Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead:
I have been in and out of college classrooms for the last 10 years. I have worked as an adjunct instructor at a community college, I have taught as a graduate instructor at a major research institution, and I am now an assistant professor of history at a small teaching-first university.
Since the spring semester of 2023, it has been apparent that an ever-increasing number of students are submitting AI-generated work. I am no stranger to students trying to cut corners by copying and pasting from Wikipedia, but the introduction of generative AI has enabled them to cheat in startling new ways, and many students have fully embraced it.
Plagiarism detectors have and do work well enough for what I might call "classical cheating," but they are notoriously bad at detecting AI-generated work. Even a program like Grammarly, which is ostensibly intended only to clean up one's own work, will set off alarms.
So, I set out this semester to look more carefully for AI work. Some of it is quite easy to notice. The essays produced by ChatGPT, for instance, are soulless, boring abominations. Words, phrases and punctuation rarely used by the average college student — or anyone for that matter (em dash included) — are pervasive.
But there is a difference between recognizing AI use and proving its use. So I tried an experiment.
A colleague in the department introduced me to the Trojan horse, a trick capable of both conquering cities and exposing the fraud of generative AI users. This method is now increasingly known (there's even an episode of "The Simpsons" about it) and likely has already run its course as a plausible method for saving oneself from reading and grading AI slop. To be brief, I inserted hidden text into an assignment's directions that the students couldn't see but that ChatGPT can.
I assigned Douglas Egerton's book "Gabriel's Rebellion," which tells the story of the thwarted rebellion of enslaved people in 1800, and asked the students to describe some of the author's main points. Nothing too in-depth, as it's a freshman-level survey course. They were asked to use either the suggestions I provided or to write about whatever elements of Egerton's argument they found most important.
I received 122 paper submissions. Of those, the Trojan horse easily identified 33 AI-generated papers. I sent these stats to all the students and gave them the opportunity to admit to using AI before they were locked into failing the class. Another 14 outed themselves. In other words, nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.
The percentage was surprising and deflating. I explained my disappointment to the students, pointing out that they cheated on a paper about a rebellion of the enslaved — people who sacrificed their lives in pursuit of freedom, including the freedom to learn to read and write. In fact, Virginia made it even harder for them to do so after the rebellion was put down.
I'm not sure all of them grasped my point. Some certainly did. I received several emails and spoke with a few students who came to my office and were genuinely apologetic. I had a few that tried to fight me on the accusations, too, assuming I flagged them as AI for "well written sentences." But the Trojan horse did not lie.
There's a lot of talk about how educators have to train students to use AI as a tool and help them integrate it into their work. Recently, the American Historical Association even made recommendations on how we might approach this in the classroom. The AHA asserts that "banning generative AI is not a long-term solution; cultivating AI literacy is." One of their suggestions is to assign students an AI-generated essay and have them assess what it got right, got wrong or if it even understood the text in question.
But I don't know if I agree with the AHA. Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know. My hidden text asked them to write the paper "from a Marxist perspective." Since the events in the book had little to do with the later development of Marxism, I thought the resulting essay might raise a red flag with students, but it didn't.
I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written. The most shocking part was that apparently, when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, "I thought it sounded smart."
[...] I have no doubt that many students are actively making the decision to cheat. But I also do not doubt that, because of inconsistent policies and AI euphoria, some were telling the truth when they told me they didn't realize they were cheating. Regardless of their awareness or lack thereof, each one of my students made the decision to skip one of the many challenges of earning a degree — assuming they are only here to buy it (a very different cultural conversation we need to have). They also chose to actively avoid learning because it's boring and hard.
Now, I'm not equipped to make deep sociological or philosophical diagnoses on these choices. But this is a problem. How do we solve it? Is it a return to analog? Do we use paper and pen and class time for everything? Am I a professor or an academic policeman?
The answer is the former. But students, society and administrations that are unwilling to take a hard stance (unless it's the promotion of AI) are crushing higher ed. A college degree is not just about a job afterward — you have to be able to think, solve problems and apply those solutions, regardless of the field. How do we teach that without institutional support? How do we teach that when a student doesn't want to and AI enables it?
[...] But a handful said something I found quite sad: "I just wanted to write the best essay I could." Those students in question, who at least tried to provide some of their own thoughts before mixing them with the generated result, had already written the best essay they could. And I guess that's why I hate AI in the classroom as much as I do.
Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a savior. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.
[...] We live in an era where personal expression is saturated by digital filters, hivemind thinking is promoted through endless algorithms and academic freedom itself is under assault by the weakest minds among us. AI has only made this worse. It is a crisis.
I can offer no solutions other than to approach it and teach about it that way. I'm sure angry detractors will say that is antiquated, and maybe it is.
But I am a historian, so I will close on a historian's note: History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost for many Americans, ranging from ostracism to death. Those in power recognized that oppression is best maintained by keeping the masses illiterate, and those oppressed recognized that literacy is liberation. To my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don't surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday November 25, @08:55AM (26 children)
It's been clear for many years that the advances in tech make intrusive surveillance, characteristic of early 20th century dictatorships, far cheaper and more effective.
