If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless.
If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a degree, then it has lost all value as a certificate that the holder has completed some minimum level of education and learning. Institutions that award such degrees will be no different than degree mills of the past.
I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth.
All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams taken either in class or at the university testing center.
For most subjects at the university level graded homework (and graded attendance) has always struck me as somewhat condescending and coddling. Either it serves to pad out grades for students who aren't truly learning the material or it serves to force adult students to follow specific learning strategies that the professor thinks are best rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults.
Give students the flexibility to learn however they think is best and then find ways to measure what they've actually learned in environments where cheating is impossible. Cracking down on cheating at homework assignments is just patching over a teaching strategy that has outgrown its usefulness.
> rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults
I have had so many very frustrating conversations with full grown adults in charge of teaching CS. I have no faith at all that students would be able to choose an appropriate method of study.
My issue with the instruction is the very narrow belief in the importance of certain measurable skills. VERY narrow. I won’t go into details, for my own sanity.
> I have no faith at all that students would be able to choose an appropriate method of study.
That is their problem, not your problem. You're not their nanny.
Exactly. Turning tertiary education into a third tier of babysitting just screws over the adults who actually grew up during secondary school. Tell them how to succeed in your class and then let them fail if they won't listen to you! It's high time someone let these kids grow up.
When hiring, I would very much like to hire people who have figured out how to learn things for themselves using whatever techniques work for them, and don't need nannying.
So I'm perfectly happy with a system of higher education that strongly rewards this behaviour
I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but just like junior employees, I think university students should clock in at 9am and finish working at 5pm.
I think they would really benefit learning how to work a full day and develop some work life balance.
I actually like this idea in theory. Except, it wouldn't allow for students to find flexible part-time work.
As an example, I was a university student in Canada ~15 years ago. I lived with my parents, driving 30 minutes each way to attend classes. I had car insurance, gas, a cell phone, tuition, parking and books to pay. Tuition was costing 6000$ a year over 5 years. Being in humanities, I chose my own course schedule. I would often have classes 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday. I would work nights and weekends 25-33.5 hours most weeks..Most part-time employment worked around student hours and allowed some flexibility. Once I graduated and had a full-time salary position, I had much more free time and struggled to not feel lonely in filling up that time.
> All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams taken either in class or at the university testing center.
I have the opposite experience - the best professors focused on homework and projects and exams were minimal to non-existent. People learn different ways, though, so you might function better having the threat/challenge of an exam, whereas I hated having to put everything together for an hour of stress and anxiety. Exams are artificial and unlike the real world - the point is to solve problems, not to solve problems in weirdly constrained situations.
I don’t disagree, but in most cases degrees are handed out based on grades which in turn are based on homework.
I agree that something will have to change to avert the current trend.
Most of the college courses I took had the bulk of the grade be based on exams or projects. Homework was usually a small proportion to give students a little buffer and to actually prepare them for the exams. AI might have helped on coding projects but a lot of my grades were based on exams using pencil and paper in a room of 30-200 other people. It also just seems like a waste of your own time and money to avoid the act of learning by skipping all the hard parts with a corporate token generator.
Maybe schools and universities need to stop considering homework to be evidence of subject matter mastery. Grading homework never made sense to me. What are you measuring, really, and how confident are you of that measurement?
You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube. Universities need to accept that AI exists, and adjust their operations accordingly.
Grading homework has two reasonable objectives:
Provide an incentive for students to do the thing they should be doing anyway.
Give an opportunity to provide feedback on the assignment.
It is totally useless as an evaluation mechanic, because of course the students that want to can just cheat. It’s usually pretty small, right? IIRC when I did tutoring we only gave like 10-20% for the aggregate homework grade.
The annoyance with 10-20% means that in order to be an "A" student you have to do all the homework instead of just ace the exams which is obnoxious if you actually know the material. Edge case, I know, but that last 20% is a ton of extra work.
I wish it was only 10-20%. I'm a non-trad student at a small state school and IMO they try to inflate grades via homework. This semester I aced my exams, but only had time/energy to complete ~60% of my homework. Since it was 30% (on average) of my final grade I ended up with a 3.0 for the semester.
It is an edge case… I mean, if people are required to take classes where they already know all the material, somehow a failure has occurred earlier in the process (unfortunately it is a very common failure mode to not be allowed to try and test out of a class).
Realistically I think the more common case is to think you know the material, skip studying, and then faceplant on the test. Homework should help self-correct.
