Is Everyone Using AI to Cheat Their Way Through College? (msn.com) 88
Chungin Lee used ChatGPT to help write the essay that got him into Columbia University — and then "proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment," reports New York magazine's blog Intelligencer:
As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: "I'd just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out." By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in. "At the end, I'd put on the finishing touches. I'd just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it," Lee told me recently... When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, "It's the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife."
He eventually did meet a co-founder, and after three unpopular apps they found success by creating the "ultimate cheat tool" for remote coding interviews, according to the article. "Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.)" The article ends with Lee and his co-founder raising $5.3 million from investors for one more AI-powered app, and Lee says they'll target the standardized tests used for graduate school admissions, as well as "all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests. It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything."
Somewhere along the way Columbia put him on disciplinary probation — not for cheating in coursework, but for creating the apps. But "Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI." (OpenAI has even made ChatGPT Plus free to college students during finals week, the article points out, with OpenAI saying their goal is just teaching students how to use it responsibly.) Although Columbia's policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities' — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn't know a single student at the school who isn't using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn't think this is a bad thing. "I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating," he said...
In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments.
The article points out ChatGPT's monthly visits increased steadily over the last two years — until June, when students went on summer vacation. "College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point," a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.... It isn't as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, "the ceiling has been blown off." Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences?
After using ChatGPT for their final semester of high school, one student says "My grades were amazing. It changed my life." So she continued used it in college, and "Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students' laptops open to ChatGPT."
One ethics professor even says "The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there's not really a point in doing this." (Yes, students are even using AI to cheat in ethics classes...) It's not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students' essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.
He eventually did meet a co-founder, and after three unpopular apps they found success by creating the "ultimate cheat tool" for remote coding interviews, according to the article. "Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.)" The article ends with Lee and his co-founder raising $5.3 million from investors for one more AI-powered app, and Lee says they'll target the standardized tests used for graduate school admissions, as well as "all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests. It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything."
Somewhere along the way Columbia put him on disciplinary probation — not for cheating in coursework, but for creating the apps. But "Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI." (OpenAI has even made ChatGPT Plus free to college students during finals week, the article points out, with OpenAI saying their goal is just teaching students how to use it responsibly.) Although Columbia's policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities' — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn't know a single student at the school who isn't using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn't think this is a bad thing. "I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating," he said...
In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments.
The article points out ChatGPT's monthly visits increased steadily over the last two years — until June, when students went on summer vacation. "College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point," a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.... It isn't as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, "the ceiling has been blown off." Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences?
After using ChatGPT for their final semester of high school, one student says "My grades were amazing. It changed my life." So she continued used it in college, and "Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students' laptops open to ChatGPT."
One ethics professor even says "The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there's not really a point in doing this." (Yes, students are even using AI to cheat in ethics classes...) It's not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students' essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.
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China has an extensive culture of cheating.
Prof here (Score:5, Informative)
...and the answer is: only the students who would struggle or fail anyway. It's not hard to catch them, at least, in technical courses.
Of course, (1) you have to want to catch them, and (2) the administration has to have your back.
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Parent here, with a son graduating high school. ChatGPT is used by everyone he knows in high school. He used it recently to write an essay for a highschool class. But it's not the essay he handed in. More like it wrote out an outline that he used to get started on his essay. Kinda like a first draft, but more just to give him inspiration for him to get started in writing something in his own voice.
I saw him do it, and told him that it was reasonable so long as he didn't try to submit something that was
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But it is a good way to get a start on a paper.
Sure, if he was never taught that.
Fail.
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reading the Wikipedia page
Wikipedia is so bad there's peer reviewed articles about how it's one of the leading vectors of holocaust denial [tandfonline.com].
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Teachers can have kids do short tests in person in class to test knowledge, while using projects that allow AI input to test understanding.
Exactly. The curriculum needs to change as the tools change, and the tests and exams need to change as well. Just like calculators in the classroom were perceived as threats to kids' ability to learn arithmetic, until they were accepted as a useful tool that student would encounter later in life. By the same token, students need to be taught about AI as a tool, and especially its pitfalls.
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This is the right way to minimize the wasted time from continual assessments. The only reason that continuous assessments exist
Backwards Use (Score:2)
I saw him do it, and told him that it was reasonable so long as he didn't try to submit something that was completely written by AI.
