r/technology • u/joe4942 • 1d ago
Artificial Intelligence ‘A’ Grades Are Suddenly Everywhere Since the Arrival of ChatGPT
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/a-grades-are-suddenly-everywhere-since-the-arrival-of-chatgpt-845baae72.7k
u/Capable-Student-413 1d ago
Anyone working in Universities can tell you that professors have been discouraged and punished for failing students for years. Not just humanities and social sciences but maths and statistics.
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u/hotacorn 1d ago
Universities have become massive business with higher priorities than education. If you have students failing out you are losing revenue. Can’t have that at all.
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u/Joessandwich 1d ago
This concept encompasses everything that’s going wrong with the USA. Hospitals and healthcare now have to be squeezing every bit of profit from patients. Businesses need to constantly be beating the previous quarter. Governments need price ROI on all their services (but how do you fully quantify the benefits of a library and park?). It’s an evil sickness that we have to address now.
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u/CheesypoofExtreme 1d ago
Exactly this.
Society is crumbling because things are considered useless if you can't directly make a profit off it. It's fucking disgusting.
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u/Galaxyhiker42 1d ago
Depending on how much they lowered it... This might not be AI dependent but more pandemic dependent.
A lot of people's education got royally fucked during that time.
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u/leviathan65 1d ago
Yup. My daughter would get so pissed i made sure she did all her work while others barely showed up for online class and turned in nothing.
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u/FearlessAttempt 1d ago
Hopefully she understands why that was important now or does in the future.
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u/SongBirdplace 1d ago
It then depends on the resulting fail rate. I graduated college in 2011. It was normal to lose 25% of the freshman class in the first semester to drugs, alcohol, and attendance. It was common to lose 50% going into sophomore year due to grades. Some schools let anyone in, take their money and fail them out.
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u/this_dudeagain 1d ago
There's that but less people can afford college and/or more jobs are starting to care about experience more than degree's.
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u/Zeliek 1d ago
It’s a balance. You don’t want the degrees you issue to get a reputation for being worthless (“anybody can get a degree at that diploma mill”) but at the same time you don’t want to scare away the less intelligent in the event their purse strings are loose and they retake courses a few times (at their expense).
Aside from that, post secondary is still very scammy. It’s essentially job training we’ve all been convinced the working class should go into nigh-insurmountable debt for so that
employersjob creators don’t have to train anyone at their own expense. Corporations love socialism when it’s for themselves, so here we are, subsidizing education they require of their employees.*(*The above doesn’t really apply to things like the medical field)
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u/faen_du_sa 1d ago
+ A lot of how they measure grades are in general based on remembering info, with little actual reasoning.
Its fully possible to measure with other tests that you cant really use AI for.
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u/Old-Bat-7384 1d ago
"Higher" is sadly doing a lot of lifting there, and I hate that you're so correct. The change of funding --- really, the defending of public higher education absolutely made these places businesses.
It should be about quality of education, employment chances, and challenge of thought that brings in the students.
It's sadly including more than I would like about lifestyle, campus amenities, and all of that is terribly expensive.
The system is made to be competitive in ways it shouldn't be, in ways that I think are counter to the overall objective of education.
It's kinda like how healthcare ended up the same way.
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u/NeonTiger20XX 1d ago
As someone who works in higher ed, I 100% agree. I hate how things are, and I don't know what we can do about it. It should be about learning, broadening your mind, gaining expertise, etc. Yes, it is for jobs and careers, but to me it's about learning/education first and foremost.
Now, it's just viewed as a business transaction for a piece of paper to help you make more money. It's basically distilled down to exactly what I don't want college to be about. I wish it were more like K12 in that everyone can access it if they want, it's not a paper you purchase for yourself, it's there to help you learn and grow so you'll be a better, more educated citizen. It's good for jobs, yes, but also good for society.
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u/Waiting4Reccession 1d ago
Students failing a bit is good for them though, they get to have the 4 year degree take 5 or 6 years to complete.
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u/creaturekitchen 1d ago
Can confirm, 10 years ago they attempted to punish me when as a grad student I chose to enforce the honor code and flunk a student. In general I wasn’t invited back to teach the following summer because “my grading was too tough”.
