[pants2]

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.

[rsa4046]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[mariusor]

> you have little choice

I personally disagree with that very hard. Deontology begins at home.

[bigstrat2003]

Yep. You always have a choice. If cheating is wrong, it does not become acceptable just because everyone else is doing it.

[gedy]

Agreed, but it feels like a Pyrrhic victory to not cheat, then get lower scores than the cheaters.

[dgellow]

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

[ewild]

It's an incredibly privileged Pov to say it isn't a contest. These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.

[ndriscoll]

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.

[wrs]

Well, not once the scores become meaningless because everyone assumes they cheated.

[none2585]

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.

[em-bee]

if they are graded on a curve then they are competing against each other.

[1270018080]

> Are those exams a contest?

Yes

[aag]

Schools should forbid grading on a curve. MIT does, for example. Standards should be absolute.

[danjl]

The Lance Armstrong defense

[IncreasePosts]

As bill burr said - "our roided up guy beat your roided up guy".

[watwut]

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]

You yourself are on drugs if you think Lance Armstrong "created the situation."

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.