the professor has all the power in the classroom. If you don't want cheating, define better conditions for the exam. You allowed a take-home exam which means students are able to use any and all resources.
carljungslabtek · 2026-06-28 18:24:33 UTC
The thought of a closed book take home exam really made me laugh. They also mentioned Princeton hasn’t had professors in the room for exams since the 1890s… They just have a code of honor and rely on other students to report cheaters??
Ivy league is such a scam, in so many different ways.
jimbooonooo · 2026-06-29 01:48:15 UTC
how is expecting integrity a scam?
rsfern · 2026-06-28 18:33:40 UTC
> You allowed a take-home exam which means students are able to use any and all resources.
It was a closed-book exam. The professor shouldn’t have to hold students’ hands for them to act with integrity, they are all adults.
In this particular class, the professor made the final exam in-person, and didn’t count the take-home midterm because the score distribution wasn’t consistent between the two exams. I think that’s a reasonable approach, but it’s kind of sad that it was necessary
revolvingthrow · 2026-06-28 19:46:41 UTC
When the highest offices of the land are packed to the gills with liars and grifters and anyone with a brain can observe there’s no downside to such behavior, "just be honest" rings rather hollow
rsfern · 2026-06-28 20:09:12 UTC
Maybe I have too optimistic a mindset, but “just be honest” in academia isn’t about being a rule-follower, it’s about not short-changing yourself by coasting though on autopilot instead of learning to think and solve problems for yourself.
Whether that really matters if your goal is to climb the social ladder and have power and influence, I don’t know.
profmonocle · 2026-06-28 22:44:23 UTC
Replace "climb the social ladder and have power and influence" with "be able to afford a home, have kids, and go on vacation occasionally."
It's become very difficult to have even a middle class lifestyle without a college degree. Obviously a huge percentage of people there don't want to be.
bigstrat2003 · 2026-06-28 20:33:15 UTC
Not really. I'm not responsible for how others behave; I'm responsible for how I behave. I don't like the rampant immoral behavior in society any more than you, but I still hold myself to a higher standard of behavior and others should too.
vlod · 2026-06-28 21:50:55 UTC
This comment irked me. Yes others do it.
I've noticed more and more that people lie to me and I call them out immediately (aggressively, as if they've just spat in my face) and they just don't care.
Does "my word is my bond" not have meaning any more?
hackermailman · 2026-06-28 17:21:32 UTC
They're going to have change everything so use of an AI assistant doesn't matter because once they graduate they're just going to continue using it anyway.
If it's a math for finance course then some kind of model building for the midterm and being marked on the quality of the model or something. If AI becomes so good that it always chooses the best fitting model and requires no numerical optimization then they will have to change the courses to be more like UChicago where it's primarily undergrad directed research but AI assisted.
hgoel · 2026-06-28 17:27:15 UTC
The challenge I think is that students then struggle because they used AI throughout the semester and didn't actually learn. The proper response would be to be strict and fail students that don't perform to a satisfactory level, but this messes with the funding incentives.
You can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. Maybe a student's sincerity should play a larger role in the admission process, maybe with a sharp expense curve such that students judged to be more sincere have to pay less tuition. It is an inherently subjective evaluation though.
Edit: I completely misread your comment. Asking students to build a model is not a finance class anymore.
hackermailman · 2026-06-28 18:00:02 UTC
It's a welfare economics theory course that requires many frameworks with measures where you are maximizing some graphical representation. It also requires assumptions to work and can be visualized in a model where you can see what happens when one of the assumptions doesn't hold.
For example the old and new Berkeley model to study rent control effect on market prices
hgoel · 2026-06-28 18:22:24 UTC
I should've been clearer, I meant AI model. If you're referring to financial models, then yeah, that can be a reasonable direction.
orlp · 2026-06-28 17:33:17 UTC
This is a dumb take. It's like not teaching kids 1 + 1 because a calculator can do it for them.
danny_codes · 2026-06-28 17:46:20 UTC
Why teach kids how to read, they can just take a picture of whatever text they want and have AI say it aloud.
danny_codes · 2026-06-28 17:48:48 UTC
Damn that's crazy. Guess the take home test is dead now.
I never understood this behavior from undergrads though, you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?
thereitgoes456 · 2026-06-28 18:10:16 UTC
Because it's an important aid to getting to a high-paying job in the US, not just a means to learn.
One need only look at the resume filtering process, a once manual bias that has now been codified into algorithmic bias with AI. A degree from a good school boosts your chances immensely, and other facets such as coursework don't matter much.
If you have ever seen someone filter applicant resumes, you will understand instantly. There are too many, you have to filter them somehow and the allure is irresistible.
