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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

I have adopted the following explicit policy: I am here to teach you. I am a good teacher, and if you work hard you will learn important material in this course. If I catch you cheating you will be referred to the university for a disciplinary infraction. However my job is not to ensure that you are not cheating. Again, it is my job to teach you. And, likewise, it is your job to learn from me. You (or your parents) are paying good money for you to be here, and it is your responsibility to make good use of that time. It is likely possible to pass this class by simply cheating. However, that is deeply pointless for you. I get paid the same regardless. When you sit down at your first job, staring at a mess of unfamiliar code you have been given, you will either be glad you didn't cheat or regretful that you did. Let's begin.

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Realizing that my professors were being paid by the university and not by me, and that they had no natural incentives to ensure I actually passed the course, was a necessary wakeup call. At some point I realized I was spending that money on the opportunity rather than the outcome. I just wish I had clocked it sooner. I never did graduate, but the classes I did complete, when actually exerting the required effort, taught me what I needed to know. Once I had learned how to make myself learn, I found that I was able to adapt adequately to the workforce and the degree became little more than a signal.

It's ... odd, to have arrived at this conclusion. On paper, the decision to drop out once I had a real IT job would be seen as a failure. But it's not like I ever stopped learning. I love to challenge myself to learn new things. And I do feel like GPT and friends somewhat short circuits that process. It's handy for a quick lookup in a subject I'm not interested in, but to actually learn a thing I need to practice doing it. There is no substitute.

> had learned how to make myself learn

Someone told me ~30y ago, that the purpose of the higher education is: so you learn how to learn. (okay, ought to be). Not the memorizing, or the get-drunk parties :) Now, whether the system-as-is actually even targets that, is a separate question.

So if one achieves that earlier, yeah, no need to waste further years there.

Although as with most institutional artefacts.. , these diplomas - let's call them <tags> - are still used across the institutions, to prove institution-"tax" has been paid.

I think that's a bit flawed. The purpose of lower education is learn how to learn. By the time you get to university is when you apply those skills to really learn.

At least, that's how I feel.

I dunno. I passed all the undergrad maths through calc 3, diffeq, linear, and a 400 stats class, ~20 years ago. I could probably solve a calc 2 problem (which was harder for me than calc 3), but I would need a textbook and an hour or two.

Did I learn it? Or did I learn how to teach myself it? I would argue the latter.

I never cared for the "learning how to learn" line. We start from infancy and learn to walk and talk, albeit in that very special way. We are always learning, every day.

For me personally, earning by bachelor's and master's degree was a continuation of K-12 and I made sure to be a top performer. The looming debt was the underlying, motivating factor.

Looking back, I learned most outside after K-12 was done for the day and I was free to explore and get hurt.

That phrase is a thing because K-12 is structured as just learning what the teacher tells you. In undergraduate degrees, the professors are more like guideposts and you can't learn everything in their lectures - you have to figure out and understand the material yourself and most people upon finishing K-12 can't do that.

I also wasn't one of them, so I also had no trouble in college, but I knew a lot of people this applied to.

Well, maybe the purpose of higher education is to learn how to learn _for yourself_. That is: to find sources, read them, evaluate them, and synthesize them into a conclusion.

Fellow professor here, I don't think your approach would work where I teach. I teach in a Polytechnic school (Portugal), which is almost free for the students, so the incentive that they are paying good money does not work.

This semester I'm teaching a web development course (fullstack development), and my policy is that the project must be done on github classroom repositories, and I'll be asking clarification (face to face) on some of the commits. They can use whatever they want (stackoverflow, chatgpt, whatever), but they better know how to explain their commits to me. I don't know if my approach will work in the end, but I surely got their attention.

I'm doing this because it got so bad that, last semester, on my Object Oriented Programming course, even using moodle with the Safe Exam Browser on and an instance of Visual Studio code to try the code, we caught lots of cheaters. How they were doing it? By installing co-pilot plugin. How did we caught them? Some students solve all the exercises in 10 minutes, others had comments that were clearly made by AI, etc. etc. Of some 15 students we caught, only 3 came to us to review the exam.

Hard problem to solve..

Is it hard? What's the difficulty with just having assessments be done in a controlled invigilated exam room?

I don't quite understand why higher education is acting like this is an impossible problem to solve when high schools manage to stop 13 year olds using phones and calculators just fine by virtue of having teachers watch them as they write their answers.

> What's the difficulty with just having assessments be done in a controlled invigilated exam room?

Not all assessments are exams, eg: projects, and students cheat even in exams with professors present, eg: the OOP exam I mentioned before, where we had 2 teachers for 40 students.

Maybe you’re suggesting 1 professor watching 1 student on a 2,5h exam? For 40 students we would need 40 professors.. We don’t have that number of professors in out departament..

> Maybe you’re suggesting 1 professor watching 1 student on a 2,5h exam?

Does your local school bus in hundreds of professors on exam day to act as personal security guards? Probably not. When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating, in exam halls with procedures designed to prevent cheating.

