AI Cheating Is Getting Worse
AI Cheating Is Getting Worse
Stop relying on students to do their work in home. Most of people work from 9 to 5 yet education system expects teenagers to do overtime assignments. And noone even pays them for it.
Students don’t learn by just going to class then doing nothing afterwards. Teachers give the tools, the kids need to practice them. Jesus I wish I could get paid for just going to school.
That's not entirely true. Practice is important, but homework actually has a negative impact on learning: https://hachyderm.io/@Impossible_PhD/112969358305278574
Students don’t learn by just going to class then doing nothing afterwards
Really? Then why are they going there in the first place???
And how do you get that juicy job experience allowing you to negotiate higher wage? You spend time on homework given you by your boss???
Jesus I wish I could get paid for just going to school.
Maybe you should be paid for passed exams and decent grades?
When students want to cheat their way through the education system, the fault is not solely their own. Perhaps this will drain some of the excess credentialism out of the system.
On the contrary, it will raise the floor of required credentials. When everyone has a HS education, an undergrad degree is needed to stand out. Now that a bachelors is the de facto education level, a masters degree is necessary. If it gets easier to get a MS degree, we'll be requiring a PhD for entry level positions.
If they're smart enough to cheat they're smart enough to pass.
Be real now. How much of that stuff do you all really use in your daily lives?
Because the real world doesn't care about rote memorization as long as the work gets done in my experience.
The only thing the world gives a shit about:
CAN you do it? If you can, how long will it take and how much?
The how is irrelevant.
The how is irrelevant.
What I usually tell students is that homework and projects are learning opportunities. The point isn't for them to produce a particular artifact; it's to go through the process and develop skills along the way. For instance, I do not need a program that can sort numbers... I can do that myself and there are a gazillion instances of that. However, students should do that assignment to practice learning how to code, how to debug, how to think through problems, and much more. The point isn't the sorting program... it's the process and experience.
How do you get better at say gymnastics? You do a bunch of exercises and skills, over and over.
How do you get better at say playing the guitar? You play a lot songs, over and over.
How do you get better at say writing? You write a lot, some good, some bad, over and over.
To get better at anything, you need to do the thing, a lot. You need to build intuition and muscle memory. Taking shortcuts prevents that and in the long run, hurts your learning and growth.
So viewing homeworks as just about the artifact you submit is missing the point and short-sighted. Cheating, whether using AI or not, is preventing yourself from learning and developing mastery and understanding.
I'm an engineer. I use all of it. I use it whether I'm writing technically correct and accurate forensic reviews or doing math in my head (or on paper) to analyze a condition in real time or checking a complex finite element model to ensure that there are no improper assumptions or invalid boundary conditions. AI/ML is really useful for some things, and deadly for others.
Rote memorization may seem unnecessary, but a mental catalog - whether it be quotes, body parts and systems, equations of natural phenomena, or even manufactured parts and specifications - is the hallmark of someone who can work independently in a real time industry. It may not matter for some jobs, but it's make or break in others.
I am entirely certain that it’s the same amount of cheating as it always was and the only thing that changed is that AI is how they’re doing it.
Maybe. It is true that people who would have cheated in the past are now just using AI in addition to the previous means. But from my experience teaching, the number of students cheating is also increasing because of how prevalent AI has become and how easy it is to use it.
AI has made cheating more frictionless, which means that a student who might not have say used Chegg (requires some effort) or copied a friend (requires social interaction) in the past, can now just open a textbox and get a solution without much effort. LLMs have made cheating much easier, quicker, and safer (people regularly get caught using Chegg or copying other people, AI cheating can be much harder to detect). It is a huge temptation where the [short-term] benefits can greatly dwarf the risks.
Colleges having a meltdown over AI reminds me of colleges having a meltdown over Wikipedia when wikipedia first came out 20 years ago.
Maybe we need to teach them the kinds of things that AI can't do, instead of the same old crap?