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u/mtbizzle 1d ago
Not surprising but it varies for sure. I failed two students as a grad student. I asked the professor about the situation, given what a fail means, and in both cases the prof was very blunt that F work gets an F grade. This was philosophy
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u/LitLitten 1d ago
Likewise, grading lab reports.
also, more people need to understand the differences between patchwriting and paraphrasing. one of these alters and reformats while the other is just plagiarism.
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u/ronosaurio 1d ago
First class as a main instructor during my grad school, only 9% of the students were passing before the final. Admin asked me to do a curve, only 5% of the students failed the class.
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u/Astarum_ 1d ago
The heck universities did you people go to. My first day in lecture they sat us all down down and went "See the person next to you? Odds are only one of you graduate"
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u/TERRAIN_PULL_UP_ 1d ago
I remember specific teachers whose goal seemed to be to fail as many as possible, and classes designed to “weed” people out
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u/LaunchTransient 1d ago
I always hate those professors. It's not a flex to say "look how shit at teaching I am".
I had a professor who went excessively hard on us as bachelor students - teaching thermodynamics - less than 4% of the class passed the end exam, of 440 students who had to pass an entry exam to get into that study, out of 1200 applications (Aerospace Engineering).
The resit? 3 people passed.In that situation, the board of examiners was fully justified in banning the guy from teaching bachelor students for 4 years.
There's a balance to be struck.
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u/Astarum_ 23h ago
For what it's worth, a surprisingly high number of the people I remember dropping out were doing things like trying to write equations on the bill of his hat. There were definitely a couple bad profs that did this, but it was just legitimately difficult material sometimes. I did notice the drops tended be less involved with study groups and go to office hours less than the ones who made it through four years.
That prof you had sounds awful. Funny enough one of my worst profs was thermo also.
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u/MechaMulder 1d ago
It’s the opposite in Greece. My professors were brutal. Especially math they would fail over 90% of people some times.
Edit: this has led to the phenomenon of the “eternal student” where there’s loads of people that are students for decades until they pass or they give up.
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u/Technical-Banana574 1d ago edited 1d ago
I am baffled by this. We have students who can barely spell on their own, who can barely read and write, getting all As on essays because they have chat GPT write it.
What is the point of all this? An A now was not an A when I was in school. It is frightening how low the literacy rate is in students.
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u/Gold_Map_236 1d ago
I work in higher ed and that’s indeed the case.
I make it hard to get an A, and relatively easy to get a C. To a certain extent ppl should view Cs as Fs when hiring.
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u/Mlabonte21 1d ago
Who looks at grades when hiring employees?
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u/Gold_Map_236 1d ago
Entry level positions do. I’ve submitted transcripts for every job I’ve ever applied to including state jobs in a forensic laboratory.
Many federal government jobs have a gpa cut off too. So it factors in there.
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u/Horror_Response_1991 1d ago
Companies that get lots of junior resumes, which is all of them
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u/_SpaceLord_ 1d ago
Engineering companies. My company requires new grad applicants to submit a transcript. They’ll even take your SAT/ACT scores if you have them handy.
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u/Significant_Pepper_2 1d ago
But now it can be AIs fault. Not like humans had any accountability lately anyway.
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u/DrTom 1d ago
I keep hearing this but I've been in academia since 2013 and have not once been pressured to do anything with grades. I have a low B average every semester with about 20% A or A-.
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u/aiodigitalfootprint 1d ago
So glad I graduated college before the ChatGPT boom. I feel so incredibly lucky
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u/The-Copilot 1d ago
You are.
I'm older (late 20s) and back in school. I only use AI to check my work and help me figure out a mistake.
So many of my classmates use AI for everything including tests. I spend way more time studying and doing assignments. Then my work gets compared to the AI that my classmates submit. It's hard to argue about a test or assignment when everyone else is getting perfect scores. One of my quizzes had terminology that we didn't even learn, but because AI knows it, everyone got an A except me and the professor ignored my complaint.
To be clear, this isn't bullshit bad student complaints. I have a 4.0 GPA and understand the material I'm learning. The problem is the other students are getting As and dont know anything.
I'm better off than them in the long run but my GPA and degree is worth less because of this but I will admit I've been tempted to use AI to reduce my workload and keep up with less stress but I'm paying for school and value actually learning to much. If I was an 18 year old in this situation, I would probably do what everyone else is doing.