Actually I think that is a bad way to use AI.Having it write an outline that you then flesh out is backwards compared to what we call "AI" can do and while you may be able to get away with that in less technical subjects, it is much less likely to work in the sciences, particularly the hard sciences.
Current AI is nothing more than a text prediction algorithm. It does not understand concepts. This makes it a very poor choice to write outlines since it will miss details, get concepts wrong or even just ha
Re: Prof here (Score:2)
They are the same people who will get caught once employed, exaggerating their knowledge, skills and experience. 100% frauds. You really can't fake it until you make it in a skilled position. Marketing sure. Technical not a chance. You will be caught.
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You really can't fake it until you make it in a skilled position.
Get the bot to write code that does 90% of what you need, maybe with a few small issues left. Ask senior devs for help, they tell you how to fix those. You pass that to the bot, which fixes the bugs. Now you get the credit for delivering a feature.
There is no intrinsic difference between legacy programming (telling the computer what to do using a programming language) and LLM-based programming (telling the computer what to do using English). The problem of getting it to do exactly what you want as opposed t
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Marketing is a skilled position you can't really fake either. We've all seen good marketing and bad marketing and if you've worked with good people there is definitely a skill there in terms of knowing how to cohesively market a brand and a product and having a strategy there. You have budgets to spend and results to get just the same as anyone technical and you're on the front lines of the executives crosshairs too. If they believe the technical team has a good product and it's not moving they're side-e
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AI doesn't help with mixed martial arts either.
Or, more specifically, it doesn't help against opponents who learned MMA the old-fashioned way.
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So many jobs put a degree as a requirement, even if they don't actually need one and pay minimum wage. The stuff learned on the course rarely has anything to do with the work. It's just got to the point where people need that bit of paper, and it doesn't matter how they got it.
Re: Can't understand why my kid is bothering... (Score:2)
I'll bite.
Which people aren't worth saving?
Re: Can't understand why my kid is bothering... (Score:3)
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Average lifetime earnings for a doctor in the US is $7.5M vs the rest of the US sectors at around $1.7M so that's what she is getting with a non-AI job.
If there are jobs that can be AI performed and those people can earn more than the doctor I would say we need to say it's something systemic about what our economy prioritizes.
Re: Can't understand why my kid is bothering... (Score:3)
Re: Can't understand why my kid is bothering... (Score:2)
Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
It is so easy, nobody can resist it.
Besides, as we see from the many comments here, being shameless about having "AI" generate garbage instead of you is a valuable ability.
In a decade, the population of the "developed world" won't be able to read, write or do arithmetic.
And that's how it'll stop to be a "developed" world.
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The goal is, as aptly put in the TFS, to get laid, to get a "co-founder" with good connections to free money and to get fuck-you money early.
How you do it is beside the point, as the president of the US is demonstrating daily.
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How you do it is beside the point, as the president of the US is demonstrating daily.
Donald Trump is an example of success in the sense that starting with money and losing some of it is success. Then you become president.
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It will be developed... the second a population becomes weak, it will be invaded and pushed aside for a stronger one. Look how Europe is likely going to be an Islamic continent in a few decades. Similar with Japan and Taiwan, it is only a matter of time before history mention that there were people there, but the rehab camp buildings popped up, the people quietly disappeared into the cold dark night, and those became Chinese and North Korean territories.
It is nice if a nation can become Sybaritic, but whe
Back to in class writing and testing. (Score:2)
In a decade, the population of the "developed world" won't be able to read, write or do arithmetic.
Only if we do absolutely nothing about this. An easy solution would be to have more work done in controlled settings. Using AI to cheat on homework won't get kids very far if the bulk of their grades are dependant on their performance accomplishing things in classroom where they can't use it.
That's going to be trickier for some majors more than others but not impossible
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It's tests, baby, all the way down! Midterms! Quarterlies! Weekly quizzes! Your grade is now 10% attendance and 90% exams! Good luck! Just be thankful they aren't oral.
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It'll suck for people with test anxiety but I can't think of any other way for kids to prove they are learning how to think for themselves rather than just letting AI do things for them.
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Back in the '80s there were classes with three tests that added up to 100% of your grade. The final was 50%.
Did it change since?
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The problem is: what should you learn? How do you learn it? How do you know what is "right", "true", etc.
I consider myself lucky. I was schooled before the WWW became a thing, I remember the "invention" of the PC. I am used to books and reading. To me, that is a massive advantage.