I guess this article provides evidence that the modern tech is now undermining democracy from the other end. Our kids are losing their ability to think critically and understand why we are doing things the way we are.
Cyberpunk is now.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Tuesday November 25, @11:21AM (3 children)
It's a shitty version of cyberpunk when I can't get some neat modular body mod enhancements.
(Score: 5, Funny) by PiMuNu on Tuesday November 25, @01:12PM
and if you do you forget the f-ing password
(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Tuesday November 25, @05:29PM (1 child)
You thinking Syndicate? cause i'm thinking Syndicate!
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday November 26, @06:31AM
Ah, memories.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday November 25, @12:04PM (11 children)
You have to look beyond technology to understand cheating on this scale (roughly 40% of the class was either caught or admitted to cheating via AI). This is a systems problem not a technology problem. And I would say a key factor is that the college isn't putting resources into detecting and addressing cheating. Even in the absence of technological ways to make cheating easier, there would still be large-scale cheating in such a situation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday November 25, @01:03PM (7 children)
I agree in that it's a systemic problem. The issue isn't detecting. We detected it. There are both tools and software that can detect it but more often then not you just know from reading it that this is odd or wrong. For students you have had for a while and seeing writing of you can also notice that their writing style suddenly and erratically change, in a non normal way.
The issue is that it's now so common that it's bordering on becoming normal. The students just don't know any better. They have not been taught that this is wrong. They don't see an issue with it. They apparently can't tell the difference between them doing assignments or the AI burping up answers for them and then they cut-n-paste that in and in a few cases they at least try and rephrase things a little. The issue is new students that you don't know or have writing samples from, if they cheat all the time it's harder to detect in that regard since you have no frame of reference in regard to them.
The problem is that the universities doesn't want to, or know how to, address the issue. Cause that would require that we would fail about half the classes on various form of AI-cheating. When that was suggested our head of department said no. It would have dire economical consequences for the university. So instead it is you that have to create extra assignments and help your students not to be cheating scumbags. We now have to teach them things they should have been taught long before coming to university. But the system failed them before and we now have to pick up the slack of previous levels. Unless it's repeating or horrible we don't even bother reporting them to the schools disciplinary board either. That is just normally a waste of time these days. They might get suspended for a few weeks or so and then you have to help them pass the class with extra assignments and so forth afterwards.
Even if they are told before the assignments that we will check and fail students for using AI. They still do it ... They apparently thing that they are somehow smarter or that they'll get away with it. Which it turns out for a lot of them they actually do. So it's hard to blame them in that regard.
As noted they can't tell the difference. They don't see the difference between writing it themselves and the AI doing it for them. In this case they didn't write hardly anything. They fixed a prompt or just cut-n-pasted the assignment in and let it do the work. Then they arranged the output in some form. That was their work.
That is in large what we did. Online hand-ins and such counts for almost nothing when it comes to grading. It's all the analog that matters. Problem is that students are not used to writing by hand for four-six hours. We can't police them, and we don't want to either. But we can't control what they "write" and do at home.
That is how you detect first semester students. They all start to talk about things that they know nothing about. Had nothing to do with the assignments. But their friendly AI just started to sprinkle things in there that they think sounds smart.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, @04:42PM
Not a teacher or prof, but this makes total sense to me -- when you have the students in class, take away their devices. Homework should consist of studying to prepare for near-daily short quizzes that have to be answered with pencil/pen on paper in class.
I can commiserate with the problems of extensive longhand/printing, I'm lefty with an awkward hand position. Hand pain was a limit on my ability to write long essays (word processing solved that...but not available until after my undergrad degree.) Thus my suggestion above to keep the quizzes very short.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Wednesday November 26, @05:44AM
Once upon a long time ago I was tasked with rehabbing some retired middle-school computers. Before doing in the software, I took a tour through it, and was struck by how it did not teach the subject (basic mathematics). Rather, it taught how to get the program to spit up the desired answer.
This is basically the same issue. Here, instead of the students learning about the subject and writing about it, they have learned how to get AI to spit up the desired writing about the subject.
To use a car analogy, rather than learning how to drive, they have learned how to turn on the self-driving function..
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday November 26, @01:17PM (2 children)
I don't buy that. But I do buy that cheaters will use that as an excuse once they get caught. My take is that any professor who cares enough to put this much effort into finding cheating has made it quite clear that cheating isn't acceptable in their class.
You wouldn't just implement anti-cheating measures immediately. Rather do it at the beginning of a semester/quarter and then make it stick even if you have to expel a considerable portion of your student body. Sure, getting rid of half your students would be bad (I doubt there are that many who would continue cheating under such a situation), but it's better than your school getting a reputation for putting out graduates whose primary skill set is cheating.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday November 26, @06:46PM (1 child)
A case could probably be made for both perspectives. For some of them they do know that it is wrong. But they do it anyway due to some reason, to short time to read the books, didn't understand the material or there was a super important party that evening so they just didn't have time. But for some having the AI-chat-buddy do it, they see it as part of their work process. But then they take all the credit and don't mention where all this work came from or how they got there. Also no references. Usually a dead give away.
