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If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem even worse.
These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.
It's been a lost battle for decades, then.
so, the primary function of going to school is to get a job, not for self enrichment.
It's a shit show everywhere.
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."
- Will Hunting
Having gone to university in Germany, there are glimpses of this ideal, but they're mostly faint memories enshrined on faded plaques around the campus. I did have an old geezer prof (90+ years old) that went to the very same university over half a century ago and showed us his diploma: greek, latin, humanities, ... for a technical diploma, no less!
I do still cringe a little when we get newjoiners fresh out of university proudly proclaiming "Yeah, no can do, we didn't learn that at university". Yes, obviously, university is not an apprenticeship. You learn how to learn and then apply that to unknown-to-you problems. Oddly enough ChatGPT seems to have brought a change to that mindset, but Im not sure if it did so for the better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
You’re paying to be surrounded by smart kids that will ensmarten you too and for access to the school’s career networks.
For some reason in discussions like this, things are always framed as if everyone is going to Yale.
Everyone I know including myself, went to college because that is just what you were supposed to do. That was my mom's dream for me to get a degree and I didn't want to disappoint my mom.
I am sure there were really smart kids in my high school that were figuring out post graduate network strategy but that was hardly the majority.
- Surrounded by other kids who have access to the same internet you do
- Access to the school's career networks (LinkedIn)
It doesn’t help that a lot of desirable fields are comically out of date at the academic instructional level anyway.
Would you honestly tell an aspiring software engineer that your typical computer science degree will teach them much about wielding computers in a cutting edge way?
If I were to list the top 5 things I got from university, knowledge wouldn’t make the cut and were I to do it again, I would certainly attend less class.
AI isn't the issue as much how AI is used. Passive use of any tech, including social media, and now AI is lazy and has poor outcomes.
Aligning AI use with the goals of all sides, and not just one side getting paid, or just one side graduating could look different.
Most people attend higher education to access opportunity to improve their lives, overwhelmingly for a career and earning.
The idea of higher education teaching "learning how to think" is perhaps a relic of the origin of some universities which didn't historically do STEM, and focused on things like liberal arts, which in turn often had the support of coming from a privileged background, or financial safety net.
STEM money and funding though, attached a lot of traditional post secondaries to do that as well.
It's perfectly acceptable to expect higher education of any kind to have you ready to grow and earn more in better suited opportunities. Not enough educational institutaions don't publish their % of students who graduate in the area that they started in, and also the % of graduates who find their next step, career wise, etc, in 6-12 months of education.
Hear, hear!
Spot on. I am teenager going to college soon and I feel like the same way about the education system (and in extension, the job market but I suppose that the job market might be more understanding probably over all of it), part of my comment was as follows.
I do feel a bit like coding/a lot of fun-ness out of life is also like this, quantified, measured, transactional (posting for social-media?) [as I wonder if I am writing this comment for hackernews karma or relevant discussion talking points..]
This feels to me the most irreversible consequence because it might be hard for the generation (myself included) to see value in non-measurable things as everything has to be measured and transactional-ized.
(...) I would like for humanity to be more nuanced and less measured but more varied (grey rather than black or white) but I feel like that there is enough noise on the internet that maybe even this ends up becoming noise and I am not sure if anyone who might benefit from reading this actually does end up reading it.
From one of my comments that I had written sometime ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559013
What other kind of culture is there? A culture of not measuring?
For almost all of history, higher education has been a luxury good for the rich, including the Greek city states. There have been a few exceptions, most notably European countries with tax funded schools, but even those are primarily pumping out degrees used for chasing jobs.
Many people are going to college primarily to make more money in their adult life, the actual learning is secondary. If you're already well-off or just don't care, you can still get the education for its own sake.
The issue is that we've created a perverse incentive to get a college degree.
You're not supposed to make more money, or be happier, or really become anything other than a better version of yourself.
I wonder if they still do this.
But I was referring to happiness more generally as enjoyment, joy, satisfaction - that type of thing.
And in that case - there are plenty of ways being better = less happy. Eg if I were to sacrifice myself to save my family, then that’s the best version of me, but I’d be pretty dang unhappy about it.
UChicago should be pretty uniquely positioned to address the problem of AI writ large. They already require a full year of each philosophy, literature, and history (all through primary sources). This "Core" should already be fairly AI-proof, given they are primarily small-group, discussion-driven courses; oral exams, in-class essays, or even graded discussions should be straightforward adaptations.
And yet, the university shifted towards professionalism before AI ("training a mind for the workforce" rather than "the good life").
