I agree that this situation that the author outlines is unsatisfactory but it's mostly the fault of the education system (and by extension the post author). With a class writing exercise like the author describes, of course the students are going to use an LLM, they would be stupid not to if their classmates are using it.

The onus should be on the educators to reframe how they teach and how they test. It's strange how the author can't see this.

Universities and schools must change how they do things with respect to AI, otherwise they are failing the students. I am aware that AI has many potential and actual problems for society but AI, if embraced correctly, also has the potential to transform the educational experience in positive ways.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6817fe76-973c-8011-acf3-ef3138c144...

> Universities and schools must change how they do things with respect to AI, otherwise they are failing the students.

Hard disagree.

Students need to answer a fundamental question of themselves;

  Am I here to learn or to get a passing grade?

If it is the latter, the former was not the point to begin with.

For most continued learning it's better if the university uses calculators, compilers, prepared learning materials, and other things that do stuff on behalf of the students instead of setting the bar permanently to "the student should want to engage everything at a base level or they must not be here to learn". It allows much more advanced learning to be done in the long run.

IMHO, the example of using calculators in a learning environment is a great topic to explore.

Using calculators in a university setting is entirely reasonable as it is expected students have already mastered the math calculators automate. Formulae calculators are also included as, again, the expectation is a student capable of defining them have an understanding of what they are and when to use them.

Now, contrast the above with using calculators in elementary school, where basic math is an entirely new concept and the subject being taught. Here, the expectation is students learn how to perform the operations themselves through varied exercises, questions to the instructor, and practice.

> It allows much more advanced learning to be done in the long run.

Only if the fundamentals have already been established. Which leads back to my original question:

  Am I here to learn or to get a passing grade?

University is like a supermarket.

For some, they go there with a loose idea of what they want only to find ingredients not previously considered, often ending up with a better dining experience because of it.

For others, it is aisle after aisle of crap "Uber Eats" can deliver already made and without the hassle of having to cook it.

To each their own.

Why would they be stupid? Were people before LLMs stupid for not asking smarter classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve the homework for them?

Large part of education is learning about things that can be easily automated, because you can't learn hard things without learning easy things. Nothing conceptually changed in this regard, like Wolfram Alpha didn't change the way differentiation is taught.

I agree that making assignments not designed with external sources in mind significantly impact the final grade is not ideal. I think this is minor and easily fixable point rather than some failure of the whole education system.

In American universities where your GPA from your in-class assessments forms part of your final grade? Yes, absolutely.

Where I came from you do your learning in class and your assessment in a small, short set of exams (and perhaps one graded essay) at the end of each year. That seems far more conducive to learning things without having to juggle two competing objectives the whole time.

Whether not doing everything to maximize your GPA is "stupid" (literally or figuratively) is a good question too.

But even if your assignments influence your GPA it's rarely the only thing that does, and not doing assignments will harm your ability to perform in midterm/exam/whatever.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hun3e4/my_little_...

I don't know what the answer is. I'm old school, if it was up to me I'd bring back slide rules and log tables, because that's such a visual and tactile way of getting to know mathematics and numbers.

It's interesting to consider how AI is affecting humans' cognition skills. Is it going to make us stupid or free us up to use our mental capacities for higher level activities? Or both?

Its only stupid if you try to optimize for the wrong things (finishing quickly, just getting a pass).

I'd say it's very smart if you don't rely on LLMs, copy the homework from someone else, or similar; because you're optimizing for learning, which will help you more than the various shortcuts.

Exactly. I tend to think that the role of a teacher is to get the students to realise what learning is all about and why it matters. The older the students get, the more important it is.

The worst situation is a student finishing university without having had that realisation: they got through all of it with LLMs, and probably didn't learn how to learn or how to think critically. Those who did, on the other hand, didn't need the LLMs in the first place.

I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which I cannot do by actually learning the material (and which, for classes I care about, I may have already done without those exercises), but can only do by going through the hoops that professors set up and paying the massive tuition cost. If there were a different system where I could just actually learn something (which probably wouldn't be through the inefficient and antiquated university system) and then get a valid certificate of employability for having actually learned it, that would be great. Unfortunately, however, as long as university professors are gatekeepers of the coveted certificate of employability, they're going to keep dealing with this incentive issue.

I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken. It's not the case in all countries though.

Not that it is your fault, just stating the obvious.

But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want to build more housing because that will undermine the equity growth of homeowners.

We are a society of ladder-pullers.

  > We are a society of ladder-pullers.

  > We can't fix the problem by making better choices as individuals

The problem itself was created through individual actions...

I would love to live in a world where everyone was altruistic and made correct choices for the long term good of society, but I don't. And there are limits to how much I'm willing to act as if I do, when in practice it just means I'm giving away resources to people who are purely (thinkingly or unthinkingly) selfish.

  > The problem of individuals making optimal choices on an individual scale being sub-optimal on a society scale

The classic example of this is the marshmallow experiment. It's myopic. We do it all the time but frequency doesn't make an action intelligent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873275

This isn't a tragedy of the commons issue. There's no finite resource we're all trying to draw upon in this case. The supply is generated by ourselves and it could be infinite if we chose to.

To me it reads as if you're contradicting yourself. It can be plainly seen that almost nobody is willing to defect. So change is impossible, you claim. Also change is possible, you claim. Which is it? You think people will change their choices as a result of you writing this comment and "winning" the argument?

I agree that people are responsible for the current situation, since their choices brought it about. That does not constitute a solution, though.

One or a thousand individuals changing their choice by themselves will do nothing. For tens of millions to change some external factor is required. If it was not, then it would have already happened. You say no external factor is required, so why do you think it didn't happen already, and why would it happen in the future?

  > So change is impossible, you claim

You are not mindless automata.

You have a choice.

Your actions matter.

Things have changed before, they can change again.

Every big problem is composed of many small problems.

We programmers are experts in breaking complex things down. Sure, fixing one small problem doesn't solve the big problem, but they do add up. That's all I'm arguing. I'm asking that others stop being apathetic and defeatist, to get up, and continue. I'm extending my hand, will you take it? There's more of us making effort, will you help?

While I get where you're coming from -- I think the correct thing to do is to both move for systemic change and attempt to live the life you advocate for -- I think the position of "I'm moral, why do other people need the system change in order to be 'moral' as well?" more totally abandons the actual goal (fixing things) than the other way around. Fundamentally, things tend to change for material, systemic reasons, and so most often the best way to get at issues is not to go after individuals (whose behavior is more a symptom than the disease) but the root cause, the systemic influences that cause them to act that way.

  > I think the correct thing to do is to both move for systemic change and attempt to live the life you advocate for

  > Fundamentally, things tend to change for material, systemic reasons, and so most often the best way to get at issues is not to go after individuals (whose behavior is more a symptom than the disease) but the root cause, the systemic influences that cause them to act that way.

Ultimately this is the root. There's no magic wizard in the sky making people do things, there is only us. Those "systematic reasons" are a bullshit excuse to pass blame[3]. All those things are created by us. The only reason we pretend it isn't is because the results of our actions are only observed after long periods of time. It's those small decisions that add up over time. With each action we choose a better future, a worse, or a neutral. No one can predict the future, but we have a lot of evidence that short term thinking leads to worse results. I'm not asking anyone analyze every move and overload themselves with the infinite chaos. But I am saying we all need to think a few steps ahead and consider unintended consequences. To not be so rash. If things were easy, they would have already been resolved, so we so really take a moment to consider more than our gut reaction.

