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Comment by Peacefulz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not trying to justify, or infer here, but I read recently that around 20% of American adults are functionally illiterate.

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

I wonder how LLMs are going to affect these metrics.

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I also saw an article on here that to me that seems to support your statement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609948

I also have a relative going for a PHD, he says many times for the classes he teaches, students are using AI for their homework. He has brought that up may times to his superiors but the response tends to be "oh well".

Sad world we may be heading towards :(

It’s a bit like the old saying about the banks: “If you owe the bank $10,000 it’s your problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000 it’s the banks problem”. If everyone in class is using LLMs to cheat, it’s really the university/instructors problem and it may be easier to bury their heads in the sand then to change their teaching methods and lesson plans. You can’t fail them all…

Why not?

Today the university is a business and the students are the customers.

Inertia. They were cheating a lot when I was a TA, but using whatsapp groups and other online resources. Nothing changed then, and it probably won't change much now.

When I taught a class of engineering students Python in 2015 they were all copying from each other, did some basic plagiarism checks and 40% had submitted identical code. The University then didn’t care, lots of international students paying higher fees than domestic students.

That's how universities lose their reputation, and that's why the programmer hiring process is so complicated.

Harvard passes 98% of intake.

The quality of the teaching or learning seems almost irrelevant already.

(Edit) link confirming 98%: https://college.harvard.edu/resources/faq/what-harvards-grad...

If you consider that plagiarism it's a bit overzealous. Definitely not in the same league as asking chatgpt to solve for you.

Working with or seeking information from colleagues is a valid and essential part of university.

It is plagiarism, we’re not talking simple weekly assignment, it was a core course and it was a 40% of the module. They had to write a report along with it and two Chinese students had copied much of that from Wikipedia and had the same exact passages!

Ah I thought you meant stuff like " write a sorting algorithm given this function signature in C"

In the context of discussing the American education system, the more relevant figure is the number of native born functionally illiterate adults which, according to that source, is roughly 14%.

Almost 30 years ago, at my first job, a coworker got mad at someone and broke a broom. He was trying to write a letter to apologize and he couldn't. Couldn't meaning he was really trying but he didn't have the writing skills to write "I'm sorry that I broke a broom." The rest of the employees helped him.

Over 40% possess literacy so poor that it isn't considered sufficient to cope with daily demands.

It’s more like 50% of survey respondents are at a literacy level where they can read a letter but not understand what it means.

It has to be much higher than that. Look at the reddit op. I assume this person is nearly an adult and their writing is very broken and meandering. Sure you could argue “it’s just a reddit post”, but I find how people write informally is generally indicative of their overall writing ability.

> how people write informally is generally indicative of their overall writing ability

I don't think that's true... I personally change writing styles often depending on who I am talking to. It's effectively code switching but on the internet. Not to say that this redditor isn't like that - but there are more objective cues from the content of their post than from the spelling/grammar of their post (like how they choose to watch their sibling develop bad learning habits and rather than doing something about it, they make dramatic complaints about how her whole generation is screwed on Reddit).

Code switching. I don't write my reddit comments like I do my HN ones, my emails, my formal papers, etc.

That is terrifying. But what is the trend? Maybe it’s historically low. I tried Googling around and could only find recent data of that same 2019 report.

You need to be able to read to use an LLM (the second "L" is particularly salient).

Actually voice

Screen readers might help. LLMs too.

The US must be one of the few countries were the concept of movies with subtitles doesn't exist.

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