The automated anti-cheating or plagiarism detection software have been a thing now at the university for about two decades. So this is not new. It's not something that AI brought on. It was there before. It's just more and different now. There is plagiarism as in taking others work and claiming credit for it, but there is now then also having AI write it for you. Which I guess could be seen as a form of mega-plagiarism. It's just that it's hard to know where it all came from since it might not be one source but an amalgamation of sources that you have copied. They just might not see it as such. They might know that flat out copying the text from someone else is wrong. But they might find that talking to their chat-AI is some kind of middle grey area. Even tho as noted it's dodgy as hell.
It's starting to be a universal issue tho. So the issue exists for all the schools. There are even meetings about it. What should be done etc. They don't have a proper solution. They are all stuck in the same boat and nobody know where they should go or how to get there.
In that regard it would not matter financially if we cut half the class at the start or the middle or the end of the semester. The cost is the same. We get a minor amount when they start the classes and then the bulk of pay when they complete the class. So cutting them somewhere is as noted economical disaster ever which way it is done. Then we also become known as the hard-arses that cut people or are very strict or mean or whatnot so we get less students and then we get less money that way. Cause nobody wants to take classes that flunk half the students on principle.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 27, @03:24AM
The perspective that was well documented at the beginning of the semester and firmly upheld will win out over the perspective that only comes out when the student gets caught.
Let me introduce you to the word "disincentive". You won't need to cut half the class if they don't cheat. And most universities get paid up front - the "bulk of pay" happens before the class starts.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 26, @05:37PM (1 child)
For students you have had for a while and seeing writing of you can also notice that their writing style suddenly and erratically change, in a non normal way.
Change how? From never using "whom" or always using it to using it properly? That could be a sign that they're actually learning, unless the style goes from interesting to boring. That would be a dead giveaway, or perhaps simply a bad day.
That said, I did see something on the internet the other day that made me think "I'll bet that was computer-generated" but didn't see what I thought was wrong, it just looked wrong.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday November 26, @06:33PM
It's is more that the change is to rapid and to inconsistent. They start to use words and phrases in not exactly the right context. But to the casual reader they appear to sound super smart. It's words that they think are academic or that sounds nice. But it's not their words. Or they start to apply perspectives or interpretations that they quite clearly do not understand more then at a word level. As if someone else wrote the papers for them, which since the AI "wrote" it someone else did write it.
You can see natural progress and development. It's also clear in some cases when it is unnatural. In some cases it harder to tell so then you do nothing. But wait and see where this is going.
(Score: 3, Touché) by OrugTor on Tuesday November 25, @04:52PM (2 children)
A large part of the problem is that the college is run on capitalist lines. They are paid to confer degrees. With tuition rates so high there is pressure to pass as many students as possible. It's rough on the teaching staff who think they are paid to educate. The tuition rate/pass rate ratio will dominate as long as employers insist on degrees for jobs that really don't need them.
(Score: 2) by FunkyLich on Tuesday November 25, @05:09PM
That is basically the heart of the problem. Call it "tuition fees"? Very little difference from "buy your grades" in my calculation. Discussions why is one and not the other will always end up similar to discussing who has the squarest balls, Jesus or Apollo, and are best conducted with a lot of booze (or weed) at hand.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 26, @01:24PM
You can call it "capitalist", but it's driven by government policy (particularly various sorts of student loan subsidies) that is at best completely indifferent to the problem.
And they're insisting because they don't want to risk lawsuits [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 25, @12:48PM (8 children)
> Our kids are losing their ability to think critically and understand why we are doing things the way we are.
Anybody remember Cliffs' Notes? As TFS points out: Wikipedia has also been a significant source of easy research for years now.
Students take shortcuts. Some of the most successful students take the shortcuts like: researching the academic landscape and cherry picking their professors and courses. Others leverage their fellow students and existing organizations like frat house test banks. Your "great leaders" in our elected halls of legislators operate entirely on pyramids of people using people using tools to do their reading and analysis and speech writing, and... frankly... most of their thinking for them. That's how they ascend to the top of the power broker game.
The art of the wise is to develop and retain your ability to think for yourself while simultaneously leveraging the best available resources.
The art of the successful doesn't require them to be wise, it mostly requires them to leverage the powerful in ascending the ranks of society to their desired perches.
The art of the powerful seems mostly built on nepotism, sycophancy and otherwise appealing to the animal desires of the existing powerful, while dancing the political dances of alliance and treachery.
As a society, it would be best for us to transfer as much power as we can to the wise and the young, but the powerful have little interest in that.
The scariest thing about AI, to me, is the ability for its owners to use it as a tool to manipulate its users, to shape their opinions against even their own best interests to support the interests of the powerful owners of the "oracles of (not always) truth."
The scariest thing about Wikipedia and similar, to me, is the ability for its owners to use it as a tool to manipulate its users, to shape their opinions against even their own best interests to support the interests of the powerful owners of the "oracles of (not always) truth."
The scariest thing about Television news, to me, is the ability for its owners to use it as a tool to manipulate its users, to shape their opinions against even their own best interests to support the interests of the powerful owners of the "oracles of (not always) truth."