But yeah, I could it being annoying if you really do already know the material.
The course could offer nonlinear grading where you get the maximum of [exam grade, 0.8 exam + 0.2 hw]
A lot of my university professors would use this kind of strategy where your final grading structure depends on various grades you got throughout the semester, so all students could get good grades whether they ace the exam or they are terrible at exams but excel at project based learning/labs.
You're there to pass and get your diploma. If you want to excel, there are other real venues for that ambition.
In most of my classes the HW was far more valuable of a measure of ability -- assuming cheating didn't occur. For example, my compilers HW assignments much more greatly captured my learning. I just feel like a semester writing an optimizing compiler is just going to be better than the 90-120 minute final exam.
I’d probably label something that size a project rather than a homework, although I admit my definition is entirely arbitrary.
IMO the ideal class would be 4 or so students working together on a bespoke project, with weekly check-ins with some grad student teaching assistant. The goal would be to do something interesting and new. Of course nobody ever has enough teaching staff for that kind of thing.
I can say that making my homework part of my grade is a great way to actually get me to do it.
Something I didn’t love about mandatory homework was that it provided an implied “you are done” point, when really it is the bare minimum (or maybe less than the bare minimum—there’s a pretty strong downward pressure if the instructor actually wants to provide thoughtful feedback).
Before college, when I was a kid, I just had the textbooks, so I read the chapters and did the assignments… it was much better than sitting and listening in lectures, then doing some small assigned subset of the problems…
How do you suggest we measure whether the students have actually learned the stuff then?
In person, pen and paper exams? They are closer to how most certifications are conducted.
Also, They don't need to be literally pen and paper exams, they just need to be run on computers without network connectivity, administered by the university.
You could sit down at a workstation with all the tools you might need to test your skills. :)
> If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless.
I suspect the opposite: Known-good college degrees will become more valuable. The best colleges will institute practices that confirm the material was learned, such as emphasizing in-person testing over at-home assignments.
Cheating has actually been rampant at the university level for a long time, well before LLMs. One of the key differentiators of the better institutions is that they are harder to cheat to completion.
At my local state university (where I have friends on staff) it’s apparently well known among the students that if they pick the right professors and classes they can mostly skate to graduation with enough cheating opportunity to make it an easy ride. The professors who are sticklers about cheating are often avoided or even become the targets of ratings-bombing campaigns
I've tried re-enrolling in a STEM major last year, after a higher education "pause" of 16-ish years. 85% of the class used GPTs to solve homework, and it was quite obvious most of them haven't even read the assignment.
The immediate effect was the distrust of the professors towards most everyone and lots classes felt like some kind of babysitting scheme, which I did not appreciate.
> I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth.
College students still cram and purge. Nobody forced to sit through OChem remembers their Diels-Alder reaction except the organic chemists.
College degrees probably don't have as much value as we've historically ascribed to them. There's a lot of nostalgia and tradition pent up in them.
The students who do the best typically fill their schedule with extra-curricular projects and learning that isn't dictated by professors and grading curves.
I've been hiring people for the better part for 15 years and I never considered them to be valuable outside of the fact that it appears you're able to do one project for a sustained period of time. My impressions was unless your degree confers something such that you are in a job that human risk can be involved, most degrees are worth very little and most serious people know that.
To be clear, I think that most college degrees were generally low value (even my own), but still had some value. The current trend will be towards zero value unless something changes.
> If students using AI to cheat on homework
This is not related to "AI", but I have an amusing story about online cheating.
* I have a nephew who was switched into online college classes at the beginning of the pandemic.
* As soon as they switched to online, the class average on the exams shot up, but my nephew initially refused to cheat.
* Eventually he relented (because everyone else was doing it) and he pasted a multitude of sticky notes on the wall at the periphery of his computer monitor.
* His father walks into his room, looks at all the sticky notes and declares, "You can't do this!!! It'll ruin the wallpaper!"
Aren't the jobs they'll get be expecting them to use AI?
If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans? Either AI will replace them or employers will realize that they prefer employees who can think. In either case, being a human who specializes in regurgitating AI output seems like a dead end.
> If you’re hiring humans just to use AI, why even hire humans
You hire humans to help train AI and when done you fire humans.
“Prompt Engineer” as a serious job title is very strange to me. I don’t have an explanation as to why it would be a learnable skill—there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does.
> there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does.
That's a "black box" problem, and I think they are some of the most interesting problems the world has.