Already, this transition did what the author observes AI is doing. I would hardly believe someone who cheats through an econ/stats major is less educated - if only through osmosis - than someone who honestly completes Business Economics.
And so I wonder - if the damage of AI is primarily instrumental to the broader trend of hyper-professionalism, what damage has it actually done?
If we automate away the signal to companies "yes, I can do stats for you," does that free students to focus more on the _less_ professional aspects of education?
Sure, it undercuts credentialism, making the "piece of paper" near worthless - but if our aim of education is just to "be better," should that not give us hope?
Why shouldn't universities switch to examinations where no technology (apart from say calculators) are allowed; and this is strictly enforced? This was certainly the norm when I went to university.
I agree that A.I. trivializes (or changes how you approach) a lot of take home work; but people who wanted to cheat could more or less always do so for that to some degree. I guess it makes it easier to do so; however my expectation would be a greater reliance or weighting on in person examinations as a response; as opposed to a normalization of cheating.
One way in which A.I. could be seen as contributing to this is that it is devaluing the importance of what were seen as 'intellectual' pursuits; as we now have automation for them that is at the very least often surface level effective for undergraduate work.
EDIT: I meant writing in blue books before this era of copying words out of the claude app on your phone
We were deducted points for trivial syntax mistakes.
If these stories I keep hearing are true, then university programs have really taken a nose dive recently. This isn’t a “back in my day” thing, but within the past 5 years.
The pace of the purported decline makes me question if some of these stories are sensationalist. But I don’t know, I keep hearing about them.
Otherwise your suggestion makes sense.
And if we are talking about the various AI strategies people have where they have LLMs talking to LLMs to come up with whatever gooblyguck, are the poor souls who've been asked to come up with the AI class for the department going to know any of these strategies themselves? Are these strategies even going to be sustainable going forward after VC is no longer subsidizing tokens?
Some of these AI chatters may become oncologists.
Generally, i wasn't allowed a calculator in university.
Have tests.
Supervise said tests to make sure people don't cheat.
That's how it worked when i was in university. Admittedly maybe that is easier in the sciences than humanities, but still, it seems doable. Cheating isn't a new phenomenon it just got cheaper and easier.
You are part of the problem. Just admit you dont have what it takes.
Apart from entry-level texts, what discipline are you thinking of? Pretty much all my after-freshman-year undergrad texts contained debates.
a) This is about universities, not "college" b) The University teaches you critical thinking, not how to learn "textbook items". It's not vocational training for upper middle class. It's for building and developing citizens who can think critically.
And if I want to do something interesting I need the skills and knowledge which are learned at a college level.
Not really, you need cooperation with other people in this complex world to live. No necessarily a job. You could be self-employed or a member of a cooperative or an elected official.
But yeah, the capitalist default is to have a job, sure.
> And if I want to do something interesting I need the skills and knowledge which are learned at a college level.
Not really, no. You need the skills and knowledge and for some professions you do need the official certificate of education and for a subset of those that's actually warranted, because you cannot get your hands on the training other ways. Doctors kinda need the official system, self-taught appendectomy would not be ideal. English literature? Not so much.
Trades can pay very well and frequently require nothing more than on the job training.
You think you need college for the same reason you equate "job" with survival. These are not universal truths, not even in capitalist hellscape America. It might be harder but it is in no way a requirement. Anyone who tells you different is lying to you.
To the majority of students, they seem quite laser focused on acquiring the degree with the right grades so that they can maximize their chance of a job after university (apart from the personal element of partying and having a boy/girl-friend etc.). The primary utility of the university to students is the credentialing, and secondarily the structure to the learning program, but otherwise the books themselves suffice to teach.
Perhaps we should move more training to technical institutes and people can come out with the knowledge of how to operate this or that thing. The problem is that everyone will know that the smarter student has gone for the higher-end university. The credentialing then works not because of the program but because of the selection that the university can do. Okay, so the whole thing continues to make sense even if AI zombifies everything.
> I don’t think she was laughing two years later when I was TAing the class and we observed a fairly distinct gap of about 40 percentage points between the take-home test and the one administered in-person.
40pp is massive. Take homes are pretty much dead at that point. And not just in schools, but also for interviews. I don’t see how you can get a meaningful signal, it’s guaranteed they will be made using AI.
It becomes apparent really fast which students just delegated the work to AI.
Of course it’s also much more effort for the instructor.
> Whatever your conception of the modern university, whether grand or grim, understanding the current landscape of campus-wide AI use, much less its intensification, should destroy it.