The scariest thing about books used in academia, to me, is the ability for the curators to use them as a tool to manipulate their users, to shape their opinions against even their own best interests to support the interests of the powerful arbiters of the "oracles of (not always) truth."
The answer? Crowdsourced, low barrier to entry, democratized tools of information gathering and distribution.
Are we making forward progress? Absolutely yes, in the long view. Is it always smooth and without local regressions? Absolutely not.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, @05:20PM (3 children)
"The answer? Crowdsourced, low barrier to entry, democratized tools of information gathering and distribution."
"And who polices the self-appointed editors/gatekeepers of Wikipedia" is a perfect counter-example.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, @05:48PM (1 child)
The point of "professors" originally was to obtain the experience and wisdom of someone who has studied a subject deeply.
Books were condensations of this knowledge and a mechanism for wide dissemination.
Today, anyone no matter how shallow their knowledge can "publish"
Who do you believe? What was their real motivation for "publishing"
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 26, @03:12AM
>Today, anyone no matter how shallow their knowledge can "publish"
And 50 years ago, anyone well connected enough to "the system" could publish what the "the system" wanted disseminated, while competing ideas struggled to get any attention at all - great thinkers out there with the shallow, uninformed and unhinged, all pushing their self-promoted pamphlets in the same arena because they were not in line with the power brokers.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 25, @09:16PM
>"And who polices the self-appointed editors/gatekeepers of Wikipedia" is a perfect counter-example.
If Wikipedia gets a hostile Twitter style takeover and rebranded "Y" (sub-text: It takes a Y chromosome to be worth anything in this world...) I would hope that an alternative shows up (ala BlueSky) as a counter-balance to the mockery of its former not-so-perfect self that it quickly becomes.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 26, @05:42PM (3 children)
Students take shortcuts
Dishonest students cheat. "Take shortcuts" is a rather dishonest way of saying "cheat".
I miss honesty and competence. Both were the norm in the 20th, very rare in this century.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 27, @02:47AM (2 children)
>I miss honesty and competence
I remember a distinct lack of both in the 1980s, but it has gotten dramatically worse since then.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday December 09, @02:43PM (1 child)
It started with Reagan's Capital Gains Tax cut that sent Wall Street into a hostile takeover feeding frenzy that cost workers hours worked or even their jobs. IMO Reagan was the worst president in my lifetime, worse than Nixon, until Trump was elected. REAGAN was the root cause of most of America's problems today, from housing to child care to mental health and mass shootings.
Tripling the minimum wage would solve most of America's problems. When a McDonald's hamburger was 15¢ and the minimum wage was $1.50, a minimum wage worker could buy a small house. Today that exact same 15¢ burger is $2.49. Today's mental health problems are caused by the fact that parents are now forced to each work two jobs and let their children be raised by corporate child care from birth rather than a loving parent. Before the 1980s, only single parents needed child care.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 09, @05:00PM
>IMO Reagan was the worst president in my lifetime
I agree, and all the more remarkable that he essentially pulled off a three term presidency while: A) being an obvious front-man (Bedtime for Bonzo FFS) for a cabal of movers behind the scenes, and B) blatantly strip-mining the engines of increasing prosperity that the majority of the voters had enjoyed for decades up until "his" policies got put into place.
>Tripling the minimum wage would solve most of America's problems
Screw wages, they'll just get inflated into meaninglessness at a whim. UBI changes the playing field from people having zero net economic value to being "worth something" just because they exist. We already have it but it's wrapped up in hellishly expensive "poor shaming" bureaucracy. Give people enough economic power to live without groveling for handouts from the social safety net mess, then let the businesses negotiate wages to make it worth peoples' time to work.
Most people want to work, and will work given the opportunity. A big problem with our social safety net bureaucracy is that it takes so much time and effort to get the survival money taps turned on that it severely dis-incentivizes benefits recipients from getting (non-under-the-table) employment, sharply dividing society into working and non-working classes.
>parents are now forced to each work two jobs and let their children be raised by corporate child care from birth
That's a big one, and the "working vs non-working" divide makes it worse... women (and men) can't take a couple of years off from career building for childcare, lest they spend the rest of their lives as non-working or no-skills-job people.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday November 25, @12:57PM
Both Plato and my Bible have made the same observation about the younger generation being ignorant of the ethics that make civilization work, as if only the elders possessed such wisdom.
I'd like to posit it's human nature and the integral of experience...call it "education" if you want.
As a baby through adolescence, we have only experienced everything done for us. Our parents had the responsibilities of providers. We just had to not piss off our parents by trying to learn where the limits were and the rewards and penalties for our works.
So, we were dependent. Our works made little effect on the world at large. About all we could do is piss off the neighbors, or worse, attract the attention of law enforcement.
Well, that shapes our behaviour toward simply being a consumer without much regard for others.
But, time passes, and we assume the role our parents had. Responsibilities. And our creature comforts become very dependent on employment, either self-made, or working for a paycheck.
Both teach by experience that resources are in limited supply - which varies a *lot* as a function of our stewardship of those resources.