As a result, "AI" becomes a useful tool. I use it to save time, or to occasionally get new ideas. But I am very aware that it is a problematic, faulty tool. Younger generations have it much harder here ...
The bigger problem may w
Universities are officially stupid. But so is this (Score:1)
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It takes a startling amount of incompetence to take four years worth of classes and not learn anything.
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Get on the bus sometime and look around. Nearly everyone around you is having sex pretty regularly. It's not special, it's how we exist. everyone does it.
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You should feel neither, because that post has a zero percent chance of being true.
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I learned a lot in college, but I've learned a heck of lot more since college from just life and experience. Actually I've learned more from some great youtube channels about a variety of topics, some CS-related, some not, than I did in many of my college courses. That's not the fault of the college courses, nor is it my fault.
Uni did teach me some vital skills, though. Like how to reason about complexity, and how algorithms work. I also learned vital skills of how to ask the right questions and how to
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I learned a lot in college, but I've learned a heck of lot more since college from just life and experience. Actually I've learned more from some great youtube channels about a variety of topics, some CS-related, some not, than I did in many of my college courses.
That's great, you learned more in the many years since college than you did in the four short years of college. It means you've continued to learn, good job.
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This. Above all, college teaches you how to learn. Because you're going to be doing it for the rest of your life.
They took our jerbs!!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They took our jerbs!!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
An old piece of shit defends the new pieces of shit.
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When I was in college, I made extra money by typing papers for other students, who had hand-written them because they didn't know how to type. It was the 1980s, and the price was $1 per double-spaced typewritten page. The personal computer took THAT job away, and AI had nothing to do with it.
Yes, I'm ignoring the obvious cheating you used for profit. The point is, technology has been taking people's jobs for centuries.
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When I was in school I would sell my essays to underclassmen who would then rewrite it in their voice and likely sell it to another student after they were done with the class. This is just technology removing that economy. The bots are taking the jobs of poor college students.
I graded essays (and other assignments) when I was a grad student. It wasn't hard to find assignments written by people like you and your co-conspirators.
When I encountered such assignments (that were eerily similar but with different word-choices) I would distribute the grade evenly amongst the similar assignments. So, if there were two such essays worth 80 out of 100, each copy would get 40.
Employers will have to sort out the cheats (Score:3)
At the end of the day it all comes down to employers. If everyone - or at least practically everyone - is getting AI to do all their college work for them then the college degree basically becomes worthless because it is no longer any measure of knowledge or ability in whatever subject it is supposed to represent. If employers wish to identify capably potential employees for any job other than operating AI then they need to test the candidates themselves. Further more they need to physically do this in person by bringing candidates in and testing them face to face with no phones allowed.
Presumably this will lead to an "In the land of the blind the one eyed man is King" scenario where most candidates know practically nothing about their professed subject and any student who has done even a modicum of actual real study will appear to shine!
If colleges want to retain any real purpose at all in education then they need to adopt the same approach and only award degrees to students who can sit in a real physical room with their lecturers and provide cogent answers to questions asked!
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At the end of the day it all comes down to employers.
OK... I'll hear this out.
If everyone - or at least practically everyone - is getting AI to do all their college work for them then the college degree basically becomes worthless because it is no longer any measure of knowledge ...
Was it ever a measure of knowledge (IE: facts)? It's supposed to give you the tools to get the results you're after. It's not there to help you memorize the encyclopedia.
... or ability in whatever subject it is supposed to represent.
Please explain. IMO, ability in a subject sounds like your talking about results based valuation - can this person do this thing well enough for the role in the real world? If they've figured out a way to do that and it leverages new/different tools (eg. LLMs), and the results are as good or better than graduates f
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If AI usage skills are all you are expected to come out of college with then I guess it doesn't need to be years of learning. It also begs the question why bother employing anyone if all they are going to do is feed your tasks to an AI, why not cut out the middleman and not employ those people?
Also
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The Real Cheats. (Score:5, Insightful)
"I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,"
One might also argue that we’re but years or months away from labeling a college graduate as nothing more than someone who hopes their $60K+ investment in a Bachelors of Artful Scamming is going to be valued outside of a college campus marketing bubble.
If cheating is that prevalent across the board, guess we better prepare for job interviews/interrogations that last four fucking days. Not like a degree is going to imply educated anymore.
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As an engineering professor, my prediction is that the economic value of a liberal arts degree is going to fall nearly to zero by 2033 at the latest.
