads them...) but rather the thinking that went into them and the hard-won wisdom and knowledge we created in our heads.

> Leaning on an LLM to ease through those tough moments is 100% short circuiting the learning process.

Sounds like "back in my days" type of complaining. Do you have any evidence of this "100% reduction" or is it just "AI bad" bandwagoning?

> But you're definitely not learning how to write.

How would you know? You've never tested him. You're making a far-reaching assumption about someone's learning based on using an aid. It's the equivalent of saying "you're definitely not learning how to ride a bicycle if you use training wheels".

Many people with working legs choose to drive. It doesn't mean they don't go to the gym. Actually people even drive to the gym! (surprise, I know)

You’re describing an extreme so let me counter with a different “what if” extreme: If , every day, you use a wheel chair for five minutes and run for several hours followed by 200 squats then your legs will not atrophy. My point is that writing papers is only one way to work your mind and using llm’s for this does not indicate how you use your mind overall.

And yet there is still value in facts. For example, learning the ideal gas law in high school has enabled me to understand in my adult life how gases will react when compressed or when released. Yet the ideal gas law is a simple fact that you can memorize in minutes. In this case, memorizing that small fact about physics enabled me to apply it to gain understanding of other situations.

I believe that the same holds true for other facts one might memorize. Yes, the fact may seem like meaningless trivia (and might even be so at times), but in the right situation knowing that fact can help with understanding. You can certainly spend too much time on memorization of facts, but that doesn't mean it has no place either.

There will be bigger LLMs, too big to run locally

Eh, I think this is going to be an outdated take.

Employees are increasingly expected to use personal devices in work settings.