I think you've identified the main issue here:
LLMs aren't destroying the University or the essay.
LLMs are destroying the cheap University or essay.
Cheap can mean a lot of things, like money or time or distance. But, if Universities want to maintain a standard, then they are going to have to work for it again.
No more 300+ person freshman lectures (where everyone cheated anyways). No more take-home zoom exams. No more professors checked out. No more grad students doing the real teaching.
I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows you and if you've done the work. And I know, that is not a cheap way to churn out degrees.
>I guess, I'm advocating for the Oxbridge/St. John's approach with under 10 class sizes where the proctor actually knows you and if you've done the work. And I know, that is not a cheap way to churn out degrees.
I could understand US tuition if that were the case. These days with overworked adjuncts make it McDonalds at Michelin star prices.
Funnily enough I only had 10-person-classes when I paid $125 for summer courses in a community college between expensive uni semesters.
This matches my experience. I attended the local community college, which works closely and matches curriculum with Ohio State University. The same classes, with the same content, were taught at both schools.
The biggest difference between them is the community college offering class sizes of about 20 people, while the university equivalent was taught in a lecture hall with hundreds of students, and cost significantly more.
Given that the adjuncts often aren't paid all that much better than the McDonalds workers...
Believe it or not, 300-person freshman lectures can be done well. They just need a talented instructor who's willing to put in the prep, and good TAs leading sections. And if the university fosters the right culture, the students mostly won't cheat.
But yeah, if the professor is clearly checked out and only interested in his research, and the students are being told that the only purpose of their education is to get a piece of paper to show to potential employers, you'll get a cynical death-spiral.
(I've been on both sides of this, though back when copy-pasting from Wikipedia was the way to cheat.)
> though back when copy-pasting from Wikipedia was the way to cheat
Back when I was teaching part time, I had a lot of fun looking at the confused looks on my students' faces when I said "you cannot use Wikipedia, but you'll find a lot of useful links at the bottom of any article there..."
Over here in Finland, higher education is state funded, and the funding is allocated to universities mostly based on how many degrees they churn out yearly. Whether the grads actually find employment or know anything is irrelevant.
So, it's pretty hard for universities over here to maintain standards in this GenAI world, when the paying customer only cares about quantity, and not quality. I'm feeling bad for the students, not so much for foolish politicians.
Gosh, I'm so myopic here. I'm mostly talking about US based systems.
But, of course, LLMs are affecting the whole world.
Yeah, I'd love to hear more about how other countries are affected by this tool. For Finland, I'd imagine that the feedback loop is the voters, but that's a bit too long and the incentives and desires of the voting public get a bit too condensed into a few choice to matter [0].
What are you seeing out there as to how students feel about LLMs?
[0] funnily enough, like how the nodes in the neural net of an LLM get too saturated if they don't have enough parameters.
After a short stint as a faculty member at a McU institution, I agree with much of this.
Provide machine problems and homework as exercises for students to learn, but assign a very low weight to these as part of an overall grade. Butt in seat assessments should be the majority of a course assessment for many courses.
>> (where everyone cheated anyways)
This is depressing. I'm late GenX, I didn't cheat in college (engineering, RPI), nor did my peers. Of course, there was very little writing of essays so that's probably why, not to mention all of our exams were in person paper-and-pencil (and this was 1986-1990, so no phones). Literally impossible to cheat. We did have study groups where people explained the homework to each other, which I guess could be called "cheating", but since we all shared, we tended to oust anyone who didn't bring anything to the table. Is cheating through college a common millenial / gen z thing?
Even before LLMs, if you walked into any frat and asked to see their test bank, you'd get thousands of files. Though not technically cheating, having every test a professor ever gave was a huge advantage. Especially since most profs would just reuse tests and HWs without any changes anyway.
To my generation, it wasn't that cheating was a 'thing' as much as it was impossible to avoid. Profs were so lazy that any semi-good test prep would have you discover that the profs were phoning it in and had been for a while. Things like not updating the course page with all the answers on them were unfortunately common. You could go and tell the prof, and most of us did, but then you'd be at a huge disadvantage relative to your peers who did download the answer key. Especially since the prof would still not update the questions! I want to make it clear: this is a common thing at R1 universities before LLMs.
The main issue is that at most R1s, the prof isn't really graded on their classes. That's maybe 5% of their tenure review. The thing they are most incentivized by is the amount of money they pull in from grants. I'm not all that familiar with R2 and below, but I'd imagine they have the same incentives (correct me if I'm wrong!). And with ~35% of students that go to R2 and below, the incentives for the profs for ~65% of students isn't well correlated with teaching said students.
Seems to me that studying a collection of every test over the years, without knowing what questions will be on the exam is... actually learning? >_<
It's a lot easier to memorize AABBCCBDDADBADABCCABAD than the actual information.
Did you have a lot of multiple choice tests in higher education? I know Americans used them a lot in high school, but didn't realise that extended to college.
Not really. I had fellow students who understood nothing, could not program at all, but could tell you the answer to question 6 of the 2015 Java exam because they had memorized it all.
Then I would hire that person to be a requirements & specifications archival expert! ;)
Don’t know about frats, but I went to a lowly ranked “third tier” university and a “top 10” one.
While most of the classes were taught pretty well at both, the third tier ones were taught much better. Just couldn’t get an interview upon graduation despite near 4.0…
It is utterly bizarre that we use graduate research dollars to evaluate the quality of undergraduate education.
Here's how cheating advanced since then.