DANmode · 2026-06-29 01:08:46 UTC
If any hiring managers are reading this: make your directions super specific, or require a cover letter.
stackskipton · 2026-06-28 18:11:53 UTC
>you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?
Because you are viewing the motivation of college wrong for most people. For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities. Ergo, they are just doing whatever required to get said piece of paper with least amount of effort.
Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.
onemoresoop · 2026-06-28 18:51:10 UTC
Sadly this is true. Another take is that if you don’t use AI but everybody outperforms you on exams using AI at some point you’re forced into it as well.
bmitc · 2026-06-28 19:08:04 UTC
That motivation isn't necessarily inherent in the attendees though. That has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.
It's why we're seeing the death of the liberal arts majors. It's sad, because usually the smartest and most creative people I've worked with in the field of engineering and software have been liberal arts majors. But corporations don't want intelligent people. They want people who have been molded to whatever the soup du jour is.
aleph_minus_one · 2026-06-28 19:19:52 UTC
> That [motivation] has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.
I don't think so.
The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universities teach to the students.
If what the universities teach was very important for the job, applicants who have not invested serious effort into getting a deep understanding of the topics of the courses would nearly all fail in the job interviews.
The problem rather is that for many jobs the knowledge that you could have gotten from the university typically does not matter, and thus investing minimal effort into the courses does not get you rejected in a job interview.
Avicebron · 2026-06-28 21:34:23 UTC
If only they could communicate with each other and explain their reasoning.
Corporation A "Hi University, here is what we hire highly paid people to do, and what we need to improve as a company."
University B, "Hi Corp A, here is our educational mandate to create well-rounded, highly educated people, we can probably fit your needs into the curriculum in the last couple of semesters, let's work together to make sure you have good employees and we have people who aren't struggling to pay back loans because they have an engineering degree but can't make more than 50K at a dead end job."
aleph_minus_one · 2026-06-28 22:22:36 UTC
I basically do agree with you. The only problem that I see with your suggestion is that companies often don't know what they actually, really want from their employees.
consensus1 · 2026-06-29 02:48:50 UTC
But in practice the typical situation is that it is perfectly easy to graduate from University B without being well rounded and highly educated, and also you can skate by without actually learning any of the job relevant stuff in the last 2 semesters either.
I'm surprised Corporation A doesn't say "FU, we're just going to hire HS grads with high SAT scores and train them ourselves," but for whatever reason they typically don't.
ghostly_s · 2026-06-28 21:28:21 UTC
> For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities
More true at an Ivy than anywhere else.
> This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools).
If this guy thinks AI is motivating his previously guiless student body to start cheating on these tests, rather than simply changing the way they are cheating, he's been sniffing too many of his own farts.
userbinator · 2026-06-28 21:44:46 UTC
Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.
This is already starting to happen, at least for software engineering positions. There have been plenty of stories of candidates with degrees from prestigious institutions failing to answer the simplest of questions correctly. FizzBuzz is a famous example, but there are many others.
DANmode · 2026-06-28 18:36:04 UTC
They’ve been taught that not having the piece of paper will keep them from having even a menial job,
so you have a huge population of people bullshitting their way through to the piece of paper.
TrackerFF · 2026-06-28 21:00:02 UTC
Because for many a college degree is a pure formality to land a job.
My first job out of college, I worked with veterans at the company who all got in with a HS diploma. Now you realistically need a masters degree to be competitive, for no other reason than that where I live (Norway) most applicants have a 5-year masters degree. It is basically academic inflation.
Here we have a tongue-in-cheek word "Mastersyken" which translates to "Master's illness/disease", a word for the phenomena that too many people are pursuing a master's degree for the sake of the diploma alone, trying to become more attractive in the search for a job, but with the side effect that suddenly "everyone" has a master's degree, and in the end everyone is stuck at the same place as before, but with extra student loans.
The worst part is when you start working, and indeed discover that this is a job you could have done just fine straight out of HS.
musicale · 2026-06-28 21:18:36 UTC
A master's in CS can teach you interesting and very useful things, like how OS kernels, distributed systems, networks, and microprocessors work. A master's in EE will teach you things like signal processing and analog circuit design as well. Knowing these things helps you to design, build, and evaluate systems that are reliable and efficient.
A master's in science helps you understand how the physical world works and how to reason quantitatively as well as qualitatively. A master's in humanities gives you knowledge and understanding of human culture, such as literature and the arts, and history - subjects that can be deeply enriching and can provide insights that transcend disciplines. A master's in social science will teach you about how humans behave in groups and how they interact with their environment, and about statistical analysis.
Writing a master's thesis will also teach you a lot and make you a better writer - if you actually write it yourself and don't rely on AI.