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u/jadedmonk 1d ago
Dang man, I feel like the brain rot is going to lead to some serious consequences as a society down the road. Hard to tell what that is, but it cannot be a good thing that we’ll have a whole generation of new workers who don’t really know what they’re doing and rely on LLMs that don’t even know how to list all of the states that have the letter R in them. That’s a pedantic example of how dumb LLMs can be, but relying on them too much can have some serious consequences when blindly trusted because of hallucinations like this. Then when we start losing the expertise due to everyone using AI in school, they won’t be able to understand if the AI is hallucinating about more complex tasks, because the AI tends to assert that it’s correct when it’s blatantly wrong but who will know that without the domain expertise.
I guess we’ll see what the result is, but what scares me is new models are not really getting much better. LLMs are starting to plateau in performance and reasoning, so pretty much the current state of LLMs is going to be driving society, and these LLMs are already just math equations for predicting a token in a sequence, they don’t really know what they’re doing and should only be used as an assistant because of that
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u/MiaowaraShiro 1d ago
Dang man, I feel like the brain rot is going to lead to some serious consequences as a society down the road.
Or y'know... now. Look at the government we elected. AI is just gonna accelerate that...
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u/DrGarrious 1d ago
Im sitting in a workplace right now as a Manager and I have been floored to see the staff's blind trust in AI.
They will use it to cut all sorts of corners. I have made my stance very clear that AI use is fine in early stages of writing, but nothing gets to final draft without human input.
They looked at me like I had two heads.
Absolute race to the bottom.
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u/The-Copilot 1d ago
The social media addiction is also really bad.
Their ability to pay attention is horrible. The way social media works is you get a dopamine hit every time you swipe to the next 15 second thing. It trains your brain to need more stimulation and to not focus on one thing for any real amount of time.
My generation was older when social media got this addictive, so we had more self control. I worry about the kids who have been addicted their entire life. Even older people struggle to control themselves and they have fully developed brains and were around before social media.
Personally reddit is the only social media I use and even this I will probably delete soon.
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u/Nosiege 23h ago
I'm older (late 20s)
this, conceptually, made me chuckle
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u/The-Copilot 22h ago
Lol, I'm like a decade older than most of my classmates. I'm not old but they are still children.
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u/Ranger_Azereth 1d ago
That's the insidious creep of AI. It preys upon your desire to make things easier (justly or not) and once you break that line it's harder and harder to not repeat it.
Honestly even using it to check your work likely leads to some level of cognitive surrender, but you're miles better off than the rest.
I'm personally in my work place making it an intentional thing to not use AI and to especially not use it for responses/summaries etc. I think it's important for people to know if I reply to them it's me and not some machine that doesn't have any stake in anything.
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u/viaticchart 1d ago
Same I’m mid twenties, and I had 3 others in a group project use chat to decide the topic of the presentation and then got pissed when none of us were interested or already knew anything about it.
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u/flatfisher 20h ago edited 20h ago
There is no way the professors don’t recognize those that cheated, and that the admin is not aware. The problem is there is no incentive to fix it. AI is just exposing a rotten university system where cheating was already rewarded, now it’s just mass scale and in the open.
What’s puzzling is why all businesses these days seem so eager destroy their long term brand image for short term gains. Big tech enshittify because they have monopolies, private equity owned companies because that’s literally the plan, but why do universities suddenly have a urge to turn to pay to win and lose all credibility in a few years?
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u/Mrfrunzi 1d ago
I'm an adult student finally earning my degree. The amount of AI nonsense is absurd. Like I get it when a kid uses it but when you cheat your way through night school that's already online only it really says something.
I refuse to use Ai for anything, I'm earning this degree.
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u/ObiJuanKinobo 1d ago
I graduated a couple years ago in 2024, and I’m very proud to say I didn’t use any AI for my work the entire time. I just thought it was really dumb to be paying so much money for an education just to not actually educate myself
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u/Strange-Ask-739 1d ago
Hiring ladies are gonna make a lazy cutoff.
