Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown

Using a special computer works too. I do my exams with our institution's Computer-Based Testing Facility, a bank of computers with fixed software and firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site. As a result, I've been able to challenge students to solve interactive software security challenges on the midterm and final with automatic grading - something that would have been impossible with pen and paper. Scalability is really the major challenge. We're rolling out more CBTF rooms and rolling out access to other departments due to demand, but it's definitely more resource-intensive than pen-and-paper. One possibility is to treat CBTFs as computer labs when not actively administering exams (or maybe even vice-versa), something we're looking into doing.

> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor. Let people at least type their essay with the standard features of a word processor as usable as MS Word 2000 or better.

I'm currently getting my Bachelor's in Computer Science, while in-person is absolutely necessary, it doesn't necessarily need to be hand-written. We now have the exam questions printed out, and we respond on the online exam platform, just like we would before. It is explicitly stated that no aids, including AI, are permitted. There's usually the prof and at least one more TA walking around the room, if anyone is seen with something other than the exam platform open they fail the exam. Some profs also started requiring special software for doing the exams, which works fine but is pretty annoying to use since it requires Windows, but that application basically hijacks the OS, making it impossible to navigate to any different webpage/ application. In 2024, we had some coding exams, and AI was explicitly NOT forbidden, which lead to them making the exam more difficult (because with AI, you can solve it so much more quickly, so gotta make it harder), which was really annoying, because it made it practically impossible to solve it yourself because of the time crunch. I hope they realized how wrong that was.

During uni I only took a Java class. During the exam I had to turn in hand written code. I guess that would work today.

As a student, I have no issue doing oral exams or written exams without notes. I mean I'm there to learn and out of curiosity so I like that challenge... I truly don't understand how people can sign up for a degree and then have to cheat? Must feel torturous to endure a class you're not even interested in.

There are limits to what you can assess on timed assessments, and there are students whose performance on such assessments is not a good signal of their intellectual ability. In addition, at many institutions such tests are given infrequently and can be worth a significant component of a student's overall grade, increasing both student stress levels and the tendency for such assessments to measure short term knowledge students have obtained by cramming, not more meaningful longer-term knowledge gains. I see you're giving quizzes every three weeks, which is better than twice a semester, but still not what I would consider an ideal cadence. In my course weekly computer-based quizzes comprise 70% of a student's grade, but that's supported by a significant institutional investment in high-frequency computer-based testing: https://cbtf.illinois.edu/.

I agree that that is probably the lowest stake solution. Alternatively there are solutions like the safe exam browser which locks down the device quite well during the exam session. —- Disclosure: I run a small start up which offers teachers a platform to create and conduct digital exams and interfaces with the safe exam browser precisely because cheating is the number one complaint teachers I have spoken to have when it comes to digital exams.

I think most teachers have adapted pretty well. I'm really surprised to find teachers that haven't reckoned with possibility of AI cheating in 2026. In person writing, etc. But also for anything take home students have to verbally discuss their work in some fashion. Seems to mostly work. Students still us ChatGPT as a search engine, which seems fine. (Source: married to a professor. And my son is in high school)

I graduated from the University of Washington about 8 years ago. Even then we had to write our code on paper for exams. Every missed semi colon was marked. This isn’t a new practice and I’m surprised more colleges haven’t already been doing this regardless of AI.

Funny thing is in India we were ahead of the curve in this one cause most of our CS undergrad classes involved writing code by hand. And students were ahead of the curve too, with chits, hidden iPads, phones and the classic psst-psst in the middle of exams.

It's news to me that they weren't already. My exams were all in person and on paper in the early 2020s, and even my physics homework was a "do it on engineering paper and drop it in a mail slot" affair. The professors would forbid computers and phones during lectures and would stop to shame anyone who thought they were being sneaky. Computer Science classes were all on paper for exams, and low level ones did the old "here's a Javadoc, write some code with a pencil." The only online exams I had were for 100 level electives.

All my university (Oxford, UK) exams were in-person and had written. I had 6 exams over 6 days in 2012, in which my entire undergraduate degree was examined. It's not easy, but I think that method is just as good (or bad) now as it was then.

