Do most people really need to learn college level writing? I would ask, what is the motivator of learning how to write well? One reason could be communication. However, if we can communicate easier and faster than ever before with an AI, that subject no longer needs to be taught.
College writing will go the way of calligraphy. Colleges and the faculty that staff them need to keep up with the times or risk being obsoleted. Instead of teaching students to write, they should instead offer courses on prompt engineering and how to get the LLMs to spit out what is needed, in a minimum amount of time.
And let's face it -- most people are being prepared for the life of a corporate worker or laborer. I'd argue a great number of people don't need college. Cheating is widespread because there are people in those courses who aren't interested in the material. A quick course in how to compose an email, workplace communication should be all that is needed for most white collar workers. Those who really want to study writing should be offered the courses as an artistic, historical and anachronistic pursuit and those courses should definitely not be financed on the tax payer's dime.
Uni CS lecturer here: It's not the writing itself that is important, it's the ability to communicate ideas and express one's own thoughts.
I use writing on exams as a way to determine what the student actually knows about a particular thing. It's not a perfect metric by any stretch, but it's one of the few that we have to test knowledge of a subject (theoretical knowledge) versus a practical demonstration (project or code).
Why not use more oral exams? It'd be quite difficult for me to cheat on an algorithms examination if you and I were talking back and forth in real time. I understand time is probably a factor, but I still think such assessments could be conducted. I had foreign-language assessments and musical assessments conducted in such a manner at the university level.
Not to mention, when those students apply for many of the jobs out there, they might have gained some useful skills for interviewing, conversing with team members, etc..
I'm not opposed to some writing, but it seems like our education system believes it to be the only medium that matters.
> Why not use more oral exams? ... I understand time is probably a factor
We do this, actually. Usually in the form of project demos when students complete a longer project.
But also consider: I have ~200-250 students a semester. Even at 10 minutes a student per semester (and really...how much can I learn about a student in 10 minutes??) that's a whole lot of hours.
I also don't get paid hourly. I also don't get paid a lot. Teaching isn't exactly a high-paying job in the state Uni system.
I work in a sector where due to poor English and writing skills, OpenAI has been quite transformative in the quality of emails being sent - to me at least. But…I find my eyes glossing over when I notice ChatGPT’s telltale signs. Also on matters of substance, ChatGPT has a way of saying nothing at all - it writes in glittering generality and in a way that can feel devoid of context. I’m quite pro AI as an editing tool, but I think it would be a great loss for people to lose the capacity for writing.
> Cheating is widespread because there are people in those courses who aren't interested in the material
I think academic cheating is partially due to Goodhart's Law. In other words, grades have become the target, and are no longer a good assessment of understanding. An easy way to get rid of cheating would be to get rid of grades. However, grades are too ingrained in our system for them to be removed any time soon.
I am not saying that assessments and evaluations should be completely eradicated. I just think assessments should be more holistic. By that, I mean that assessing a student's ability should be more contingent on personalized evaluations, a pass/fail system, and should involve more apprenticeships/mentoring opportunities with those more experienced. Much like in the times of yore.
> > Cheating is widespread because there are people in those courses who aren't interested in the material
This is only part of the issue, IMO. Students (especially CS/Engineering students) are usually overloaded with work.
I've caught otherwise motivated students cheating simply because they're stressed to perform and didn't want to fail--especially since they've usually gotten pretty far in their coursework once they get to me--and the stress got the better of them.
No excuses for them (and I fail cheating/plagarism along with my Uni policy) but lack of interest isn't always the motivating factor.
> I just think assessments should be more holistic
I'm with you on this, but aside from the time issue which I brought up in a previous response, this has been attempted at Uni before. In the 1960s, UCSC attempted to eliminate all grading and assessments and had professors write a narrative about their students. It worked from a knowledge perspective, but was absolutely lambasted in the wider media and academic circles.
A client worth north of a million dollars to me once said point blank that my competition can't write an email, and that's a big part of the reason we're doing business.