But ultimately, only you can control you. I hope you advocate for others around you to make good and thoughtful decisions, but there's no dragon in a cave where we can get everyone together and defeat. The dragon only is at thing of our collective consciousness. Each person that decides to defect makes the dragon a little weaker, and each person that decides to believe in the dragons power makes it a little stronger. That's the choice.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43809695

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43852024

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787383

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824534

Lead by example. Mimicry is real, we all do it whether or not we are aware. Every node in the graph influences others. If you must exhort, it works better if you follow your own advice.

Of course, be discerning as you do this, and don't expend your energy or goodwill where it will be wasted. Be like Gandalf.

Any dogmatic system is fault-tolerant, in that it will "route around" some amount of internal dissent, but this does not make it impregnable.

The ruts in our minds steer us just as much as those in the ground. But earth turns and so can we.

I'm not even sure if people are aware of inflation/housing as a completely solvable issue by the govt. I guess it's because people most people are clueless on how it is to be solved.

>We are a society of ladder-pullers.

It's by design, to serve the rulers. It's an assembly line of slaves who are given some freedoms and are put through various stages of school, university, work and retirement. When most people retire they are left with little to nothing.

Meh, academic degrees don't come for free, someone has to pay for universities, staff and other expenses. In the US it's everyone for themselves by student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcies, in Europe it's the tax payers.

The problem is, the ones profiting from the gatekeeping (aka employers) aren't the ones paying for it in either system. If employers had to pay, say, 10.000$ for each job listing that requires an academic degree without an actual valid reason, guess how fast that incentive would lead to employers not requiring academic degrees for paper-pusher bullshit jobs.

But how do you get all students to agree with this in principle when someone is in more rush to start earning an income than others?

However, employers would then look to only hire from universities that do good teaching, so maybe it's a win-win?

Ideally maybe employers ought to rely on more targeted selection mechanisms. But this would be extremely expensive (and potentially legally risky due to equal opportunity laws) so most don't bother.

As I said, the only country I know where it is like that is the US.

For a true solution, the entire taxation and monetary system will have to overhauled. It's of course not going to happen.

Transactions outside of the govt monetary system is effectively illegal or taxed so people are forced to participate by applying for jobs for their livelihood.

Broken? Saddling individuals with a quarter million in debt when they are just starting life is absolutely broken. That they must indenture to be a modern professional (and buy hope for at least a middle class landing) is broken.

The notion that everything must return a (generally, near-term) accounting profit is on its face stupid.

Even today, that university is considered expensive for the state at ~$8,200/semester.

I can’t imagine this in my own life. I use concrete things and ways of thinking and working I learned in my CS degree _all the time_.

Further, some high school graduates (like myself at the time) literally don’t know HOW to learn on their own. I thought I did but college humbled me, made me realize that suddenly i’m in the drivers seat and my teachers won’t be spoon feeding me knowledge step by step. it’s a really big shift.

If you were the perfect high school graduate, then congrats, you’re like the 0.01%! And you should be proud (no sarcasm). This doesn’t describe society at large though.

For the very few that are extremely motivated and know exactly what job they want, i do think we need something in between self guided and college? No BS - strictly focusing on job training. Like a boot camp, but one that’s not a scam haha.

The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce. It’s also one of the best times to date, but that’s another story.

Completely agree that the cost of college in the US is ridiculous though.

I don’t know how generalizable this is. I remember reading a few studies trying to assess if Ivy League education was really more valuable that a state school. The result (IIRC) was that it only matters for students who came from the lowest economic strata; the authors presumed it was due to the network effect. But that also means the network effect was negligible for the majority of students.

I think you underestimate how bad some high schools really are.

Citation needed. There's great books out there that provide a lot of guidance down a particular path. I'd say a lot of them do, and I can't imagine online learning sources would be worse. There's online communities for learners for specific subjects that are full of people offering good advice.

I’ll leave you with this thought though. Of all the professions, tech is probably the one where this is the easiest to do. There are many companies that don’t require a bachelors. For most of the last 15-20 years tech was in a “boom” cycle, and yet the vast majority of software engineers I met DID have a bachelors degree.

Why? If it’s as easy as “pick up a book”, then why didn’t more people take that path? I think very few people have the drive and discipline to accomplish a full career prep on their own.

If your hypothesis was true, wouldn’t tech be mostly filled with self-taught engineers?

1) The cultural zeitgeist around higher education (at least in the US) is and has been "you must go to college and get a degree". It's been over 20 years since I dropped out of my first university. I'm doing just fine, and yet to this day, I will be asked by older members of my extended family if or when I'm going back to "finish" my degree, or whether my company will offer tuition assistance to help me go back. If you graduate high school these days (and for at least the past few decades), the expectation is that you go to college and get a degree. And if you're going to have to do that anyway, you might as well get the degree in the field you want to go into.

2) As a corollary to that, while new / younger companies might have set aside the degree requirements, the big tech houses definitely still preferred them and having the paper was still a leg up in the hiring and recruitment process. And even in companies without an explicit preference for a degree, it's often listed as a requirement on the job posting. "BS or Equivalent Experience" is easier to match both as a candidate and as an employer if the candidate has the BS as that is an objectively verifiable fact.

Academia put itself as a gateway and barrier to the middle class. Why would we be surprised when people with no interest in anything but the goal are not enthralled by the process?

We could make it less meaningful if employers weren’t so keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.

You can start issuing your own credentials tomorrow.

Accreditation is regulated by NGOs who need government approval and without that you cant received financial aid (or participate in some programs) — but you can hand out pieces of paper for completing your program.

https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/higher-education-laws-and...

But it wasn't about credentials even. It was about inculcating a culture. You knew that someone had the knowledge and ability to reach university, and you knew that they had a shared common culture with you. Shared common culture and norms increases trust. Credentials mattered for doctors, but universities, in the end, were selling something far more intangible: culture.

How did academia do that? It doesn’t seem like universities would have the power to do that. More likely, either employers put academia as a gateway. Or even: the culture at large misunderstood what pathways existed to middle class life. Or even: pathways to middle class life became scarcer and more insecure, and the real gatekeepers (hiring managers) had no good ways to select which of the many people at the door to let through.

Why don't employers recognize the credentials of a MOOC to the same degree that they would a university degree?

We could similarly ask why employers value the degrees of some universities more than others.

I think it's important to realize that ultimately the decisions come from the employers, not the universities. No one is making the employers do anything. But at least the second question might have a clearer partial answer. In part, there is a selection of a tribe, an implicit "culture fit" that's happening. It isn't uncommon to see employer bias towards specific universities. This is especially true with prestigious universities.

But it's not the universities that are making anyone do anything and that's an important distinction.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890682

It is a confounding variable[0]. The problem with trying to go after the confounding variable is you 1) don't solve the problem after fixing it 2) let's the current negative feedback loop continue growing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding

  - ebiester claimed academia made itself the gatekeeper of credentials
  - alpinisme suggested that was silly. Employers have autonomy
  - you asked why MOOC classes don't get the same credentials
  - I said you missed alpinisme's point. The employer is the one that is deciding those credentials are not equal. I also pointed out how the same is true about different universities. Pointing out that you didn't need to say "MOOC" when "Stanford vs University of Wyoming" also leads to the same conclusion (which makes it weirder to point to academia as a whole instead of the prestigious unis)
  - you act like I was supposed to have read a reply to a different person while not addressing my point
  - I double down saying you're barking up the wrong tree. Take the finger and point it at employers
  - you say you never claimed employers aren't the problem and I'm creating a narrative

Regardless, it still doesn't change the fact that the employers have complete autonomy. They can make whatever rules they want. There's no use to pointing at academia because ultimately they have no say. Do they want to be the credential keepers, yeah! Which also means they'll be happy to be the ones being yelled at if the result is that employers keep using them as credential makers.