Even then, AI smart glasses are now making an appearance in classrooms [1]. The situation is getting really quite ridiculous. [1] https://www.evenrealities.com/en-GB/blogs/buyers-guide/ai-mo...

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Same with job interviews. Right now Hr insists on us doing them over zoom so we get this absurd result that we eliminate candidates that perform too well to be true, at the risk of eliminating a genuine excellent candidate. You have to look a bit messy!

Wait, is this not how things are now? Do students do exams at home now? I guess it has been 14 years since I graduated but I didnt expect it to change that much.

it will be interesting to see if any new formats emerge. if ai kills the take home, what can replace it for similar "let's see how far you can go if you have resources available" style examinations? maybe we'll see specialty chatbots that give the equivalent of oral examinations and/or are willing to provide reference material but not make suggestions, connections, solutions or generate prose on behalf of the user?

Hand written is unnecessary, just ban/confiscate phones and restrict internet access if the test needs a computer.

Thanks for the very interesting write up, I am teaching management studies programming Python (people who want to be quants, dana analysts, etc.) and I am struggling with the same problem - how the hell do grading to make it reliable. LLMs has become good enough so whatever homework task I give, it can be solved easily by any LLM (and, in fact, this becomes unfair to those who are not able to pay for good model). I was asking to add comments & interpretation of results, this slightly helped, but LLMs are increasingly good in all this as well. So, quite seriously, I am considering some on paper tests & quizes, because what else can be done? Making people aware about importance of writing code is indeed a good hint to convince, at least part of the people to do this. Another thing is: they will leave university one day, they will search for employment and the employer might be much more hostile towards cheating during job interview and can easily make cheating with AI impossible... Question is, will it still matter?

Why hand written? Wouldn't a one-on-one interview be a better way to establish a broad evaluation of competency.

The problem isn't the AI - it's the assessments. It used to be that shipping a large, well-researched essay with multiple citations was proof of work. Now it's proof of prompting, not learning or effort. If you want to test for memorization, you need a live test to do so. If you want to test for comprehension and understanding, require sessions with a tutoring AI and grade the level of comprehension exhibited. And then please, please test for prompting with challenging assignments that would usually be beyond a student's skills and make sure they know how to drive the machines to do valued work. I totally agree that there is utility in memorization and comprehension. I also know that by the time students graduate, AI will be the job and if they can't pair successfully with agentic workflows they will not be much use in the work force for many roles.

of you could require presentations with a Q&A section at the end. they can use the AI all the want to help their workflow to develop teh content, but the better engage with the material enough that they can field some questions at the end. the main downsides are: - takes a long time to administer - the Q&A section leads to unstandardized grading, but i think that's fine. just away from scores on precise 0-100 scale and just score in a couple coarse buckets (superb, acceptable, fail, etc)

> I'm finding AI increasingly harder to like. That summarises pretty well the whole situation. AI is cool and all, but not worth it considering all the disadvantages

I was in high school from 1986-1989, and my experience began with TI-99/4A in grade school, a VIC-20 at home, and then a C=64 (high school offered a Commodore-based lab as well.) Dad indulged me with many peripherals, including an Epson dot-matrix tractor-feed printer that printed 132cps! Among its features were configurable fonts and point-size. I discovered that this device could be set up for extremely small fonts that remained legible. So, for Spanish and other classes, I decided to go into the "cheat sheet" production business. I worked out how to print a sheet full of little 2x2" sheets that contained Spanish vocab, or the study answers for our next quiz or whatever, and I used them myself, and then I began to sell them!! And the most ironic thing happened, when I discovered that I never needed the cheat sheets: having created them by typing them in, repeatedly, correcting errors and checking against our textbooks, I had internalized, memorized and learned all the answers as any ethical student would! I got caught, once or twice, and disciplined for distributing those cheat sheets, and I definitely did not continue cheating in classes, because I'm not that kind of guy, but the process was a revelation to me, and ever since the 1980s I have relied on hand-written notes to reinforce my memory of those words and facts that flow from ears, to mind, to hand muscles, to pen, and onto ye olde fashioned paper. Now can we see a reason that "writing 100 times on the chalkboard" may have been an edifying exercise, beyond its punishment value?