Professors keep acting like this is some unsolvable research problem when it's not. What's "hard" is stopping cheating for the near-zero price universities seem to expect to pay, and the solution is to get real and change the underlying practices to prevent cheating, regardless of what it takes. If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well.

CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it.

The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing right now as a preview of what happens when the credibility of public sector education and research falls too low. If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis?

> When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating..

Not here where I leave (not USA)..

> If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well.

I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam?

> CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it.

Do you think we are police officers or what?! There's a limit for what we are able to do, and what students are able to tolerate..

> The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing (...) If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis?

Ok, I get your point now! You probably live in some third world country where there's lots of wealth inequality and the state does not help its own citizens. Here in Portugal (and I guess almost all of EU) the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year), so I wouldn't consider failed experiments for now..

I don't live in the USA nor grew up there, and "invigilator" was a job title when I went to school. Usually people who wanted a bit of part time work. Mums, retirees, students, that sort of thing. It doesn't take much time or skill and is a nice way to help out in the local community so they had plenty of takers.

> I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam? Do you think we are police officers or what?!

Nope. You have to watch them do it anyway, if you want your credentials to mean anything. Arguably they already don't, very few companies are willing to hire a software developer given just a proof of a degree exactly because universities are so willing to graduate people who can't do the work. But that's not sustainable. It may take decades but that path leads to Venezuela. Eventually, this will catch up with universities and they will be gone because they're not delivering value.

> the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year)

The price charged up front is 700EUR/year but the cost is a lot higher than that, obviously. All your government does with this policy is force everyone else to pay for the industrial-scale production of well rewarded cheaters, enabled by professors who don't care enough to stop them. It's a socially corrosive policy.

> Professors keep acting like this is some unsolvable research problem

I am a professor, and yes, it's trivially solvable. The solution has been well known for hundreds of years (at least). If only the institutions we work in would let us *@#$ing solve it!

Where I work, administrative obstacles have been erected to make it pretty much impossible to give my students traditional closed-book, unseen, invigilated exams. I have been fighting this for several years.

But I'm hoping management are going to have to cave in before too long, because students are surely going to realise pretty soon that their degree certificates will be worthless otherwise.

I agree with the notion that cheaters are only cheating themselves.

However, it's in the university's interest to make sure the students it confers the degrees upon are have met the bar to be qualified to recieve it. Otherwise, they risk losing accreditation for the program (ABET, etc.). Part of your job, or the university's job, is to provide that evaluation.

Whether or not that accreditation matters at all is another question...

>However, it's in the university's interest to make sure the students it confers the degrees upon are have met the bar to be qualified to recieve it.

Absolutely correct. Unfortunately that ship has sailed a log time ago. When I was in college in the 1990s, the program was laid out where you could learn a hell of a lot and get a great base of knowledge. You could also do just enough to get a C without really learning much. C's get degrees as we used to say.

Another thing is when I was in school, cheating would get you expelled, so there was a pretty good deterrent.

>Otherwise, they risk losing accreditation for the program (ABET, etc.). Part of your job, or the university's job, is to provide that evaluation. Whether or not that accreditation matters at all is another question...

I haven't been paying attention, but I don't recall any state schools losing accreditation. Based on the number of candidates I get with degrees that don't know shit, this should be more common. It's definitely degraded the value of the paper, which sucks because I worked hard to get that paper.

>Another thing is when I was in school, cheating would get you expelled, so there was a pretty good deterrent.

Although what constitutes cheating varies quite a bit. Working together on problems sets is OK in some places/classes but not others, having cheat sheets/formula sheets/open book is OK on some exams but not on others, some classes are explicitly group projects, etc.

True, that's why my professors always explained the parameters of the assignment and what you were and were not allowed to do.

> I agree with the notion that cheaters are only cheating themselves.

Everyone loses when someone cheats, not just themselves, if they only cheated themselves it wouldn't be a problem.

You lose by getting incompetent bureaucrats and engineers in the future etc, even if you didn't cheat.

Not only that, but it devalues degrees. If one could assume that getting through college is actually difficult and cannot be cheated on, one can assume that someone having a degree in a field means something. Someone else cheating means you need to work that much harder to convince people you know what you are doing. It's helpful to have certifications that mean something, otherwise they are just more noise.

> Not only that, but it devalues degrees.

In the US, while sadly undergraduate degrees are used as a gatekeeper, they are not valuable. They’re absolutely not worth the money spent to obtain one.

I agree that aren't valuable, that's my point. Cheating has been rampant and easy for a long time. Though, it's not just the cheating causing it.

The author makes some points debunking the "cheaters are only cheating themselves" position.

"One of the courses I teach is health ethics. Many of the students who enroll aspire to careers in medicine, in one form or another. Those who make it might become nurses, doctors, pharmacists, or emergency medical technicians. But whatever path they take, they will inevitably confront ethical dilemmas—some of them agonizing....