This is an odd take, do people in white collar jobs not need to write and communicate through writing effectively?
I write memorandums and reports for clients where I need to articulate technical concepts in a way that is simple to understand. Where I need to communicate my findings to non-technical and technical stakeholders, the process to be able to write those reports takes a long time.
You may not need a college course on writing, but generalising that people don't need to be taught to write is stupid.
I have seen many of our graduates use LLM's to help compose their reports, without them understanding how it reads and what they're trying to communicate, those sections need to be rewritten.
Same here. I pushed my team to use ChatGPT instead of fearing it. But one of my ex employees who used to write substandard tickets still wrote substandard tickets with ChatGPT (I had asked him to get advice from ChatGPT on what makes for effective tickets). The only difference was that they had perfect punctuation and grammar, and were 5x more verbose.
Like any tool, if you don’t know what you’re asking for, the result will suffer.
Exactly, if you don't know what you're asking for, how it reads or how it tells the story you're trying to convey. You will just have a well written piece of text that doesn't make sense in the context of what you're trying to say.
> Do most people really need to learn college level writing
No, but only because college level writing is really bad (or, at least, the gen-ed writing courses are. I've had plenty other courses that didn't have writing in the curriculum, but still expected actually decent writing.)
Even if we ignore the entire "college is not job training" view, writing is is probably one of the skills most universal to knowledge jobs.
It upsets me that collaboration, and now the use of AI is considered “cheating”. By calling it cheating they are conditioning people to be stupid. You are supposed to work with others and it’s necessary. The people that learn to work with others are way more successful.
But in school teachers are focused on cramming info into kids heads instead of teaching them how to self learn. It’s like “give a kid a fish feed him for a day”. If you teach kids how to self learn then give them fun projects, they will naturally collaborate, use ai, and be totally prepared for life!
They would be much better off if they spent time studying real world problems and using ai to make kid level solutions in my opinion.
I feel very strongly that collaboration is perversely demonized, and that language models are used to delay or even defer collaboration.
I can cite junior devs who use ChatGPT instead of asking for a pair, and I have had to very, extremely emphatically reassure them that I was available—and enthusiastically so! This kind of shyness is historically typical of juniors, but I see the use of language models as an obstacle to their development.
Does AI cheating in school matter much? The primary party that loses out from the cheating is the cheater because they will fail to learn what they ought to have learned.
But wait, you say, won't they get a degree that they didn't earn? Doesn't matter: Right now anyone can just claim to have any degree they want. Universities will not confirm or deny if a particular party got a degree, citing privacy laws. Lying about degrees is probably widespread, we only hear about the few extremely uncommon cases where its caught and the perpetrator was someone high profile.
Even as it is, without/prior-to AI plenty of people manage to actually earn respectable looking degrees that turn out to be utter imbeciles in practice.
There are greater abuses of AI we ought to be concerned about.
> Does AI cheating in school matter much? The primary party that loses out from the cheating is the cheater because they will fail to learn
Sure, I suppose. But the secondary effect is that others with the same Uni degree now have their degree valued less in the eyes of whomever hires the cheater and they fail to do their job right.
Or, much worse, the cheater gets someone hurt or killed. Tech can kill people--just ask Boeing (guess who has large hiring events at my Uni!).
> Universities will not confirm or deny if a particular party got a degree
Hmm. I've had several jobs in the past which, as a contingency of being hired, must show proof of a Uni degree via official transcripts. Mine charges $12 for the privilege of printing out your record on "official paper", stamping it, and mailing it to your presumptive employer (or grad school) on demand.
> Or, much worse, the cheater gets someone hurt or killed. Tech can kill people--just ask Boeing (guess who has large hiring events at my Uni!).
Do you think cheating was a major factor there? Or has Boeing just been prioritizing things like cost over other considerations?
For life critical engineering roles it would be entirely reasonable to test candidates. If an org like Boeing fails to do so, it has to be because they just don't prioritize the candidate's capability.