I was a teacher assistant circa 2023. I required every student to submit the assignments typed digitally, since grading a single handwritten one would take as much time as 5 typed. I saw a single fully AI generated assignment and it was laughable and an easy zero. I wonder how I would do it now.

"best not to blame the students" There are dozens for every one who didn't get the opportunity to attend an Ivy. The penalty for cheating should be automatic expulsion. I'll note as a hiring manager the college degree won't be worth shit unless the school can show their students have any integrity.

> Obviously, understanding someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own. Unrelated, but once you get to a more mature level, say grad school and above, I can say this is not always the case! Just like it's easier sometimes to Roll Your Own Damn X in programming, so too are some expositions of proof so dense (necessarily or unnecessarily so) that it is a less taxing affair to simply figure it out yourself, or at least figure out 90% of it, consulting a suggestive sentence or two in the proof in order to get at that last 10%. Maybe this observation of mine is not so unrelated after all. I don't regret many of the times that I've thrown up my hands at the rococo explanations or solutions given to me by LLMs and simply did my own work. The Socratic method with AI is sometimes more effort than it's worth.

> It's best not to blame the students. They are good at optimizing metrics; that's how they ended up here in the first place. As an alumnus of Dartmouth College's CS program, I am sad to hear that my alma mater has sunken so low. Look, I know that the Committee on Students was historically bad at handling CS plagiarism cases back in the 90s (compared to ones in the humanities). But Dartmouth's historic solution to this sort of pernicious "optimization" was to reduce the expected value of cheating by imposing extreme negative consequences on anyone they caught, with a 3-term suspension and a permanent transcript notification for a first offense. Allowing widespread cheating and LLM regurgitation will destroy a school's reputation with graduate schools and employers, and rightfully so.

You reminded me of my Univ. Math's class (on integrals). The test was basically get one integral equation randomly and solve it in the blackboard only with the teacher present. Because you didnt know which type of integral you will.get, we had to learn to solve all of them. We made.hundreds of exercises with a small group of close friends (the teacher gave us a book that's infamous in Mexico from an author Schaumm).

> This doesn't stop students from generating code, but at least they have to understand that code in detail. I mean even before AI this should get tested, as people could just copy code from SO or other websites, from books, or from their classmates. I've done a few projects where the other students didn't really do much (in hindsight this was probably because I was excited and productive instead of helping and delegating work, which was selfish of me), but they were caught out in 1:1 interviews.

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People optimizing for grades is so sad. I got a BS in CS and no one has ever asked about my grades. I tried to optimize for learning and it turns out that pays off really well once you hit the real world.

Without a hint of irony, wouldn't a Voice AI solution help better manage the 1-1 interview process?

> At the end of the pandemic academics were thanked with two years of 0 and 1% salary increase, due to a tough economic situation. During the same time the president received a 8% raise. Let us know when they institute stack ranking and 10% mandatory cuts every spring. Then academia will have been fully corporatized!

Are you asking for the president to make a snap decision undermining the authority of the Academic Code Committee? How to teach and test students who have to start work under the current AI frenzy let alone who will still be working alongside whatever it becomes in forty years is an extreammly under-researched and unanswerable question. Even an interim answer will require the full consideration of the faculty and beyond; a good leader facilitates that not replaces it. Yes the should probably _some_ discipline for students who broke the rules written in a past and very different world; but I certainly would not want to hire any who didn't challenge them.

> Grades are often adjusted on a bell curve and honest students are disadvantaged when others cheat. It depends per country. Here we use a grading system that isn't relative to how other students perform. You basically get a percentage score on how many questions you got right. Perfect score is 100. 55 and up is pass, below that is fail. But still, teachers can make exams easier or harder depending on last year's scores, so there's that. In short, nobody will hone your mind for you, it's up to you to want to.

Yeah corruption begets corruption. Who knew. But seriously this is a real problem that university and school provide a "safe" version of, see the same dynamics in any blatantly corrupt country for how hard it is to follow the law when everyone else expects you to grease pockets and or lie to officials with a wink. Oxidation in steel structures is informative of where these things go and how to address them.

