I wrote about this topic last week based on a couple articles I’d read about how the use of AI by high school and college students has changed things. Students no longer have to work hard or even at all to complete major assignments in classes like English, History, etc. Anyone who has a computer or a phone and can type a prompt into ChatGPT can produce a credible essay. It’s just so easy to cheat now that you’d be a fool not to do it.
And most of the kids who make it to college aren’t fools. Hence, this recent article from New York Magazine titled “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.”
Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment. 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.
Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college-prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools; he didn’t get into any of them. So he spent the next year at a community college, before transferring to Columbia. (His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. 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.”…
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 spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI. “We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”
If professors are worried about students cheating with ChatGPT, students are also annoyed to find out their professors are using it to design their classes.
In February, Ella Stapleton, then a senior at Northeastern University, was reviewing lecture notes from her organizational behavior class when she noticed something odd. Was that a query to ChatGPT from her professor?
Halfway through the document, which her business professor had made for a lesson on models of leadership, was an instruction to ChatGPT to “expand on all areas. Be more detailed and specific.” It was followed by a list of positive and negative leadership traits, each with a prosaic definition and a bullet-pointed example…
Ms. Stapleton decided to do some digging. She reviewed her professor’s slide presentations and discovered other telltale signs of A.I.: distorted text, photos of office workers with extraneous body parts and egregious misspellings.
She was not happy. Given the school’s cost and reputation, she expected a top-tier education. This course was required for her business minor; its syllabus forbade “academically dishonest activities,” including the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence or chatbots.
Gizmodo published an article prompted in party by the New York Magazine piece. It’s titled, “It’s Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System” and here’s the doomy conclusion:
Everybody who uses AI is going to get exponentially stupider, and the stupider they get, the more they’ll need to use AI to be able to do stuff that they were previously able to do with their minds.
There’s already some social science to back this up. A study published last year was titled “Beware of metacognitive laziness.”
As the researchers analyzed how students completed their work on computers, they noticed that students who had access to AI or a human were less likely to refer to the reading materials. These two groups revised their essays primarily by interacting with ChatGPT or chatting with the human. Those with only the checklist spent the most time looking over their essays…
“This highlights a crucial issue in human-AI interaction,” the researchers wrote. “Potential metacognitive laziness.” By that, they mean a dependence on AI assistance, offloading thought processes to the bot and not engaging directly with the tasks that are needed to synthesize, analyze and explain.
“Learners might become overly reliant on ChatGPT, using it to easily complete specific learning tasks without fully engaging in the learning,” the authors wrote.
The Free Press has an optimistic spin on this trend. If everyone is cheating at school, maybe that’s a good thing because it won’t be long before the AI can do a better job of teaching your kid than their current teachers.
These models are such great cheating aids because they are also such great teachers. Often they are better than the human teachers we put before our kids, and they are far cheaper at that. They will not unionize or attend pro-Hamas protests. But in the meantime, the doomers are right about at least one thing: It will feel very painful…
We are now in a situation where everyone is continuing to go through the motions, and probably will do so until the students and the tuition-paying parents rebel. Because college is fun, and parental wealth is rising, I do not think that will happen soon. We will all continue to march just a little bit further toward the edge of the cliff…
A few “rebels” will do their classwork on their own, but everyone else will wonder what exactly they are planning on doing with the writing skills they develop.
Enrollments will shrink, and conditions for faculty will deteriorate. But the enterprise will just keep on chugging along, a sign of how much of it was based on a big dose of illusion in the first place.
I’m sure the author is right that there’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. Students and professors will continue to cheat as long as these LLM’s exist. And maybe that makes the collapse of our education system inevitable. If the mental work of students and teachers can be replaced by AI, then there’s really no point in having teachers or students at all.
But I think he’s wrong to assume nothing is being lost here. Maybe the system of colleges will collapse thanks to AI cheating, but if high school and college become an absurdist exercise in AI’s responding to one anther, then why not take out the middle man and just let AI do all the jobs. Maybe that’s inevitable too, but it can’t be good for people who have no skills, no knowledge and no jobs.
