“I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats | The Walrus”
https://thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-teach-students-now-i-catch-chatgpt-cheats
> One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all.
@baldur Given how much most employers treat a college degree as a mere gatekeeping checkbox to tick I can't really blame them for wanting to invest as little effort as possible... I am seriously disappointed at the lack of creativity on display though; They seem to half-ass half-assing things...
@lpwaterhouse @baldur I was thinking exactly this. With all the discourse around 'cheating' (also prior to ChatGPT), remarkably few people ever seem to ask what's driving cheating in the first place, and whether that might hint at a deeper problem with how education is treated...
If you require people to go through 'education' that they have no reason or motivation to go through, it's really not surprising that they look for the shortest path to meeting that requirement. What might education look like if it were a voluntary, student-governed experience instead? Would there be any reason left for people to cheat?
@baldur @joepie91 In Germany I know a couple people in academia that are aware of the incentive to "just get it over with", but beyond trying to make courses actually interesting there isn't much they can do (After all, they can't *make* employers treat a degree differently while those same employers blanket-require one for *everything*). But most seem to charge blindly into "we must combat this new cheating tech", with little understanding of it themselves and while writing papers gushing how great "AI" is. They seem unaware of the grating sounds it makes :-P *shrug*
It would look like libraries.
We should replace school with libraries.
CC: @lpwaterhouse@ioc.exchange @baldur@toot.cafe
@cy @lpwaterhouse @baldur I think it's going to depend on how you define 'libraries' - philosophically, I agree that that's probably what it would look like.
But most libraries today do not have on-call expert instructors for a wide range of topics that can assist you with the thing you're trying to learn! And that would probably be needed to be a good alternative to schools.
But if people don't have all their time and energy stolen by those plotting against their education, then they'll educate themselves just fine. And yes that does mean people refusing to study Trigonometry, until they have a reason to actually use it, but I think that's worth the resilience and resistance to tyranny people gain, once we're not training our children to bow before oppression.
CC: @lpwaterhouse@ioc.exchange @baldur@toot.cafe
@joepie91 @lpwaterhouse So, at least outside the US people in academia have been talking for a while about this change in student's attitudes towards higher education, the shift towards a "I'm buying a piece of paper that employers demand, education is an optional extra" attitude
I haven't followed US higher education discourse closely but in the UK and Iceland teachers have been worrying about this for quite a long while. First heard talk about this around 2002 when I first taught at uni level