ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.
  • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.auEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Higher education needs to move with the times. Just like the old reason of “you won’t always have a calculator with you” for not allowing a calculator in an exam is outdated, writing essays and reports as assessment is outdated.

    The entire system should be built around preparing people for the real world, giving them the knowledge and the skillset to succeed in their chosen field. Determining this by how many formulas, definitions, rules etc they can remember in a test environment does not do that. Asking them to write an essay or a report in their own time doesn’t do that, nor does saying they can’t use all the tools available to do so.

  • gradual@lemmings.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Honestly, we’re having the same revolution for white-collar jobs that automation made for blue-collar ones.

    Like with chess, we’re going to reach a point where AI isn’t just ‘as good as humans,’ but it will be many times superior to the point humans need to make their own competitions excluding AI in order for them to be fair.

    • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Deskilling blue collar labor is how America gave China a manufacturing edge. What do you think will be the result of deskilling white collar labor?

      • gradual@lemmings.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Actually, it’s the American business owners that gave china the manufacturing edge.

        They cared more about maximizing profits off of Americans rather than competing with foreign companies offering customers better deals.

        Keep in mind, you’re trying to argue against industrialization right now. Are you suggesting we shouldn’t have industrialized to prevent “deskilling blue collar labor” so “China doesn’t get a manufacturing edge”?

        • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          I’m suggesting that the choice between industrialization and skilled labor is a false one because China is industrialized and has a highly skilled labor force. I agree this is because of American owners seeking profit, but it seems the same won’t happen to China now that they’re industrialized.

      • ILoveUnions@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        America gave china the manufacturing jobs by failing to block slave labor imports and failing to put proper tariffs to account for differences in cost of living to a reasonable extent. I say this at risk of sounding like a trumpy…

        This is to be clear that while I advocate for some level of global inter investment, having capacity in your home country is ever very important. Usa could’ve kept the jobs if they were smart back then.

        • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          Eeeeeeh… China was rapidly industrializing, and the low skill manufacturing jobs they took were going to leave the US anyway. While ensuring the rights of foreign workers is definitely something I support, it still wouldn’t have stymied the tidal shift in low skill labor to lcol nations.

          Ensuring a domestic supply of some goods is definitely important. But tariffs aren’t the answer here - instead, the answer is to support local industries by giving them government contracts to produce their goods, which the government can then use and/or stockpile when we aren’t in a time of crisis.

          And anyway, while a great amount of manufacturing labor went overseas in the last century, American has been reclaiming ground recently… with robots.

          Basically no matter how you split it, those high paying, low skill manufacturing jobs were never going to stick around for long. That’s just the forward march of technological progress.

          • ILoveUnions@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            3 days ago

            the low skill manufacturing jobs they took were going to leave the US anyway.

            … Yes and no. A lot of junk, sure. But there was no necessity to move much of large scale manufacturing over—the primary reason it happened was rampant consumerism desiring the cheapness that lower standards brought, without regard to workers or the ability of the national economy to have a modern strength against foreign influence.

            Production is fully capable to have been kept in the usa for a lot of products, as long as people were willing to buy less. It’d have been a greater benefit to our economy and the environment overall.

            But tariffs aren’t the answer here - instead, the answer is to support local industries by giving them government contracts to produce their goods, which the government can then use and/or stockpile when we aren’t in a time of crisis.

            Tariffs are an important tool. They should never be the only tool used from the tool box. But nonetheless, they’re important to disincentive the moving away manufacturing based just on wages. They make products more expensive, allowing local products to survive more easily —but if you rely on them too heavily, your local industries become stagnant.

            Most goods are not reasonable to spend government money on as well. That works great for medical goods and food, but not much else.

            That’s just the forward march of technological progress.

            When companies like Amazon use that logic to cut wages to half of competition… I got a problem.

    • agent_nycto@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Yeah sure, enjoy that glue pizza.

      If my surgeon was booting up chat gpt I’d just euthanize myself to save them the trouble.