Grading on a curve is utterly irrational, unfair and cruel. I'm sorry you have to put up with such a system.

The sad thing is that it shouldn't even be immoral to use an LLM to help teach you the material, only to use the LLM as a substitute for your own skills.

Is it really cheating if you work hard and memorize all the questions? That's basically learning.

After retiring at 65 from a university teaching and research science career (all pre-AI), I went back to teaching, but this time teaching high school science, mostly AP STEM courses at an A-ranked public high school. The cheating/AI problem is now a crisis greater than COVID. My experience: very few students in advanced and AP classes do not cheat — largely for the reasons given above — and it takes enormous resourcefulness on the teacher's part to design coursework and examinations in which cheating through AI is not an issue. Many teachers I know have all but given up — the cost and effort required to circumvent cheating are simply too great given the already sky-high demands on teachers' time and energy. And school administrations are little help, due to thoughtless and enthusiastic reliance on software at every level. In some ways they are part of the problem. I don't know what the situation is in schools outside the US. But here it had become an arms race. [Edit: typos]

> you have little choice I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.

Schools should forbid grading on a curve. MIT does, for example. Standards should be absolute.

> graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same You always have a choice. The right move, in this case, is to raise a stink to administration, donors and politicians. Hell, use AI to do it. Schools refusing to punish teaching is a problem that’s leaking into business and politics.

I wonder if for certain fields, like finance, that itself would be a positive signal for the corporation that actually would prefer workers with quite flexible ethics and mores who are focused on "the bottom line"..

The Lance Armstrong defense

This is bullshit and basically this kind of justification is part of the moral and ethical rot of most institutions in the US now. You do have a choice, you just want to pretend you don't to get away with it. Besides, no one outside of a few stuffy finance/quant shops ever even asked what my GPA was in college, they don't care.

That depends on the reward function. Should society reward credentials or skill?

I think you're missing the fact that everyone knows. He just got reliable data from a natural experiment, which makes the chancellor can't just look away any longer.

Another irony from TFA: "We economists understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions."

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Game Theory seems sort of useless in the real world because people are not rational players, and the real challenge is in getting an accurate model of their behavior. The honor system would work probably fine in a tiny close-knit liberal arts college, while it would obviously wouldn't in a place where the degree itself is the target.

My favorite exams (as a ugrad for classics, and in grad school to advance to candidacy in CS) were in person, hand written, open book. We had lots of time, and a fair idea of the range of questions. It rewards actuality mastering the material vs memorizing it. For the CS exam some people brought more books than they could physically carry, I don’t think it helped them much.

I've had such exams. It was the honor system. The idea is that a typical exam is too short to evaluate the student's knowledge and a belief that fast students shouldn't have an advantage.

The final exam was not take-home, which is where the massive discrepancy showed up. I do agree that the idea of giving take-home exams and expecting students not to cheat has long since passed its prime. There may have been a time when it was reasonable to expect most students to behave honestly, but that does not hold at all in today’s climate. Especially post-COVID, for whatever combination of reasons, students just don’t seem to care at all about anything other than min-maxing their effort to grade ratio. Which leads to a lot of outcomes like this one where students start using ChatGPT early, think it will continue forever, and then get completely crushed when they encounter the first assignment where they can’t cheat.

The craziest part is that a game theory expert can't see the problem here!

I can't say what the reality looks like today, but when I was in college 25 years ago (Harvey Mudd), closed-book take-home exams were pretty common (often with a specific time limit: maybe 3/5/8 hours), and I would have been shocked and aghast at the thought of anyone cheating. We took our Honor Code deeply seriously. (I've given my own students take-home open-book exams with "no outside resources" rules regularly in the past, but I've pretty much concluded that isn't viable anymore. But then, we don't have a formal Honor Code here.) One particularly striking example was a timed, closed-book math exam where the exam paper just listed four problem numbers from the book. We were expected to open the book, copy down those problems without looking at anything else, and then put the book away. Honestly, that one felt like just asking for trouble and now that I'm a professor myself I think that the prof was unreasonably lazy, but it certainly captured the spirit of the thing. (Technically, that wasn't a Harvey Mudd professor but rather a professor at the adjacent graduate university. Maybe that had something to do with it.)