Any of these degrees will certainly qualify you to be a more interesting, knowledgeable, and insightful barista or Uber driver.
alex43578 · 2026-06-28 21:34:03 UTC
There should be no reason you have to jump to a master’s for that. A bachelor’s in CS or EE would be a joke if it didn’t (doesn’t) cover those things. Arguably, even the current 4 year bachelor’s is a waste compared to a focused 2 year program: looking at my college’s requirements, many classes are wasted. Business majors taking a physical science with lab component, entry level English classes being taught by a TA that doesn’t speak English natively, etc.
musicale · 2026-06-28 21:48:41 UTC
I guess it depends on the program, but at my university an undergrad EE major, even though it had more units than any other major, didn't get to the best and most interesting stuff (perhaps because engineering majors also had to learn about things other than engineering, which seems like a pretty good idea.) Personally I wish more CS grads (including many people I worked with) had a better understanding of compilers, programming languages, databases, operating systems, distributed systems, networks, and computer architecture, as well as applications programming and interaction design. It's hard to get all of that while working at a single job, but readily achievable at a university, and an extra year of coursework really helps.
Business majors should take physical science courses with a lab component! How else are they going to learn anything about reality?
But there is no excuse for bad teaching, anywhere (especially given how insanely competitive faculty positions are - even crummy adjunct and lecturer positions.)
Unfortunately research universities prioritize fundraising > research > teaching. And sometimes grad students are selected to teach based on financial need or departmental requirements rather than interest or ability.
RugnirViking · 2026-06-29 09:20:51 UTC
I feel like that's quite an american phenomenon - from the universities I have experience with in Denmark and the UK, a bachelor's program consists of classes entirely focused on the topic of the degree. But then again there is no idea of a "major" and a "minor" or even that many elective classes. We had a single semester where we had a choice of three courses for my batchelors degree, and for my masters similarly a single semester where we had the choice of an entrapreurship course or doing a placement (internship) in industry. all the other semesters (3 year batchelor and 2 year master) were pre-determined classes only, all strictly relevant to the topic of the degree.
gwbas1c · 2026-06-28 21:43:56 UTC
Don't assume that TrackerFF is doing the kind of job that requires higher education.
It's also dangerous to assume that higher education is for everyone. (Although I agree the opportunity needs to be there for anyone who wants to try it.) Some people just want to get on with their life after high school. (I raise my children assuming that they will go to college, and if they want to seek an alternate way through life, I will support it.)
musicale · 2026-06-28 22:21:07 UTC
(Serious answer in spite of the punch line at the end of my parent post which perhaps addresses your first point.) I think it's good for people to be educated, and to have the opportunity when they want it, but it can be self-defeating to force people to be there who don't want to be.
shermantanktop · 2026-06-28 22:35:38 UTC
The grad school inflation in Europe is incredible. People with five degrees who have never worked a real job in their life, looking for work at 35.
musicale · 2026-06-28 21:05:25 UTC
Apparently some students aren't actually interested in learning and view the diploma as a meal ticket rather than a meaningful credential. Or perhaps the university is just seen as a networking opportunity.
If students don't want to be there in the first place and/or don't see any value in learning, it is unsurprising that they'd take the easy way out. Or maybe they cheated their way into Brown and are just continuing.
But I was always interested in learning, and understood that cheating was a method of learning avoidance. Why waste the amazing learning resources - faculty, teaching assistants, courses, labs, libraries, studios, rehearsal spaces, interesting speakers, arts and culture events, computing facilities, maker spaces, etc. - that are available at a place like Brown?
watwut · 2026-06-28 21:23:52 UTC
When it costs a lot of money, the failure itself costs a lot of money. And you cant afford it. Because failure means you paid a lot of money for nothing.
An expensive education comes with higher temptation to cheat.
IshKebab · 2026-06-28 21:46:07 UTC
> then you just skip the education part? Why bother?
You've never put anything off in your life or taken the easy short term route? Come on this is not difficult to understand. You aren't different either.
throawayonthe · 2026-06-28 21:56:19 UTC
i mean, even if you are truly there for learning, doesn't it make sense in a low risk setting to try and boost your grade? it's different if you're cheating on your homework or other learning, but there isn't much learning left to do on the exam, that's for the grade
mrkeen · 2026-06-28 22:02:03 UTC
* I am in the state of not knowing about something
* This is brought to my attention by an exam question
* I have an oracle in the form of a textbook, an LLM, the internet, or all of the above
Which action is skipping the education: looking up the answer, or not looking up the answer?
hidroto · 2026-06-29 01:01:55 UTC
Not understanding the answer.
energy123 · 2026-06-28 23:23:47 UTC
Take home tests were always rife with cheating, although it's probably worse now.
