Rampant AI cheating is ruining education alarmingly fast
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/art...eating-education-college-students-school.html
EXCERPTS: . . . After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI.
[...] while professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. ... There are, of course, plenty of simple ways to fool both professors and detectors...
The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.)
In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”
[...] Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills... (MORE - details)
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/art...eating-education-college-students-school.html
EXCERPTS: . . . After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI.
[...] while professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. ... There are, of course, plenty of simple ways to fool both professors and detectors...
The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.)
In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”
[...] Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills... (MORE - details)
- OBLIGATORY COMMENT: If going by this... Apparently higher education doesn't even need the threat of Elon Musk praising acquisition and demonstration of practical skills over academic certificates. AI alone seems to have assumed the role of an adequate wrecking ball.
At first glance, this outputting of college graduates who actually lack writing and thinking skills would seem to primarily affect the future of the humanities. But the sciences require papers to be written after research, and using AI for that is fraught with errors, rejections, and retractions.
The "difficult to employ" members of such a pseudo-educated population group may (afterwards) ironically have to turn to training in vocational-technical schools to remedy their struggling life situation.
The potential collapse of the humanities (already under duress) could even be a "back to roots" revitalization for the political Left. Many of the intellectuals of old were self-taught members of the proletariat (see Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life). They arguably had a very different set of preoccupations and social justice fetishes back then than the insulated, formally educated scholars of today -- i.e., those autodidactic ancestors were primarily focused on their own special interests and inequities rather than late hours spent pondering the delicate hardships and sensitivities of fringe communities.
Of course, a key problem with such vintage nostalgia is that much of the working class of today is enamored with Trump's brand of populism, rather than the collectivism [and progressivism alternative] of yesterday. So from the Left and Left-Center's standpoint, if the pseudo-educated generation wrought by AI does eventually have to fall back on blue collar, technical, and agrarian careers... Hopefully their numbers will not swell the ranks of MAGA, as a side-effect.
That's where the "cultural ignorance" referenced above might loom. Though it's pretty difficult to picture the family momentum of Mom and Pop's allegiance to the pursuit of socioeconomic utopia just being forgotten or cast aside so easily.