For me when I teach, no laptops or phones in class along with in-class handwritten paper quizzes on course readings and concepts has helped a lot.
Ouch.
https://pistolas.co.uk/work-that-need-not-be/
I hadn’t thought of this. Every school district and university tied into centralized AI inherently undermined its ability to decide how its kids are to be taught.
Schools will adapt, as they have already, by weighing grading more towards in-class quizzes and tests . I think the humanities will continue to struggle, but I see the AI boom making STEM more relevant, even if AI can automate a lot of code or math.
More precisely, the people motivated enough to actually do the online MIT version were often already on a high-performance trajectory, and for the people who were not, few people took the online credential seriously, despite whatever skills they acquired.
Logic 101 changed the clarity of my thinking markedly.
They are vouching for the intelligence, knowledge acquisition and work ethic of their graduates. If they lose that signal, they lose the ability to gate keep prestige and status.
I'm not sure if an ivy league education proves anything anymore other than that you're connected.
The piece discusses blue book tests where students were still cheating with their phones providing AI responses
That's telling in and of itself.
Because my student path is non-linear (vs just following a life script), I may be a bit weird / not the average student, but it's especially true for me that I'm very intentional about actually learning the things I sign up for classes to learn.
My point is that I'm not taking classes just for the motions or to create slop. With that context, here is how AI helped me very specifically in a recent linear algebra course:
1. I was able to prompt very specific questions, usually audits of my work, in ways that provided responses that were more like a socratic tutor and not a cheating parter. In this way I did not need to bother my professor as much or seek out a tutor, when I was stuck. But I also didnt shortcut my way to answers. I was intentionally limiting the AI assistance to finding small errors or jogging my memory about steps missed or next steps.
2. I vibe coded a note taking web application (started as a chrome plugin for notion) so that I could shortcode and pick math symbols while my other arm was full holding my newborn (yes I'm a dad too). This has since evolved into a full-on science writing platform that I love whether or not anyone else ever uses it (though I am trying to turn it into a business). Maybe I actually ended up adding more work to my math class but it added a layer to the learning (what math symbols are needed, what are typical patterns for this subject, etc) that I think helped with my overall absorbtion of the subject.
I dont know if #2 is transposable to other students or to other subjects but I imagine there is some version of a double major yet to be created that is Core Subject + "how to properly use AI to learn (including vibe coding tools to help yourself and other students)".
There are many other smaller ways AI can be used to help learning (flash cards, generated quizzes, etc) that are oft mentioned but that articles like this gloss over.
Having said that, I loved reading this (so well written it could not be AI despite the emdashes), and especially appreciate any mention of "The Whispering Earring", which is one of my spinning tops to remind me to remain vigilant of my cognitive health despite my almost complete embrace of AI.
I don't regret getting my degree (back in 2009), but I think requiring a person to have one is a dumb job requirement.
Frankly, we shouldn't have so many people going to university in the first place. There's a lot of people it's just utterly wasted on, and it drags down the entire apparatus as a result. In a sane society we'd have much more apprenticeships, vocational training, etc.
With rampant AI cheating it's no longer a guarantee of any of those.
You can cheat as much as you want on homework, but it won't help you on supervised written tests. At some point you have to sit down, unaided, and show that you can solve the problems yourself. So I do not see how AI substantially weakens the signaling value of a degree, at least in systems where the degree is backed by in-person written assessment. It may make take-home coursework less meaningful, but that was already the weakest part of the signal.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
My university CS program didn't even teach programming in any of the major classes, it was assumed you'd learn on your own or by doing one of the optional workshops.
There's a lot of stuff taught in academic CS that you simply won't learn on the job, or if you do, it won't be as rigorous and you'll be missing the fundamentals.
The mandatory "practical" courses were often much worse. For example, I studied relational algebra on my own, plus a few chapters from Kleppmann's Data-Intensive Applications book, and it was painful to realise how shallow it made the mandatory database course look.
I agree that CS should not be mere job training. I think many CS programs are neither rigorous enough to feel like math/science and prepare you for proper academic work, nor practical enough to be good vocational training. They sit in a bad middle ground, where academics teach industry-lite.
In this world, what are the benefits of a humanist education? The only reason we care so much about education is that it's how to determine merit in meritocratic societies, and therefore a key part in how people gain social status. In a world where AI does all the knowledge work and robots do all the physical work, with an 'elect few' owning everything and everyone else in a 'permanent underclass', why do the elect few even need to keep the permanent underclass alive?
The other problem of course is attention span due to social-media erosion.
