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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion.

Universities need to stay ahead of how people actually work. Framing the use of AI as 'cheating' gives a university a reputation that it isn't keeping up with industry, which has a wildly negative impact on admissions. You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.

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You're conflating two different types of work, which each have a different purpose:

- making a change to your own mind and/or body (studying math, lifting weights)

- making a change to the world (optimizing ad placement, operating a forklift truck)

Do you think gyms should allow people to lift heavy weights with forklift trucks, so that they can work like they do in the real world?

That's an amusing analogy, but it's conflating university as a purely academic pursuit (learn these things in order to know the things) with university as vocational training (learn these things so you can get a job.) As people have to pay for their degree through loans now, people see it as a means to get the career they want. It's not learning any more. It's training.

So, to continue the analogy, a degree is the equivalent of a forklift truck license, and people do want to drive their forklift truck to the gym. Because they're paying to be able to do that.

If you use AI to complete all your assignments and exams, then getting a degree is less like getting a forklift truck licence (which indicates you've learned some useful skill that few people have) and more like getting a Waymo account (showing that you're competent enough to enter your credit card details and destination into a mobile app).

Undergraduate degrees are not vocational in any of the leading universities in any field. They are sometimes a prerequisite to vocational training, but aren't one in and of themselves.

There's a pretty good reason for that - the base assumption is that training in fundamentals, methods and ways of thinking is something you won't get anywhere else.

> You can't expel people for 'working like they do in the real world'.

You totally can, though. In the real world if I can't remember something, I might look it up in a textbook. Closed-book tests have historically been a totally accepted practice, though, and getting caught bringing notecards with textbook info secretly into a closed-book test would absolutely bring about disciplinary action.

One problem here is that students that use AI to outsource thinking become people who cannot think. These people are not likely to be very useful to employers or even society. We have to figure out how to allow AI to outsource drudgery but not the thinking itself. It should be a better and better bicycle for the mind not a replacement for the brain.

> 'working like they do in the real world'.

But in real life I am allowed to look at any material available while solving a problem yet school exams dont allow it.

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