Ultimately academia is about prestige. Ultimately it's about far more than "the product" (the credential). But who decides what credential is best? The fucking employers. No one is holding a gun to their head. There's no front door or back door dealings.

You have concluded that since academia benefits from the employers selecting them as credential makers that they are the problem, or a meaningful part. The issue is, if you take away academia, the problem doesn't get resolved. Nor does it improve. Arguably, it becomes more noisy until employers converge onto some other arbitrary credential

There is certainly room for employers to stop over-credentialing jobs, but there’s also room for universities to improve their role in the process. Employers don’t have “complete autonomy”; we can’t just suddenly decide we’re going to create more nurses, doctors, engineers, and lawyers because we’ve found a loophole in the pipeline.

Depending on the type of nurse, you do not need a degree. Some will need to pass an exam though. You can become a lawyer without a degree, only needing to pass the BAR. An engineer doesn't need a license. You are thinking of a Professional Engineer, which is a specific job title that has legal ramifications. This requires a degree but it also requires you working under another PE for some time and then passing state competency exams.

The cases we're talking about here are jobs where if you do something wrong you can kill hundreds or thousands of people and destroy millions or billions of dollars worth of assets. *You've just completely moved the goalpost to try to make your point.*

Do you really honestly believe that these jobs shouldn't require a formal education?

I'm not going to take anyone seriously that is going to argue that medical doctors shouldn't receive formal educations. Come on, don't be dumb. Just have a normal fucking conversation. You don't have to double down and back yourself into a corner.

I know you're not that dumb, so stop bring disingenuous.

We agree on most, I just think you tend to think on absolutes and I do not. I don’t think most current degree progressions need degrees, but I’m willing to recognize there is a large subset what do. And colleges still hold a monopoly on those degree. But the fact you can’t follow HN guidelines because you’re proved to argue makes further discussion boring and fruitless.

It also recognized the GI Bill as an opportunity and also sent lobbyists for the HEA in 1965.

Maybe if and when you ever grow up you might understand just how misguided you are in your entire argument...

"certificate of employability" 8-/ maybe just skip it all and spend the rest of your life in assassin's creed... You have nothing to offer any thought work based employer.

  > I'm there for the degree

When you're in a position to hire or influence hiring, will you consider those without degrees?

I ask because I hear this sentiment a lot but we still have a system becoming more reliant on degrees. The universities may be the gatekeepers of those degrees but they're not the ones gatekeeping the jobs. They have no influence there. They were not the ones who decided degree = credentials. I ask because many people eventually grow in their jobs to a point where they have significant influence over hiring. So when that time comes will you perpetuate the system you criticize or push against it? Truthfully, this is a thing that can be done with little to no risk to your own employment.

I see your point, but the issue is that it's quite futile to shame students for playing the game that people in the industry has set up. It doesn't help that in the past, college degrees were in fact more relevant than today, especially before the era of the internet and wikipedia, so if older people who are currently in charge of hiring aren't aware of these changes, they might just apply their outdated personal experience and just assume college degrees hold the same weight as they did in the past.

I'm pretty certain when kids these days eventually become responsible for hiring decisions, they probably will handle things differently since their experiences are different.

But I think the second part is amiss. I do agree that educators (being one) need to recognize the reality of the environment. But I think you also can't ignore that the reason the degrees are used to signal qualification is because the degree is intended to signal that some knowledge is held by a specific person. Yes, things have changed. It did used to be that interviews were much shorter, with a degree being a strong signal (at minimum, it is a signal that someone can sufficiently follow directions and manage their time). Should that mean those tasked with ensuring a student gets their education does not get their education? I get your point, but I think it is barking up the wrong tree. Asking academia to change only furthers the problem as it lets employers shift blame. It is like getting upset at a minimum wage worker for increased prices due to tariffs.

The really weird thing is we're now in this bizarroland setting where employers will filter for degree and then spend months and a lot of time and money putting candidates through testing rounds. Making them do tons of leetcode and other things to evaluate their performance. Where the candidates spend months studying to pass the interviews. And the complaints here are probably more apt, about how the material they need to study is not significantly relevant to the skills needed for a job[0]. Worse, it doesn't seem to be achieving the results it is setting out to seek.

As they say about the stock market "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". My point is that some academics are making classes easier. Grade inflation is a measurable phenomena and it sure got worse with Covid. My point is that employers are acting irrationally.

[0] I'll give an example. I had an interview a few weeks ago and we had run a bit longer than expected prior to getting to the coding portion of the interview and where their coding software crashed a few times, giving us 10 minutes to do what was expected to be 30. Finally coding, the program crashed and I said "I don't use a lot of Juypter Notebooks, does the kernel crash when OOM?" I'm explaining my thought process aloud and frankly, I'd never hit this on the job. No answer. I quickly scroll through logs, say "I'm going to guess that's the issue, I'd normally guess and if wrong google it". Yes, it was the right answer. But there was no reason to do this, especially with me guessing right. This wasn't some dinky startup, it was a multi-trillion dollar company...

Yes.

A person is a idiot if he/she takes someone's competence at face value because of a degree. ( jobs aside - don't assume your doctor is competent because he has MD, it will cost you your life)

Not to burst yours or anyone else's bubble, but no, probably not.

The hard part of learning isn't access to content, it's discipline and dedication. School provides structure, goals, timelines, and deliverables. The value of this cannot be understated.

I've heard from many people how they're going to learn programming online and then get a job as a developer. Almost all of them fail.

I learned programming online and got jobs as a developer (I did later study CS at a university though). In my experience the best developers are those who taught themselves. Admittedly this may have been more the case for my older generation where formal education for programming wasn't that great nor widely available.

The simple question to ask is, when you go home, what do you do? If the answer is learn how to sew or work on your project car you've had for 10 months, you can probably learn on your own. If your answer is watch TV, play video games, go on a walk - then you can't, and you should go to university. Some people have told me this question is unfair. I mean, they're so tired from work, of course they want to relax. Well, guess what - your life doesn't stop if you're learning how to code on your own or whatever. If that's all it takes for you to not do it, then you don't have what it takes.

How often are people picking up new and complex skills that takes years to get the hang of? Almost never. So there you go, most people require a formal, structured education to pull that off.

Highly self-driven students are a minority, but not a rarity. People do things out of being interested and enjoying learning. It shouldn't be a surprise in a website called hacker news.

How do you know? It's easy enough to assert, but what kind of proof can there be for this assertion? Obviously the students are enrolled in university, and their accomplishments without it are only hypothetical.

I don't understand how you can make this claim based on observing students who are in an environment with discipline and structure.

I thoroughly believed this to be true when I was younger. I thought the explosion of the internet and availability of free course materials, videos, MOOCs, and any information you want was going to change the education game forever.

What finally changed my mind was when I became a hiring manager. I decided I'd give an interview to almost every self-taught developer who applied. If someone didn't have a college degree listed on their resume, I'd schedule a call to hear their story. I thought I was going to be uncovering diamonds in the rough that other companies overlooked.

With a few notable exceptions, it did not work out that way. Don't get me wrong: A couple of the self-taught developers were absolutely brilliant. However, I found that most were, to be blunt, not even progressing their intra-career knowledge as fast as peers with traditional backgrounds. We hired a few, but a common theme was that they needed more guidance for dealing with the structure and expectations of an office job.

