Comment by nkrisc
8 months ago
If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless.
If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a degree, then it has lost all value as a certificate that the holder has completed some minimum level of education and learning. Institutions that award such degrees will be no different than degree mills of the past.
I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth.
All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams taken either in class or at the university testing center.
For most subjects at the university level graded homework (and graded attendance) has always struck me as somewhat condescending and coddling. Either it serves to pad out grades for students who aren't truly learning the material or it serves to force adult students to follow specific learning strategies that the professor thinks are best rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults.
Give students the flexibility to learn however they think is best and then find ways to measure what they've actually learned in environments where cheating is impossible. Cracking down on cheating at homework assignments is just patching over a teaching strategy that has outgrown its usefulness.
> rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults
I have had so many very frustrating conversations with full grown adults in charge of teaching CS. I have no faith at all that students would be able to choose an appropriate method of study.
My issue with the instruction is the very narrow belief in the importance of certain measurable skills. VERY narrow. I won’t go into details, for my own sanity.
> I have no faith at all that students would be able to choose an appropriate method of study.
That is their problem, not your problem. You're not their nanny.
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When hiring, I would very much like to hire people who have figured out how to learn things for themselves using whatever techniques work for them, and don't need nannying.
So I'm perfectly happy with a system of higher education that strongly rewards this behaviour
I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but just like junior employees, I think university students should clock in at 9am and finish working at 5pm.
I think they would really benefit learning how to work a full day and develop some work life balance.
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> All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams taken either in class or at the university testing center.
I have the opposite experience - the best professors focused on homework and projects and exams were minimal to non-existent. People learn different ways, though, so you might function better having the threat/challenge of an exam, whereas I hated having to put everything together for an hour of stress and anxiety. Exams are artificial and unlike the real world - the point is to solve problems, not to solve problems in weirdly constrained situations.
I don’t disagree, but in most cases degrees are handed out based on grades which in turn are based on homework.
I agree that something will have to change to avert the current trend.
Most of the college courses I took had the bulk of the grade be based on exams or projects. Homework was usually a small proportion to give students a little buffer and to actually prepare them for the exams. AI might have helped on coding projects but a lot of my grades were based on exams using pencil and paper in a room of 30-200 other people. It also just seems like a waste of your own time and money to avoid the act of learning by skipping all the hard parts with a corporate token generator.
Maybe schools and universities need to stop considering homework to be evidence of subject matter mastery. Grading homework never made sense to me. What are you measuring, really, and how confident are you of that measurement?
You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Universities need to accept that AI exists, and adjust their operations accordingly.
Grading homework has two reasonable objectives:
Provide an incentive for students to do the thing they should be doing anyway.
Give an opportunity to provide feedback on the assignment.
It is totally useless as an evaluation mechanic, because of course the students that want to can just cheat. It’s usually pretty small, right? IIRC when I did tutoring we only gave like 10-20% for the aggregate homework grade.
The annoyance with 10-20% means that in order to be an "A" student you have to do all the homework instead of just ace the exams which is obnoxious if you actually know the material. Edge case, I know, but that last 20% is a ton of extra work.
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In most of my classes the HW was far more valuable of a measure of ability -- assuming cheating didn't occur. For example, my compilers HW assignments much more greatly captured my learning. I just feel like a semester writing an optimizing compiler is just going to be better than the 90-120 minute final exam.
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I can say that making my homework part of my grade is a great way to actually get me to do it.
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How do you suggest we measure whether the students have actually learned the stuff then?
In person, pen and paper exams? They are closer to how most certifications are conducted.
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Tests, both oral and written.
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Captcha, of course. \s
> If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless.
I suspect the opposite: Known-good college degrees will become more valuable. The best colleges will institute practices that confirm the material was learned, such as emphasizing in-person testing over at-home assignments.
Cheating has actually been rampant at the university level for a long time, well before LLMs. One of the key differentiators of the better institutions is that they are harder to cheat to completion.
