• @[email protected]
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    12 months ago

    God this is so depressing. Remember when people were actually INTERESTED in things and learned because they were curious and stimulated. Fuck all of these little corporate know nothings and their cheat-machine. If I were teaching these classes, I’d be standing these kids up in front of the class and asking them probing questions about the essay topics they wrote about and grading them purely on demonstrated knowledge.

  • DFX4509B
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    2 months ago

    How long before Respondus introduces an education equivalent of BattlEye or other kernel-level anticheats as a result of stuff like this?

    And I don’t mean the Lockdown browser, I mean something beyond that, so as to block local AI Implementations in addition to web-based ones.

    Also, I’m pretty sure there’s still plenty of fields that are more hands-on and either really hard or impossible to AI-cheat your way through. For example, if you’re going for carpentry at the local vo-tech, good luck AI-cheating your way through that when that’s a very hands-on subject by its nature.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 months ago

            I would argue that in person exams with no resources to do research goes against how the world works for most white collar workers.

            Few are unable to research on the internet to verify information, or at least look at say a man page for coding or look up past stuff on stackoverflow, if they are working through a problem.

            Standardized testing is just not as useful as-is. I do great at it and can typically pass exams without really studying the material, but others are not so lucky.

            I’ve met people who can flunk exams but talk about the problems, go into how they would fix it, and work through a problem to implementation and testing in the real world.

            Oh, and LLMs are the new typewriter, for better or worse. It’s unlikely we are going to have a future where they are not readily available. We already have models that run locally and do not transmit data anywhere, and AI customized to your own data that is not shared is already a service provided by Microsoft.

            Education needs to evolve with technology. It’s always been 5-10 years behind the curve.

            Maybe we should be using LLMs to proctor tests and generate interactive testing. Grading can be verified by a professor reading a transcript to verify hallucinations didn’t occur or influence the results. We can even have LLMs monitor the working process of people to help determine what are the most efficient ways to work custom tailored to individuals. This is just one idea of many potential options.

            • @[email protected]
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              52 months ago

              Those are all very nice ideas, and we’ll see if they pan out in the future. But universities need ways to stop (or, fine, reduce) cheating that can be implemented right now. A class in English literature and composition should test how well you can read and interpret the source material to then express something about it in your own words in a coherent way. This is a useful life skill to have, and students should learn to do it without AI assistance. Giving them a pen and paper and a quiet room to work in has been a good enough method of assessment for at least the last 50 years which is reasonably cost effective.

              Yes, there are problems with standardized testing. Yes, you can cheat on a paper test. But the way to improve the evaluation process is to first establish a stable baseline, and then try new things that might work better to see if they actually work better. Not to throw out everything we knew before and haphazardly try every random idea that pops into someone’s head in a panic.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 months ago

                Lol, english classes have always been the biggest joke of college for me. All you do is write an outline, pull some bullshit quotes to back up your argument from the source to satisfy MLA, and write enough to satisfy the word requirement. It’s all bullshit. it’s all opinion. Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

                If you really want to make people learn how to write professionally without computer assistance like spellcheck or LLMs, give them a fucking typewriter. It’s how I learned to type as a kid in the 90s. At least the typing skill is transferable and you get a great understanding of why applications like Word function the way they function.

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 months ago

                  Easy A for me, except when i’m forced to write by hand.

                  Okay - I’m sorry your nerd muscles were so weak you couldn’t even hold a pencil.

                  But regardless of your personal shortcomings, these classes exist because they teach useful things, and if we want to tell others who did and did not learn those useful things in this class, we need a way to test that knowledge.

                  Now, it seems like your point of view is that all the knowledge and experience of a university education is useless anyway. This is a point of view I have some sympathy towards, but on the whole I don’t think it is right. However, if you do, then why the fuck arent you filthy rich yet? If you know so well what people need to know to be successful and well educated for the next 30 years, and you think you know how they should learn, and you know how you can evaluate their abilities after receiving an education - then why aren’t you doing that and raking in the billions of dollars that go into university education right now?