Teachers really need to stop doing it, it's so destructive to create a metric that tracks how well you can cheat and lie, and basically forces you to cheat and lie (because everyone else is) if you want to get a job.
pants2 · 2026-06-28 18:50:22 UTC
When you're a student in a competitive program at a top university, graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same. Especially when jobs for new grads are harder to come by and there's more pressure to also go above and beyond with internships and side projects during your time in school. There's no way to compete without cheating.
mariusor · 2026-06-28 18:55:09 UTC
> you have little choice
I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.
bigstrat2003 · 2026-06-28 20:29:57 UTC
Yep. You always have a choice. If cheating is wrong, it does not become acceptable just because everyone else is doing it.
gedy · 2026-06-28 21:33:45 UTC
Agreed, but it feels like a Pyrrhic victory to not cheat, then get lower scores than the cheaters.
dgellow · 2026-06-28 21:40:31 UTC
Are those exams a contest? Like, they will only take the best N percentiles? Because if not, you’re competing only against yourself and should ignore others’ grades
em-bee · 2026-06-28 22:03:57 UTC
if they are graded on a curve then they are competing against each other.
1270018080 · 2026-06-28 22:24:32 UTC
> Are those exams a contest?
Yes
none2585 · 2026-06-28 22:39:16 UTC
I did not go to an Ivy League but many of my classes at an alright school were graded on a curve and so C was average, B/D was one standard deviation above/below, and A/F was two.
ewild · 2026-06-28 22:49:40 UTC
It's an incredibly privileged Pov to say it isn't a contest. These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.
wrs · 2026-06-28 23:11:37 UTC
Well, not once the scores become meaningless because everyone assumes they cheated.
ndriscoll · 2026-06-28 23:31:17 UTC
Ivy League kids tend to not be facing some extreme economic precarity. In fact a decent number of them likely have enough family wealth to not need to work a day in their lives. The others are unlikely to face too much trouble over a few Bs at Brown.
dgellow · 2026-06-29 07:23:03 UTC
I’m literally asking. I haven’t said it’s not a contest
technothrasher · 2026-06-29 10:52:33 UTC
> These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.
Has that changed since I was in school? After I got my degree, not a single person or entity in the workforce ever asked for my grades. They just wanted to see the degree.
anigbrowl · 2026-06-29 01:30:51 UTC
Yes they are, that's what 'graded on a curve' means. It's common in the US to give students a percentile or Z-score or T-score rather than the raw score for the examination. This was a source of massive frustration to me when I first encountered because I had no way of self-reviewing my exam performance to guess which questions I might have gotten wrong.
rsa4046 · 2026-06-28 19:18:15 UTC
After retiring at 65 from a university teaching and research science career (all pre-AI), I went back to teaching, but this time teaching high school science, mostly AP STEM courses at an A-ranked public high school. The cheating/AI problem is now a crisis greater than COVID. My experience: very few students in advanced and AP classes do not cheat — largely for the reasons given above — and it takes enormous resourcefulness on the teacher's part to design coursework and examinations in which cheating through AI is not an issue. Many teachers I know have all but given up — the cost and effort required to circumvent cheating are simply too great given the already sky-high demands on teachers' time and energy. And school administrations are little help, due to thoughtless and enthusiastic reliance on software at every level. In some ways they are part of the problem. I don't know what the situation is in schools outside the US. But here it had become an arms race.
[Edit: typos]
rawgabbit · 2026-06-28 19:39:42 UTC
Personally I believe AI has made exams and high stakes testing unworkable. Even before AI I would argue teaching to the test made high stakes testing unworkable. How grades are assigned IMO will be more like how employees are evaluated in the workplace: some metrics, some oral exams, some peer feedback, but mostly on what they produced.
rsa4046 · 2026-06-28 20:20:33 UTC
Yes, oral exams, content created in plain sight, project-based activities, all of these can provide a true appraisal of student understanding. But these approaches, although highly rewarding for both student and teacher, are extremely time-consuming. They also run counter to the priorities of the district, which are forever and always: student achievement on standardized tests accomplished with minimal teaching personnel. The only ones benefiting here are the corporations providing and grading the tests. To a large extent it is a sham. More importantly, IRL science is not a multiple choice test. As you state above, whether you work in industry or academia, your value is what you can produce (usually by plain hard work), what problems you can solve, your imagination, creativity, what you can create yourself or with a group. But from what I've seen thus far: AI has little place in education.
bryanlarsen · 2026-06-28 22:46:40 UTC
My daughter just finished her Grade 11 finals in Canada. They were done on locked down school Chromebooks, which should be enough to prevent cheating by all but the most dedicated.
