I don't see how I could possibly cheat during my engineering studies. Every exams was different from previous years, you had to detail the calculation steps, you had to be so fluent with using the formulas and fast at calculating in order to even have a chance to answer all questions. Most exams were calibrated so that only the top students have just enough time to finish.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Unpopular Opinion
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We are producing graduates who are good at solving trivial technical problems at breakneck speed. Meanwhile, back in reality, nothing of value is created quickly. Who would board a plane that had been designed like this? It would be disconcerting to hear from a doctor 'I did your surgery as fast as possible' when waking from a medical procedure.
Engineering and science is done slowly and meticulously because it is very difficult and takes years to become competent and decades to truly master.
It's taught us to learn fast. Also, it's made so that you can't lean answers by heart, you need to understand what your doing to have a chance to solve the exams. You can't succeed by being fast and mindless, you need to be optimal (maybe skip some questions strategically). I think it's a good learning method for engineering, teachs you to be thorough and methodical.
College is a failed business model
Aren't they just complaining about another form of cheating that is low-effort and low-cost. I don't think people are complaining that there wasn't cheating at all?
We had that Aunt Becky from Full House scandal not too long ago.
Hell man, when I was in uni we noticed all the software engineers did better than the computer science students. Well, guess what the software engineering students had? previous exams and stuff ...
I definitely think that University/College or what-have-you is broken and has a bigger problem for sure though.
least for the US, it's a direct consequence of the federal student aid process. a pipeline literally written by investment bankers to milk the american public for every $ they could instead of taxing rich people for the public good.
schools naturally want as much of this $ as they can as well so they lower standarda and just let anyone through, it's not their problem if someone doesn't learn anything
Canada isn't as bad as the US in that regard but we have echoes of that. Universities didn't know how to deal with more students and just crammed us in, raised the price, and didn't care if we learned anything.
Your title is wrong anyway. We had like 10% of cheaters before because it was hard to cheat, you could get caught, and there was some moral barrier to do that. Now, you only need a Google account to cheat, and I'm pretty sure that the rate of 50% of students cheating is pretty accurate.
how broken are education systems
Yes, but it's not an excuse for that huge increase. There was way less cheating before, AI enabled it.
What do "collage students" have to do with colleges and science education?
At least the previous cheating took effort. In all seriousness though, university was originally a system where a class was basically a book club directed by an expert. You went to class, discussed the reading, found out what to read for next time.
- going back to this format, plus tests that you take in class, with no grading of homework which was always stupid in the first place, would solve all the problems with cheating. It is also a better format for learning. Having lectures where students face to take notes in real time to have the material for the tests when it could just be in a book is absurd and massively inefficient
- but you'd have to have enough professors
- and professors would have to stop reusing tests
Just cause it was bad before doesn't mean it's not worse now. It's a lot easier to use AI.
Yes and I mentioned it in my post.
What the fuck is even the point of going to college if you don't want to learn?
A lot of people go to college specifically to get a decent job later on. Companies requiring college degrees for work that really shouldn't are to blame, mostly.
If everyone in college and university is getting easy degrees with AI and similar, why not just bypass the process and give everyone a Phd?
You get a Phd, OP.
I get a Phd.
Everyone on Lemmy gets a Phd.
We all get Phds!
Yaay!!
I gpt a phd, a pretty huge dick
/s
Social network tradition.
They say frats do their hazing as a way of extortion.
Degrees look impressive
Not being incompetent is more impressive!
Doesn't pay the bills, though.
College is about accreditation instead of learning, so people will only put in the effort they need to become accredited rather than putting in the extra effort required to actually learn.
All the Dude ever wanted was a good "collage" upon his rug.
I had seen people paying for services to write research for them.
I had seen people translate research papers from foreign languages(Like Russian for example) to English to avoid doing any work.
What I see as the main distinction between these forms and AI-enabled cheating is that the university is at least accrediting someone's scholarship (assuming it goes through the system just fine). AI/LLMs output pure, unverifiable, black-box gobbledygook in a way that gums up the whole system. I'm not associated with a university anymore but have several friends who do teach at that level and the amount of opaque muck they're having to trawl through just to try to prove if a human wrote any bit of the essay they've been handed in makes me glad I didn't pursue my own career in education further.
I agree with the gist of your argument, I really do, but I don't think that the current gen of AI cheaters are just a new form of a forever problem in academia.