      • gradual@lemmings.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Yeah, people say they don’t want AI driving cars while AI has better safety records than the average human.

        People also fought back against having machinery to automate production.

        You might want to look into the “Luddites.”

        I hope you can admit you’re wrong when the time comes, but I genuinely expect you to just pretend you never stuck your neck out in the first place.

  • DFX4509B@lemmy.orgEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    How long before Respondus introduces an education equivalent of BattlEye or other kernel-level anticheats as a result of stuff like this?

    And I don’t mean the Lockdown browser, I mean something beyond that, so as to block local AI Implementations in addition to web-based ones.

    Also, I’m pretty sure there’s still plenty of fields that are more hands-on and either really hard or impossible to AI-cheat your way through. For example, if you’re going for carpentry at the local vo-tech, good luck AI-cheating your way through that when that’s a very hands-on subject by its nature.

          • Critical_Thinker@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            3 days ago

            I would argue that in person exams with no resources to do research goes against how the world works for most white collar workers.

            Few are unable to research on the internet to verify information, or at least look at say a man page for coding or look up past stuff on stackoverflow, if they are working through a problem.

            Standardized testing is just not as useful as-is. I do great at it and can typically pass exams without really studying the material, but others are not so lucky.

            I’ve met people who can flunk exams but talk about the problems, go into how they would fix it, and work through a problem to implementation and testing in the real world.

            Oh, and LLMs are the new typewriter, for better or worse. It’s unlikely we are going to have a future where they are not readily available. We already have models that run locally and do not transmit data anywhere, and AI customized to your own data that is not shared is already a service provided by Microsoft.

            Education needs to evolve with technology. It’s always been 5-10 years behind the curve.

            Maybe we should be using LLMs to proctor tests and generate interactive testing. Grading can be verified by a professor reading a transcript to verify hallucinations didn’t occur or influence the results. We can even have LLMs monitor the working process of people to help determine what are the most efficient ways to work custom tailored to individuals. This is just one idea of many potential options.

            • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              3 days ago

              Those are all very nice ideas, and we’ll see if they pan out in the future. But universities need ways to stop (or, fine, reduce) cheating that can be implemented right now. A class in English literature and composition should test how well you can read and interpret the source material to then express something about it in your own words in a coherent way. This is a useful life skill to have, and students should learn to do it without AI assistance. Giving them a pen and paper and a quiet room to work in has been a good enough method of assessment for at least the last 50 years which is reasonably cost effective.

              Yes, there are problems with standardized testing. Yes, you can cheat on a paper test. But the way to improve the evaluation process is to first establish a stable baseline, and then try new things that might work better to see if they actually work better. Not to throw out everything we knew before and haphazardly try every random idea that pops into someone’s head in a panic.

              • Critical_Thinker@lemm.eeEnglish
                0·
                2 days ago

                Lol, english classes have always been the biggest joke of college for me. All you do is write an outline, pull some bullshit quotes to back up your argument from the source to satisfy MLA, and write enough to satisfy the word requirement. It’s all bullshit. it’s all opinion. Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

                If you really want to make people learn how to write professionally without computer assistance like spellcheck or LLMs, give them a fucking typewriter. It’s how I learned to type as a kid in the 90s. At least the typing skill is transferable and you get a great understanding of why applications like Word function the way they function.

                • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  0·
                  2 days ago

                  Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

                  Okay - I’m sorry your nerd muscles were so weak you couldn’t even hold a pencil.

                  But regardless of your personal shortcomings, these classes exist because they teach useful things, and if we want to tell others who did and did not learn those useful things in this class, we need a way to test that knowledge.

                  Now, it seems like your point of view is that all the knowledge and experience of a university education is useless anyway. This is a point of view I have some sympathy towards, but on the whole I don’t think it is right. However, if you do, then why the fuck arent you filthy rich yet? If you know so well what people need to know to be successful and well educated for the next 30 years, and you think you know how they should learn, and you know how you can evaluate their abilities after receiving an education - then why aren’t you doing that and raking in the billions of dollars that go into university education right now?