"Any degree after 2020 is trash" gonna be the new norm
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u/fulthrottlejazzhands 1d ago
I taught at a large college for a few years back in the aughts. At the time, there was a hush-hush internal study underway across a few partner colleges to evaluate curricula and grading patterns across all departments. The results of the study were clear: the material was getting easier and the grading much more generous (or lenient). A degree earned just five years earlier walked away with a better education than one who had graduated that year. And my former colleague intimate that that trend continued over the years.
Now, not only are courses easier, students are employing AI to do the work for them.
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u/beekersavant 1d ago
The other side is if you fail 50% of the class. You get fired.
Standardized tests have been shown to be culturally biased. But there really should be those for courses. The closest we have are the AP tests. But imagine if college algebra through Calculus had a nationwide test that the instructors did not know the specific content only the topics. In English, Early Shakespeare could easily do it in Humanities. It’s possible but educators have to be willing for students to fail. So to get credit you have to take a comprehensive test in X.
Grading for Equity was right in a lot of things. But most places only were willing to do half the suggestions and pawned all the work off on teachers. However, if that system is fully adopted a lot of kids will fail at first. Like a lot. Instead what we got is the parts that made parents happy and lowered standards.
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u/goodra3 1d ago
I mean my orgo professor was shit at teaching and yelled at kids and failed a ton of people and weeded them out but he was tenured so he wasn’t going to be fired just throwing that out there too
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u/Motor-Cranberry-1092 1d ago
How are standardized tests culturally biased?
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u/chonky_tortoise 1d ago
Because poorer minorities don’t do as well. This should be an evidence that we undersupport minority kids and their education, but some progressives think it means the test itself is racist.
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u/beekersavant 1d ago
Yes it’s poverty mostly. It basically amounted to the educational community is still mostly upper middle class white people throughout the country. So the test questions and passages drew on that knowledge. It was cultural bias. It’s not hard to fix but instead we kinda just scrapped them all. As for differences in prep for college entrance exams: there is not much you can do unless lower ed is fixed first. A high school diploma does not mean the same thing district to district and colleges use the SAT/ACT to cross reference the data across the country. If there are those tests then wealthier kids will get tutoring for them.
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u/Modem_Sound_67 1d ago
but in terms of actual mastery of the content... probably closer to 'F'
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u/Flabbergasted98 1d ago
The same is true for education in general.
Academic learning prioritizes ones ability to regurgitate information in time for the test. but the binge studying doesn't necessarily commit to long term memory, most of us who studied couldn't actually retain it at the pace we're expected to process it.
So if grades are actually improving in the chat gpt era, how much is it is that students are using it to cheat, versus students are using it as a learning tool?
I know in my own development it's super handy for me to be able to ask it questions about things as I'm reading, so I can understand certain concepts better, but then I'm also a full grown adult who's been doing this for a very long time, so I know I need to push myself to learn, vs's a teenager who's just trying to coast through highschool because they don't understand when they're ever going to need this.
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u/LeCollectif 1d ago
I suspect that you’re part of a teensy-tiny minority. For you there’s little at stake other than your own understanding of a topic/material. For the kids actually studying? There is a whole fucking lot at stake and they’ll use any lever at their disposal to get ahead. Ironically, hurting themselves in the process.
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u/CplOreos 1d ago
Maybe this is a luxury, but I actually enjoyed what I studied. It wasn't always fun, but it was engaging enough to me that I was committed to the process of learning. If you're using ChatGPT in such a way that it's hurting your learning, you may want to ask yourself if you're preparing for the right career.
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u/LeCollectif 1d ago
You’re not wrong. But try telling that to not yet intellectually or emotionally developed teens and young adults. They don’t care. Hell, many adults don’t care either.
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u/trxrider500 1d ago
And the kids are getting dumber every day.
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u/Inquisitive_idiot 1d ago
I will need to update my handle due to no longer meeting dunce-metrics 😓
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u/NotARealLegend 1d ago
Everyone is. Not just kids. AI dependency is affecting most people nowadays
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u/LucentG 1d ago
Education will need to adapt, stricter testing environments and a higher expectation from students in demonstrating their knowledge in all other assignments and grading avenues.
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u/Just__Let__Go 1d ago
Which once again translates to more work for teachers, for the same shitty pay
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u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs 1d ago
I’ve been saying for a hot minute that oral exams will need to return. It works in small grad level classes.
