There have always been students that cheat themselves out of learning. It may even be the majority. It’s best to focus on the ones who have a genuine desire to learn.
While I see your point, these people do benefit greatly from great teachers! (They’d do well in either case but do even better in the right environment).
I think a bigger problem is in programs where you have group projects. You can't really be the sole person who's against using LLMs and in favour of doing 'the right thing'. Unlike what some people think there's little difference in terms of raw intelligence or ability to get rewarded by the system in the 'cheater' group vs the 'non-cheater' group.
You ever hear the state if you owe the bank a 1000$ you have a problem, and if you owe the bank 100,000,000$ they have a problem? I think if a majority of students end up without basic skills the genius students will have problem. Will LLMs do that i don't think so but if you think its an acceptable outcome thats also not okay.
You can't just handwave the fact that we're requiring what probably amounts to two orders of magnitude more discipline and self control out of students than we've ever done before. The educational system will collapse under this.
I'm not seeing how it requires any more self control than not copying another student's work or asking them for the answer. It's basically the same thing. We're also talking about adults here. They understand if they're cheating.
The difference is huge. Put yourself in the shoes of a student.
The student you're copying from won't be sitting next to you for the rest of your career. The LLM probably will be, and you'll be probably expected to use it, so why not use it here as well?
All your peers are doing it too, and look at all the cool things they're doing while you're struggling with the basics. And what if the LLMs keep improving at a high rate? What if being able to use them efficiently turns out to be a more important skill than what you're being taught anyways?
Because you're paying a lot of money and opportunity cost to learn how to do something. No one needs the assignment. It's there for you to learn. You were given the assignment for you. Any adult should be able to understand this. We're not talking about 7 year olds asking why they need to learn to multiply when a calculator can do it better than them. These are 20 year olds. If they don't have the maturity for this, a university should not be accepting them.
Being able to use LLMs efficiently isn't a specific skill. It's a reflection of your ability to articulate what you want, which is a reflection of your understanding of the world, which is what you're in school to build. Terence Tao can get an LLM to do math better than I can. I can probably get one to build software better than he can.
And you can still use one to do cool things like your peers. Just not your assignments, the purpose of which is literally to teach you the basics that you're struggling with and that you're there to learn in the first place.
This is like why don't you copy out of the back of the book or look up proofs on the internet. It's all there, but doing that completely misses the point of why you're there.
This only makes any sense if youre happy dropping most folks from higher education.
You want adults to be very disciplined and rational. That sounds great but are most of the adults in your own life experience at this level? They certainly aren't for me (I'm not sure I am at this level).
If I recall correctly, there was a mandatory ENGR 101 class that all of the different engineering fields had to take at my school, and on the first day, the lecturer said somewhere around half (might've been more, might've been fewer, I don't remember anymore) of the students in the hall were not going to complete the degree. So yeah, most folks dropping sounds about right.
And it's not even about discipline; it's lying. If you're not going to do the work, just don't do the work. Don't turn it in. Pretty much every syllabus ever says that turning in work you did not do is grounds for failing the class and possibly expulsion.
And why would we want to pass these people through? Then when they come interview with someone like me, I'm still going to find out within like a minute of talking to them that they didn't actually learn anything, and they won't get hired. Do I want to work with somebody incompetent? No. Do I want to work with somebody dishonest? Definitely no. Those both make my job more difficult to have around. So then they end up with a bunch of debt complaining about how they don't have a job.
