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.
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.
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.
That is their problem, not your problem. You're not their nanny.
So I'm perfectly happy with a system of higher education that strongly rewards this behaviour
I think they would really benefit learning how to work a full day and develop some work life balance.
As an example, I was a university student in Canada ~15 years ago. I lived with my parents, driving 30 minutes each way to attend classes. I had car insurance, gas, a cell phone, tuition, parking and books to pay. Tuition was costing 6000$ a year over 5 years. Being in humanities, I chose my own course schedule. I would often have classes 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday. I would work nights and weekends 25-33.5 hours most weeks..Most part-time employment worked around student hours and allowed some flexibility. Once I graduated and had a full-time salary position, I had much more free time and struggled to not feel lonely in filling up that time.
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 agree that something will have to change to avert the current trend.
You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Universities need to accept that AI exists, and adjust their operations accordingly.
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.
Realistically I think the more common case is to think you know the material, skip studying, and then faceplant on the test. Homework should help self-correct.
But yeah, I could it being annoying if you really do already know the material.
IMO the ideal class would be 4 or so students working together on a bespoke project, with weekly check-ins with some grad student teaching assistant. The goal would be to do something interesting and new. Of course nobody ever has enough teaching staff for that kind of thing.
Before college, when I was a kid, I just had the textbooks, so I read the chapters and did the assignments… it was much better than sitting and listening in lectures, then doing some small assigned subset of the problems…
You could sit down at a workstation with all the tools you might need to test your skills. :)
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
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.
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.
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!"
You hire humans to help train AI and when done you fire humans.
That's a "black box" problem, and I think they are some of the most interesting problems the world has.
Outside of technology- the most interesting jobs in the world operate on a "black box". Sales people, psychologists are trying to work on the human mind. Politicians and market makers are trying to predict the behavior of large populations. Doctors are operating on the human body.
Technology has been getting more complicated- and I think that distributed systems and high level frameworks are starting to resemble a "black box" problem. LLMs even more so!
I agree that "prompt engineer" is a silly job title- but not because it's not a learnable skill. It's just not accurate to call yourself an engineer when consuming an LLM.
It's a bit like an audio engineer setting up your compressors and other filters. It's not difficult to fiddle with the settings, but knowing what numbers to input is not trivial.
I think it's a kind of skill that we don't really know how to measure yet.
None of this is true of an LLM. I believe there’s a little skill involved, but it’s nothing like tuning the pass band of a filter. LLMs are chaotic systems (they kinda have to be to mimic humans); that’s one of their benefits, but it’s also one of their curses.
Now, what a human can definitely do is convince themselves that they can control somewhat the outputs of a chaotic system. Rain prognostication is perhaps a better model of the prompt engineer than the audio mixer.
But how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong...
You keep human employees and require them to use LLM so that it gets corrected all the time from their input. Then you fire them.
Sounds laughably naive now, doesn’t it?
It’s the same old story with a new set of technology.
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
To be able to direct an LLM you would need to know how to do those things yourself.
So the end result is this. you don't need to know how to write an essay but you get an essay written for you. It's very different from using calculator and knowing math or using ProTools and knowing how to make a song.
I don't think we're living in the same world. I have met plenty of people who, despite having a calculator, can't solve their own problems because they don't know what to do with it in order to solve their problem.
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.
Just because machine can do things, doesn't mean humans should be able to do it too. Say reading a text aloud.
^ Why many go to Harvard. Very nice club.