[jstanley]

> Students who intend to cheat by using an LLM to write their essays are entirely capable of learning "there's some secret data hidden in the text so copy-paste it through this other site to strip that out before turning it in"

In fact there is precedent for this. When I was at school a lot of kids would start writing an essay by copy and pasting the most relevant Wikipedia article into Microsoft Word, and then edit it to sound different, but this resulted in a subtle light-blue background being inserted into the resulting printed page, which made it very obvious that they had copied from Wikipedia. They quickly learnt that they had to paste it through Notepad or similar first to get rid of the background colour.

[adhesive_wombat]

Has anyone ever actually wanted paste from an HTML source into a word processor to drag all the random formatting along for the ride? I still don't understand why that is the default. I see about an email per day with mismatched styles because people are pasting from various documents, each with their own slightly different formatting. No one really cares, presumably, but it's ugly. Give me plain text any day (except as the company logo is inserted as an image, it's verboten by the server now).

It's usually Ctrl-Shift-V to not include formatting (or get a menu of options, of which that's one), by the way.

[namrog84]

I stand by default should be unformatted and preserving formatted should be special ctrl shift v case.

[abdusco]

I like it when Excel parses and recreates a HTML table into a spreadsheet. You could possibly paste it as text and split to columns, but I doubt it would work as well.

[adhesive_wombat]

It still does that, just without formatting, with Ctrl-Shift-V. Or at least LibreOffice Calc does.

[roygbiv2]

Microsoft teams will happily copy the name and time of the person that sent you a message, even though you didn't highlight it. Thanks Microsoft!

[eviks]

Yes, for quotes you'll want to preserve all the bold and italic and other non-random formatting

[PaulHoule]

Reminds me of the time I was in college and a friend of mine in CS 101 wanted my help in stealing somebody else's programming assignment. We had no trouble stealing one from an account which had open permissions but the program had bugs and we had to fix it.

I could hardly comprehend, at that time, how much this was preparation for a career in software development.

[wddkcs]

Isn't that the key take away? Legal plagiarism is rampant in the corporate world. Trying to root it out at the university level now that LLMs have trivialized content stealing seems like a waste of time.

[alexanderh]

This is so very true.... Academia has not fully adapted to the reality of the world now with the internet and AI, and the reality of real world use cases, work environments and human nature in relationship to it.

We're still in the early stages of it, but AI is and will continue to force us to re-explore our relationships with work, productivity, authenticity and what really matters to us about the "human element" in anything.

[cosmojg]

At least as far as a career in software engineering goes in the United States, the field moves so fast and is so thoroughly differentiated that it seems like it might make more sense from both the student's and the employer's perspective to replace the current university-to-job pipeline with an apprenticeship program of sorts. Given the emphasis placed on internships in college Computer Science programs, this seems to already be implicitly understood and inefficiently implemented on some level.

Come to think of it, the current socioeconomic equilibrium where students take out loans (or pull on their parents' purse strings) to fund their own education to provide more value to future employers than they ultimately get back seems woefully inefficient, not just for software engineering, but for most academic and industrial fields more generally.

Why not run application cycles or even scout students directly out of high school and enroll them in professional programs run by the organizations themselves in exchange for some number of months or years of discounted labor? Obviously, this isn't happening because it transfers risk from individuals to organizations, but it also seems obvious that, were it subsidized or enforced in some way (insurance?), it might lead to better, more equitable outcomes.

Has anyone else had similar thoughts? Or thoughts to the contrary?

[theyinwhy]

Universities are not meant as incubators for office bees. They are meant to allow yourself being curious in whatever field you signed up for. They are meant to be places for critical discussions. In some countries that's working fine. In others, not so much. Anyways, universities are not schools.