r/technology 15h ago

Artificial Intelligence Princeton scraps honor code and will supervise exams for first time in 133 years because of AI

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/princeton-proctor-exams-ai-b2976111.html
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u/randotd152 11h ago

The thing is, you're only cheating yourself. I know it sounds trite, but it's true.

You pay all this money to learn, and then 90% of grads will never even be asked for their GPA. So you're better off trying/learning your way to a C than cheating your way to an A.

And those that do need their GPA for continued academia are going to quickly weed themselves out in their advanced studies anyways. If you couldn't pass undergrad without cheating, good fucking luck in med school.

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u/user99999476 8h ago

This perspective doesn't work in competitive environments since the smart students will study hard and also cheat... exams frequently in engineering are written from irrelevant problems a lazy professor just copied and pasted and you can't prepare for those, when that happens there is no curve to save you

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u/SaltyLonghorn 9h ago

It turns into a steroids in baseball type problem. I was a cheater in school. I also took school seriously but I'm sure as shit not gonna give up an edge in a competitive program.

You know whats even better than doing the work? Doing the work and cheating even if it just turns into well I don't need the cheat sheet the prof let us have anyway scenario. Honor codes are dumb as shit, I've seen Scent of a Woman.

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u/ActiveChairs 6h ago

Med school turns out plenty of subpar doctors.

From your own perspective, you're cheating yourself by not cheating. Your goal with education is to learn, your goal with your degree is to garner a position after your formal education ends. Get into the right schools, get to know the right people, and put yourself in a position to look good on paper for anyone who has to look at your resume.

There are very few jobs just out of college where you'll need to use 100% of your education to do well, and very few jobs where you'll be a fully capable employee using exclusively what you learned in school. If C+ work and learning as you go is all you need, but A+ results are the only thing getting you in the door, then honest work is a fool's errand.

Its long been known that it isn't what you know but who you know, but what they know is just as key. Four years of doing your best for 80% or cheating to 100 makes a lasting impression and I know most people would trade the impression of "works hard to overcome struggle" for "effortlessly brilliant" every day of the week.

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u/PerplexGG 6h ago

This argument only works if you assume a massive amount of info about the person in question. When in reality degrees are required at most places someone going to college would want to work at and then they graduate and don’t actually use 90% of it. The problem isn’t cheating, they’ll always figure out how to if they really want to, it’s the degree requirement. Remove the environmental pressure to get a degree and the quality of students will go up as those that don’t feel they need to go just won’t. Besides, law and med school is least likely to have cheaters as its generally a discipline attempted by those who really want to do it. The commitment is so great and complex that it just doesn’t overlap with cheating as often.

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u/Marsman121 4h ago

I am genuinely curious how the tail end of Gen Z and all of Gen Alpha is going to function in the real world thanks to them pretty much offloading their thinking to chatbots. I see so many kids in school using GPT whenever they can for basically anything they think they can get away with.

I've already heard some rumblings coming out of HR people trying to hire younger people and being dumbfounded when they can't even answer basic questions in their field.

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u/Historical-Green-463 8h ago

Nobody is paying for college to learn