                  So go do that. Tell me when you make your first million. But until then, I’m gonna assume that the foundational western liberal education has value, seeing as it has persisted for quite a while. LLMs on the other hand, may very well turn out to be a fad of the summer.

      • milicent_bystandr@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Doesn’t even need to be paper. Have locked-down, internet-disconnected computers in the exam hall bas glorified typewriters.

        • JustARaccoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          Why not a middle ground? Have them only access a local network version of Wikipedia + a verified library to search

        • FinishingDutch@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          Back when I was in grade school in the mid 1990’s, we were one of the first families to have a computer. We weren’t allowed to ANY schoolwork on it. If you had to write a paper, it had to be written by hand. Which, as someone who could type much faster and used bigger words, was REALLY fucking annoying.

          But yeah, I imagine we need to go back to dumb, disconnected computers in exam halls to keep things above board. It’s depressing to see how lazy this tech makes students.

        • real_squids@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          Exactly, that’s how it works in my country. I think the PCs are connected to a local server that then matches the results to your id and email.

      • DFX4509B@lemmy.orgEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Or even actually show what they learned in a practical sense. In a vo-tech, for example, have the students fix up a car or get a small LAN set up, or even in the case of art school, have the class do a mural outside as their end-of-instruction project (which sounds like a really fun end-of-instruction project, btw), with admin approval, of course.

          • DFX4509B@lemmy.orgEnglish
            0·
            3 days ago

            Vo-techs at least kinda have to be based on the types of things they tend to teach, you can’t really teach things like masonry out of a book, for example, that’s one subject where you actually need to go in and get your hands dirty as it were, and actually do the thing being taught, to learn it, or really anything else having to do with building a house.

            I could very much argue that this also applies to art school as well, but there’s also a lot of theory and history and such that very much needs a lot of reading to pick up, although things like color theory are best picked up by actually mixing different paint colors together, as well as the practical side of things in terms of actually doing a painting or drawing or sculpture or whatever.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      tools like that were going big in the pandemic for online exams. Basically rootkits that fully compromise your machine

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Computer science is going to be q commodity job. Prediction of three tiers:

    • Tier 1: No education requirement. I write code and build things. Large percentage of developers.
    • Tier 3: Science based, high education working on algorithms, physics, and other elements requiring an understanding of matters in deeper education
    • Tier 2: Right in between 1 and 3, may require formal education, but definitely experience. Will understand applications of high science, and can both program well and manage teams. Will replace current nontechnical middle management, because who needs that when the market is flooded

    We’ve been headed this way for years, AI is just speeding it up.

    • TonyOstrich@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      That’s always been my issue. I worked full time and went to school full time when I was in college and still had to take out some loans. I did have some scholarship money that covered about half of it, but they only covered four years. My degree path didn’t have any free electives meaning in every assignment, test, and class I only had a single shot. Failing would likely mean having to retake a class and push graduating out to a year which would have doubled the amount of debt I came out with. All just to get a piece of paper that would allow me to do the job that I knew I would be good at and enjoy.

      The entire course of my life was at the mercy of some bad teachers and worse bureaucracy. I get that my profession shouldn’t just hire people without any kind of training and hope for the best, and there were things I learned that had value, but the stakes and imbalance of power is so high I can’t really be mad at some one “cheating” when they themselves are getting royally fucked.

      • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        If you’re only doing university for a piece of paper, you done gone screwed up.

        University is to learn how academia works so that you can continue your development independently afterwards. You become capable of researching topics, reading the papers and solving a problem you’ve never faced before.

        Nobody ever tells you this, but your first degree is more about developing you than developing your knowledge. If you just askGPT the whole time you’re cheating yourself.

        • TonyOstrich@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          That’s great, but if they want to make that the goal then they should structure it in a way that is more conducive to that goal. When failure without dire consequences isn’t an option, then they have fucked up.

