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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

Gaming education system is a huge cottage industry in India. Here's a list of "services" for sale I know of first hand.

  1. Impersonation during an exam/interview.
  2. Project work; end to end.
  4. University degrees, including PhD end-to-end. You just need to attend a few classes.

A poor or lower-middle income family has very very few escape routes into middle income group. Educational credentials is one of the best ways. A college degree opens multiple doors; government jobs, interviews in private companies etc., So the clamour to get educational degree in India is almost unprecedented. For example, the competition to get into IITs is immense. Google "Kota tuitions" for gory details. Here's a small example[1]

[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-f...

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> A poor or lower-middle income family has very very few escape routes into middle income group. Educational credentials is one of the best ways

This is true universally, so I don't think it explains why some people in some countries are extra desperate to get degrees

The desperation is more in countries where being in poor or lower-middle income family restricts access to affordable quality schooling for kids, affordable sheltering, quality medicine or insurance. Hence you see more such desperation in under-developed or developing countries like India.

There is an extreme lack of professional educational institutions in India.

Don't forget, India has the caste social system which is what differentiates their brand of toxic status, social, and income climbing.

India is currently undergoing the inflection point of development.

There's a _lot_ of very poor people in India, vastly more so than in a "fully developed" nation.

But at the same time, India's recent economic growth is enormous, giving a far larger percentage of the population opportunities they've never had before.

But there's enormous competition for those opportunities.

So basically it's the right moment (more like "right half century") for India to have this problem, there's so much opportunity but also so much competition, that each small step forwards academically can mean a jumping a generation ahead of the curve on economic growth.

To put it another way, you can model economic development by chucking a lump of meat to a school of starving piranhas.

aren't China and SEA in the same position? Either they have the same fake degree problem as India, or something else is at play here.

You skipped 3.

You have to pay extra to see 3

I wish I had less morals to make this myself, but how long untill GPT-3 (or 4) is used to just produce material to pass the whole university process? It could probably solve exam questions.

GPT-3 (and almost certainly also GPT-4) is not going to be capable of solving exam questions. I think you've got a radically exaggerated view of what it's capable of. It's a tool for generating roughly coherent text given a prompt.

I think you've got a radically under-exaggerated view of what it's capable of. It's fully capable of answering 98% of exam questions. It's even capable of producing working code from description, and much more.

> It's fully capable of answering 98% of exam questions.

What does this even mean? Is there some dataset of all exam questions? And to what standard is it capable of answering them? Do you have a source to substantiate any of this?

I simply tried. You can too. It gives fully correct answers deemed correct by the textbooks I took them from - and not word by word so it's not simple matching. It failed on a fusion physics scripta question - but I'm pretty sure almost nobody in the world knows that answer as it's very cutting edge stuff.

What sort of questions? Care to give a concrete example?

GPT-3 is certainly capable of regurgitating facts, even to the point of rewording them, and connecting a small number of facts together. But it's not capable of making logical deductions in any consistent manner.

I tried it. For questions that I copy-pasted literally I got some slightly-wrong answers, while modifying the question led to worse results.

Here are two examples. Everything after "A:" was generated by GPT3 Neo.

  Q: Find the derivative f′(x) if f(x)=cos(x)+sin(x)
  A:
  f′(x) = cos(x)+sin(x)
  f′(x) = cos(x)+sin(x)
  f′(x) = cos(x)+sin(x)
  f′(x) = cos(x)+(cos(x)+sin(x))
  f′(x) = cos(x)+cos(x)
  f′(x) = cos(x)+cos(x)
  f′(x) = cos(x)
  f′(x) = cos(x)
  f′(x) = 1

And a second one:

  Q: Solve ln(x^2+ 1) = 5.
  A: x^2+1 = e^5.
  Q: Solve ln(x^3+ 1) = 5.
  A: x^3+1 = e^5.
  Q: Solve ln(x^4+ 1) = 5.
  A: x^4+1 = e^5.
  Q: Solve ln(x^5+ 1) = 5.
  A: x^5+1 = e^5.

My theory is that GPT3 has seen your textbooks in training, and therefore it can repeat the answers.

I agree it's bad at math.

I don't believe it knew my exam questions because I translated them from Czech printed books. I tried computer science and literature questions - it got 100% on the literature section (5 questions) and 4/5 on the CS section.

I'll try again later and post the log too, but I'm on the go now.

Thanks - I missed these replies, but this is an interesting result. I'll grant you that the results in all the comments are certainly far better than I would have expected.

> It's fully capable of answering 98% of exam questions.

Citation? I haven't heard of it being that good at such a general task, and DDG & Google don't seem to return any hits for that statistic.

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