The younger generation has yet to experience this level of training yet, so they are likely to take everything for granted. They will get their turn in the great scheme of things just as we did.
I remain hopeful they will see what we did that had any real value, and what we did that only resulted in landfill.
Many of us see that right now, and I am quite sure our kids will see it too. Some call it good and evil. I see it as community and selfishness. Some of us work for abundance, by means of the economies of scale. While others strive for ownership of other's debt.
We still haven't figured out how to direct these forces of human nature near as well as we have understood how to direct the forces of nature.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Marvin on Tuesday November 25, @10:26AM
...professors use AI to teach whole classes... https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/nov/20/university-of-staffordshire-course-taught-in-large-part-by-ai-artificial-intelligence [theguardian.com]
It's like that scene in one of my alltime fav movies: Real Genius https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 25, @12:11PM (12 children)
"I can't give you brains, but I can give you a diploma."
The fact is that colleges and universities have been turned into a combination of 2 things:
1. Job training at the would-be employee's expense.
2. A requirement that anybody in what was once a high-salary white collar job do the equivalent of paying off a house before they even get to 0 net worth.
That is not what it is supposed to be for, it's supposed to be about training minds in different techniques to interpret data, think about problems, draw and test conclusions, and express ideas clearly to others in a relentless pursuit of the truth of things. But like a lot of good things, we've sacrificed all that on the altar of profits. And it's telling that so many of the people with lots of power under the current system treat critical thinking and skill with baloney detection among those they consider to be the modern peasantry (which yes, includes everybody likely to be here at Soylent) as a bad thing.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 25, @12:53PM (11 children)
>A requirement that anybody in what was once a high-salary white collar job do the equivalent of paying off a house before they even get to 0 net worth.
See Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society [wikipedia.org]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday November 25, @01:23PM (8 children)
Things have changed a lot since the internet and AI.
We have all sorts of educational opportunities in the form of internet "universities" ... Like Brilliant, Khan's Academy, Veritassium, and more.
As far as knowledge goes, just about anyone curious about anything has the means of getting access to the world's knowledge.
This was something that my ( older ) generation HAD to go to University for, or be mentored.
These days, I believe the only thing you really need to get an excellent education is CURIOSITY .
However, if it's a high paying job you are after, learning negotiation skills, not math and physics, will land you the top spot..I have seen way too many extremely knowledgeable tradespeople and engineers laid off while people having "people skills" were retained, even though the lack of ability to back up salesmanship with operable product eventually catches up with them by loss of customers and trust.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 25, @04:45PM
>while people having "people skills" were retained,
Beyond academic knowledge and ability, one thing required to get a 4.0 (or whatever "perfect" is, these days) GPA is: certain kinds of "people skills."
It doesn't matter how brilliant you are, if you piss off your professors not all of them will be giving you A+ grades.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gnuman on Tuesday November 25, @06:01PM (3 children)
You missed the memo, that in today's attention economy, things like curiosity are commoditization by 30-second tick-tocks and 2 min youtube shorts. Heck, 20 minutes Veritassium videos, a great milestone is perseverance. Learning requires 10,000+ hours to become good at something.. and it's not 10,000 hours of watching youtube.
Curiosity stopped to exist today, because to have curiosity, you first need to have BOREDOM!
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday November 25, @09:38PM (2 children)
I think curiosity is just as strong today as ever. I see it in myself a lot. Arduino applications. Lately it's been using aircraft Bendix Autosyn motors as magnetic based goniometers ( angular position transducers ), using dual-slope ADC timed to operate as synchronous detectors, while generating rotor drive using class E resonant amplifiers, implementing a "lock-in amplifier".
Why? Just pure curiosity! Can I do it? The whole thing seems so elegant. And being an ex-aerospace engineer, I have worked with my older peers that shared tales of the "AirData" electromechanical computer that was used on fighter jets in WW2. Those Bendix Autosyn ( a form of a selsyn motor ) were at the heart of the cockpit gauges driven by the AirData computer, which used matching Autosyn motors as goniometers to convert rotations derived by mechanical means to a form the gauges could display .
It was a very robust design. Beautiful design using rotary transformers and three phase stators to convey angular information using only magnetic coupling in the signal path. No brushes at all!
So, knowing what I know about data acquisition techniques and interleaving various topologies into an elegant solution...I just want to build one.
It's my form of Sudoku. But for me, it's things like this. I can really get absorbed in things like more efficient power converters or tight algorithms done in machine code.
I see the kids doing it too. But few kids have that internal drive that drives them to do this, neither are they psychologically compatible with those obsessed with optimizing profit margins. Different goals. One is pushing the limits of physical law, while the other is optimising profitability. Obsessive attention to detail doesn't help the bottom line all that much.
Maybe Asperger's is not a mental disorder - it's more like comparing a laser to a flashlight. Just have to get an Asperger of the correct orientation.
I often think that leadership training schools present a puzzle containing various geometries of pegs which are to be inserted into matching holes.
The ones of engineering capabilities will return correctly assembled puzzle.