                  So go do that. Tell me when you make your first million. But until then, I’m gonna assume that the foundational western liberal education has value, seeing as it has persisted for quite a while. LLMs on the other hand, may very well turn out to be a fad of the summer.

      • @[email protected]
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        92 months ago

        Doesn’t even need to be paper. Have locked-down, internet-disconnected computers in the exam hall bas glorified typewriters.

        • @[email protected]
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          42 months ago

          Why not a middle ground? Have them only access a local network version of Wikipedia + a verified library to search

        • @[email protected]
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          42 months ago

          Back when I was in grade school in the mid 1990’s, we were one of the first families to have a computer. We weren’t allowed to ANY schoolwork on it. If you had to write a paper, it had to be written by hand. Which, as someone who could type much faster and used bigger words, was REALLY fucking annoying.

          But yeah, I imagine we need to go back to dumb, disconnected computers in exam halls to keep things above board. It’s depressing to see how lazy this tech makes students.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          Exactly, that’s how it works in my country. I think the PCs are connected to a local server that then matches the results to your id and email.

      • DFX4509B
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        Or even actually show what they learned in a practical sense. In a vo-tech, for example, have the students fix up a car or get a small LAN set up, or even in the case of an art school, have the class do a mural or a sidewalk-scale mosaic outside as their end-of-instruction project (both of those sound like really fun end-of-instruction projects, btw), with admin approval, of course.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 months ago

          I like this idea, but I also think that we should keep in mind that the time of university staff is expensive, and with the already outlandish cost of education we need to strike a balance

          • DFX4509B
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            Vo-techs at least kinda have to be based on the types of things they tend to teach, you can’t really teach things like masonry out of a book, for example, that’s one subject where you actually need to go in and get your hands dirty as it were, and actually do the thing being taught, to learn it, or really anything else having to do with building a house.

            I could very much argue that this also applies to art school as well, but there’s also a lot of theory and history and such that very much needs a lot of reading to pick up, although things like color theory are best picked up by actually mixing different paint colors together, as well as the practical side of things in terms of actually doing a painting or drawing or sculpture or whatever.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 months ago

      tools like that were going big in the pandemic for online exams. Basically rootkits that fully compromise your machine

  • fmstrat
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    162 months ago

    Computer science is going to be q commodity job. Prediction of three tiers:

    • Tier 1: No education requirement. I write code and build things. Large percentage of developers.
    • Tier 3: Science based, high education working on algorithms, physics, and other elements requiring an understanding of matters in deeper education
    • Tier 2: Right in between 1 and 3, may require formal education, but definitely experience. Will understand applications of high science, and can both program well and manage teams. Will replace current nontechnical middle management, because who needs that when the market is flooded

    We’ve been headed this way for years, AI is just speeding it up.

  • mesa
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    22 months ago

    If you go to coffee shops, you can literally see the chatgpt prompt in most browsers where people are doing work.

  • @[email protected]
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    572 months ago

    College courses have long been structured to incentivize rote memorization and regurgitation over actual critical thinking and understanding. When i was in college the “honors” students literally had filling cabinets with a decade of old tests for every class in their dormatory. I’ll admit llms have probably made it even worse, but the slide of colleges into worthless degree mills has been inexorably progressing for like 40 years at this point.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 months ago

      The term bulimia learning has been used for well over a decade now to describe that cramming before an exam only to immediately forget all of it afterwards too. Testing in education is fundamentally broken and has been for a long time.

      • @[email protected]
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        112 months ago

        I tutored my wife in Trigonometry, which I fucking hate and have never gotten more than a C in, and she got an A. She also hates trig and math in general. It’s basically a measure of whose memory and work ethic is best.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          Exactly. Studying with people who understood less but could remember the magic words to ace tests was an exercise in frustration

    • Aatube
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      32 months ago

      it’s been heading in the opposite direction, fortunately, if collegeboard is to be representative

  • @[email protected]
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    2 months ago

    When the only thing that matters is the piece of paper people will skip the fluff.

    We can make it illegal for employers to discriminate based on education whenever we want to stop prioritizing degrees.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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      202 months ago

      I get where you’re coming from, but in certain fields I don’t think that’s going to fly too far.