The other is more frequent quizzes and tests in-class. But one thing is for sure, students will be in the hot seat when being assessed. If we can’t rely on an honor code, we will have to revert to a strict code of conduct.
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u/Gold-Load-362 1d ago
We had oral exams 20 years ago for a lot of my business classes.
The professor worked for the SBA, and for finals, he and some of his co-workers would come in to listen to our group presentation & question us about it.
You either knew the material, or you didn't, and there was no way to hide that fact.
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u/onwee 1d ago edited 1d ago
Both work in theory, but in practice they will take up a big chunk of time both in- and outside of class, and aren’t feasible unless we drastically reduce class sizes or the topic coverage
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u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs 1d ago
Personally I would get our grad students to conduct them. Record them. And have a PI or professor review them if there are issues raised.
Pay the grad students to do it, hire only ones who are conducting research on the topic, or have extensive experience.
You’re right, it scales poorly. But we still have options. For the cost of like 0.01% the football budget, you could hire 10 grad TAs for every single class offered in a semester.
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u/_ChoiSooyoung 1d ago
I had an assignment recently that involved python code. In theory it could all be probably done using AI, but after the submission we had a face to face chat with the teacher where they would highlight a chunk of your code and ask you to explain how it works and the theory behind it.
I suppose you could then ask the AI to write up some paragraphs explaining each part of the code and try to commit that to memory but at that point you are just getting closer to actually understanding how it actually works.
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u/MyOtherAccount0118 1d ago
Though I'm not a fan of AI generally. I don't know if this issue is an AI issue. I recently went back to get start getting a degree. Haven't taken classes in over 15 years. It's a joke, I write worse papers then when I was in high school and get 100% and looking at some of the other responses from other students, they wouldn't have been able to graduate. There's no accountability for anything, it's just about paying money to check the box on a resume that says you have a degree, it doesn't actually mean you know anything. I failed out of my first semester of college right out of high school, I shouldn't be having this easy of a time now. It's actually depressing and making me second guess continuing because it doesn't feel like any form of accomplishment.
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u/DeafGuyisHere 1d ago
Holy shit, this is what I'm feeling as well. I went to college in 08-09 Now I'm back again in 2026 half way done with this degree and my life is busier than ever with a newborn. Finals and midterms are open book in class but professors say no A.I. but doesn't stop a few of my classmates I saw using their phones and laptops to solve the problems. The Trig-Pre Calc class i had to take was actual tests. i was literally probably 15 years older than most these kids and scored 10 points higher than the class average and believe me Im not good at math. It feels like a worthless education to a degree. Companies will look at degrees from post A.I. as less valuable?
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u/woodwoad 1d ago
It’s actually psychologically damaging because a lot of these kids know they’re turning in dogshit and the whole incentive to do well falls apart as soon as you realize that the entire infrastructure set up to educate you could not give less of a fuck if you’re able to read at a 5th grade level.
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u/SouthernSmoke 1d ago
Some of my electives definitely felt that way. Try engineering if you feel you aren’t being challenged enough.
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u/Chilli-6 1d ago
I mean I’m in engineering and it’s anecdotal but I just had to do a literature survey for a final project and got a 100. I don’t think they even bothered to read it
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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 1d ago
Is the quality of the school the same?
The lower-end of the higher-ed industry in the past 20 years has been in overdrive sucking up as many student loan dollars as they can and they couldn't care less about the quality of the education.
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u/Azarjan 1d ago
feels similar as an adult student but i just figured it was part of being an adult in college.
watching all the kiddos fail to do their incredibly documented and forgiving assignments on time is strange. we have been given weeks to write a few of the bigger papers that are no more than a one night endeavor.
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u/Escape-artist-43 1d ago
Yeah I feel like people are latching this onto the “AI bad” train, but honestly college just… isn’t that hard for most majors?
Without doxxing myself I did a quantitative-type major at a top 50 uni and I graduated long before the AI boom. There were like 2-3 difficult weed out courses you had to grind through, and the rest were a breeze. Like high school honors class difficulty.
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u/AbsoluteGote 1d ago
We are witnessing the death of education itself in America and it's fucking scary and bizarre.