While those of leadership capabilities will return boxes of smashed puzzle
And those of governmental capability will reward those who passed this test by rewarding those who returned boxes of smashed puzzle, as they have demonstrated the ability to think outside the box.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday November 25, @11:19PM
Meant to add that if you give a really good engineer such a puzzle, he's apt to take the puzzle apart and bring you back an airplane, saying he has plenty of puzzles just like the one given, but he wants an airplane.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Wednesday November 26, @11:30AM
I'm not sure how old you are, but it seems you are old enough as you are already an "ex-aerospace engineer"... so, my comments do not apply to the old guard. They apply to the kids today that are prevented from being bored. That have their attention spans destroyed by instant gratification hits. *You* know what is possible and *you* know the reward at end of the rainbow of trying something. You go ahead, make somethign, and when it works (more or less), you get your own dopamine hit that you made it work. I too, like to tinker for probably same reasons.
But....
To be able to get here, you need to start as a clueless kid that is bored and doesn't know if tinkering will be rewarding or not. You know, when I was 10 years old, I would have been sooo impressed by today's tech. you can program everything so easily. No need to even buy a compiler (or pirate it). You can just start... so... where are all the kids that learn to program these days? Suddenly we have higher percentage of CS graduates where their first programming experience comes from school and not self-taught. Many kids today do not know how to use mouse/keyboard to even play games, never mind making games. There is more access to tech these days than ever before, but no one is actually using technology. They just consume content on it. Billions of people are not curious at all how this magic tech works. They are not curios how to leverage it for their own purposes.
Like I wrote originally. You only have so much time in a day. If you spend it watching youtube or crawling over Friendface or Jitter, then you will not have it for creative tasks. Boredom is missing. And without boredom, you never learn that rewards can be intrinsic and not just external. Boredom is a *prerequisite* to discover intrinsic motivation. You do not need to find it -- you have it. But for kids today? Many more will never discover it due to tech usage today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, @06:40PM (1 child)
"just about anyone curious about anything has the means of getting access to the world's knowledge."
awash in a sea of uninformed opinion and fantasy.
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Tuesday November 25, @08:29PM
There are some curators out there who gather the good stuff. And the good ones tell you where the other ones are.
Just like right here.
We are a gem in the cesspool of the internet, but we managed to find it, despite the huge publicity of other social networks.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 26, @05:54PM
As far as knowledge goes, just about anyone curious about anything has the means of getting access to the world's knowledge.
It's been like that since the advent of the public library, but the internet makes it MUCH faster and easier.
This was something that my ( older ) generation HAD to go to University for, or be mentored.
I learned Z-80 assembly well enough to write a two player battle tanks game in that language from the Orlando Public Library alone. Yes, I did learn a lot in college after learning nothing in high school. My high school teachers were educated, of course, but I received an A+ on a science class paper because the teacher said it was over his head.
These days, I believe the only thing you really need to get an excellent education is CURIOSITY
Indeed. You can't be educated without curiosity. But the American public school system doesn't want you to learn, they want you to memorize. They do their damndest to kill curiosity.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 25, @04:03PM (1 child)
So yes, decentralized learning about whatever subject you like is good. No question about it. And I agree with the sibling poster that curiosity about a subject is the #1 best factor for studying it, and the amount of information that's readily available is fantastic.
But there's also a place for traditional schooling structures:
1. For research, it helps to have like-minded colleagues right down the hall that you can bounce ideas off of and collaborate with. The best university departments I've seen in action were like that - everyone had their specialties, but were avid supporters of their colleagues' work, and especially once they were tenured when you overheard discussions it was clearly respectful enriching of each others' work.
2. For learning, it helps to have someone who knows what they're doing providing a structure for your studies. Like, sure, I can go in depth into a lot of areas with what's out there on the web, but there's a big difference in what I'll find between chasing my personal rabbit holes and having a good comprehensive 5-month course on the subject. Again, in my experience, the best teachers I've seen in action absolutely loved it when students were really engaging with their material, not just answering the questions but thinking beyond what was in the syllabus and the exams. You'll also note that the typical academic structure involves a lot more rote learning and exams earlier on, with progressively more self-directed study as you get closer to being on the same level as your instructors.
3. The institution and its brand name can help with getting cash, time, and resources to really pursue things. Like, it's a lot harder to go to a bank or a non-profit and say "Can I get $X,000 to study my favorite subject online for 4 years?" than it is to say "Can I get $X,000 to study for a doctorate at Harvard?" And without that time, you can't really dive in to the level you need to to truly grok the subject.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 25, @04:48PM
The main thrust of "Deschooling Society" isn't about killing schools and learning, it's about breaking down their position as gatekeeper, rentseeker, and institutional barrier to entry in the higher paying fields. Those aspects of academia have "crossed the second watershed" in Illich's terms - not so different from "jumped the shark" - passed their point of net positive contribution to society and started becoming a net drain on it instead.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 25, @01:00PM (10 children)
Yes, surprising that only 39% were discovered to be "partially written by AI." How many ways can students parrot back "the truths" the professor is seeking "in their own words"? Here's a fun test: Compare / contrast the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg from the perspectives of the Union and the Confederacy in 300 words or less:
How would you say it differently, in your own words?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday November 25, @01:16PM
> surprising that only 39%
Presumably 61 % of students spotted the Trojan and excluded it from ChatGPT search...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Deep Blue on Tuesday November 25, @05:41PM
I don't know about you, but formating it like that makes it pretty dubious.