      The guy selling me a sofa, I really don’t care if he has a bachelor’s degree or not. My doctor? Yeah, I kind of think he needs to have legitimately completed medical school.

      • @[email protected]
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        42 months ago

        Cool, certifications are different than degrees.

        Part of the problem is we keep treating degrees like certifications.

    • @[email protected]
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      The main issue is that testing if someone knows and has the skills to do a job well (or at all) is a hard problem, whether you outsource that to people who write a piece of paper or try to do it in-house in the employing company. Hell, half the companies do not know if the employees they have had for years are any good at their job.

  • StinkyFingerItchyBum
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    82 months ago

    Universities are being disrupted. Everyone is going to have to rethink their role is society with AI, Universities included.

    • @[email protected]
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      392 months ago

      The best part about AI is people are shooting themselves in the foot using it at school, where you’re supposed to learn things, and it will make the rest of us not nearly as dependent on a LLM rise to the top. I truly do not understanding cheating in college. If you’re not learning, what’s the fucking point? How well are you going to perform without access to that LLM? Good grades are not the point of college.

      • Aatube
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        52 months ago

        When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

      • nfh
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        282 months ago

        Imagine borrowing $200k for an education, and then doing as little work as you can to actually learn the things you’re paying to know

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          Are you paying to know those things? I think you’re paying for a piece of paper that said you went there. The number of employers who have hired me for what my Bachelor’s of Science is for: 0. Programmers are probably screwing themselves if they are going to program later in life and using an LLM to write it. But something like 60-90 out of the 120 credit hours for that Bachelor’s degree are not programming courses. If I was in college today I could safely say I would know which courses I needed to pay attention to, and which ones I don’t. Hell I took Archeology of Caribbean Piracy one semester, fun course though.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 months ago

          I went to college to get the degree so I could check that box on job applications, I already knew most of the material.

        • @[email protected]
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          Imagine lacking the curiosity to want to take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn interesting new things with all the resources at your fingertips. I think the root of the problem is that capitalist society sends students the message that learning is valuable only as a means to make more money. If that’s your view then it makes sense to skip the difficult stuff and just pay for the piece of paper that gives you access to better-paying jobs. Capitalism absolutely doesn’t value having a wiser and more knowledgeable populace, and students pick up on this.

          • @[email protected]
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            42 months ago

            Most people can’t afford to go to Universities for the purpose of research. Most people go to Universities for a specific college (every university is requured to have multiple colleges to be accedited) to learn information that is already known. Which is where I think we have it set up wrong. It shouldn’t cost large sums of money for a person to learn what is already known, the information should be made available for free. The tests universal and unattached to a University name. Were you able to pass the test showing proficiency in A, B and C. Yes or no, that is what we need to know you are proficient in for this job. It doesn’t matter if you went to Alabama, Yale, Community college, online seminars, w.e. Researching knowledge we do not currently possess is what I think the University setup should be pushed back towards.

          • nfh
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            92 months ago

            I was one of the people who went to college to learn things, but the more I learn, the more I’m saddened by all the people I went to school with who studied things they didn’t enjoy, didn’t particularly care to get better at, all because they saw it as a way to make money. In optimizing for money, they miss out on learning and fulfillment.

            This wasn’t that long ago, but I can only imagine how much heavy GenAI use could intensify that effect

            • @[email protected]
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              32 months ago

              I was one of those people too and the academic environment was honestly depressing. Almost none of the professors actually cared about the topics they taught, only about the ones that were their research subjects, on the topics they taught many were stuck at the state the introductory topics were at when they first graduated themselves (in IT where everything changes much more quickly than that). Many university wide decisions were nonsensical (e.g. teach memory management in OS classes in Java because Java was the language they standardized on for everything due to industry pressure). For Bachelor topics they only wanted to accept topics where you could tell you would basically spend months to write something that would end up in the round filing cabinet once it had served its grading purpose. Questions in larger classes were highly discouraged, even pointing out mistakes in the lecture materials (obvious indisputable ones that shouldn’t hurt anyone’s ego like some typo in the order of digits) got responses that discouraged doing that again.