I also had a few very above-average friends in high school who went the self-education route. "College is a waste of money" mindset. Voracious readers in their youth. Last I checked, both of them were bouncing from entry-level job to job.

Of course, there are students who go to paper-mill colleges who also learn very little.

I think the value of a demanding, structured college education is partially the education, but largely about learning how to learn. Learning how to deliver, learning how to operate on a schedule, and having some structure to check your understanding relative to peers. Almost everyone I know (including me!) who does self-studying reading thinks their understanding is better than it is right up until they have to apply it, at which point they realize they didn't understand it as deeply as they thought. It's easy to read course materials and think "That makes sense" because it's logically consistent, but integrating the knowledge in a way that you can apply it and reason about it is harder. Structured learning forces people to do the latter, whereas self-guided learning leaves it as an exercise for the reader. An exercise that many don't follow up on.

Universities have all sorts of pathologies, from academic fraud to parasitic admins, but they also have people with deep knowledge of their field and who occasionally are even good teachers, and undergrad courses at least leave you enough time to explore and direct your own learning.

They also put you in an environment where you can measure yourself against others, which you sure don't get sitting in your bedroom hacking your games. As a consequence, your head doesn't get inflated so much (unless you're top of the class, which kind of naturally resolves itself when you get your first job where everyone thinks you're a useless moron with no life experience).

Also: university libraries.

Edit: oh shit. I just realised. I did learn to code on my own O.o

That _may_ be true for the vast majority, but it's criminal to waste the time of bright young people by putting them though hoops. I would even speculate that that they phoney goals, timelines, and deliverables in school actually damage kids.

Also, do I really need to remind people here of the "resources" used when you struggle and need help while self-guided?

- I probably don't need to rant about StackOverflow. Discord can be incredibly hit or miss, many forum pleas goes uncalled. It can be really hard to get unsuck compared to asking a teacher about their own assignment

- worse than asking quesions, forget getting high quality feedback on your project: getting people to do more than a quick skim takes effort in and of itself. You'd truly find an angelic soul if anyone decided to disect and correc your source code.

- there's also so, so, so many domains to explore. How will you specialize without knowing they exist? And if you've dug deep into any domain, you know that this is where the publicly free knowledge truly dries up. You won't find a nifty course on low level optimization hacks, nor network architecture (beej gets close, but only touches the surface), nor modern rendering techniques. You'll find some 300 level material, but 400 level stuff will likely require a mix of cobbling project ideas together that's within your reach but also pushing you. Scoping is always hard to do, and nearly impossible while still a student.

And Software is one of the easier domains to self learn. Good luck with the lab based STEM, getting proper feedback in art while learning theory, taste testing as a cook, using power tools in any given blue collar work, etc.

If I wanted to learn JavaScript or .NET or CSS or whatever I could easily do so online. But that's different from becoming a software developer. The important thing is that university doesn't focus on one topic, it teaches a variety of topics that they think will be useful for your career. You can do this without uni, but you need to be good at figuring out what to learn, not just how. And of course the discipline to complete your goals by yourself, like you mention.

Although maybe something you could do would be to look at a university's course structure and copy it.

When I was a kid and got an assignement for writing an essey about "why good forces prevailed in Lords of the Rings" as a gate check to see if I actually read the novel I had three choices: (a) read the novel and write the essey myself (b) find an already written essey - not an easy task in pre-internet era but we had books with esseys on most common topics you could "copy-paste" - and risk that the professor is familiar with the source or someone else used the same source (c) ask class mate to give me their essey as a template and rephrase it as my own

A and C would let me learn about the novel and let me polish my writing skills.

Today I can ask ChatGPT to write me a 4 pages essay about a novel I've never heard of and call it a day. There's no value gained in the process.

That's a simple example. The problem is that the same applies to programming. Novice programmer will claim that LLM give them power to take on hard tasks and programm in languages they were not familiar before. But they are not gaining any skill nor knowledege from that experience.

If I ask google maps to plot me a directions from Prague to Brussels it will yield a list of turns that will guide me to my destinations, but by any means I can't claim I've learned topography of Germany in the process.

(I don't usually do that, but it appears so many times in the first few sentences that I had to do it here)

I agree with your points, though, but I think that they are in agreement with the comment you are answering to...

And yeah, and revisiting the OP we're on the same track.

It sounds like you agree with GP.

Not true.

Using LLM to learn quickly a new programming language + being productive is best method ever. If you pay attention, you acquire rapidly new skill and knowledge, and those that are relevant to your job.

Using LLM is MUCH more efficient than reading a book going through all the minute details of the language prior telling how to use it. It's the same as learning a language from your parents compared to learning a language from a class. You might not know all the grammar rules, but you'll be way more proficient. And nothing prevents you from learning the grammar later on.

I tend to disgree. maybe for you, but my mind does not work that way.

As a teacher at a university I come to see that students "learn" by asking an LLM, but they forget to understand the content the LLM produces because the LLM actually solves the assignment (mostly) for them. One may say that's the teachers task to produce better questions, but the thing I most "struggle" with that getting educated as a student seems to just be a play of "gaming the system". Yes, it was similar during my time (learning how to reach your goal with as less effort as possible is a good part of the "education" at a university IMHO), but we actually had to think and understand while today just seems like prompt-and-copy.

There are multiple ways you can use such technology, too. If you use Google Maps with its out-of-the-box configuration for turn-by-turn directions, with it oriented in the direction of travel, you won’t learn so much; but if you change it to always display the map north-up, and look at the map it shows you—inferior though it be to good paper maps, in most cases—it’s easier to develop a feel for layouts and geography.

If we take the original article at face value, no you can't do that. ChatGPT will apparently produce something that is obviously ChatGPT produced and fail to fool even the most absent minded of instructors that you have read the material. So even with a ChatGPT LLM to help you out, you're largely going to have to do a modified version of C, replacing your class mate with the LLM and adding in the need to do your own reading and validation to ensure that the text matches the actual book contents.

> If I ask google maps to plot me a directions from Prague to Brussels it will yield a list of turns that will guide me to my destinations, but by any means I can't claim I've learned topography of Germany in the process.

I would argue that even if you plotted a route by hand reading maps, you can't claim to have learned the topography of Germany either. "The map isn't the territory" after all.

So, you can usually get away with it if there is not some way the professor/TA can prove it.

As things change, this will change, but that's the situation the author of the original article finds themself in, because it's the current situation.

Only if you don't have any custom instructions about style and don't proofread it afterwards. All the usual "tells" of ChatGPT are very obvious to scrub out, and you don't have to use OpenAI's chat wrapper to begin with.

I figured this out in high school. It can’t be all that uncommon of a thought that if you are already in school and paying and given time to learn, you might as well do so?

Young kids don't get it, they just do what they're asked. That's okay. University students graduating without having figured it out is a problem. And somewhere in the middle is when the average student gets there, hopefully?

Even if one won’t need that specific know how after exams - just realization how much one can memorize and trying out some approaches to optimize it is where people grow/learn.

I believe that the same holds true for other facts one might memorize. Yes, the fact may seem like meaningless trivia (and might even be so at times), but in the right situation knowing that fact can help with understanding. You can certainly spend too much time on memorization of facts, but that doesn't mean it has no place either.

Facts and knowledge acts as a scaffolding, making it easier to absorb more information and knowledge the more you have.

You might have attended a good degree, where the learned information was actually beneficial. But I'd bet for most degrees out there, rote memorization is the consequence of professors wanting easily gradable exams, existing for their benefit, not the students.

Which means the actual problem is low quality education and degrees and we might find common ground here.