My reasoning: the kids who started using ChatGPT to cheat on everything are currently in 8th or 9th grade. Gi
Re: The Real Cheats. (Score:2)
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As an engineering professor, my prediction is that the economic value of a liberal arts degree is going to fall nearly to zero by 2033 at the latest.
As a physics professor I'd say you do not need to predict anything - I think we are already there but for slightly different reasons. It's not that using AI to cheat has rendered such degrees worthless (although I agree that is happening too), it is more that AI itself has rendered such degrees useless because most of the skills you learn from a liberal arts degree vs. a STEM degree are those that AI is now replacing.
But in the long run, no degree program is safe.
That's always a safe bet given technological progress but I do not see current "AI" techn
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If cheating is that prevalent across the board, guess we better prepare for job interviews/interrogations that last four fucking days.
You won't need four days. Talk to them about their claimed learning face to face. Get them give some answers on a whiteboard. Without falling back on a computer it should only take 10 to 15 minutes to see if they bothered actually learning anything.
I dont believe this guys story (Score:2)
Re:I dont believe this guys story (Score:4, Interesting)
A Stanford grad friend of mine has a son who dropped out of a very good university after one year because it was obviously a scam by everyone involved. He's getting into plumbing now, with my friend's encouragement. His other son is presently at Stanford and feels the same way as his older brother but is intent on beating the system some other way.
My own son "accidentally" got an associate's degree in mathematics the Olde Fashioned Way ("linear algebra is fun!") but he's in disbelief at what's going on around him at the community college level. He doesn't think it will be much different after transferring to a top University of California campus, either. I'm trying to keep my daughter from just completely giving up before her senior year of a hybrid high school/college program: she thinks the whole thing is bullshit on every side.
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Geeze. This is a seriously jaded family.
STEM Degrees no Scam (Score:2)
son who dropped out of a very good university after one year because it was obviously a scam by everyone involved.
I think it depends a lot on the subject. I do not see much evidence that the STEM fields have lost value much at all in top universities, at least in Canada but also from interactions with colleagues in the US and UK. Certainly the content is new (science has advanced considerably) and we are all dealing with lower educational standards in schools meaning incoming students are less prepared but ultimately, at least in physics but also in many other technical STEM subjects, I do not see any evidence that go
Undermines one of America's biggest advantages (Score:2)
Congratulations, Mr. Lee. "Innovators' like you are helping to turn America's higher ed system "degrees" into the fancy toilet paper that a typical degree from Belarus or Congo would be worth.
Colleges will likely have to turn to extreme measures to survive. Don't be surprised that if by 2030, all college exams will be done with pencils and paper, in Faraday cages.) Maybe now's a good time to invest in Bic or Dixon Ticonderoga?
Cheating? (Score:3)
How does someone "cheat" in college? The answer is that college education has turned into a diploma mill that produces a credential. And the person cheats to get a better credential. Who are they cheating? The person they provide the credential to and employers don't actually use the credential to evaluate people for very long. Those straight A's don't matter much if you can't produce results.
So the danger of "cheating" to get a better credential is if by cheating you fail to develop the tools you need to be a productive employee. In that case, you are cheating only yourself.
Colleges don't really "teach" any content of value any more. The information is out there for the taking. What they do is provide opportunities for people to develop, practice and polish their learning skills. And coaches to help people do that in a focused way for the skills needed in their field(s) of study. The whole diploma mill, including tests etc, is just a distraction. So if by cheating you can waste less time on the diploma mill tasks then you come out ahead.
What goes around... (Score:2)
So you're just a front-end for an AI tool eh? (Score:1)
Then why the fuck should I hand you over a paycheck when you can't do anything I can't get that very same AI tool to do myself?
Hey everyone, remember back before I was born when they said CNCs would eliminate the need for skilled machinists?
And now fifty years later there's a shortage of skilled machinists?
Perhaps there's some wisdom to be gained from that history. If only I could find an AI that would tell me what it is...
How many of these do we need to see (Score:1)
You can't use AI to cheat your way through college (Score:2)
You might be able to use it to just barely keep ahead of the grind, the workload in a modern school is orders of magnitude larger than what anyone over 45 has experienced. They basically added a shitload of requirements and then forced you into various job training prog
First hit's free (Score:2)
OpenAI has even made ChatGPT Plus free to college students during finals week, the article points out, with OpenAI saying their goal is just teaching students how to use it responsibly.
Sure, use it responsibly, just like alcohol commercials want you to enjoy a case of beer every night responsibly.