The University as We Know It Is Finished | Hacker News Reader

The University as We Know It Is Finished

persuasion.community

15 pointsseregine8 comments

This is such a grand title, but the conclusions are surprisingly tame.

- The take-home projects and papers are useless for grading purposes because of AI cheating. Time for more oral exams.

Yep, the only real change from AI. This used to be $50/page from diploma mill and this was expensive enough to dissuade most people. Now it's almost free, and cheating is rampant.

I think author's hope for oral exams is too optimistic, that is too expensive. Good old written exams, either in blue books or on special locked-down devices, proctored to prevent cheating, will be a way to go.

- It makes no sense for professors to stand in front of large classes and deliver lectures. They should do small, interactive seminars.

I don't see what this has to do with AI? Ever since VCR was invented, professors doing non-interactive lectures could be replaced with recordings. Either there is a "human element" in those, in which case it's still there, AI or not; or it's just pure information transfer, in which case AI is just an inferior version of recorded lecture with worse presentation style and hallucinations.

- Professors should teach about AI, include how to prompt efficiently and how to critically scrutinize the output

100% agree, as with any important technology. But this is just a small curriculum change, just one more topic to cover in the lecture, and maybe a class.

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Overall, I believe that modern university is pretty bad and should be changed, but I hardly think that AI made this problem significantly worse, and this essay really did not convince me of that.

>>Professors should teach about AI, include how to prompt efficiently and how to critically scrutinize the output

>100% agree, as with any important technology. But this is just a small curriculum change, just one more topic to cover in the lecture, and maybe a class.

Critically scrutinizing LLM output is just critical thinking skills, something universities should already teach.

> I think author's hope for oral exams is too optimistic, that is too expensive.

Ironically AI is perfect for quizzing you.

That's pretty common actually. Calculator is great for checking arithmetic exam. CAS is great for checking calculus problems. Spell-checked for spelling errors. Scantrons + multiple-choice question for all sort of problems..

Every technology like this makes testing faster at the expense of introducing false positives / false negatives. AI is really not going to change that much.

(Unless AI will be solely responsible for grading, and there will be no human fallback / appeals process.. in which case this will be hell and I don't envy students stuck with this)

This is a mostly American thing though.

I’m Italian and in all my university experience i tool all my exams in person, simple pen and paper. Some professors would require an additional in person oral examination as well, depending on the course.

Passing an exam through at-home assignments alone was sci-fi for us.

I like the emphasis on the development of the individual as a mentally co-ordinated cognitive whole.

Carbon-based lifeforms gotta give the silicon-based a run for their money.

We let the university model degrade, and now this author is pontificating about how the university model isn't working.

Yes.

Because we let it degrade.

I like the critique of the problem - unclear how many model releases the proposed solution helps (or should help, looks at student loan balance) the economic structure of a university survive.

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