It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI.
They were more prone to cheating before AI, too.
Cheating has always existed at some level, but from talking to my couple of friends who teach undergrad level courses the attitudes of students toward cheating have been changing even before AI was everywhere. They would complain about cohorts coming through where cheating was obvious and rampant, combined with administrations who started going soft on cheating because they didn’t want to lose (paying) students.
AI has taken it further, with students justifying it not as cheating but as using tools at their disposal.
I was talking to my friend about this last week and he was frustrated that several of his students had submitted papers that had all the signs of ChatGPT output, so he asked them simple questions about their papers. Most of them “couldn’t remember” what they wrote about.
It’s strange to me because when I went to college getting caught cheating was a big problem that resulted in students getting put on probationary watch and being legitimately scared of the consequences. Now at many schools cheating is routine and students push the boundaries of what they can get their classes to accept because they have no fear of any punishment. YMMV depending on the institution
IBM used to hire software developers based on aptitude test scores regardless of formal education, then put them through an extensive internal training program. It worked fine.
People who got through via cheating in college tend to be low performers in work for the exact same reasons.
An interesting side effect of the AI gold rush is that companies are starting to look critically at these do-nothing email jobs where someone forwards emails around and makes slides and Notion pages.
I’ve worked with many who occupied jobs that didn’t contribute much other than organizing text and sharing it around, but they got a pass because it looked helpful enough. Now it’s a lot harder to justify those positions when management realizes that having the not-really-competent person summarize communications and documents isn’t much better than having ChatGPT do it.
So a student who only understands the basics should be able to answer most of the easy questions and students who have a deeper understanding can answer the harder ones.
Well-written exams should feel pretty fair and leave students feeling like the result they got is proportional to the effort they put into studying the material (or at least how well they personally felt they understood the material).
Is this kind of test - many short questions - a standard thing for math in your country?
My university exams were pretty much all "2-question", in 90 minutes.
The first half was an essay where you have to reproduce a lesson from the curriculum, in your own words.
The second half was "the formulas" - you have to develop one or two formulas from first principles.
I once got an A- even though I got "the formulas" half very wrong. As the teacher explained later, I simply chose the coordinate system beginning at not the same place the textbook did. And this was supposed to be a bad teacher - he actually gave Ds to almost all of us (180 people). This was a makeup exam.
You've never been a teacher.
Assignments and projects are great for learning, but suck for evaluation.
Another example, lit classes where the grade is based on time limited, open book exams, hand written in "blue books"
Read the book, pay attention in class, spend 90 min writing an essay, and you are done.
However I suspect that there are many who 1) are more concerned about the short term outcome, 2) consider the degree/diploma to be little more than a meal ticket or arbitrary gatekeeping without any connection to learning, 3) view the work as a pointless barrier to being handed said diploma, and/or 4) don't see the value of human learning in a world where jobs are done by AI and AI systems routinely outperform humans on complex tasks.
A lot of Gen Z are ferociously anti-AI, but for tribal and emotional reasons, not because of a nuanced understanding - which is ironic, because the nuanced reasons for being wary of AI are much stronger than the usual talking points about "stealing art".
Being tribal and emotional is going to make Gen Z easier to replace, because nuanced strategic insight is less common and more useful.
The other thing that feedback feeds into is credentials. I realize that some people are dismissive of this aspect of the degree, but it is important to pursue further studies or secure a job. While you can argue that these people are only cheating themselves, and some of them are cheating themselves, a great many will continue to cheat as they advance in academia or the workforce. In other words, they are cheating others out of opportunities.
Personally, I dropped out despite a full ride+ becuase why would I put in work for a no name state school when I already has an FTE job as a developer out of high school anyway.
Turns out fraudulent action can still get the bag.
And for most students that’s all they really care about.
If the companies stop valuing the diplomas, students will stop paying tuition to attend, and the universities eventually collapse.
You can imagine a world where the Corporate or State AI handles education, tailors it to individual student levels and talents, and assigns work based on its own direct experience of a lifetime of interaction.
You can also imagine that in that world where most humans would be redundant - unless the AI was optimising for human-to-human jobs and for evidence of unusual insight and creativity, not managing bullshit work for corporate profit.
Unfortunately a lot aren't, they feel like they have to be there or these courses are the only path for them to get a good job. And unfortunately they end up in the workforce, too. You'll often see teams with one good developer and a lot of hangers-on.