        • @[email protected]
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          132 months ago

          Imagine borrowing $200k for an education, and then doing as much work as you can to actually learn the things you’re paying to know and then not being able to get a job

          • @[email protected]
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            82 months ago

            You frame that as if the same can’t happen if you use AI. At least if you actually do the work you have the knowledge and the ability to research.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 months ago

              My argument is knowledge is priceless, but education is worthless. Degrees now mean nothing whether AI assisted or not so going into insane debt for no reason is reckless.

              • @[email protected]
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                2 months ago

                depends on your major, and if you were able to get said experience, some are quite difficult to get especially if requires wet lab work and research experience(which isnt neccesary but is highly sought after especially if it was published) in STEMS. if a students gets a psyche or studies degree without the forethought of a graduate schools thats on them, and i hear alot of them whine and become bitter about it. just because you can finish the degree faster, wont lead you to a job.

                i followed one person on yotube, asian whiened about his psych major, eventually became bitter and full magat and one of his latest rants is about college. i had cousin get a psyche major but with proper proecedures she got a psyD which is the correct career track, Phd is another but harder to achieve.

              • @[email protected]
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                72 months ago

                If you’re coding or whatever this is fine. But I would really, really like my doctors and engineers to be educated by other doctors and engineers.

                • BombOmOm
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                  If you’re coding or whatever this is fine.

                  I want coders to learn from trusted sources too. How do you authorize a user and store the password (plain text, hash, encrypt)? Do you use MD5 or SHA-256? (Always hash passwords, don’t use MD5)

                  If you have to encrypt some information, do you use AES or Triple DES ? (never Triple DES)

                  When authorizing with OAuth, should one send the auth url, client id, client secret, scopes, and redirect url to the client machine? (yes, yes, no, yes, yes)


                  These are basic questions with answers that are easy to find…and many programmers get them very, very wrong. Mostly out of carelessness, often the question itself doesn’t even pop into their head.

                  Relavent XKCD

  • LostXOR
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    232 months ago

    Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat.

    How far do you have to be into the AI shit bubble to think everyone is cheating with AI? Some people are always going to cheat, but that’s been true since long before AI tools existed. Most people have some level of integrity and desire to actually learn from the classes they’re paying thousands to attend.

    • Em Adespoton
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      72 months ago

      It all depends on goals. If your goal is to fake it into a high paying job, cheating works. If your goal is to enrich your knowledge, it’s useless.

      But in order to always do the second, you pretty much have to have enough confidence in your ability to have a soft landing when you graduate that it isn’t worth it OR already have a better grasp of the subject at hand than the average intelligence distilled by an AI.

      • @[email protected]
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        It’s also not all-or-none. Someone who otherwise is really interested in learning the material may just skate through using AI in a class that is uninteresting to them but required. Or someone might have life come up with a particularly strict instructor who doesn’t accept late work, and using AI is just a means to not fall behind.

        The ones who are running everything through an LLM are stupid and ultimately shooting themselves in the foot. The others may just be taking a shortcut through some busy work or ensuring a life event doesn’t tank their grade.

    • @[email protected]
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      82 months ago

      I think it’s also a bit obtuse, depending on the situation, to say they’re “cheating”. Using it in class during a test is clearly cheating. Doing it for homework is just using resources you have at hand. This kind of statement has been made over and over throughout the years.

      Using a calculator is cheating. Using a graphing calculator is cheating. Using a previous years assignments is cheating. Using cliff notes is cheating. Using the Internet is cheating. Using stack overflow is cheating.

      I’ll admit there is a point of diminishing returns, where you basically fail to learn anything, and we’re pretty much there with AI, but we need to find new challenges to fit our new tools. You rarely solve 21st century problems with 19th century tools and methods.

  • @[email protected]
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    Why are you borrowing like $3,000 a credit hour to use ChatGPT? Take some fucking humanities courses so you don’t grow up to be like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk challenging each other to an MMA match. This might be your last chance in life to be surrounded by experts and hot people having discussions.

    Being able to use software everyone uses isn’t a marketable skill. Learn some shit. You’re an adult now.