The ethical conundrums that health care workers encounter don’t arrive neatly packaged like an essay prompt. It won’t be anything you can google. Even if there were time to feed the dilemma into AI, the AI won’t help you figure out just which questions need to be asked and answered. And in real life, this is often the most difficult part. "

When I was teaching, I thought not "I am here to teach you. " but instead "I am here to help you learn", and thought more about structure, direction, and how to provide corrective and constructive feedback to help with the learning.

Perhaps that's because as a student, I rarely got anything out of my teachers' slow oration vs more rapid reading and slow working the exercises.

> When you sit down at your first job...

Or do your first interview. We've passed on candidates who clearly rely heavily on LLMs to get through their work. Interestingly, others have mentioned face-to-face conversations as a way to assess skills. My company doesn't use LeetCode, etc. and instead do 1:1 evaluations with a staff dev.

My company does, and I find it pretty easy to weed out the LLM candidates either way. "You used a heap here, can you explain why?", "why did you name your variable [something unrelated to the question but relevant to the underlying concept]?" will send them stumbling or "just a sec, I need to think about it". That's obviously not how it works, if you're actually writing the code you'll have thought about it before, you won't just throw in a heap "just because". It's also not super hard to figure out when someone is just reading something off of the screen, especially when they clearly have a second monitor, or a phone, or a tablet nearby, but even on the same screen you can see their eyes dart back and forth.

The bigger problem for us is the online assessments that they give out as a replacement for the phone screen nowadays. They clearly can't detect LLM use, even though to me as a human it seems quite blatant - things like extensive use of comments explaining the code, which should throw up a red flag on an assessment where the only thing that matters is passing the test cases. So we get a lot of candidates at on-sites that would have never made it past the traditional phone screen.

As an aside I initially only ask "LeetCode easy"-type questions. Stuff you would encounter in your day to day. You get to choose your favorite language. There's at least 3-5 solutions for each of the problems I give, they're really not meant to be trick questions. Any dev should be able to code these in 5 minutes without even googling, let alone need ChatGPT. I almost think some people use ChatGPT out of habit more than anything else and it trips them up more than if they had taken a minute to think about it and do it themselves.

What percentage of candidates are you seeing that are attempting to use LLMs at various stages of the pipeline? It would be interesting to hear a data point how prevalent the problem is getting.

In the past 6 months about 50%. That's my n=1, I have another colleague who may just have been unlucky - their number is 100%. This is all on-sites, I barely get phone screens anymore.

This is a great policy.

Ironically, it can also be used to justify "cheating"... but not in a bad way. If a university course is a requirement and I have no interest in learning the material, it makes sense for me to speedrun the material using all the tools I have at my disposal.

Maybe I'm missing out, but I'm an adult that's being "forced" to (pay to) take a class I have no interest/motivation for, which seems like being treated like an child.

I like your approach because you treat your students like adults.

This speaks to a greater problem in the way we treat university in the US. It's not supposed to be a place where you're trained to do a job, it's supposed to be a community where you are exposed to new ideas, so you can become a more well-rounded individual.

But then university is so expensive, and you need it to get a halfway decent job these days. So now you're paying tons of money for a class you didn't want to take in the first place, and you come in with a chip on your shoulder already. And then these classes typically have a very high workload, with extremely strict grading requirements (ESPECIALLY mathematics), and they end up becoming sort of a filter, which does a disservice to the students and to the instructors.

I don't know how unique those properties are to the US. Even if Unis are often cheaper elsewhere they still have a huge opportunity cost and it's not like credentialism doesn't exist outside the US.

What about when they say 'when I "stare at a mess of unfamiliar code" I will ask ChatGPT to explain it and it will fix the problem for me'?

If it works I'll say "I can automate you away". If it doesn't work I'll say "You checked in that code without understanding what it does?"

In which scenario does the cheater win?

> If it works I'll say "I can automate you away".

I don't think deciding not to use LLMs makes you any more immune from automation, because other devs will.

If anything, assuming it really does increase productivity, it'd seem to me that the devs using LLMs would be safer than devs in the same domain that refuse.

> If it doesn't work

The extent to which a human using an LLM still produces buggy code should already be taken into account by assignments.

I'll answer my own rhetorical question: the human wins when (s)he creates value; by asking the right questions (crafting prompts better than the next person) and by recognizing deficiencies in the computer's output.

My job is to conduct research. I also am called to share a bit of what I know. It's up to you whether your brain will be a sponge or a rock.

I mean, why would anyone want to take a class from a person who doesn't want to teach it?

Not trying to say that the students are excused here.

But neither is the professor.

They have to put in the effort too. Learning is a 2-way street. A professor that doesn't care about the individual student is probably going to be worse than just using chatGPT as a professor by 2030 (if not already).

Most professors who conduct research do not want to teach.

I mean, I would not then be surprised if the students are picking up on that.

Like, if most of the profs are grudgingly teaching, then the students are going to think that being taught is something to begrudge, right?

Why wouldn't I just use chatgpt or any other ai assistant to help me get familiar with the code?

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