But a huge amount of "ugh I'm too smart for this assignment" complaining that students do is just kids being immature rather than an honest attempt at learning through other means.

It means that you are losing your time. If you are a university student and use LLMs for your classes while "challenging your mind" for stuff outside of class, maybe you should just not be studying there in the first place.

If you want to make your own certificates, good luck getting them on the trusted list.

Companies need to bring folks in on a probation period and actually test the skills are there.

While we're talking about things we're grateful for, I am so glad that we've structured the education and employment systems such that not having a degree puts you at significant risk of unemployment, prevents you from ever immigrating anywhere for the first decade of your working life, and generally marks you as a failure.

I thought I was pretty clear when I told you I got marked down for taking the stance that one should not commit crimes when asked to by one's boss.

The problem isn't that I was asked to produce an essay as part of the process of teaching me about ethics. The problem is that the entire class was pointless busywork taught by lecturers who weren't particularly ethical and who failed to teach any of us about ethics. ChatGPT could have done the entire thing and the class would still have failed to leave me with anything other than lingering resentment.

It's not like this in every country, though.

Writing is hard. Sometimes it means sitting with yourself, for hours, without any progress. Leaning on an LLM to ease through those tough moments is 100% short circuiting the learning process.

To your point, maybe you're learning something else instead, like when/how to prompt an LLM or something. But you're definitely not learning how to write. Whether that's relevant is a separate discussion.

Sounds like "back in my days" type of complaining. Do you have any evidence of this "100% reduction" or is it just "AI bad" bandwagoning?

> But you're definitely not learning how to write.

How would you know? You've never tested him. You're making a far-reaching assumption about someone's learning based on using an aid. It's the equivalent of saying "you're definitely not learning how to ride a bicycle if you use training wheels".

Its basically adults producing texts of slop messages to each other. It is actually atrophying.

You might be in a circle of people that wants to know "why" things work. For example, when there's a bug, we go through several processes of:

There's a bug...why does it happen? What were they thinking when they wrote this? How to prevent this from happening?

This is true even for simple bugs, but nowadays you just vibe code your away into the solution, asking the AI to fix it over and over without ever understanding how it works.

Perhaps its just the way things are. I mean who uses their head to do calculations nowadays? Who knows how to create a blurring effect in physical drawing?

Regardless of the existence of other ways to exercise your legs which you also will not do, because you're a person with working legs who chooses to use a wheelchair.

Employees are increasingly expected to use personal devices in work settings.

The vast majority of companies still issue laptops and other hardware

Source: I used it to write this post.

> how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this

Mastery of a discipline does not imply any pedagogical knowledge, despite anything one of my childhood heroes, Richard Feynman, might have claimed.

Despite frequent claims otherwise, in my experience and sampling of PhDs and Masters of different sorts and grad students working toward those degrees, an advanced degree does not teach anyone how to lead or teach. This is true of even some of the folks I knew studying Education itself who were a little too focused on their own research to understand anything "so simple."

> cheat themselves out of an education

What's "an education," though? For some people, education is focused on how to learn. For others, it's focused on some kind of certification to get a job. Some of us see value in both. And I'm sure there are other minority opinions as well. We, as a society, can't agree. The only thing we can seem to agree on in the US is that college should be expensive and saddle students with ridiculous debt.

Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym.

If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you. The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.

Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), because I actually want to learn.

There are many college students for whom none of these tests would pass. They would not attend if there was no diploma, they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class.

What made us think these students were ever interested in learning in the first place? Instead, it seems more likely that they just want a degree because they believe that a degree will give them an advantage in the job market. Many people will never use the information that they supposedly learn in college, and they're aware of this when they enroll.

Personally, the fact that they can now get a degree with even less wasted effort than before doesn't bother me one bit. People who want to learn still have every opportunity to.

Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.

I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.

The course I'm interested in gets kinda hard, and my "just pull up an LLM" muscle is very, very strong, (and besides, I'm not used to struggling! and why should I get used to it in the classes i like?! I can't afford a C in my major!) so ... I use LLMs on my "I'm interested in it" class too and... we're back to the original argument.

If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.

If employers no longer look for the diploma-signal in an employee, what will be the reason an employer will hire an employee?

I think this story will become true, and society will radically shift into one where critical thinking skills will actually be the only skills employers look for in employees, since the grunt work can be automated.

What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?

In the computer engineering industry, you increasingly have to demonstrate the same: either as a part of your prior work for hire, or a side project, or a contribution to something open-source.

A diploma is still a useful signal, but not sufficient, except maybe for very junior positions straight from college. These are exactly the positions most under pressure by the automation.

IMO one of the big problems is that we’ve gone too far with the assumption that learners can’t be valuable until after they’re done learning. Partly a cultural shift around the role of children and partly the reality that knowledge work doesn’t require much unskilled labor compared to physical industries.

So degrees have been a weak signal for a long time. Several of the best developers I've worked with had no CS degree at all. As a result we have interview processes that are baffling to people from other industries. Imagine a surgeon having to do interview surgery, or an accountant having to solve accounting puzzles. AFAIK we are very unusual in this regard and I think it's because degrees are such a weak indicator and the same is true for certificates in our industry.

I strongly disagree, that’s the intent not a side effect.

It’s IMO a common misconception that early algorithm classes are just designed around learning algorithms. Instead basic algorithms are the simplest thing to turn abstract requirements into complex code. The overwhelming majority of what students learn are the actual tools of programming, debugging, etc while using the training wheels of a problem already broken up into bite sized steps.

Ramping up the complexity is then more about learning tradeoffs and refining those skills than writing an ever more efficient sorting algorithm or whatnot.

My experience is graduates of schools focused on the more practical aspects tend to make better Jr developers on day one but then stagnate. Meanwhile graduates of the more theoretical programs people pick up those same practical skills on the job leaving them better prepared for more demanding assignments.

This then feeds into the common preference for CS degrees even if they may not actually be the best fit for the specific role.

But I wasn’t aware about the master peace. Thank you for sharing that!

We simply stopped doing that. A decade of apprenticeship reduced down to 3 months of shadowing during summer.

Compare that with today, by early 20s one is only getting out of college undergrad. About to start the real world job training.

So much of wasted time.

More reason to vye for labor protections. If they realize they can't just rotate out people every 6-20 months they may actually go back to fostering talent instead of treating acedemia like a cattle farm.

LLM cheaters might incidentally be doing society a service.

Annyway, any advantage is entirely offset by having to live in a world with LLMs. I'd prefer the tradition of having to educate retarded college graduates. At least they grow into retarded adults. What are we gonna do about chatbots? You can't even educate them, let alone pinocchio them.

I graduated university around the turn of the century, long before the current AI boom started, and the majority of my classmates were like that. Learning the bare minimum to escape a class isn't new especially if you're only taking that class because you have to because every adult in your life drilled into you that you'll be a homeless failure if you don't go to college and get a degree. The LLMs make that easier, but the university, if the goal wasn't just to take your tuition dollars to enrich a vast administrator class instead of cover the costs of employing the professors teaching you, could offset that with more rigorous testing or oral exams at the end of the class.

The real lesson I learned during my time in university is that the two real edges that elite universities give you (as a student) are 1) social connections to the children of the rich and leaders in the field that you can mine for recommendations and 2) a "wow" factor on your resume. You can't really get the first at a state school or community college, and you definitely can't get the second at a state school or community college, despite learning similar if not the same material in a given field of study.

It hasn't been about (just) the learning for a long time.

It's not so much what you learn, but that you train it hard.