        • anachrohack@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          Academia is a universe unlike anything else in the world. Academics will not prepare you for a job in the real world; it will prepare you to climb the academic ladder

  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    make education stupider and less important, put AI assistants in front of everyone, automate as much as possible, and allow the proletariat class to enjoy decreasing levels of control over society

  • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    It’s almost as if college isn’t about bettering yourself but paying a racket so you can check off a mandatory box on your resume for the pleasure of your corporate liege-lords…

    • immutable@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Not to sound like a starry eyed idealist, but it’s both.

      It sucks that it’s just a weird mandatory box, but if you don’t cheat your way through college you should better yourself in lots of ways. Learning how to independently organize tasks and time and research and challenging your preconceptions and struggling to really grasp complex ideas.

      It should be all those things.

    • gradual@lemmings.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Correct.

      It’s also why everyone needs a linkedin and to wear a suit. We have an environment where you’re not an attractive hire unless you can show you’ve ‘paid into the system.’

      It’s fucked, and that’s by design. We need to start respecting people who are fighting back instead of shaming them.

  • trashboat@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Do we have to throw mud at “cheating” students? I’ve been hearing similar stuff about K-12 for a while with regards to looking up answers on the internet, but if the coursework is rote enough that an LLM can do it for you, then A. As a student taking gen-eds that have no obvious correlation to your degree, why wouldn’t you use it? And B. It might just be past time to change the curriculum

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      How do you teach a kid to write in this day and age? Do we still want people to express themselves in writing? Or are we cool with them using AI slop to do it?

      • trashboat@midwest.socialEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        I may disagree with you that the ability to write alone is where the problem is. In my view, LLMs are further exposing that our education system is doing a very poor job of teaching kids to think critically. It seems to me that this discussion tends to be targeted at A) Kids who already don’t want to be at school, and B) Kids who are taking classes simply to fulfill a requirement by their district— and both are using LLMs as a way to pass a class that they either don’t care about or don’t have the energy to pass without it.

        What irked me about this headline is labeling them as “cheaters,” and I got push-back for challenging that. I ask again: if public education is not engaging you as a student, what is your incentive not to use AI to write your paper? Why are we requiring kids to learn how to write annotated bibliographies when they already know that they aren’t interested in pursuing research? A lot of the stuff we’re still teaching kids doesn’t make any sense.

        I believe a solution cuts both ways:

        A) Find something that makes them want to think critically. Project-based learning still appears to be one of the best catalysts for making this happen, but we should be targeting it towards real-world industries, and we should be doing it more quickly. As a personal example: I didn’t need to take 4 months of biology in high school to know that I didn’t want to do it for a living. I participated in FIRST Robotics for 4 years, and that program alone gave me a better chance than any in the classroom to think critically, exercise leadership skills, and learn soft and hard skills on my way to my chosen career path. I’ve watched the program turn lights on in kids’ heads as they finally understand what they want to do for a living. It gave them purpose and something worth learning for; isn’t that what this is all about anyway?

        B) LLMs (just like calculators, the internet, and other mainstream technologies that have emerged in recent memory) are not going anywhere. I hate all the corporate bullshit surrounding AI just as much as the next user on here, but LLMs still add significant value to select professions. We should be teaching all kids how to use LLMs as an extension of their brain rather than as a replacement for it, and especially rather than universally demonizing it.

        • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          I have been tutoring high school students as a volunteer for nearly a decade. Most of these in early high school (9-10) can’t even write a simple paragraph. How are they going to express critical thinking when they can’t even write very simple things?

          I mean we’re talking about kids who are functionally illiterate. The system has failed to teach them this basic skill. Critical thinking about complex and nuanced topics is way beyond that! And the problem is they’re not going to learn the basic skills if they use AI to prevent themselves from doing any work.

          By analogy, imagine trying to train people to be Olympians. Before they can perform in their sport they need to train their bodies to build muscle and endurance. Yet they insist on bringing a forklift to the gym because they think what it really want them to do is move weights around, not lift them.