1. People in the Greek system would save all homework sets and exams in a "library" for future members taking a given course. While professors do change (and a single professor will try to mix up problems) with enough time you eventually have an inventory of all the possible problems, to either copy outright or study.
2. Eventually a similar thing moved online, both with "black market" hired help, then the likes of Chegg Inc.
3. All the students in a course join a WhatsApp or Discord group and text each other the answers. (HN had a good blog about this from a data science professor, but I can't find it now. College cheating has been mentioned many times on HN).
Cheap "universities" are fine for accreditation. Exams can be administered via in-person proctoring services, which test the bare minimum. The real test would be when students are hired, in the probationary period. While entry-level hires may be unreliable, and even in the best case not help the company much, this is already a problem (perhaps it can be solved by the government or some other outside organization paying the new hire instead of the company, although I haven't thought about it much).
Students can learn for free via online resources, forums, and LLM tutors (the less-trustworthy forums and LLMs should primarily be used to assist understanding the more-trustworthy online resources). EDIT: students can get hands-on-experience via an internship, possibly unpaid.
Real universities should continue to exist for their cutting-edge research and tutoring from very talented people, because that can't be commodified. At least until/if AI reaches expert competence (in not just knowledge but application), but then we don't need jobs either.
> Real universities should continue to exist for their cutting-edge research and tutoring from very talented people, because that can't be commodified. At least until/if AI reaches expert competence (in not just knowledge but application), but then we don't need jobs either.
Okay, woah, I hadn't thought of that. I'm sitting here thinking that education for it's own sake is one of the reasons that we're trying to get rid of labor and make LLMs. Like, I enjoy learning and think my job gets in the way of that.
I hand't thought that people would want to just not do education of any sort anymore.
That's a little mind blowing.
Some people go to college to learn, some go just to get a job. I think colleges should still exist for the former, but the latter should be able to instead use online resources then get accredited (which they'd do if it gave them the same job prospects).
That would also let professors devote more time towards teaching the former, and less time grading and handling grade complaints (from either group, since the former can also be graded by the accreditation and, if they get a non-academic job, in their probationary period).
I'm an autodidact. I've found leaked copies of university degree plans, pirated and read textbooks on all kinds of subjects, talk to experts for fun when I can etc.
American universities mostly get in the way of doing this sort of thing. You need a degree to be credentialed so you can get your "3 years of experience" that lets you apply for jobs. That's pretty much all its for these days.
> I'm an autodidact. I've found leaked copies of university degree plans, pirated and read textbooks on all kinds of subjects, talk to experts for fun when I can etc.
The last decade+ has been a goldmine for this, especially in computing-related topics. Between textbooks, school course sites, MOOCs etc, there's lifetimes of stuff out there.
> I enjoy learning and think my job gets in the way of that
Spot on, this gave me ideas, thank you for that!
There are excellent 1000-student lecture courses and shitty 15-student lecture courses. There are excellent take-home exams and shitty in-class exams. There are excellent grad student teaching assistants and shitty tenured credentialed professors. You can't boil quality down to a checklist.
No but you can observe and react to trends. Remote courses for me have me sitting directly at the Distraction 9000 (my computer) and rely entirely on "self discipline" in order for me to get anything out of it. This is fine for annual training that's utterly braindead and requires nothing from me but completing a basic quiz I get unlimited attempts for so my employer can tell whatever government agency I did the thing. If I want to actually get trained however, I always do in-person, both because my employer covers those expenses and who in the world turns down free travel, and because I retain nothing from remote learning. Full stop.
Of course that's only my experience and I can't speak for all of humanity. I'm sure people exist who can engage in and utilize remote learning to it's full potential. That said I think it's extremely tempting to lean on it to get out of providing classrooms, providing equipment, and colleges have been letting the education part of their school rot for decades now in favor of sports and administrative bloat, so forgive me if I'm not entirely trusting them to make the "right" call here.
Edit: Also on further consideration, remote anything but teaching very much included also requires a level of tech literacy that, at least in my experience, is still extremely optimistic. The number of times we have to walk people through configuring a microphone, aiming a webcam, sharing to the meeting, or the number of missed participants because Teams logged them out, or Zoom bugged out on their machine, or whatever. It just adds a ton of frustration.
On the edit: maybe two-way remote. One-way (read: remoting into conferences, music festivals, etc.) has been a revelation, and no more difficult to access than any other streaming service. I'm going to be sad to see YouTube's coverage of Coachella go away in a few years; losing SXSW was already quite painful.
I gather that that's not necessarily what you were referring to, but with the way that people tend to lump all remote experiences in the "inferior" basket together, I just wanted to point out that, in many cases, that kind of accessibility is better than the actual alternative: missing out.
I think this is where it's going to end up.
The masses get the cheap AI education. The elite get the expensive, small class, analog education. There won't be a middle class of education, as in the current system - too expensive for too little gain.
10 is a small number. There's a middle ground. When I studied, we had lectures for all students, and a similar amount of time in "work groups," as they were called. That resembled secondary education: one teacher, around 30 students, but those classes were mainly focused on applying the newly acquired knowledge, making exercises, asking questions, checking homework, etc. Later, I taught such classes for programming 101, and it was perfectly doable. Work group teachers were also responsible for reviewing their students' tests.
But that commercially oriented boards are ruining education, that's a given. That they would stoop to this level is a bit surprising.
Very common. Large lecture with a professor, and small "discussion sections" with a grad student for Q/A, homework help, exam review.
All of my classes with a dozen students were better than all of my classes with 2 dozen. My favorite class had 7 students.
All degrees are basically the same though and of 95% of the value is signaling nobody really cares about the education part