Now if students can shortcut the education process, they can spend less time in it and this may force colleges to reinvent themselves and actually rethink what education looks like in the new era.

This is already true to some extend. Not apprenticeship taking place of college, but the last couple of places I worked hiring generally happened based on: I already know this person from open source projects/working with them in a company/etc.

In certain companies, degrees were already unimportant even before LLMs because they generally do not provide a very good signal.

The Harvards will be fine, though. But I guess that will raise the standards naturally.

Four year degree is a very expensive investment in the current environment. We should push younger people to face the real world as soon as possible. Apprenticeship is indeed a great way to achieve that IMO. As a great side effect the young people won’t have to start out their careers saddled with huge debt.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43768903

Amen.

I look forward to the era where we train professionals the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.

They can't have it both ways

In many countries, regardless of how learning it was achieved, you still need a paper to prove that you actually did it.

And in countries like Germany, better keep all those job evaluations close at heart because they get asked for as part of many job interview processes, additionally have them reviewed by lawyers, as they legally can't say anything negative, there is an hidden language on how to express negativity which to the reader sound positive on first read.

The employers that do use those hidden phrases just hope they arent challenged/the employee doesnt notice.

Thats also why most evaluations are entirely written in the superlative.

Many employeers profit from foreigners that aren't well versed in these nuances, and have to be educated this is a thing.

An example for others not used to German work market,

https://www.karriereakademie.de/arbeitszeugnis-formulierunge...

Just go through the site with your favourite translation tool.

When one gets to have a good works council, there are plenty of stories that go around.

That's not a standard at all. You usually can't graduate without at least one peer-reviewed publication, but beyond that, as far as number of publications goes, it varies a lot from institution to institution. The biggest standard is that you complete a dissertation and defend it.

That's why the universities of Oxford and Cambridge give Master's degree to everyone that gets a Bachelor's degree after five years, without further examination or coursework (note that these are MAs only, not MRes, MPhil or MBA degrees, which typically require 1-2 years of studies, exams and theses).

Historically, the academic Master was seen as equivalent to a Master in a craft (e.g. philosophy <=> carpentry).

I hire people now and where they went to school means little to me. The first priority is “can they do the work?” which is a niche programming. After that is established, I barely take note of school.

I don’t personally count a CS degree as an indication the person is a good programmer, or thinks logically, or has good work ethic.

For company I work for we hire 1 dev per year and I believe last year we did not even hire a single person.

So I do have time to check up the candidate do 3 rounds each 1 hr so that candidates can see what company are we and what person is the candidate. We also are small company so we don’t get that many applicants anyway.

I cannot imagine how it goes when someone needs to hire 20 devs in one quarter. Especially for a company that is any way known and they can get 1000CVs for a single position. They need to filter somehow.

In my experience, only very large and bureaucratic institutions (governments, schools) really demand degrees and certifications.

One could in theory establish the value of a thing or person by comparing it with similar things but if everyone does that the process becomes senseless.

If a working car is worth 5000, the same car from the same year with a defect that costs 1000 to fix should be worth 4000. If the repair costs 6000 there is no car.

No. It has value, because companies value it. It sets the starting point for your first salary and then for every salary negotiation moving forward.

As someone who did not go to university, but has the same knowledge self-taught I can tell you that this piece of paper would have opened so many doors and made life so much easier. It took me 15 years to get a salary, that people get with the piece of paper after graduating. And not because it took me 15 years to reach that level of knowledge. I had that by the time the other graduated.

I had a friend who always cheated in school, and now he works for a big car company and earned a fuck ton of money.

Life is unfair and companies only care about the paper your diploma is printed on. If students would ask me for advice, I would tell them to cheat whenever possible.

This isn't exactly news, or even a recent phenomenon. My peers who finished their CS degree circa 2004 ish were a broad mix of utter idiots who shouldn't get a job in that field, or damn sharp (if green) technically-minded people, or somewhere in between.

The industry will sort them out; the ones that can, do, the ones that can't, will do something else of use, or find another job.

I am not arguing on the merit of having a diploma is a bad thing - the colleges these days have turned their backs on the people as well.

Average $100k to get a piece of paper (LLMs are not the issue here the useless degrees that the colleges offer). Invest that $100k at an average 15% return - it becomes a lot of money 25 years from now.

Or get a piece of paper (if your major is useless) and pay the banks 100k + interest.

And even if you ramped up a 50k debt, it’s a government loan where the interest rates are low, your monthly pay off is based on your salary, and if you are not able to pay the debt within a certain period, it’s wiped away.

I think this is already the case.

No. That's how it should be, but the reality looks different: it has value because it shows that someone spent 3+ years doing what they were told to do, enduring all the absurdities they were subjected to in the meantime. Whatever means they used to cheat don't matter, since they still worked on what someone told them to and produced results satisfying the expectations.

There are, perhaps, institutions where learning and problem-solving are seen as the most important while "following orders" and "staying in line" are deemphasized. For the students of all the others, putting up with an utterly absurd environment is often one of the biggest barriers to learning. Yet, it's a requirement without fulfilling which you can forget about graduating. Hence my conclusion: the diploma from most learning institutions certifies you as a good corporate drone - and that's enough of a signal in many situations, so why bother trying to fix it?

From what I remember it was 4 years of learning stuff I signed up to learn, occasionally being quizzed on said stuff, and then they gave me a paper that claims I know the stuff.

No, it has value because it gatekeeps class mobility. Degrees haven't signified learning or problem solving longer than I've been alive. The attitude is that if you pay for an education, you're entitled to a degree. The education aspect is optional.

I find a lot of these comments more disturbing than the concerns about AI.

But she is a good example of degrees not equaling skill

The music industry is built on the back of people with music degrees. They don't get the name recognition of headliners. But song writers, arrangers, and session musicians are all very likely to have formal training in theory and maybe performance.

Producers and engineers less so. Those are more of a track record who-you've-worked-with occupation.

Music is no different from software in thst regard.

They are in some countries, you get at the vocational programs or apprenticeships alongside the highschool, and in the end you might get the opportunity to apply to the university or just carry on with your job.

That is how I did mine in the 1990's Portuguese education system, and how I was already coding and understanding the big boys computer world at 16y.

Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.

  > then she could issue a degree in piano.

Being able to play moderately hard pieces from dots and sight-reading are the entry level requirement. It's taken for granted you can already do that.

The degree part means learning music history, theory, and performance styles, working on performance projects, solo and with other musicians.

The analogy with ChatGPT is that it's taking over the entry-level part of the process. You can't expect to get onto a music degree if you only know how to prompt ChatGPT to produce a MIDI file for your entrance exam.

And in CS, you can't produce good code if you barely know what a server is.

It's all very Dunning Kruger. If you use an LLM to produce course work to get your piece of paper at the end, you don't even know what prompts you should use to do an unfamiliar job, never mind having the skills to do it yourself.

For the exact reasons you state, pre-AI homework was often copied and then individuals just crammed for the tests.

AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many students are only in it for the diploma.

If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment from a classmate or previous grad.

And I imagine the students who really want to learn are still learning because they didn't cheat then, and they aren't letting AI do the thinking for them now.

You have this option with things like mits open courseware. Some colleges are OK with you just wanting to learn

1. Students given bad incentives to be thrown into a system with a completely different purpose than their main goal. Then those jobs turning face to suddenly say "schools teach you nothing" and even refuse to hire the newest generation.

2. Students in general not being stimulated by primary school and given direction and vision on what to do in life. Simply being pushed by parents to "be successful".

3. The crippling reality as of late that a job doesn't even guarantee keeling a roof over your head anymore. Leading to discouragement to even bother trying.

