Comment by yavor-atanasov

Gen Z definitely didn’t invent cheating, but LLMs brought qualitative difference and scale. That changes the properties of the system.

During my university most courses had a good mixture of take-home assignments/projects and in-class exams. Yes, people could always cheat either through plagiarism (usually easily caught) or at the extreme by getting someone else to do the work (which I have never personally seen).

Anecdotal data around me shows:

* outright paper/assignment generation via LLM

* using chatGPT as a “professor” proofreading and polishing course work before submission (arguably good use but depends on the personal effort)

* avoiding reading by asking chatGPT for summaries

* using chatGPT to help explain various concepts (this is a good example of using LLMs as a source for learning…accepting that occasionally they can lie)

In a small classroom where a good teacher-student interaction happens, I guess it’s easier to catch people cheating. But some universities (maybe most) have massive classes where a professor may never have an actual conversation with some students. That context makes cheating harder to detect.

I accept my outlook on this may be a bit bleaker (hopefully), but saying it’s business as usual is at the other extreme.