The big tech has really done a number on society already and they’re just getting started.
There are problems: Having students attend lectures is great but they have to work with the material and prove they understand it - how to do that without homework? I'm sure there are ways. Have them work in a building full of computers cut-off from the internet maybe, but how to keep them from using their phones?
Another option is just severe comprehensive testing in heavily inviglated rooms long after they finished the class involving the material to prove they know it. Perhaps you could do this for the first few years of knowledge in a discipline and then assume the student actually is serious and take the leash off after they passed the tests. I know some disciplines already do this kind of thing, even before AI. Basically everyone has to pass a bar-exam type thing, even if they're studying art - but things like art can't really be condensed into an exam and it would certainly restrict and narrow what can be taught and learned, that's a big problem in my mind. Also what if there are new ideas in the study of physics and they can't really be taught because the exam is too difficult to change quickly? What if there's a big split in the philosophy of buisness, but the exam only asks about one side of the split? What if you have an ingenious professor who wishes to talk about a new branch of philosophy he's created - not on the exam though.
Edit: I guess if professors designed their own exams, instead of some distant exam-comittee it would alleviate most of my concerns about them.
Actually, give them internet why not. But they have to use a 56k modem. Mwhaaha
Tests. Many of my university courses only graded on tests. They strongly encouraged you to do the homework to better understand the material, but didn't consider homework completion when calculating your grade.
Consider that universities are educating adults who are -often- paying to be there. If we assume competent course design and instruction, if an adult chooses to not work on the material until they understand it, then the only person they're harming is themselves... which -as an adult- is a thing that they're usually fully entitled to do.
The part that is more difficult is take-home work, and I think the solution is that instead of being something that you turn in for credit, it needs to move to being more of a chance to practice for in-person exams.
What about essays? I've taught classes where students had to write essays in class, in person. On paper, with a pen (this may no longer be allowed on many campuses because of access and perceived fairness reasons, which IMO is a shame, but it is what it is). I think the traditional assignment of "write a 15 page paper on XYZ" is probably done. Instead students will have to prepare to write an essay in class by reading the source material (books, papers, etc) and converse with AIs that are hopefully not hallucinating, to get an understanding of the material and then come to class and be prepared to write about it.
It's a new world, but one we can adapt to.
The only thing that mattered were the exams, be it pen and paper or coding/electronics labs, in person and proctored. No matter how much slop I could have access to back in the day I would have failed the same subjects I did.
One option… They can do homework just test them every week in class. Homework doesn’t count for grade anymore. But test questions based upon homework.
Another… kids do reading at home in textbook, then work together in class to finish. Adjust hours accordingly.
There’s a very interesting problem space here though, to “disrupt” education by going back in time and applying a modern spin on education.
Like we'd been doing for literally hundreds of years.
The reason it doesn't happen for the rest of the system is scaling. The US awards about 60k PhDs per year, compared to about 2M bachelors. There simply are not enough faculty and it is not realistic to hire enough (if there are even enough qualified people in existence)
And that's ignoring all of the problems with "not giving out grades" or "ending credentialism" - I guess people are supposed to just get hired on vibes?
Unfortunately that's way more expensive to do.
I studied maths, and spending time alone trying to solve problems and redoing the proofs from memory was important for my learning.
I don't think I'd have learned as much had those moments been replaced with more in class discussion.
Internship / coop programs at places like Waterloo already look a bit like this.
If we want to teach students to use AI, it should just be a separate course, not shoving it in every possible nook and cranny to the point it is teacher AI talking with student AI with light supervision from both AI handlers
Modern education is like that, even before AI. Check this https://www.jstor.org/stable/25006902
Evidence of people complaining about a thing isn’t evidence of the thing per se.
Higher education needs reform more intensive than a simple defense against LLMs (as does the legal system and profession, as does the software engineering field, as does the field of psychology/psychiatry, as does-).
And, anyway, the point the article is trying to make is obvious. What's absolutely not obvious, and what it sheds very little light on, is what the University is going to look like in 10 years. Not what it should look like, but what it is most likely to look like.
Mostly like they look like now, probably. With slightly more strictly enforced rules around exam.
I fail to see why it won't be like that.
I'm confident this is human.
Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.
Without defending the quality of the rest of the essay, it's a great start. LLMs today could never match it.
Will Universities still be centers of knowledge and exploration? or will that be more disseminated through society, and so Universities not so important?
What courses will exist? Are those vastly different from today's courses?
Computer-assisted instruction been amazing unsuccessful. Why is that?