The other day some sucker told me, "don't throw that trash over there it's littering" and I told that sucker "there's no way anyone could enforce it" lol. Some people get up in their jimmies about this but if they don't want me doing something they should make it impossible to do it </bait>

Your employer (the university) sells a credential (diploma and transcript) that your customer (the student) uses to help them get a job. You are not doing it for free. Grading is part of what UC gets for the $250k+ they pay a professor in salary and benefits. HR departments will use whatever signals exist. If smart people tend to have college degrees, they'll use that as a filter. If smart people tend to have gone to a certain set if universities, they'll use that list as a filter. If colleges hand out transcripts with grades, and smart people tend to have better grades, they'll ask for transcripts. HR departments didn't invent grades or transcripts. I agree with your final sentence. The signal in grades (and even graduation) has been greatly diminished (even at brand name universities). If you want to improve that situation a good step you can take right now is add your name to this open letter from UC STEM faculty: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwvDywR-CAt3t_U3Aw...

Wow. Do you care at all about the reputation of your university? I worked briefly in post-secondary CS education a long time ago, before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today, and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job. Also, grades have long been inflated Then stop inflating them. This is also what standardised testing is good for --- but no surprise, so many are against it because it would just show how terrible they actually are. "The fish rots from the head."

Grading is to provide your students with a goal, one that isn't so high-minded as "the goal is education". The human mind uses a "reward system", within a feedback cycle. If you want to do away with that, just because it's what you prefer, then you're ignoring the reality of being human.

If I'm studying something, it's nice to get an external assessment of how well I'm doing, so i don't fall victim to over-confidence or imposter syndrome. When you're dealing with new material it's hard to be truly objective about your own project level.

I think the point is that your college/university want the earned credential to mean something. Presumably you need some way to gauge the quality of your graduates

It saddens me to see how creativity seems to "peak" at "let's go back to how we did it in 20th century" instead of asking the better questions like you did.

Let's play this out further. How about high school, should there be grades there? Tests at all levels also typically involve a grade / metric -- are those included too?

>grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people. Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.

> But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Corporations were able to convince future employees to pay for their job training (i.e school). Getting professors to do the screening is not much.

During my bachelor I remember getting a distinction for an assignment that I put a shit ton of effort into and being elated. And then finding out that my tutor had taken it to the board trying to make the case for a high distinction, and narrowly failing, but it then being archived as an example of the output that the class wanted anyway. That bowled me over when I was young and still sort of working out effort/reward sort of stuff. I had put a lot of work into a lot of subjects where I wasnt very naturally talented and got a lot of mediocre results, but seeing that if I put the effort in continually I could make stuff thats worthy of recognition was amazing. Meanwhile, my (now) wife was completing a diploma subject at the same institution and they were handing out pass/fail only. You could see a lot of people really confused about that. The quality of work that fit into "pass" ran a very large gamut.

You should know full well you need some method of determining if a student is competent enough to move on to the next class in whatever sequence. Perhaps universities are slacking on this front, but at a minimum a student who doesn't understand the basics of Calc I should not go take Calc II

Grades ideally should measure the understanding a student has of the subjects presented, and their ability to execute on that understanding. Regardless of other incentives, that alone warrants them. Are you suggesting a pass/fail method, or something else?

During my undergraduate university, the best scores had priority when choosing the limited slot numbers, including the time slots and sometimes which professor we were to attend. e.g. I would pick Calculus MWF mornings, group two because professor XxXx was in charge; lower grade students who polled agaisnt me would be bumped to a different group, or to a different time slot, or not making it to the lowest grade cut

I've heard students react this way to seeing problems on exams that are not strictly of the types taught in class or in previously-assigned homework. "It's not fair! The teacher never showed us how to do problems like that!" This kind of thing was expected and assumed when I was in secondary school, that there would be combining of some concepts from the unit into a single problem. Very worried that there's both a cultural change supported by AI tools that will lead to the outsourcing of thought to the AI rather than outsourcing drudgery.