jay_kyburz · 2026-06-29 06:13:52 UTC
On my kids chrome books, the actual AI chatbot websites are blocked, but the kids just ask follow up questions to the AI response in a normal google search.
bryanlarsen · 2026-06-29 13:01:45 UTC
Google itself is a pretty good cheat mechanism, and was so even before they added AI. Not much of a lock down if you can Google something in a Geography exam. I'll have to ask my kids.
spicyusername · 2026-06-29 11:26:37 UTC
You'd be surprised how little those safeguards work.
danjl · 2026-06-28 19:54:36 UTC
The Lance Armstrong defense
watwut · 2026-06-28 21:26:58 UTC
In his generation, only cheating cyclists could stay in teams. He was the one who created the situation, but in fact, cyclists had two choices - stop being cyclist or cheat.
harry8 · 2026-06-29 00:11:30 UTC
You yourself are on drugs if you think Lance Armstrong "created the situation."
Note the quantity that actually got caught and with enough evidence. Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Looking at it systematically there's no way all of the top finishers were not taking drugs (how else could they compete with the world's best who were? The advantage isn't small.) And it had clearly been going on for many years before Armstrong entered the event for the first time.
I really don't care for Armstrong's yellow banded hypocrisy but blaming him for the "cheat or don't bother competing" reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
But I'm sure that's all in the past and it's not like that now. Just as was said when Armstrong won 6 times while correctly stating he was the most tested athlete on the planet.
Wrapping it up and tying all that to Armstrong, as has been done, stinks. He was clearly a bit player in that extensive fraud. Six titles with no meaningful positive drug test as the most tested athlete on the planet.
harry8 · 2026-06-29 00:52:20 UTC
If Armstrong still absolutely makes you want to vomit, that's fine.
He was literal ring leader and innovator of doping. He was also openly forcing others into doping. That is not controversial statement, but result of subsequent reports.
> Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Yes, he was doping for years before being caught. He found novel ways how to do it.
> reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
No it does not. It just guves credit to where it is due. But we also have track record of Lance scapegoating others.
harry8 · 2026-06-29 06:36:35 UTC
Oh do come on.
Bernard Thévenet won in 1975 and has said he was using steroids. Armstrong was 4 years old at the time. We don't know about all the drug cheating at the TdF, just what we do know is damning in ways we can't pin on the vile Armstrong. Do continue to loathe him as much as you like. He's earned that.
Ulrich, Riis, Fignon, Zoetelmelk, we haven't caught them all nor tried 1% as hard as those who got Armstrong did.
Look through the list and try and claim with a straight face that Armstrong was first, led the charge or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
I don't care at all about Armstrong. The sport is clean now despite an ugly past. Just as it was when Armstrong won all those tours. Can I interest you in this bridge at a good price?
Who gets off scot free with the "It was all Armstrong" line.
If Armstrong stayed retired he probably would have gotten away with it, kept lying forcefully and be a secular saint by now. The TdF didn't catch him.
I did not said Armstrong was the first cyclist to dope. I said he made a real innovation in the world of doping. There were computers in 1975, but can you agree with me that several people brought in innovations between then and now? It is the same thing.
Doping existed prior Armstrong, Armstrong revolutionized it and led worsening of the doping situation. His teammates were bullied by him personally to dope. That includes testimonies of people who left for that reason.
> or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
Yes, plenty of them actually wanted to and Americans were acting butthurt. There were regular accusations of French just being jealous, like it is an international offense to suspect and American sportsman could cheat.
harry8 · 2026-06-29 13:26:46 UTC
Oh go on.
Look down that list of winners and the list of top finishers for two decades prior to Armstrong and the amount of doping among them that we actually found about and seriously try to make the case that Armstrong is the reason for "cheat or don't bother showing up."
IncreasePosts · 2026-06-28 23:49:22 UTC
As bill burr said - "our roided up guy beat your roided up guy".
aag · 2026-06-29 00:12:55 UTC
Schools should forbid grading on a curve. MIT does, for example. Standards should be absolute.
JumpCrisscross · 2026-06-29 01:19:51 UTC
> graded on a curve, and you know your fellow classmates are cheating with AI, you have little choice but to do the same
You always have a choice. The right move, in this case, is to raise a stink to administration, donors and politicians. Hell, use AI to do it. Schools refusing to punish teaching is a problem that’s leaking into business and politics.
zaptheimpaler · 2026-06-29 03:20:53 UTC
This is bullshit and basically this kind of justification is part of the moral and ethical rot of most institutions in the US now. You do have a choice, you just want to pretend you don't to get away with it. Besides, no one outside of a few stuffy finance/quant shops ever even asked what my GPA was in college, they don't care.
