[FrojoS]

Every PhD program I'm aware of has a final hurdle known as the defence. You have to present your thesis while standing in front of a committee, and often the local community and public. They will asks questions and too many "I don't know" or false answers would make you fail. So, there is already a system in place that should stop Bob from graduating if he indeed learned much less than Alice. A similar argument can be made for conference publications. If Bob publishes his first year project at a conference but doesn't actually understand "his own work" it will show.

The difficulty of passing the defence vary's wildly between Universities, departments and committees. Some are very serious affairs with a decent chance of failure while others are more of a show event for friends and family. Mine was more of the latter, but I doubt I would have passed that day if I had spend the previous years prompting instead of doing the grunt work.

[ipaddr]

In the future the llms can answer those questions for you by listening and feeding you answers into your headset.

The process you describe is a gate keeping exercise which will change to include llm judges at somepoint.

[FrojoS]

That would be cheating. If the exam is 'gate keeping', I will say that it is a gate worth keeping.

To be clear, I am not against alternative forms of education. Degrees are optional. But if you want a degree, there have to be exams and cheating has to be prevented.