At my local state university (where I have friends on staff) it’s apparently well known among the students that if they pick the right professors and classes they can mostly skate to graduation with enough cheating opportunity to make it an easy ride. The professors who are sticklers about cheating are often avoided or even become the targets of ratings-bombing campaigns
I've tried re-enrolling in a STEM major last year, after a higher education "pause" of 16-ish years. 85% of the class used GPTs to solve homework, and it was quite obvious most of them haven't even read the assignment.
The immediate effect was the distrust of the professors towards most everyone and lots classes felt like some kind of babysitting scheme, which I did not appreciate.
> I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth.
College students still cram and purge. Nobody forced to sit through OChem remembers their Diels-Alder reaction except the organic chemists.
College degrees probably don't have as much value as we've historically ascribed to them. There's a lot of nostalgia and tradition pent up in them.
The students who do the best typically fill their schedule with extra-curricular projects and learning that isn't dictated by professors and grading curves.
I've been hiring people for the better part for 15 years and I never considered them to be valuable outside of the fact that it appears you're able to do one project for a sustained period of time. My impressions was unless your degree confers something such that you are in a job that human risk can be involved, most degrees are worth very little and most serious people know that.
To be clear, I think that most college degrees were generally low value (even my own), but still had some value. The current trend will be towards zero value unless something changes.
It doesn't matter if your boss's policy is to require a degree.
> If students using AI to cheat on homework
This is not related to "AI", but I have an amusing story about online cheating.
* I have a nephew who was switched into online college classes at the beginning of the pandemic.
* As soon as they switched to online, the class average on the exams shot up, but my nephew initially refused to cheat.
* Eventually he relented (because everyone else was doing it) and he pasted a multitude of sticky notes on the wall at the periphery of his computer monitor.
* His father walks into his room, looks at all the sticky notes and declares, "You can't do this!!! It'll ruin the wallpaper!"
Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?
If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans? Either AI will replace them or employers will realize that they prefer employees who can think. In either case, being a human who specializes in regurgitating AI output seems like a dead end.
> If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans
You hire humans to help train AI and when done you fire humans.
“Prompt Engineer” as a serious job title is very strange to me. I don’t have an explanation as to why it would be a learnable skill—there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does.
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Employers are employees too
Even if you just use AI, you need to know the right prompts to ask.
And how to verify the output and think through it. I hear time after time that someone asked something from AI. It came up with something and then when corrected apologized and printed out it was wrong...
But how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong...
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Would you rather be the guy using AI as a crutch or the guy who actually knows how to do things without it?
TBF this problem doesn’t seem that new to me. I was forced to do my lab work in Vim and C via SSH because the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning.
> the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning
Sounds laughably naive now, doesn’t it?
At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective then is college itself useful?
If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful?
It’s the same old story with a new set of technology.
> If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful?
What's your answer? Surely it was proven to be "not useful"? I don't think I ever met a person who benefitted from knowing math now that everyone has a calculator in pocket. Other than maybe playing some games where if you do calculation on the fly you win
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It was (to some degree), and could still be. The status quo was more effective, relatively speaking, before the AI boom. The status quo appears to be trending towards ineffective, post-AI boom.
So in order to remain useful, the status quo of higher education will probably have to change in order to adapt to the ubiquity of AI, and LLMs currently.
Just because you can cheat at something doesn't mean doing it legitimately isn't useful.
Thinking of that. We have build these expensive machines with massive investments to be able to output what we expect college students to output... Wouldn't that tell us that well maybe that output has some value, intent or use? Or we would not have spend those resources...
Just because machine can do things, doesn't mean humans should be able to do it too. Say reading a text aloud.
https://innovationlabs.harvard.edu/events/your-network-is-yo...
^ Why many go to Harvard. Very nice club.
Had I known that college degrees from before the 2020s would increase in value, I'd have gotten one. Damn it!
Good, colleges have staryed far from their purpose
The credentials were never about having become learned.
I mean this seems a solved problem: hand-and-paper written onsite exams + blackboard-and-chalk oral onsite exams. If this is too costly (is it? many countries manage), make students take them less often.