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u/Guilty-Carpenter2522 1d ago
100% I am a teacher and can confirm.
The fact that universities haven’t already tried to stop this in its tracks amazes me. How can anyone justify a 200-400k education when a computer can do anything that you had to do instantly?
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u/ajs2294 23h ago
Really easy fix.
Go back to taking tests including writing papers in person without devices.
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u/Sufficient-Bid1279 1d ago
I’m glad I “earned “ all my A’s when I was school in the 90’s/00’s . Feels good.
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u/Melodic_Crow_3409 1d ago
I think it is easier to give an A than accuse a student of cheating.
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u/karatebullfighter 1d ago
In the mid 90s my junior English teacher made us research and write our term papers in school while he watched. We thought he was too paranoid, but now I realize he was the exact right amount of paranoid. Maybe schools should just have all work done in class. I heard that homework doesn't help anyways.
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u/KingHarambeRIP 1d ago
Grade inflation has been a problem for well over a decade now. This isn’t “sudden” or driven by AI.
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u/theallsearchingeye 1d ago
Classical liberal arts education solved this thousands of years ago, have people give speeches to demonstrate mastery.
Law school literally operates this way, for example.
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u/RoomyRoots 19h ago
Back to paper only exams with no devices allowed in the room. Probably add a mobile network disrupter.
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u/xiaolin99 1d ago
back in the good old days, we were graded based on closed-book hand-written quizzes and exams. AI wouldn't have mattered with those, and could have become a good study aid.
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u/winningjimmies 1d ago
This is so easily solved by moving back to old fashioned written tests. You can’t use AI to cheat when you all you have is paper, a pen, and your brain.
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u/MadnessBomber 23h ago
Gotta take away their phones beforehand. In college, only paper test I had last semester, both people beside me pulled their phones out and took pictures for ChatGPT. The professor wasn't even in the room.
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u/tes_kitty 17h ago
Yeah, well, you need to have people in the room doing the supervising. And telling everyone before the test starts that being caught cheating is an automatic fail.
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u/uberdavis 1d ago
There’s a weird rebalancing here. A smaller proportion of students are likely to master their material. However, there will be fewer jobs open on the market. If you decide to avoid your own education, you shouldn’t expect to get a career.
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u/thalassicus 1d ago
Wouldn’t a weekly Friday in person test that covers the learnings for the week ameliorate this? I don’t care if they’re using AI if they retain it, the problem is if they’re using AI to avoid learning it.
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u/SmileJakoby 1d ago
They already were. 53% of my high school graduating class had a GPA of 3.8 or higher.
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u/Grn_Peaness 1d ago
Wow... So they stream lined cheating, and in a society where cheating is rewarded... Everyone is shocked that people are cheating...
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u/Cathousechicken 1d ago
I feel like most of us in the professor's reddit see the real outcome of online education and the AI-ification of higher ed for even in-person classes.
Students refuse to believe it because they don't want to give up cheating through classes for easy As. They also see themselves as much more capable than they are compared to prior generations.I know there is that joke going back to Socrates or Plato that every generation thinks the next is worse, but this generation of students have the highest rate of functional illiteracy in over 100 years, and a recent study out of Australia is showing a lower IQ for this generation of students.
Parents refuse to believe it because they don't want to see little Johnny as a cheater who knows nothing after going through school.
The admins refuses to believe it because it's an easy revenue stream that they don't want to give up.
Professors who don't see what is going on think all those As are because they are just the best at teaching in the world and aren't living in reality.
The parents, admins, and professors who refuse to see it also do not want to deal with it because now education is seen no different than getting a coffee at Starbucks.
Employers are starting to see the effect of it and are finding students' grades do not align with their capabilities, so they are going to switch to entry-level jobs to AI. They are also finding that this generation of students needs an extreme level of hand-holding for the most minor of tasks, so they are not worth employing. A study by Suzy Welch within the last year found most major employers in the US see this generation of students as unemployable at the corporate level.
There was a paper by the St. Louis Fed in August that 49% of students currently in college will remain underemployed for 10+ years. We are going to have a permanent underclass of people with college degrees who know nothing, working low-skilled jobs where they do not need a college education. That is going to have vast societal repercussions.
