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Comment by nitwit005 | Hacker News Reader

These articles consistently fail to acknowledge students were cheating in large numbers prior to these AI tools being available.

It was certainly not difficult to cheat at a "closed book" take home exam before.

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I would argue the barrier to cheating has become lower just by virtue of how easy it is to do it now. You open an app and type your question. Rue if different from Brit where you had to basically have either a skill in cheating to find and adapt the right resources or you would have to have money to pay someone to do it for you. AI as the great equaliser I suppose.

In Serrano's class and other introductory classes like it, cheating has been widespread before AI and after. The truth is that the social stigma around cheating has gone away (perhaps this is only a post-remote-schooling phenomena) so cheating is trivial. All you have to do is go text a friend in the class (most people will have many friends in any large intro class they're taking).

Source: am student @ Brown

I think this is an important point.

A time when a take-home, closed-book test, relying on the honesty and integrity of the students, was viable seems completely unrealistic now. I assume there were always some who cheated, but I can imagine that it was sufficiently socially unacceptable that many didn't.

That seems like a very different world.

Different magnitude of cheating altogether

I was in a class where around 12% of the class got caught directly copying a journal assignment. I'm sure more went undetected. AI has made it easier, but it's in the same magnitude.

Edit: typo

Hmm I think one part every commenter is missing is that students have grown way more mercenary and cynical over the last 20 years. I was shocked in grad school that:

a) I got bullied into sharing my math homework so people could copy it, just like high school and college... but this was math grad school!

b) In 2011 I TAed a 4000-level course where the instructor left the solutions to the homework online (he wrote the book). I estimate 95% of students copied the solutions. It was only 5% of the grade and they paid for it on the exams. Still. Kind of stunning to see at U Waterloo - it was a continuous optimization course and most of them wanted to work in finance, yikes.

We're talking about Brown students here.

Im going to guess that it is a safe bet that the 50 cheaters are all legacy enrollments.

1/2 of the graduating class is there for the education, the other half is there because the parents are keeping up the network.

I would not agree with this from my own experience. The truth is the culture, at least at Brown in the 2020s, has little stigma around cheating in big classes. Unclear how different this is in the past, but a friend and I often joke that the student body is very good at reward hacking. If there's a reward, people will find a way to get it! That's across grades (people will cheat), housing (a huge % people will competitively apply for specialty housing or accommodations to beat the lottery), and a whole lot of other things. I don't think this is correlated with legacy, athletics, ect. but an artifact of the current culture unfortunately.

Not quite true. As a student who had many friends in Serrano's class in question among others at Brown, I'm be quite doubtful that AI has led to an increase in this particular class. The truth is that (at least post-covid) cheating is very widespread on take-home exams. If you are taking an introductory class such as Serrano's, you will have many friends in the class and cheating is so widely accepted that there is little to no stigma to doing it and so many people do. The primary limiting factor on whether a student cheats is not access or ease but desire.

It's a sad state of affairs.

The whole discussion consistently fails to acknowledge that, in a day where we have a Supreme Court Justice who cannot define "woman", education devolves into anarchy.

Surf the chaos, bro.

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