          • trashboat@midwest.socialEnglish
            0·
            4 days ago

            I mean we’re talking about kids who are functionally illiterate. The system has failed to teach them this basic skill. Critical thinking about complex and nuanced topics is way beyond that!

            I agree with you there, and I don’t think we’re really all that far off from each other. Writing has both synthetic (the critical thinking to which I referred) and syntactical (what I believe you’re getting at) components to it, and kids have been missing out on the synthetic component for quite a while now and are now beginning to miss more of the syntactical part as a result of AI.

            Where I disagree with you is:

            And the problem is they’re not going to learn the basic skills if they use AI to prevent themselves from doing any work.

            Kids not doing their work didn’t start with AI. LLMs haven’t even been mainstream or otherwise publicly available for three years yet. A lot of these kids were never going to complete coursework in good faith because the curriculum is failing to engage them. Either that, or there are influences in their lives that make it altogether impossible, such as poverty or neurodivergence. In my other comment I was speaking mainly to career readiness, but the principle of meeting students where their circumstances and interests lie applies throughout their time in K-12.

            A trend I’ve noticed in this issue is demonizing students (hence why I keep bringing it up). These kids had nothing to do with their parents putting iPads in front of them instead of reading to them when they were little, or having to take classes that were designed before their parents were born, or so many other observations about the structure of education that make it archaic and broken (perhaps by design, but that’s out-of-scope here). Every stakeholder around this issue should be discussing with each other the ways that school can better serve students; instead, we’ve hastily created a stigma that using AI to complete assignments that you don’t understand, don’t have time for, or simply couldn’t care less about makes you a cheater.

            It is truly a wicked problem, and I believe the way that our leaders haven’t adapted education is primarily to blame. I haven’t even mentioned social media, and I think that government’s inability to regulate it has its share to blame for kids struggling in school. But as problematic as AI is, it is not the reason why this is happening, and we may have to agree to disagree on that point.

            • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              4 days ago

              Hey I’m not blaming students for any of this. I’ve been in the trenches with them this whole time. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It robs them of their ability to focus. Then when they’ve procrastinated long enough they get exasperated from stress and fire up ChatGPT for a way out.

              I’ve tried to help a teacher who can’t even get her own son to study. No avail.

              I can’t really blame our political leaders for this. They don’t know what they’re doing either. They had no more ability to anticipate the effects of all this stuff than the rest of us.

              The only ones who truly anticipated these issues are the folks working in social media. They saw what was happening first hand, through their metrics. They began unplugging their families from technology before anyone else.

              I also don’t blame our teachers nor the folks in charge of setting curriculum (also teachers for the most part). I have friends who have worked in education research. They simply do not have the resources to compete with social media psychology researchers (working for big tech) who run A/B tests around the clock on millions of people in order to learn to maximize engagement. What hope does a teacher have when facing a class of 30+ bored, tired, social-addicted, and disillusioned teenagers? Very little.

              I think we’re not too far from a huge social media and technology backlash. But before that we’re going to see a lost generation of squandered human capital.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
    0·
    4 days ago

    While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort.

    Lee goes on to claim everyone cheats. (He’s also that AI Amazon Leetcode interview person.)

    Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat.

    Well duh, what other kind of people would he know.

  • taiyang@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Always have been, as I’ve seen during my UCLA days of people buying exam answers from previous weekends and paying for papers, etc… I’m glad I never bothered, mostly because of dignity but what because I was poor (although those correlate). Rich people have plenty of ways to game the system, though.

  • Hegar@fedia.io
    0·
    4 days ago

    When I look at the quality of prominent Americans who went to ivy league schools, I don’t think cheating your way through college will make much difference.

    Pete hegseth graduated from princeton without the use of AI and he is one dumb fucking cunt, for example

  • GoobsTaco382@pawb.socialEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    I seen students put no work into changing the output text from chatgpt. Like, not even trying to hide it. Shm.