Outside of technology- the most interesting jobs in the world operate on a "black box". Sales people, psychologists are trying to work on the human mind. Politicians and market makers are trying to predict the behavior of large populations. Doctors are operating on the human body.
Technology has been getting more complicated- and I think that distributed systems and high level frameworks are starting to resemble a "black box" problem. LLMs even more so!
I agree that "prompt engineer" is a silly job title- but not because it's not a learnable skill. It's just not accurate to call yourself an engineer when consuming an LLM.
It's an experience thing. It's not about knowing what LLMs/diffusion models specifically do, but rather about knowing the pitfalls that the models you use have.
It's a bit like an audio engineer setting up your compressors and other filters. It's not difficult to fiddle with the settings, but knowing what numbers to input is not trivial.
I think it's a kind of skill that we don't really know how to measure yet.
When an audio engineer tweaks the pass band of a filter, there’s a direct casual relationship between inputs and outputs. I can imagine an audio engineer learning what different filters and effects sound like. Almost all of them are linear systems, so composing effects is easy to understand.
None of this is true of an LLM. I believe there’s a little skill involved, but it’s nothing like tuning the pass band of a filter. LLMs are chaotic systems (they kinda have to be to mimic humans); that’s one of their benefits, but it’s also one of their curses.
Now, what a human can definitely do is convince themselves that they can control somewhat the outputs of a chaotic system. Rain prognostication is perhaps a better model of the prompt engineer than the audio mixer.
Even if you just use AI, you need to know the right prompts to ask.
And how to verify the output and think through it. I hear time after time that someone asked something from AI. It came up with something and then when corrected apologized and printed out it was wrong...
But how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong...
> how do you correct it if you do not know what is right or wrong...
You keep human employees and require them to use LLM so that it gets corrected all the time from their input. Then you fire them.
Would you rather be the guy using AI as a crutch or the guy who actually knows how to do things without it?
TBF this problem doesn’t seem that new to me. I was forced to do my lab work in Vim and C via SSH because the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning.
> the faculty felt that Java IDEs with autocomplete were doing a disservice to learning
Sounds laughably naive now, doesn’t it?
At the same time though: if AI based cheating is so effective then is college itself useful?
If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful?
It’s the same old story with a new set of technology.
> If calculators are so good at math, is learning math itself useful?
What's your answer? Surely it was proven to be "not useful"? I don't think I ever met a person who benefitted from knowing math now that everyone has a calculator in pocket. Other than maybe playing some games where if you do calculation on the fly you win
Well, if you don't know math because the calculator does it you would also have no understanding of the concepts e.g. addition, subtraction, whole numbers or fraction etc. so you would not know how to in use or what to do with a calculator. It's a tool that is useful to do something you know how it works faster.
But that's very different with LLMs and that stuff. You don't need to know how to write an essay or write a song. That's kind of the point.
LLMs don't know how to write an essay or a song.
To be able to direct an LLM you would need to know how to do those things yourself.
LLM don't "know" anything. It's a program. But those programs get fed so many (mostly stolen) essays and songs that it outputs a convincing essay or song.
So the end result is this. you don't need to know how to write an essay but you get an essay written for you. It's very different from using calculator and knowing math or using ProTools and knowing how to make a song.
> Surely it was proven to be "not useful"?
I don't think we're living in the same world. I have met plenty of people who, despite having a calculator, can't solve their own problems because they don't know what to do with it in order to solve their problem.
Examples pls. I know people who can do mental math and it's maybe only sometimes useful in some games.
It was (to some degree), and could still be. The status quo was more effective, relatively speaking, before the AI boom. The status quo appears to be trending towards ineffective, post-AI boom.
So in order to remain useful, the status quo of higher education will probably have to change in order to adapt to the ubiquity of AI, and LLMs currently.
Just because you can cheat at something doesn't mean doing it legitimately isn't useful.
Thinking of that. We have build these expensive machines with massive investments to be able to output what we expect college students to output... Wouldn't that tell us that well maybe that output has some value, intent or use? Or we would not have spend those resources...
Just because machine can do things, doesn't mean humans should be able to do it too. Say reading a text aloud.
https://innovationlabs.harvard.edu/events/your-network-is-yo...
^ Why many go to Harvard. Very nice club.
Had I known that college degrees from before the 2020s would increase in value, I'd have gotten one. Damn it!
I mean this seems a solved problem: hand-and-paper written onsite exams + blackboard-and-chalk oral onsite exams. If this is too costly (is it? many countries manage), make students take them less often.