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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Universities will still act as gatekeepers of prestige and status. There is no AI alternative to the top-20 schools...I remember all the hype from 10-15 years ago about how online learning and "MIT courseware" would upend the universities or threaten credentialism, and nothing even close to that happened. As it turned out, the online version of MIT is not a substitute for the actual thing.

Schools will adapt, as they have already, by weighing grading more towards in-class quizzes and tests . I think the humanities will continue to struggle, but I see the AI boom making STEM more relevant, even if AI can automate a lot of code or math.

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>As it turned out, the online version of MIT is not a substitute for the actual thing.

More precisely, the people motivated enough to actually do the online MIT version were often already on a high-performance trajectory, and for the people who were not, few people took the online credential seriously, despite whatever skills they acquired.

All the courseware, classes, and schooling in the world cannot teach one to think.

Of course they can. What the heck?!?

Logic 101 changed the clarity of my thinking markedly.

In what ways?

Educators absolutely can teach students to think. The scientific method is one example of a key mental tool which provides an organized, disciplined framework for thinking. If you read a lot of stuff written before the scientific revolution it's kind of a mess because the authors literally didn't know how to think. When they occasionally got things right it was mostly by accident.

On the other hand, it would be really good if universities stopped being gatekeepers of prestige and status. It seems like some of the biggest idiots in high visibility posts right now come from the ivy league..

I'm not sure if an ivy league education proves anything anymore other than that you're connected.

That’s because the value of the university is the assessment, not the education itself.

They are vouching for the intelligence, knowledge acquisition and work ethic of their graduates. If they lose that signal, they lose the ability to gate keep prestige and status.

lol no the prestige is associated with the fact those who went on to do great things, generally, also went to university. Even if they dropped out - they were still there. It’s this necessary ‘step’.

Therefore one must attend university to stand a chance of greatness.

> by weighing grading more towards in-class quizzes and tests

The piece discusses blue book tests where students were still cheating with their phones providing AI responses

that's a proctoring problem though, no phones during a test is typical to say the least.

And yet a Top 10 school like University of Chicago has apparently not been able to fix that problem.

That's telling in and of itself.

AI camera watching the students?

Faraday cage. EMP blast if that doesn't work.

Body cavity search

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/26/1201734274/chess-hans-niemann...

Somehow my EMP blast idea is the less intrusive one...

When I TA'd a CS class (the students did their exams in-person but on a website with their laptops), we would solemnly tell them at the start of the exam that we would be monitoring all cell traffic in that room haha.

I was forced to get a cloud certification while working for a former employer. I took it remotely and had to leave the camera on the whole time. If you looked away even for a second, you'd get a warning. Very dystopian.

One professor in one class has not fixed the problem. You can't generalize that to the whole university. Even for that one professor/class, it's not the case that the problem can't be fixed (it could be, quite easily), it's that the professor evidently cares so little about doing their job as an educator that they simply should no longer have a job in a university.

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