Also, what was your point? That it's futile to fight it?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday November 25, @06:27PM (3 children)
Going in cold on that task, my essay would have been short on facts. I definitely wouldn't have mentioned Vicksburg. I'm not a Civil War buff, or somebody who's taking a course on it though. A professor would know what was mentioned in the lectures, which I would be attending. If he mentioned certain things, or used certain phrases, they'd show up in the essay. The one phrase that sticks in my mind is "high water mark of the Confederacy" which doesn't appear in this essay. Of course I remember that Lincoln gave his famous address there afterwords. Now that you mention it, IIRC Stonewall Jackson was lost there; but I couldn't hazard a guess at any other officers the South lost--but once again if the professor had focused on that I'd know.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 25, @09:14PM (2 children)
You remind me of the English Lit course I took freshman year, first semester. Probably 200 hours of reading assigned, if you did it "right." Of course, first semester freshman year, 6 other courses demanding attention... nobody did the reading, one or two read the Cliffs' Notes but the professor shut them down pretty hard within the first two in-class discussions so they stopped trying that. Some would skip and skim around and pick up a few phrases to throw out in the in-class discussions, and he'd acknowledge that they found something of interest, or not, in the text, but inevitably he would shut them down hard about the "bigger picture" the "overarching themes" that he was looking for...
My strategy was to stay silent for the first half of the discussions, get the gist of where he was driving the conversations then I would pick up bits and pieces of what had been thrown around in the discussion already and synthesize it into what he was driving at. The last 20 minutes were usually a back and forth with me and the professor generally agreeing about everything.
Ironically? the last discussion of the semester wasn't based on reading at all, it was an overview of all the material, the common theme of all the works discussed and I lead off with "Death, they all die, it's the end for all the major characters." He took a more moderate stance "well, no, it's more about Autumn, the Fall season, Winter approaching, the end is near but most of the text is written about what comes before..." and I just doggedly took the point "of course they talk about what comes before, because after the characters we all get invested in are dead, that's it, it's over, nothing more interesting for them to do, they are done..." and we went back and forth like that for most of the hour. I left the class thinking I'd like to take another with that professor at some point, even if it didn't apply to my major...
Over the Christmas holiday he had a heart attack while using a ladder to hang decorations, fell off, died. Or so my somewhat untrustable friend from the class told me, maybe he was just pulling my leg, but what I do know is that no more classes were on the schedule from that professor, ever, after that semester.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by istartedi on Tuesday November 25, @09:43PM (1 child)
A professor passing away hanging Christmas decorations and the last interaction you had with him was about literary interpretation involving Fall and death? That might be a fine example of truth being such that producers would reject the movie as unrealistic. Allegedly this was the case with the Audie Murphy story. They toned down his exploits for the biopic because they thought it would come off as unrealistic.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gnuman on Wednesday November 26, @01:04PM
Life has its ironic moments. From politics to my marriage (as viewed by my mom, at least). You find these moments all the time. You'd think that life is a badly written satire sometimes.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday November 25, @09:49PM (3 children)
In my own words? "I assume they both were pissed off that medical care wasn't M*A*S*H*-level, and both sides lost a lot of friends. That's probably the biggest thing that stuck with everyone in the United States at the time. But in all honesty, I don't know, because I wasn't there. AI has consumed all the writing produced during that time, so I bet it has a *way* better perspective on it."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 25, @10:05PM (2 children)
Well, none of us were there. I doubt we even have any living today who ever had a conversation with a Gettysburg survivor - not just of the battle itself but anyone of at least teenage years at the time the battle was fought. So, yeah, it's all hear-say and whatever the historians between then and now decided they wanted to write, and omit, about the topic.
In the context of a University history class? If you want the A you'd better be listening to the professor's spin on the topic and parrot that back in flattering notice of the details he (thinks he) shared with you.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 26, @06:01PM (1 child)
My great grandpa, Harry McGrew, was a child during the Civil War. I met him once in the middle 1950s, he died shortly afterwards. I was three or four. I and others alive today have met people who were alive during slavery! It wasn't nearly as long ago as it seems.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 27, @02:50AM
It's not so long ago, but getting further away faster as living memory passes from second hand to third.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by RamiK on Tuesday November 25, @01:30PM (9 children)
The Man™ forcing the people to regurgitate social class-approved political propaganda while enslaving the students in debt for the privilege of working a desk job that they could have easily accomplished straight out of high-school is disappointed his curated narration of history that happens to conveniently excuse their own class dominance despite its lack of fiscal and social contributions to society is dismissed as the bullshit that it is.
Don't drink the Kool-Aid.
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(Score: 5, Touché) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 25, @02:31PM (2 children)
The slave rebellions in Virginia actually happened, you whiny, constantly offended crybaby. I know your political opinions depend entirely upon not understanding history, but you don't have to simper like this.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by RamiK on Wednesday November 26, @07:30AM (1 child)
Where did I say the events didn't happen? I said the political interpretation (i.e. propaganda) of the events by the establishment (i.e. the Man) is used to justified contemporary youth indebted servitude.
