Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.
This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.
Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.
But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]
In France there's this law that cheating on any official exam gets you a 5 year ban on any other official exams. That includes finals, but also the exam to get the driver's license, among others.
This won't happen for the same reason very few professors stand up to this shit and why everyone gets straight A's at Harvard now - Goodhart's Law again. The money involved means getting accepted into the school is the whole task, grades are irrelevant and learning is opt-in at best. Stamp the kids, extract the money, funnel it up to the administration.
'
“56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,”
'
and the rest are lying.
(With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)
This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out.
But education is almost worthless now already. Nowadays pretty much everyone has a degree and then couldn't find a job and lucking real skills and experience. Ai is not a cause, it will simply speed up the degradation of the system.
Yup. You can either A) ban AI (good luck) and teach students to understand CS fundamentals deeply - which will of course make them totally unsuitable for an industry that is demanding tokenmaxxing from every engineer; or B) embrace AI at the university and produce students that are nothing more than prompt "engineers".
> there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into.
You know, I was reading an article about falling labor force participation rates, and one thing was pointed out was there seems to be a supply mismatch. Plenty of jobs are available, they’re just shit,
go nowhere, pay nothing in the facing of rapidly rising COL jobs.
I suspect the only retirement I’ll ever see will have to be via a shotgun.
The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way?
Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.
It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.
> Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies.
Oh fuck that bullshit. I was a dumbass to believed shit like that in school, and it didn't fucking free me. What happened was I was always calculator-dependent, which made higher-level math harder, because I was always distracting myself by operating the goddamn thing, and I never developed a very good intuition for arithmetic.
It's laughable to be surprised by cheating on take-home exams. Does the professor have a comparative assessment before AI? Do you think the cheating didn't happen on them before AI? It always happened. It's structural, in the same ways that speeding on the highway is structural, and evading taxes on cash income is structural. And the structural fix is in-class exams.
Disallowing the use of AI is basically the modern equivalent of testing based on memorization. It is a laziness to find something more useful to evaluate on or an inability to distinguish real understanding in a field from first level understanding.
Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs.
If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.
21 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.2 ms ] threadI stopped reading after the first sentence.
This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.
Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.
But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]
https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...
and the rest are lying.
(With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)
And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.
During my university time, all main exams were oral examinations: One professor, one protocol keeper, and the student. Duration: 1-2 hours.
You know, I was reading an article about falling labor force participation rates, and one thing was pointed out was there seems to be a supply mismatch. Plenty of jobs are available, they’re just shit, go nowhere, pay nothing in the facing of rapidly rising COL jobs.
I suspect the only retirement I’ll ever see will have to be via a shotgun.
Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 - June 2026 (728 comments)
Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.
It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.
Oh fuck that bullshit. I was a dumbass to believed shit like that in school, and it didn't fucking free me. What happened was I was always calculator-dependent, which made higher-level math harder, because I was always distracting myself by operating the goddamn thing, and I never developed a very good intuition for arithmetic.
I fucking hate calculators in math classes.
Oh.. he’s blind.
Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs.
If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.
"we cannot choose to become idiots"