[BinRoo]

> In the AI era...

Back in my day, you could also just Google the problems and find the solutions. What mitigated cheating at UVA was the honor code and each professor's faith and trust in our integrity. That culture was enough to not cheat.

Imo, the fix should be to work on culture. Cheating should always be a tempting choice, so that the student may challenge their integrity, which is a muscle that can atrophy.

[Aurornis]

> What mitigated cheating at UVA was the honor code and each professor's faith and trust in our integrity. That culture was enough to not cheat.

The decline of actual consequences for cheating has played a big role.

When I was in college, people who got caught cheating found themselves in a world of trouble. Repeat offenders faced severe consequences like failing courses, which could delay their graduation date if it was a critical-path course. This has a real dollar amount attached to it because you start working later.

Now it seems universities avoid addressing cheating problems at all costs. The professor in this article complains about how hard it was to draw attention to the cheating problem, with no response within his own department.

Students know this. As cheating gains critical mass and you see that nothing bad is happening to the cheaters, you start feeling like you're at risk of falling behind if you aren't cheating. The cheaters are getting higher grades (100% for many in this case) and they get to go out partying while you're still working through the material. You're really screwed if grades are distributed on a curve.

So temptation spreads. Anecdotally, I've seen a few young people lie to themselves and think that they're just going to use ChatGPT to check their answers and learn from it, but they don't realize how superficial it is to have ChatGPT fix your problem and then skim the correct answer. They put less effort into checking their work because they know they have a button to push to check it for them. When they get put into a situation where they can't rely on that button, it all falls apart

[bradleyjg]

> Imo, the fix should be to work on culture.

We can’t even agree on what’s wrong with it. We aren’t going to be able to fix it.

[willis936]

Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life. The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement. If you want the honor system back then you need to offer more stable safety nets. It's not "kids these days", it's the natural result of the systems adults have made.

[nerdsniper]

> Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life.

Yes it was. This was the pitch for as long as Google has existed. The only relevant change from the early days of Google is that now you also need to go to a T20 school and GPA inflation has gone completely insane.

[nekusar]

Exactly.

College is a pure financial transaction, and a quite bad one especially if you fail.

As for me, I use a HDMI redirect to another computer that runs a local LLM. Screen scrapes and puts the answer on the screen as an overlay.

And you can run it in proxmox. I sell services to set this up. Can't be detected, and user controls an error rate calc.

BTW, I have no degree myself. And I have no greater ioy than devaluing everyone's degrees. Its always been a fucking rick kids game. Time to take em down a notch .

[npstr]

Seems easy to counter all of this. I study at a German remote university, and they require, next to the front camera, a second camera to record the screen + hands and arms of the student while taking exams, and before the exam starts a complete video of the room, below desk areas, ears, etc. I don't see an angle how to reliably cheat in such conditions, and have seen nothing mentioned by any other student. So I would say it's up to the university if they want to allow fraud like that...they could easily stop it.

[Gigachad]

The world is getting more competitive. Integrity goes out the window when cheating in a test can mean meaningful better life outcomes and when you believe everyone else will be too.

[odyssey7]

The thing about the community of trust—of which all stewards—is that camaraderie, respect, identifying with the community, and integrity will keep the majority of students from cheating. And if that isn’t enough, the “single sanction” was historically a sufficient danger to raise the stakes immensely.

However, some students will cheat, and for that reason, I am very much against curves. If you learn the material and demonstrate that you have, you should get the A. But it’s more work for professors to calibrate their curriculums, and there seems to be no real accountability for the inverse of learning objectives—teaching objectives—so curves are likely here to stay.