And in case it wasn't clear, I was being sarcastic by using left-leaning cue words to parodize the fact that the same people who were fighting against institutional discrimination, masquerading it as Christian values, in the 60s are now advocating institutional discrimination and injustices while masquerading it as progressive values.
e.g. When a white collar humanities professor says Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, they're not talking about empowering blue collar workers. They're not promoting worker unions where members represent themselves to get better wages and secure working conditions. Rather, they're talking about themselves becoming the representatives of the working class as their betters and, naturally, living off their lowers through subsidized but privatized education and health care instead of nationalized education and health care.
Fact is, Democrats are just the white collar equivalents of the Republicans' upper class since before the civil war: They only care about securing their own positions as middle management and would refashion whichever cause comes their way to suit their talking points when the demographics call for it just like Republicans do. And in present times, when automation is cutting off desk jobs and is jeopardizing the academic inflation racket, Democrats again opt to work against the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion of blue collar Americans they pretend to embrace by actively trying to dilute blue collar wages with cheaper illegal immigrants (actual wage slaves without voting rights) while brainwashing the blue-collar children about how expanding civil rights and privileges to illegal immigrants is somehow supposed to be to their benefit and isn't coming off their own paychecks.
What makes one party the good or bad choice entirely depend on who you are and the market conditions: 30-60s it was the right thing to vote Democrats. 70-80s it was the Republicans. 90-2010s it was a shit show of bad choices all around. Now it's the Republicans again. I suspect things should turn around back to the Democrats' favor after automation settles and Democrats can reorient around whichever economic conditions the US ends up with. However, presently, they're at their civil war phase again where they're trying to preserve their status by justifying an increasingly unaffordable societal ill.
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(Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Wednesday November 26, @02:06PM
You don't need to convince me the Democrats suck. Not a difficult task.
But anyone with this visceral, hostile reaction to the idea of interpreting literature through the experiences of the writer in fucking college literature classes has got brain worms
(Score: 5, Funny) by PiMuNu on Tuesday November 25, @05:45PM
+5 insightful. US has been going downhill ever since they abolished slavery.
(ps: that was sarcasm)
(Score: 2) by Opyros on Tuesday November 25, @07:50PM (4 children)
That reads as if someone included a Trojan to make you write your comment from a Marxist point of view.
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Tuesday November 25, @09:51PM (1 child)
"Your instructions want me to include information on the use of branded condoms in a communist context. Would you like me to include that in the final answer?"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 27, @03:29AM
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday November 26, @10:33AM (1 child)
It's called parody. Alas, critical sarcasm isn't well received when dealing with true believers.
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(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 26, @06:05PM
Alas, critical sarcasm isn't well received when dealing with true believers. [wikipedia.org]
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by Ken_g6 on Tuesday November 25, @09:34PM
Do you really, these days? A whole lot of getting and having a job is just social skills. You can get far with confidence and charm alone, as both con men and the conned will attest. Being a toady will also keep one in a job for some time. I wonder whether one of those attitudes, plus liberal use of AI, would be enough to keep one employed for life nowadays?
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Wednesday November 26, @09:11AM (3 children)
I found the idea of introducing a Trojan horse in the assignment directions fascinating, but the article didn't mention how this was done. How did they insert that hidden text? Did they write it in a tiny font or in gray text in a white background, expecting that students a) would not notice it, b) that they would scan the assignment text to enter it as a prompt, instead of typing it, and c) that they would not notice the addition in the scanned text, where it would be plainly visible?
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday November 26, @01:08PM (1 child)
Copy pasta to AI is all the attention they managed to muster. Did you not read that AI even asked them if they wanted "marxist" perspective? I bet they didn't even read the question in the first place!
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday December 01, @06:04AM
I did read it. The point is that, if writing the assignment from a marxist perspective was plainly written in the assignment instructions, then anyone who didn't do so should fail the assignment. According to the article, however, this bit was hidden in such a way that only an AI would notice it. It is this hiding that I don't understand how it was done.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 26, @06:09PM
You make me think or the movie Hidden Figures, where the math lady solved the unsolvable by being a math genius and holding the paper to the light to see through the blackout.
Don't assume that because someone is lazy that they must be stupid.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday November 26, @05:30PM
I use the — character quite often in my work, probably because in the previous centuries it was very common. I have never used AI. I suspect that most AI is trained from older, public domain works from the last three centuries. Anything before that looks nothing like modern writing.
As well as the emdash I also avoid downer writing. Today's SF is the literary equivalent of emo; all dark, dreary, depressing. I let my subscription to F&SF lapse years ago, and they were the least guilty of published dystopia.
That said, I did kill three quarters of the Earth's population in Journey to Madness.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday November 26, @09:18PM
Here's a longer clip of the episode including the trojan horse part [youtu.be]. The clip looks like it was heavily edited, but even still ... it's a little flat and lifeless. Almost as if it weren't wholly written by a human. Also, the voice pacing sounds a little too uniform, but I could just be paranoid.