I would argue the barrier to cheating has become lower just by virtue of how easy it is to do it now. You open an app and type your question. Rue if different from Brit where you had to basically have either a skill in cheating to find and adapt the right resources or you would have to have money to pay someone to do it for you. AI as the great equaliser I suppose.

Different magnitude of cheating altogether

The whole discussion consistently fails to acknowledge that, in a day where we have a Supreme Court Justice who cannot define "woman", education devolves into anarchy. Surf the chaos, bro.

> What mitigated cheating at UVA was the honor code and each professor's faith and trust in our integrity. That culture was enough to not cheat. The decline of actual consequences for cheating has played a big role. When I was in college, people who got caught cheating found themselves in a world of trouble. Repeat offenders faced severe consequences like failing courses, which could delay their graduation date if it was a critical-path course. This has a real dollar amount attached to it because you start working later. Now it seems universities avoid addressing cheating problems at all costs. The professor in this article complains about how hard it was to draw attention to the cheating problem, with no response within his own department. Students know this. As cheating gains critical mass and you see that nothing bad is happening to the cheaters, you start feeling like you're at risk of falling behind if you aren't cheating. The cheaters are getting higher grades (100% for many in this case) and they get to go out partying while you're still working through the material. You're really screwed if grades are distributed on a curve. So temptation spreads. Anecdotally, I've seen a few young people lie to themselves and think that they're just going to use ChatGPT to check their answers and learn from it, but they don't realize how superficial it is to have ChatGPT fix your problem and then skim the correct answer. They put less effort into checking their work because they know they have a button to push to check it for them. When they get put into a situation where they can't rely on that button, it all falls apart

I agree with the sentiment, however I think the erosion of the honor system is inevitable given the rising cost of college. Somewhere in the last 20 years college became a luxury good, and with it a natural sense of entitlement from their customers. Couple that with increased awareness that classroom instruction (delivered by tenured research facility who seem annoyed at the idea of teaching) often has little relevance to workplace skills, I think kids have correctly surmised that the smart thing to do is say fuck the code and focus on checking boxes.

> Imo, the fix should be to work on culture. We can’t even agree on what’s wrong with it. We aren’t going to be able to fix it.

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"Fixing" the culture includes a much much broader context than just what an individual professor preaches about to a set of students. It includes the entire intergenerational contract, earning the trust of students as well, getting their buy-in. There's a lot of cynicism and distrust against it all and a lot of disengagement because they just don't buy into it anymore with sincerity. It's not simply about scolding them a bit more and telling them that actually cheating is bad, mkay. One place to start is to question seriously who actually needs a university degree and why, how this credentialism has been stealing years of productivity from young people. Though at least the deal was that in exchange you could expect some middle class job, even if gated behind a totally unrelated bachelor degree. But then this deal also got soured.

The world is getting more competitive. Integrity goes out the window when cheating in a test can mean meaningful better life outcomes and when you believe everyone else will be too.

The culture comes from the role of the institution and the degree. The fact is that the primary role of the degree is as a gatekeeper to high paying job opportunities, regardless of what anyone idealistically thinks it should be. This creates some problems. Let's say that you go to university and major in X to get a job in Y. So you assume that the companies are requiring you to get the degree to prove that you are competent in X which is necessary to do job Y. But when you get to university you realize that most of your classes required to get a degree in X actually have nothing to do with X. Furthermore you also notice that students who just cram for the test and have no functional knowledge of X are still getting As and graduating. Then you get a summer internship in a job doing Y. You notice that learning to do job Y really has nothing to do with what you learned about X in school. You notice that your mangers an the company who are really good at job Y (and all majored in X) have basically forgotten everything they know about X and know much less about it than you, but are excellent at job Y. You finish your internship and now know that you are perfectly capable of doing job Y. But, of course you can't get job Y yet because you don't have your degree in X. You have to go back to school and learn more about X before anyone will hire you even though you already know more about X than the people who do job Y and who you can see really don't need knowledge in X to do the job. So you are being forced to get a degree in X to get job Y, but job Y doesn't really require knowledge of X. And on top of that, a degree in X doesn't even really mean you have any functional knowledge of X! Everybody just learns Y on the job anyway! So now you have an exam in X, so you decide fuck it, why would I spend time on this? This whole system is retarded, I'm just going to use ChatGPT. This was basically my experience in college. I never cheated, both because it was harder before LLMs and because I didn't really need to study much to get As, but I find it hard to fault people who do. I really struggle to see how integrity plays into this system. The system itself has no integrity, so having integrity inside it almost seems like being a sucker. If you want to change the culture to promote integrity, the education and the degree have to mean something besides an arbitrary bureaucratic gatekeeping device.

Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life. The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement. If you want the honor system back then you need to offer more stable safety nets. It's not "kids these days", it's the natural result of the systems adults have made.

> make education about education, not testing and certification We tried this. The whole grades-are-racist nonsense movement (in part a reaction to NCLB). It doesn’t work. Learning requires confronting difficulty and evaluation, even if you’re learning alone. If you want to see what attempting to learn without tests looks like, see people who think they’ve taught themselves a topic by chatting with AI. Nine times out of ten they think they know something but can’t solve actual problems on their own.

How is invigilation "soul destroying"? You just walk or stand around as students write exams. Grading exams is tedious, but invigilating them is a neutral experience.

Because for many a college degree is a pure formality to land a job. My first job out of college, I worked with veterans at the company who all got in with a HS diploma. Now you realistically need a masters degree to be competitive, for no other reason than that where I live (Norway) most applicants have a 5-year masters degree. It is basically academic inflation. Here we have a tongue-in-cheek word "Mastersyken" which translates to "Master's illness/disease", a word for the phenomena that too many people are pursuing a master's degree for the sake of the diploma alone, trying to become more attractive in the search for a job, but with the side effect that suddenly "everyone" has a master's degree, and in the end everyone is stuck at the same place as before, but with extra student loans. The worst part is when you start working, and indeed discover that this is a job you could have done just fine straight out of HS.

>you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother? Because you are viewing the motivation of college wrong for most people. For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities. Ergo, they are just doing whatever required to get said piece of paper with least amount of effort. Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.

Take home tests were always rife with cheating, although it's probably worse now. Teachers really need to stop doing it, it's so destructive to create a metric that tracks how well you can cheat and lie, and basically forces you to cheat and lie (because everyone else is) if you want to get a job.

Apparently some students aren't actually interested in learning and view the diploma as a meal ticket rather than a meaningful credential. Or perhaps the university is just seen as a networking opportunity. If students don't want to be there in the first place and/or don't see any value in learning, it is unsurprising that they'd take the easy way out. Or maybe they cheated their way into Brown and are just continuing. But I was always interested in learning, and understood that cheating was a method of learning avoidance. Why waste the amazing learning resources - faculty, teaching assistants, courses, labs, libraries, studios, rehearsal spaces, interesting speakers, arts and culture events, computing facilities, maker spaces, etc. - that are available at a place like Brown?

* I am in the state of not knowing about something * This is brought to my attention by an exam question * I have an oracle in the form of a textbook, an LLM, the internet, or all of the above Which action is skipping the education: looking up the answer, or not looking up the answer?

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Because it's an important aid to getting to a high-paying job in the US, not just a means to learn. One need only look at the resume filtering process, a once manual bias that has now been codified into algorithmic bias with AI. A degree from a good school boosts your chances immensely, and other facets such as coursework don't matter much. If you have ever seen someone filter applicant resumes, you will understand instantly. There are too many, you have to filter them somehow and the allure is irresistible.

> then you just skip the education part? Why bother? You've never put anything off in your life or taken the easy short term route? Come on this is not difficult to understand. You aren't different either.

They’ve been taught that not having the piece of paper will keep them from having even a menial job, so you have a huge population of people bullshitting their way through to the piece of paper.

i mean, even if you are truly there for learning, doesn't it make sense in a low risk setting to try and boost your grade? it's different if you're cheating on your homework or other learning, but there isn't much learning left to do on the exam, that's for the grade

When it costs a lot of money, the failure itself costs a lot of money. And you cant afford it. Because failure means you paid a lot of money for nothing. An expensive education comes with higher temptation to cheat.