boelboel · 2026-06-29 12:35:34 UTC
Haven't you heard if you don't get one of these jobs and get a tc of 500k+ you're destined to the permanent underclass. So cheating is the answer.
lotsofpulp · 2026-06-29 12:53:09 UTC
Technically, that has been the case. You are either in an economically booming area, or an economically declining area. Even for those in the booming areas, the kids have to compete with a much wider pool of talent to be able to buy land for themselves to stay there.
yubblegum · 2026-06-29 12:48:47 UTC
I wonder if for certain fields, like finance, that itself would be a positive signal for the corporation that actually would prefer workers with quite flexible ethics and mores who are focused on "the bottom line"..
michaelfm1211 · 2026-06-28 19:02:03 UTC
The problem isn't AI, it's that you gave a take-home exam expected no one to cheat.
dgellow · 2026-06-28 21:43:12 UTC
AI enables a completely different level of cheating than any prior method. It’s more accessible, better at cheating, faster
xp84 · 2026-06-28 22:52:14 UTC
For real. Sneaking peeks at the textbook is "good" cheating, in that you're still doing a form of learning. Having LLM write your paper is just a waste of everyone's time.
throwawaypath · 2026-06-28 19:27:43 UTC
Administration needs to eschew "technology" and demand analog solutions: hand written exams in proctored rooms, no devices out in the classroom, no take home work, etc.
FloorEgg · 2026-06-28 21:16:13 UTC
Ensuring integrity definitely requires in person proctored exam centers. It does not require hand written exams.
Hand written exams are either very labor intensive to grade or are confined to multiple choice, so either inflationary to cost of education or inauthentic / inaccurate representation of most knowledge and skills.
The best answer, which enables authentic meaningful high integrity assessment that is also unit cost efficient is to have testing center facilities with institution supplied devices and well trained proctors.
This way instructors can assess students in ways that are relevant and authentic to the subject matter while ensuring the assessments are accurate, consistent, fair and actually reflect the students abilities.
nitwit005 · 2026-06-28 19:35:04 UTC
These articles consistently fail to acknowledge students were cheating in large numbers prior to these AI tools being available.
It was certainly not difficult to cheat at a "closed book" take home exam before.
dgellow · 2026-06-28 21:41:52 UTC
Different magnitude of cheating altogether
nitwit005 · 2026-06-28 21:57:08 UTC
I was in a class where around 12% of the class got caught directly copying a journal assignment. I'm sure more went undetected. AI has made it easier, but it's in the same magnitude.
Edit: typo
Diogenesian · 2026-06-28 22:31:05 UTC
Hmm I think one part every commenter is missing is that students have grown way more mercenary and cynical over the last 20 years. I was shocked in grad school that:
a) I got bullied into sharing my math homework so people could copy it, just like high school and college... but this was math grad school!
b) In 2011 I TAed a 4000-level course where the instructor left the solutions to the homework online (he wrote the book). I estimate 95% of students copied the solutions. It was only 5% of the grade and they paid for it on the exams. Still. Kind of stunning to see at U Waterloo - it was a continuous optimization course and most of them wanted to work in finance, yikes.
zer00eyz · 2026-06-28 22:40:09 UTC
We're talking about Brown students here.
Im going to guess that it is a safe bet that the 50 cheaters are all legacy enrollments.
1/2 of the graduating class is there for the education, the other half is there because the parents are keeping up the network.
anonbruno · 2026-06-29 00:40:32 UTC
I would not agree with this from my own experience. The truth is the culture, at least at Brown in the 2020s, has little stigma around cheating in big classes. Unclear how different this is in the past, but a friend and I often joke that the student body is very good at reward hacking. If there's a reward, people will find a way to get it! That's across grades (people will cheat), housing (a huge % people will competitively apply for specialty housing or accommodations to beat the lottery), and a whole lot of other things. I don't think this is correlated with legacy, athletics, ect. but an artifact of the current culture unfortunately.
Comments
Ivy league is such a scam, in so many different ways.
It was a closed-book exam. The professor shouldn’t have to hold students’ hands for them to act with integrity, they are all adults.
In this particular class, the professor made the final exam in-person, and didn’t count the take-home midterm because the score distribution wasn’t consistent between the two exams. I think that’s a reasonable approach, but it’s kind of sad that it was necessary
Whether that really matters if your goal is to climb the social ladder and have power and influence, I don’t know.
It's become very difficult to have even a middle class lifestyle without a college degree. Obviously a huge percentage of people there don't want to be.
I've noticed more and more that people lie to me and I call them out immediately (aggressively, as if they've just spat in my face) and they just don't care.
Does "my word is my bond" not have meaning any more?