    • @[email protected]
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      232 months ago

      “This might be your last chance in life to be surrounded by experts and hot people having discussions.”

      The things that really matter.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 months ago

      Those who don’t desire to think will attend university to not think. Those who desire to think will put off studying to discuss ideas with friends, but like they’ll keep doing that shit for life.

    • TonyOstrich
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      82 months ago

      That’s always been my issue. I worked full time and went to school full time when I was in college and still had to take out some loans. I did have some scholarship money that covered about half of it, but they only covered four years. My degree path didn’t have any free electives meaning in every assignment, test, and class I only had a single shot. Failing would likely mean having to retake a class and push graduating out to a year which would have doubled the amount of debt I came out with. All just to get a piece of paper that would allow me to do the job that I knew I would be good at and enjoy.

      The entire course of my life was at the mercy of some bad teachers and worse bureaucracy. I get that my profession shouldn’t just hire people without any kind of training and hope for the best, and there were things I learned that had value, but the stakes and imbalance of power is so high I can’t really be mad at some one “cheating” when they themselves are getting royally fucked.

      • @[email protected]
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        62 months ago

        If you’re only doing university for a piece of paper, you done gone screwed up.

        University is to learn how academia works so that you can continue your development independently afterwards. You become capable of researching topics, reading the papers and solving a problem you’ve never faced before.

        Nobody ever tells you this, but your first degree is more about developing you than developing your knowledge. If you just askGPT the whole time you’re cheating yourself.

        • @[email protected]
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          42 months ago

          Academia is a universe unlike anything else in the world. Academics will not prepare you for a job in the real world; it will prepare you to climb the academic ladder

        • TonyOstrich
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          72 months ago

          That’s great, but if they want to make that the goal then they should structure it in a way that is more conducive to that goal. When failure without dire consequences isn’t an option, then they have fucked up.

    • Platypus
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      11 month ago

      Yes, wholeheartedly. They’re not cheating the school—they’re cheating themselves. If you’re paying 200k+ for an education, for what earthly reason would you then skip the actual education?

      • @[email protected]
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        11 month ago

        Please go on tell me again how college actually translates to working a real job. What’s the point of knowing anything you can look it up just as fast. Also as fast as tech changes it’s not worth it to commiting time and energy beyond the basic understanding of things.

        • Keepthoseeyeslockedonmine
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          01 month ago

          @al_Kaholic @platypode not my usual content, but isn’t college about teaching a way for thinking and critical analysis rather than learning by rote? Obviously the bar is raised nowadays, not only do you have to be a critical thinker, you need to be smarter at analysis and insight than AI. ‘Knowing things’ is for school, it is not advanced education

          • Platypus
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            11 month ago

            Yeah, this guy is either trolling or doesn’t have the faintest clue what a good education actually comprises.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            Have you met anyone in America with critical thinking skills? Where is this magical city? You are the reason that the colleges can scam 200k because you think that being in college and getting a piece of paper is the only way to gain this knowledge

  • @[email protected]
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    2 months ago

    make education stupider and less important, put AI assistants in front of everyone, automate as much as possible, and allow the proletariat class to enjoy decreasing levels of control over society

  • @[email protected]
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    442 months ago

    It’s almost as if college isn’t about bettering yourself but paying a racket so you can check off a mandatory box on your resume for the pleasure of your corporate liege-lords…

    • @[email protected]
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      Correct.

      It’s also why everyone needs a linkedin and to wear a suit. We have an environment where you’re not an attractive hire unless you can show you’ve ‘paid into the system.’

      It’s fucked, and that’s by design. We need to start respecting people who are fighting back instead of shaming them.

    • @[email protected]
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      42 months ago

      Not to sound like a starry eyed idealist, but it’s both.

      It sucks that it’s just a weird mandatory box, but if you don’t cheat your way through college you should better yourself in lots of ways. Learning how to independently organize tasks and time and research and challenging your preconceptions and struggling to really grasp complex ideas.

      It should be all those things.

  • @[email protected]
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    212 months ago

    I seen students put no work into changing the output text from chatgpt. Like, not even trying to hide it. Shm.