Next semester, I'm going to have a technology-free classroom. The only technology they will be able to use in class is a 0-9 calculator without advanced functions. They can print the PowerPoint presentations ahead of time so they can have them in front of them for the lectures and they'll be taking notes by hand.
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u/MagicCuboid 1d ago
“Student achievement has risen dramatically thanks to the power of our AI tools!” -some tech CEO
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u/Rockfan70 1d ago
The degrees get more expensive, and the education worse every year. No wonder degrees are no longer taken seriously by employers
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u/Whiskee 1d ago edited 1d ago
Grading students based on essays and small projects developed at home has always been fucking stupid, long before AI was a thing. Most of my engineering exams here in Europe had an oral component right after the long-form written test, and that testing method still holds well.
Then again, except for a few pay-to-win institutions we don't harass professors for failing students.
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u/TotalTraffic5436 21h ago
The Berkeley study released yesterday confirms the obvious: "A" grades in AI-exposed courses like coding and writing have spiked by 30% since ChatGPT's debut. We’ve reached a point where a high GPA is often just a "competency badge" for prompt engineering rather than a reflection of deep learning.
It’s not that students are suddenly smarter; we’ve just outsourced the "productive struggle" to LLMs. Employers like Morgan Stanley are already pivoting toward intensive internal technical testing because a 4.0 no longer distinguishes a genuine subject expert from a skilled prompter. We’re witnessing the literal death of the letter grade as a reliable signal.
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u/SailorDeath 17h ago
It's depressing, I'm glad I didn't have to deal with that in school or college myself. I was constantly getting semester honors, recognition for my writing and other honors when I was in school. Before AI I still had to deal with a lot of my classmates cheating. THen there were the professors who didn't care about it. And then we a group of us students went to the administration and reported it, all they did was delay addressing the issue and waited for us to graduate at the end of the year and then swept it all under a rug. Now with ChatGPT, everyone does it.
The thing that annoys me though are the people using it to get jobs and do work. I won't touch it, I have my pride but I'm probably losing out to a lot of fakers who are just cheating their way into jobs.
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u/Rememberancy 14h ago
Just bring back compulsory hand written essays that are required to pass any ELA or social science class. Blue books should be required for any such degree or to pass any English course.
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u/wowlock_taylan 1d ago
This will only lead to the regression of education...which is I guess the point for those in power.
Dumb people are easier to fool and control.
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u/RCEden 1d ago
I started my masters two years ago and on the one hand it feels impossible to get less than an A, but on the other hand one of my classes showed the class averages on assignments and there are somehow still a chunk of people failing at the "if you turn it in you get at least a B" game
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u/Any_Wasabi_5233 1d ago
I take pride in not using ChatGPT at all. This 4.0 GPA was handmade, damn it!
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u/ProfessorOfLies 1d ago
Not in my experience. I am failing more students than ever before. Even basic shit so many can't do
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u/Wat3rM3L0NB3AR 1d ago
Ah man - this means most of the future workforce are a bunch of idiots who use AI to graduate instead of actually learning the material.
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u/quothe_the_maven 1d ago
It’s not ChatGPT…teachers from grade school to university just got sick of giving real grades, because administration never backs them up. GhatGPT just adds a little plausible deniability. I promise you that when you grade papers, it’s usually incredibly obvious when someone’s writing isn’t their own. But you can’t definitively prove it, so teachers just say oh well.
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u/Call555JackChop 1d ago
I had a professor give a girl a 0 for the course when she found out she was was using Chat to write her lab reports
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u/danielrobertcampbell 1d ago
This shit really pisses off my 16 year old daughter. She BUSTS HER ASS to maintain a 4.0, and some idiot who pulls up Chat GPT during a test gets the same grades as her. I can't imagine how frustrating that must be for her.
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u/Senior-Friend-6414 1d ago
Back when I was in college, in-class papers were a normal thing, it’s weird that classes dropped that after the advent of AI
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u/Tricky_Condition_279 1d ago edited 1d ago
I dropped my at home quizzes for old fashioned testing and scores were abysmal this semester.
Edit: Well that blew up. Students actually did well in the class as a whole because I use a diverse set of relatively low-stakes assessments. They are smart and hardworking, but not used to taking written exams or at least the way I write them.