If it's a math for finance course then some kind of model building for the midterm and being marked on the quality of the model or something. If AI becomes so good that it always chooses the best fitting model and requires no numerical optimization then they will have to change the courses to be more like UChicago where it's primarily undergrad directed research but AI assisted.
You can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. Maybe a student's sincerity should play a larger role in the admission process, maybe with a sharp expense curve such that students judged to be more sincere have to pay less tuition. It is an inherently subjective evaluation though.
Edit: I completely misread your comment. Asking students to build a model is not a finance class anymore.
For example the old and new Berkeley model to study rent control effect on market prices
I never understood this behavior from undergrads though, you're paying so much for an education and then you just skip the education part? Why bother?
One need only look at the resume filtering process, a once manual bias that has now been codified into algorithmic bias with AI. A degree from a good school boosts your chances immensely, and other facets such as coursework don't matter much.
If you have ever seen someone filter applicant resumes, you will understand instantly. There are too many, you have to filter them somehow and the allure is irresistible.
Because you are viewing the motivation of college wrong for most people. For most people, the purpose of college is to get piece of paper that will open up higher salary opportunities. Ergo, they are just doing whatever required to get said piece of paper with least amount of effort.
Until degrees, in particular, degrees from well-regarded universities stop being that method, this behavior will continue.
It's why we're seeing the death of the liberal arts majors. It's sad, because usually the smartest and most creative people I've worked with in the field of engineering and software have been liberal arts majors. But corporations don't want intelligent people. They want people who have been molded to whatever the soup du jour is.
I don't think so.
The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universities teach to the students.
If what the universities teach was very important for the job, applicants who have not invested serious effort into getting a deep understanding of the topics of the courses would nearly all fail in the job interviews.
The problem rather is that for many jobs the knowledge that you could have gotten from the university typically does not matter, and thus investing minimal effort into the courses does not get you rejected in a job interview.
Corporation A "Hi University, here is what we hire highly paid people to do, and what we need to improve as a company."
University B, "Hi Corp A, here is our educational mandate to create well-rounded, highly educated people, we can probably fit your needs into the curriculum in the last couple of semesters, let's work together to make sure you have good employees and we have people who aren't struggling to pay back loans because they have an engineering degree but can't make more than 50K at a dead end job."
I'm surprised Corporation A doesn't say "FU, we're just going to hire HS grads with high SAT scores and train them ourselves," but for whatever reason they typically don't.
More true at an Ivy than anywhere else.
> This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools).
If this guy thinks AI is motivating his previously guiless student body to start cheating on these tests, rather than simply changing the way they are cheating, he's been sniffing too many of his own farts.
This is already starting to happen, at least for software engineering positions. There have been plenty of stories of candidates with degrees from prestigious institutions failing to answer the simplest of questions correctly. FizzBuzz is a famous example, but there are many others.
so you have a huge population of people bullshitting their way through to the piece of paper.
My first job out of college, I worked with veterans at the company who all got in with a HS diploma. Now you realistically need a masters degree to be competitive, for no other reason than that where I live (Norway) most applicants have a 5-year masters degree. It is basically academic inflation.
Here we have a tongue-in-cheek word "Mastersyken" which translates to "Master's illness/disease", a word for the phenomena that too many people are pursuing a master's degree for the sake of the diploma alone, trying to become more attractive in the search for a job, but with the side effect that suddenly "everyone" has a master's degree, and in the end everyone is stuck at the same place as before, but with extra student loans.
The worst part is when you start working, and indeed discover that this is a job you could have done just fine straight out of HS.
A master's in science helps you understand how the physical world works and how to reason quantitatively as well as qualitatively. A master's in humanities gives you knowledge and understanding of human culture, such as literature and the arts, and history - subjects that can be deeply enriching and can provide insights that transcend disciplines. A master's in social science will teach you about how humans behave in groups and how they interact with their environment, and about statistical analysis.
Writing a master's thesis will also teach you a lot and make you a better writer - if you actually write it yourself and don't rely on AI.
Any of these degrees will certainly qualify you to be a more interesting, knowledgeable, and insightful barista or Uber driver.
Business majors should take physical science courses with a lab component! How else are they going to learn anything about reality?
But there is no excuse for bad teaching, anywhere (especially given how insanely competitive faculty positions are - even crummy adjunct and lecturer positions.)
Unfortunately research universities prioritize fundraising > research > teaching. And sometimes grad students are selected to teach based on financial need or departmental requirements rather than interest or ability.
It's also dangerous to assume that higher education is for everyone. (Although I agree the opportunity needs to be there for anyone who wants to try it.) Some people just want to get on with their life after high school. (I raise my children assuming that they will go to college, and if they want to seek an alternate way through life, I will support it.)
If students don't want to be there in the first place and/or don't see any value in learning, it is unsurprising that they'd take the easy way out. Or maybe they cheated their way into Brown and are just continuing.