Of course someone could cheat some but otherwise study and still pass the test, but I think those candidates will already be pretty job performance indistinguishable from people who didn't cheat. A degree only means so much at best.
> I've had several jobs in the past which, as a contingency of being hired, must show proof of a Uni degree via official transcripts.
I'm aware of that practice, though I've never experienced it first hand and you're only the second person who has told me that they've experienced it. In any case, it's easily faked if you're willing to be bold about it, particularly where you've enrolled previously (even briefly) -- get a transcript sent to yourself, make a duplicate that says what you want, send that in. Even if your forgery is not very good it is extremely unlikely to get a careful inspection because faked credentials are not currently recognized to be a widespread problem.
In practice this kind of validation is rare, so even if you're unwilling to go the master-forger route you're just limited somewhat in your hiring pool.
Somewhat ironically, hiring hoops seem to be more common for lower tier position. If your fake degrees aren't working, fake some more and apply as CEO. :D
Even in court I've had difficulty dealing with a party faking their credentials via bare assertion.
> Universities will not confirm or deny if a particular party got a degree, citing privacy laws.
For a nominal fee, universities will send a copy of your transcript to anyone you ask them to. Every job I have had since graduating has asked me to ask my university to send them a copy.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 68.8 ms ] threadCollege writing will go the way of calligraphy. Colleges and the faculty that staff them need to keep up with the times or risk being obsoleted. Instead of teaching students to write, they should instead offer courses on prompt engineering and how to get the LLMs to spit out what is needed, in a minimum amount of time.
And let's face it -- most people are being prepared for the life of a corporate worker or laborer. I'd argue a great number of people don't need college. Cheating is widespread because there are people in those courses who aren't interested in the material. A quick course in how to compose an email, workplace communication should be all that is needed for most white collar workers. Those who really want to study writing should be offered the courses as an artistic, historical and anachronistic pursuit and those courses should definitely not be financed on the tax payer's dime.
I use writing on exams as a way to determine what the student actually knows about a particular thing. It's not a perfect metric by any stretch, but it's one of the few that we have to test knowledge of a subject (theoretical knowledge) versus a practical demonstration (project or code).
Not to mention, when those students apply for many of the jobs out there, they might have gained some useful skills for interviewing, conversing with team members, etc..
I'm not opposed to some writing, but it seems like our education system believes it to be the only medium that matters.
We do this, actually. Usually in the form of project demos when students complete a longer project.
But also consider: I have ~200-250 students a semester. Even at 10 minutes a student per semester (and really...how much can I learn about a student in 10 minutes??) that's a whole lot of hours.
I also don't get paid hourly. I also don't get paid a lot. Teaching isn't exactly a high-paying job in the state Uni system.
I think academic cheating is partially due to Goodhart's Law. In other words, grades have become the target, and are no longer a good assessment of understanding. An easy way to get rid of cheating would be to get rid of grades. However, grades are too ingrained in our system for them to be removed any time soon.
I am not saying that assessments and evaluations should be completely eradicated. I just think assessments should be more holistic. By that, I mean that assessing a student's ability should be more contingent on personalized evaluations, a pass/fail system, and should involve more apprenticeships/mentoring opportunities with those more experienced. Much like in the times of yore.
This is only part of the issue, IMO. Students (especially CS/Engineering students) are usually overloaded with work.
I've caught otherwise motivated students cheating simply because they're stressed to perform and didn't want to fail--especially since they've usually gotten pretty far in their coursework once they get to me--and the stress got the better of them.
No excuses for them (and I fail cheating/plagarism along with my Uni policy) but lack of interest isn't always the motivating factor.
> I just think assessments should be more holistic
I'm with you on this, but aside from the time issue which I brought up in a previous response, this has been attempted at Uni before. In the 1960s, UCSC attempted to eliminate all grading and assessments and had professors write a narrative about their students. It worked from a knowledge perspective, but was absolutely lambasted in the wider media and academic circles.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSC/comments/wpmgax/does_anyone_kn...
