Every undergrad study is, as of now, possible to pass with AI models. Some of them not only pass, but pass with flying colors.
The harsh reality is that academia as a whole needs to be revamped. The easy solution would be to revert back to paper only exams, and physical attendance - but that would also exclude a ton students. A huge number of modern students are online students, or similar programs where you don't need to show up physically. Moreover, I don't think universities / colleges themselves want to revert back, as it would mean hiring more people, spending more on buildings, etc.
A renowned South African university, UNISA, has done remote learning for decades. Students had to mail in their work every month, and they would set up exam centres all over the country where students can take their tests.
This is not an unsolvable problem if handwritten work becomes a requirement.
Even though I majored in CompSci, I still remember my college essay class and learning about primary and secondary sources and their relative quality, how to craft an argument, and how to articulate your argument to be persuasive. Outside of just writing, those skills have been useful in other scenarios too (like when subconsciously evaluating someone else's argument)
Of course, I still treated it like a lazy college student: I did it in 2.1 or 2.2 line spacing to hit the page requirements, and flipped my thesis because it was easier to research (I started out arguing against the US invading Iraq, but found it way easier to find sources that supported an invasion... well, we all know how reliable those sources were).
An obvious solution is to require the use of Google docs and include the history as part of the assignment. If there is no sign of sentence restructuring then fail the assignment.
This is the equivalent of asking students to show their work when they do math problems and that is how we thwarted those evil calculators.
AI isn't destroying anything. Don't blame the technology for what humans do with it.
AI should allow every student to have personalized instruction and tutoring. It should be a massive win.
If everyone instead of taking advantage of that refuses to do any work and decided to lie and pass the AIs output off as their own, that is not something the AI did. The students did that.
A college-friend from the Unviersity of Oxford, where students write one or two essays a week, got the top first (best mark) in his history degree. Initially impressed, one day I asked him his exam method - where each student must produce 3 essays in 3 hours (or did then) across about 5 or 6 papers. My friend’s approach was to thoroughly research 12 essay questions and pre-write 16 page essays for each paper, which he would then learn verbatim and trot out word-for-word the best fit to each exam question.
This compared to my method of reading widely, learning quotes and ideas and then writing each essay fresh in the exam hall - and I would typically manage about 3-4 pages per essay. (Reader, I did not get a top first).
I relate this anecdote as I don’t really see my friend’s method as being much better than using AI. Although I do acknowledge his 16 page essays must have been reasonably good.
The leverage has been flipped. We all had awful college classes teaching next to nothing, and now that you can get good grades without attending, what's left? "We lost critical thinking!" No, we were barely getting that in the first place. Now, classes need to be more valuable.
Hopefully AI articles and papers can skip things like:
Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.”
Universities have been criticized for ideological indoctrination. We might be able to quantify this: the increase in use of AI to write essays should result in a weakening of this phenomenon simply due to the lower engagement in the material and reduced critical thinking as was shown recent [1] studies [2].
The question is can a really good student who knows and understands the topic at hand write a better essay with the help of AI, than I student that doesn't know the material and is just relying on AI?
I can easily tell code written by a novice programmer naively 'vibe coding' an app from code written by an experienced developer using AI to help him. Can a history professor tell the difference between a purely AI essay from one written by someone who knows what they're talking about, and is assisted by AI to make the essay better?
What if education became research? If, in the hypothetical future, the AI can answer any question about any book or scientific theory, perhaps the educational system could focus on teaching people how to come up with good ideas to research, and how to do that research effectively? Rather than making the questions about historical information more difficult, or answering them in person or writing them in bluebooks, make the process of learning about how to create new knowledge? Educators would become people who teach you how to learn, how to design questions, and how to research those questions to produce factual answers. We've known lectures have been the worst way to teach for decades. Why maintain that failed system? If the reductionist goal of the college system is a degree that certifies you as an expert in historical knowledge, maybe we can just throw that away since the AI can handle that part now, and instead certify that people know how to ask the right questions of the AI, and how to interpret their answers to create new knowledge for humanity?
AI is going to increase the value of prestige education over middle-of-the-road education.
Middle of the road colleges will not have the resources to ensure that students learn despite AI, whereas the Oxbridges, etc, will retain their tutorial systems and smaller class sizes, where AI is of no use whatsoever.
A comparable phenomenon perhaps exists in the news publishing world. It was envisaged that easy access to information would be the death of pay-to-read news. However, the huge volumes of mediocre and politically-driven output that swamped the internet, airwaves, and printing presses instead increased the relative value of thoughtful and well-sourced new and writing, e.g. the FT, Guardian, BBC, etc., even the New Yorker...
What can help you actually write? [spoiler: not LLMs]
The thing is that most college-educated adults don't really write to one another. Nor do they really read. We're now at the point of expecting college-level texts or Tweets or coffee orders. I know myself. I've seen the beast. No fat double latte please, with which I'll go about my day and forget this digression into my feelings (separate box from children or coffee).
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 41.9 ms ] threadThe harsh reality is that academia as a whole needs to be revamped. The easy solution would be to revert back to paper only exams, and physical attendance - but that would also exclude a ton students. A huge number of modern students are online students, or similar programs where you don't need to show up physically. Moreover, I don't think universities / colleges themselves want to revert back, as it would mean hiring more people, spending more on buildings, etc.
This is not an unsolvable problem if handwritten work becomes a requirement.
Of course, I still treated it like a lazy college student: I did it in 2.1 or 2.2 line spacing to hit the page requirements, and flipped my thesis because it was easier to research (I started out arguing against the US invading Iraq, but found it way easier to find sources that supported an invasion... well, we all know how reliable those sources were).
This is the equivalent of asking students to show their work when they do math problems and that is how we thwarted those evil calculators.
AI should allow every student to have personalized instruction and tutoring. It should be a massive win.
If everyone instead of taking advantage of that refuses to do any work and decided to lie and pass the AIs output off as their own, that is not something the AI did. The students did that.
This compared to my method of reading widely, learning quotes and ideas and then writing each essay fresh in the exam hall - and I would typically manage about 3-4 pages per essay. (Reader, I did not get a top first).
I relate this anecdote as I don’t really see my friend’s method as being much better than using AI. Although I do acknowledge his 16 page essays must have been reasonably good.
Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.”
[1] https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
I can easily tell code written by a novice programmer naively 'vibe coding' an app from code written by an experienced developer using AI to help him. Can a history professor tell the difference between a purely AI essay from one written by someone who knows what they're talking about, and is assisted by AI to make the essay better?
> He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.
Middle of the road colleges will not have the resources to ensure that students learn despite AI, whereas the Oxbridges, etc, will retain their tutorial systems and smaller class sizes, where AI is of no use whatsoever.
A comparable phenomenon perhaps exists in the news publishing world. It was envisaged that easy access to information would be the death of pay-to-read news. However, the huge volumes of mediocre and politically-driven output that swamped the internet, airwaves, and printing presses instead increased the relative value of thoughtful and well-sourced new and writing, e.g. the FT, Guardian, BBC, etc., even the New Yorker...
What can help you actually write? [spoiler: not LLMs]
The thing is that most college-educated adults don't really write to one another. Nor do they really read. We're now at the point of expecting college-level texts or Tweets or coffee orders. I know myself. I've seen the beast. No fat double latte please, with which I'll go about my day and forget this digression into my feelings (separate box from children or coffee).