But I was always interested in learning, and understood that cheating was a method of learning avoidance. Why waste the amazing learning resources - faculty, teaching assistants, courses, labs, libraries, studios, rehearsal spaces, interesting speakers, arts and culture events, computing facilities, maker spaces, etc. - that are available at a place like Brown?
An expensive education comes with higher temptation to cheat.
You've never put anything off in your life or taken the easy short term route? Come on this is not difficult to understand. You aren't different either.
* This is brought to my attention by an exam question
* I have an oracle in the form of a textbook, an LLM, the internet, or all of the above
Which action is skipping the education: looking up the answer, or not looking up the answer?
Teachers really need to stop doing it, it's so destructive to create a metric that tracks how well you can cheat and lie, and basically forces you to cheat and lie (because everyone else is) if you want to get a job.
I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.
Yes
Has that changed since I was in school? After I got my degree, not a single person or entity in the workforce ever asked for my grades. They just wanted to see the degree.
[Edit: typos]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#D...
Note the quantity that actually got caught and with enough evidence. Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Looking at it systematically there's no way all of the top finishers were not taking drugs (how else could they compete with the world's best who were? The advantage isn't small.) And it had clearly been going on for many years before Armstrong entered the event for the first time.
I really don't care for Armstrong's yellow banded hypocrisy but blaming him for the "cheat or don't bother competing" reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
But I'm sure that's all in the past and it's not like that now. Just as was said when Armstrong won 6 times while correctly stating he was the most tested athlete on the planet.
Wrapping it up and tying all that to Armstrong, as has been done, stinks. He was clearly a bit player in that extensive fraud. Six titles with no meaningful positive drug test as the most tested athlete on the planet.
https://quotefancy.com/media/wallpaper/3840x2160/2503086-Lan...
> Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Yes, he was doping for years before being caught. He found novel ways how to do it.
> reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
No it does not. It just guves credit to where it is due. But we also have track record of Lance scapegoating others.
Bernard Thévenet won in 1975 and has said he was using steroids. Armstrong was 4 years old at the time. We don't know about all the drug cheating at the TdF, just what we do know is damning in ways we can't pin on the vile Armstrong. Do continue to loathe him as much as you like. He's earned that.
Ulrich, Riis, Fignon, Zoetelmelk, we haven't caught them all nor tried 1% as hard as those who got Armstrong did.
Look through the list and try and claim with a straight face that Armstrong was first, led the charge or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
I don't care at all about Armstrong. The sport is clean now despite an ugly past. Just as it was when Armstrong won all those tours. Can I interest you in this bridge at a good price?
Who gets off scot free with the "It was all Armstrong" line.
If Armstrong stayed retired he probably would have gotten away with it, kept lying forcefully and be a secular saint by now. The TdF didn't catch him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#S...
Doping existed prior Armstrong, Armstrong revolutionized it and led worsening of the doping situation. His teammates were bullied by him personally to dope. That includes testimonies of people who left for that reason.
> or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
Yes, plenty of them actually wanted to and Americans were acting butthurt. There were regular accusations of French just being jealous, like it is an international offense to suspect and American sportsman could cheat.
Look down that list of winners and the list of top finishers for two decades prior to Armstrong and the amount of doping among them that we actually found about and seriously try to make the case that Armstrong is the reason for "cheat or don't bother showing up."
You always have a choice. The right move, in this case, is to raise a stink to administration, donors and politicians. Hell, use AI to do it. Schools refusing to punish teaching is a problem that’s leaking into business and politics.
Hand written exams are either very labor intensive to grade or are confined to multiple choice, so either inflationary to cost of education or inauthentic / inaccurate representation of most knowledge and skills.
The best answer, which enables authentic meaningful high integrity assessment that is also unit cost efficient is to have testing center facilities with institution supplied devices and well trained proctors.
This way instructors can assess students in ways that are relevant and authentic to the subject matter while ensuring the assessments are accurate, consistent, fair and actually reflect the students abilities.
It was certainly not difficult to cheat at a "closed book" take home exam before.
Edit: typo
a) I got bullied into sharing my math homework so people could copy it, just like high school and college... but this was math grad school!
b) In 2011 I TAed a 4000-level course where the instructor left the solutions to the homework online (he wrote the book). I estimate 95% of students copied the solutions. It was only 5% of the grade and they paid for it on the exams. Still. Kind of stunning to see at U Waterloo - it was a continuous optimization course and most of them wanted to work in finance, yikes.
Im going to guess that it is a safe bet that the 50 cheaters are all legacy enrollments.
1/2 of the graduating class is there for the education, the other half is there because the parents are keeping up the network.