4. Connected to #2, the decline of various apprenticeships, internships (which are now a college recruiting pipeline), and other ways to invest in employees. Even if they complain about new grad output, they are still content outsourcing such training instead of investing in their employees for a career.

There's a lot of systems failing which can arguably cause an entire collapse in the country. Then no one will get an opportunity to properly learn.

In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.

This is much larger than a cultural problem with the students of today. They believe, rightfully and accurately, that the university degree is yet another part of the machine that they will become a cog in.

What should be alarming to everyone is that these students will graduate without having learned anything and then go into the workplace where they will continue to not use their atrophied critical thinking skills, to simply do yet more, as a cog in the machine.

* according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey

For example, the "a university education is not job vocation training" crowd never seem to take issue with the "I'm hiring for a software engineer and I'm only looking for CS grads or equivalent" people.

I found this quite striking, since something like 10% of undergrads go into research. Most people really are there to help them get a job.

So the program is designed not to meet the needs of 90% of its "customers".

I wanted to learn a new language and I wanted to take some history courses that covered regions and eras not well covered in my high school courses. But despite my university having a significant "elective" component to my degree path, none of those courses were on the list of allowed electives for my degree. So in this case, the university was failing at a focus on education by hindering my ability to branch out away from my core studies and requiring that I take "electives" that were more closely associated with the imagined career path my degree would provide.

On the flip side, the "core" courses for my degree were bogged down in academic minutia and exercises that bore only the most surface level resemblance to the things I've done in my actual career. Often the taught material was out of date relative to the state of the industry. Other times the material was presented with philosophical reasons for learning the material, but with no practical application backing it to help make that philosophy complete. And very little material (if any) covered the usage of tools of the industry. In this case, we're failing the goal of setting people up for their careers by not teaching the practical applications of the knowledge. And to be clear this isn't just a "learning examples are by necessity simplified examples" problem. I later went back to school at a local community college for different material and from day one those courses were more relevant and more up to date. They provided material that was immediately useful in real world applications of the underlying knowledge. And I think some of that was because many of the courses for that community college were taught by industry veterans, either part time or as a "retirement" gig.

In short, my experience at a large university was indeed a series of boxes that were to be checked, ostensively to provide me a "well rounded" education, but practically all narrowly focused on getting me a job in the field. Yet the boxes also failed at being relevant enough to the state of the industry to actually give me a foundation to work from when starting my career.

Always follow the money

Yeah, that's when the great "push for education" came, as well as neoliberalism which preached continuous hustling and individuality. And in the 90s, the ADA and other anti discrimination laws hit, and requiring a college degree was and still is a very useful pre-screening filter for HR to continue discrimination.

For me the impact of the university administrators as they chased higher endowments for more buildings with naming rights and expanded their own bureaucracies with direct hires that did not directly contribute to the faculty mission did more to alter the university experience than anything else.

[0]: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

When we're talking about college costs, public schools are really the only institutions that matter. The Ivies (or even Ivy+) are a rounding error compared to the big midwestern land-grant universities and the UC and Cal State systems.

States have substantially reduced their per-student support for universities: https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in...

This coincides with federal funding programs, but student loans are famously not dischargeable, which makes them more instruments of social control than conventional financial vehicles.

The stated rationale at the time was that degree holders earn more, so if everyone gets a degree, everyone will earn more. I am doubtful that was the true rationale but it's how the policy was sold to people.

These days you need a college degree just to afford a 1 bedroom apartment by the time you are 40.

Me and most of my peers in college had the choice between two courses. Course A was interesting, yet vastly more challenging and therefore time consuming, with the additional downside of lower grade expectation. Course B was boring, a gentle breeze in comparison, yet with an almost guaranteed perfect grade.

Imagine which course most students choose?

Even if a student wants to take on the more interesting course, incentives matter, and the incentive is: better grades qualify for better compensated positions and prestigious degrees. Only students who didn't care about this or were confident enough in their ability did choose Course A. In the end, barely a handful of students out of hundreds went with A.

Does the use of a quantifiable metric like a GPA not exacerbate this? In a world where people take a GPA seriously, you'd have to be irrational to not consider cheating a viable option.

You could say the same about credit score and dating apps. These institutions assist the most predatory and harm the most vulnerable.

The current and old school way is a proctored exam.

Also, always keep in mind the most underrated kind of cheater: the clearly smart kid who cheats to go from an A- to an A. That level of student can't be "caught" with tests because by all accounts they already know and have even mastered the material. The pressure at that level of competitiveness simply requires zero room for doubt. Not really what the article is about, but some food for thought.

A decent amount of my professors don't know the answers because they bought the course, test questions, and lectures from Cengage. During exam review, they just regurgitate the answer justification that Cengage provided. During the lectures, they struggle to explain certain concepts since they didn't make the slides.

Professors automate themselves out of the teaching process and are upset when students automate themselves out of the learning process.

I can tell when the faculty views teaching as a checkbox that they officially have to devote 40% of their time to. I can tell when we are given busywork to waste our time instead of something challenging.

To use your analogy, I'm being told to move 1000 plush reproductions of barbells from Point A to B by hand because accreditation wants to see students "working out" and the school doesn't want high failure rates.

We are all pulling out the forklift. Some of us are happy because we don't have to work as hard. Others are using the forklift so we can get in a real workout at home, as school is not a good use of our time. Either way, none of us see value moving paperweights all day.

edit:

My favourite course during my Computer Engineering degree was Science Fiction because that professor graded us on substance instead of form. It was considered a hard class because one would get good marks on the essays by focusing on building substantive points instead of strict adherence to the form of a five-paragraph hamburger essay.

The call to action is to make courses harder and stop giving students plush barbells.

For example, University of Toronto Engineering Science (hardest program in Canada) gives first-year students a "vibe coding" lab in which students learn how to solve a problem that AI cannot.

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~guerzhoy/vibecoding/vibecoding.h...

But sure, you're always going to find a few meh or bad professors. And they will stick out as much ad thr great professors

It is also hard to evaluate university teaching because there are no benchmarks for that (compared with high school, for example), and it is hard to judge if teaching is good from student feedback. You can only know if someone fucked up or did really well, which are outliers.

There are other issues as well. Professor IMO is a ridiculous job, you are supposed to be an expert in the field, be a researcher, be a manager, be a teacher, be a salesman, all at the same time. There are people who can excel in all these, but these are probably just outliers. It doesn't help when PhD training doesn't train you to be a proper manager and teacher. While there are some teaching training, I think we are not really held to a high enough standard. E.g. One can pass the teaching course if they just show up and spend some time, even though their teaching is horrible.

I remember illustrating a point to a class by posing a question and then calling on a student I figured wasn't smart enough to answer correctly so that everyone could see her make the mistake.

The ethics of that still bother me.

Essentially, since they are a summary of "the" state of knowledge, the teacher should be able to ask them to put a number on how novel a piece of text is.

Once LLMs are able to evaluate, independently, the soundness of an argument... (Hopefully, this will be achieved AFTER $5 H100s reach the average consumer)

They are the wrong tool for pedagogy.

I related with that analogy too, infact that whole piece is worth reading. I can't seem to find it's link though!

[1] https://archive.is/kS8NY

Look, we have no idea what the feedback is like that this grad student gives, what the class sizes are like, what the cadence is, what the grade percentages are, etc. All we know is that Clayton Ramsey is a grad student at Rice in the robotics department and that he wrote a hot take here.