I write memorandums and reports for clients where I need to articulate technical concepts in a way that is simple to understand. Where I need to communicate my findings to non-technical and technical stakeholders, the process to be able to write those reports takes a long time.
You may not need a college course on writing, but generalising that people don't need to be taught to write is stupid.
I have seen many of our graduates use LLM's to help compose their reports, without them understanding how it reads and what they're trying to communicate, those sections need to be rewritten.
Like any tool, if you don’t know what you’re asking for, the result will suffer.
It's about the ability to demonstrate you have a coherent mental model of a topic. Use of LLMs doesn't help students who can't do that on their own.
No, but only because college level writing is really bad (or, at least, the gen-ed writing courses are. I've had plenty other courses that didn't have writing in the curriculum, but still expected actually decent writing.)
Even if we ignore the entire "college is not job training" view, writing is is probably one of the skills most universal to knowledge jobs.
But in school teachers are focused on cramming info into kids heads instead of teaching them how to self learn. It’s like “give a kid a fish feed him for a day”. If you teach kids how to self learn then give them fun projects, they will naturally collaborate, use ai, and be totally prepared for life!
They would be much better off if they spent time studying real world problems and using ai to make kid level solutions in my opinion.
I can cite junior devs who use ChatGPT instead of asking for a pair, and I have had to very, extremely emphatically reassure them that I was available—and enthusiastically so! This kind of shyness is historically typical of juniors, but I see the use of language models as an obstacle to their development.
But wait, you say, won't they get a degree that they didn't earn? Doesn't matter: Right now anyone can just claim to have any degree they want. Universities will not confirm or deny if a particular party got a degree, citing privacy laws. Lying about degrees is probably widespread, we only hear about the few extremely uncommon cases where its caught and the perpetrator was someone high profile.
Even as it is, without/prior-to AI plenty of people manage to actually earn respectable looking degrees that turn out to be utter imbeciles in practice.
There are greater abuses of AI we ought to be concerned about.
Sure, I suppose. But the secondary effect is that others with the same Uni degree now have their degree valued less in the eyes of whomever hires the cheater and they fail to do their job right.
Or, much worse, the cheater gets someone hurt or killed. Tech can kill people--just ask Boeing (guess who has large hiring events at my Uni!).
> Universities will not confirm or deny if a particular party got a degree
Hmm. I've had several jobs in the past which, as a contingency of being hired, must show proof of a Uni degree via official transcripts. Mine charges $12 for the privilege of printing out your record on "official paper", stamping it, and mailing it to your presumptive employer (or grad school) on demand.
Do you think cheating was a major factor there? Or has Boeing just been prioritizing things like cost over other considerations?
For life critical engineering roles it would be entirely reasonable to test candidates. If an org like Boeing fails to do so, it has to be because they just don't prioritize the candidate's capability.
Of course someone could cheat some but otherwise study and still pass the test, but I think those candidates will already be pretty job performance indistinguishable from people who didn't cheat. A degree only means so much at best.
> I've had several jobs in the past which, as a contingency of being hired, must show proof of a Uni degree via official transcripts.
I'm aware of that practice, though I've never experienced it first hand and you're only the second person who has told me that they've experienced it. In any case, it's easily faked if you're willing to be bold about it, particularly where you've enrolled previously (even briefly) -- get a transcript sent to yourself, make a duplicate that says what you want, send that in. Even if your forgery is not very good it is extremely unlikely to get a careful inspection because faked credentials are not currently recognized to be a widespread problem.
In practice this kind of validation is rare, so even if you're unwilling to go the master-forger route you're just limited somewhat in your hiring pool.
Somewhat ironically, hiring hoops seem to be more common for lower tier position. If your fake degrees aren't working, fake some more and apply as CEO. :D
Even in court I've had difficulty dealing with a party faking their credentials via bare assertion.
For example sake about one of the jobs: it was for a project management position in a big old tech company with three letters.
For a nominal fee, universities will send a copy of your transcript to anyone you ask them to. Every job I have had since graduating has asked me to ask my university to send them a copy.