For me, the most important thing is if this grader is bothering to really grade at all. I think we've all had a harried grad student just dash off a few red lines on the week one HW about a week before the final exam. That's not a 2 way street, and if the feedback isn't as in-depth as he wants the work to be, well, he shouldn't be surprised. He can't be expecting students to put in the time unilaterally. But, we don't know any of that really.

Personally, I think that before the decade is out, we're not going to be talking about this at all. Because the students will be adept enough at using the LLMs to make it look like their own writing anyways. This is a problem that experience will solve for them.

And also, I think that the days of the massive lectures and essays are pretty much cooked. That 'cheap' model of education can't survive this LLM revolution. We obviously have to change what the heck higher education is trying to do.

My take is that we're going to go to smaller class sizes like those at St. John's or Oxbridge. Under 10 people, you have to have done the reading or look like a fool, all with a PhD in the subject as a guide/teacher. Large classes weren't cutting it for decades (ask any Frat about their test banks), and now the veil is just ripped off.

Sure, you should lift them yourself too. But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. It's a very different but powerful educational experience.

If you never learn to research, sure. Otherwise, you should be worried about accuracy, up to date information, opinionated takes, and outright lies/misinformation. The tool you use doesn't change these factors.

Besides, those are incredibly short-term concerns. Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.

Firstly, these prompts tend to be shockingly close in behavior. Secondly, Google tends to rank reputable or self curated sites which have some accountability. It can be wrong but you know thr big news sites tend to at least defer to interviews to back up facts. Wikipedia has an overly strict process to prevent blatant, source less information.

There's room for error, but there's at least more accountability compared to what an LLM is going through.

> Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.

Lastly, prompts are still treated as black boxes, which is a whole other issue. For the above reasons I still would simply defer to human curated resources. That's what LLMs are doing anyway without transparency.

People want to give up transparency for speed? It seems completely counter to hacker culture.

This has a negative feedback loop where universities have to lower standards to bring dumber and lazier students to compete with other diploma mills.

I'm sure the time has come for college students to master using LLMs. It's just as important as grammar or basic math now. The software I build (and the entire tech industry) automates huge swaths of business processes with AI. Students need to be able to understand, work with, and manage swarms of AI agents doing work.

To stick to the analogy:

I need skilled forklift drivers, not big buff workers like I used to.

Someone with years of coding experience is going to be able to laser guide an AI agent to the answer/result than someone who has muddled their way through comp sci 101 using an AI chatbot.

This isn't even an opinion on LLMs, it's recruiting 101. You're free to convince the gym to train forklift drivers, but don't be surprised when you're laughed out the room.

  > like taking a forklift to the gym.

Second, girls dig forklift operators or so I was told.

One analogy I use a lot: if I have a professor sitting next to me, what is the best way to learn a topic?

Struggle through it on my own and I won't be leveraging the professors knowledge.

Ask the professor to do everything for me and I won't be learning anything at all.

Now if the professor is an AI, the same trade-offs hold.

For example, I will back and forth conversations with AI to explain subjects to me. I ask questions, push back, ask for examples, and so on.

If I do ask the AI to answer something for me, I then ask it to break down the answer for me so I can make sure I understand it deeply.

And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :)

>And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :)

Society makes people do a lot of things they don't want. I wonder if we're going to hit a breaking point this generation.

But the gym isn't the best place to engage in forklift training. And you engage in forklift training at the gym, expect to learn how to use a forklift to lift gym weights. Don't expect to also get the benefits that the gym is designed to impart.

My students however don't understand that the importance is on the process, not the result. My colleagues do.

But don't worry, worst case scenario, all of the kids growing up in this environment that are actually learning will build structures to exploit the prompters, I suspect the present situation where prompters can accidentally find themselves in real jobs is transient and building better filters will become survival imperative for businesses and institutions.

I myself went to college to get the meal ticket, not to learn. But since the system was entirely exam based, I was forced to learn.

The current situation is that people need to pass exams, get certain GPA's, etc. to have opportunities unlocked to them. Education today is largely about collecting these "stamps" that open doors and not about actual learning.

those who use the tools to accelerate their learning will do so and others who use it just to get by will see their skills atrophy and become irrelevant.

1. Students are a captive audience. They don't want to be there. It's the law that makes them be there. Even once you're beyond mandatory education this holds true: they were just carried into further education by momentum. They didn't realize they had a real choice or what alternatives were available.

2. A lot of the skills you build in classes aren't useful to you. I spent a lot of time in my English (second) language classes, but it was my use of the internet that really taught me the language. The later years of English classes was just busywork.

In my native language classes I had to write a fair number of essays. The only time this was useful was the final exam of that class. I haven't written a "real" essay since. Even if I did, it would probably be in English and use a different style - something taught to me by forum posts.

During the final exam, a national exam (all the students did it at the same time in the country) you were given blank pieces of paper, a pen, 10 different topics to choose from, and 6 hours.

You pick a topic, write a draft, then write the essay. ~700 words.

Bonus points if you use relevant literature or science quotes in it. Quotes you had to memorize, without knowing the topics.

None of the topics resonated with you? Tough luck, buddy.

Don't have any 'novel' ideas? Figure something out!

Cited something the reader didn't know about? Should've known better!

Quoted someone the person grading doesn't know? Better hope they're in a good mood!

There's a reason they got rid of this style of exam a few years later. Doesn't change that this one thing dominated my native language and literature classes.

My biggest takeaway from it is how much I hate my native language class and literature class, but that might've happened even without the essay.

Looking forward towards is, but I fear that might be wishful thinking in part.

Also pre LLMs I have seen too many deep thinkers fail and pretenders succed. I don't see how LLMs can change that. Unless we all collectivly grow tired if pretenders and fakers amd value deep understanding. I just see not many indication of that.

There should be zero tolerance for these types of behaviors in my opinion. I see zero evidence of these behavior even being identified by most, let alone any thought on calling them out or stopping them.

You've helped me realize that folks using llms in replace of learning to write themselves are almost certainly giving up all thought of nuance on a topic and are, without realizing it, letting the llm either ignore or add nuance based on its training data and random chance.

Hopefully the pendulum will swing the other way and there's a public epiphany but given the loss of nuance over the decades I'm not betting on it

My high-school age daughter told me how her small private school solved this problem:

They brought back oral exams.

There aren't a lot of other good options. Written take-home work and online tests have always been fertile ground for cheating. Another benefit of oral exams: you learn to communicate under stress.

So, unfortunately the student's behavior is somewhat rational given the incentive structure they operate in.

this isn't the root of the problem

the root of the problem is that higher education has become, for the most part, an exercise in getting a piece of paper, so that you can check a box on a form or pass first level screening for a job

And so often also on wildly tangential subjects that are purely academical artifacts.

Cheating with LLMs is the inevitable conclusion of being a subject to a dragged out must-have education system that mostly just cheats the students of their time and money. That's the friendly way to put it.

I jumped through all the fucking hoops and now I'm paid handsomely, at every corner of the road leading here you see some pompous academic wankers with more medals than a photoshopped North Korean general.

Different courses and universities vary in teaching quality greatly. Often the examination criteria is loosely correlated with knowledge or skill and students end up studying 'around' the examination process, rather than learning for the sake of it or for enjoyment.

Someone mentioned verbal exams - this is the way to do it, but I only had a pleasure to do very few in my years. Probably because it's seen as 'too time consuming' or 'time wasteful', so the shift is then to the student to waste their time instead.

And then you get the occasional course with a lecturer everyone just pays 100% attention to and engages with, where you almost don't need an exam in the first place.

'The problem of LLMs in academia' is a symptom. You get what you measure.