The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way?
Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.
It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.
This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out.
The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc.
I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something.
Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees.
Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots.
You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again.
If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing.
How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.
Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.
This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.
Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.
But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]
It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back then—they were—but they also had the odd side-effect that, if it was a class you cared about, the test itself could be a learning experience.
For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote.
The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol,
i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases.
I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact.
I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
My experience as a student has always been that most of the class will cheat given the chance. I remember in high school being one of maybe a dozen in a grade of over 200 who actually read the assigned novels. Everyone else used cliff/spark notes not just to familiarise themselves but also to plagiarise essays.
The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago. People were like this a few decades ago as well when I got my degree. I didn't have consistently great classmates until honors and accelerated grad courses in my 3rd and 4th year, along with various domain specific student orgs like groups for hardware hacking, computer security, etc.
Obviously this can't happen without some structural change (virtually impossible in the US due to its political ossification and indefinite deadlock) because a degree is now just a way of gatekeeping the middle class, but dull and incurious minds made ideal manual laborers in the past, and, at some point, we lost sight of that and started rotting our corporate world out with them.
College is a box to check off because we have lost the ability to support a workforce without college degrees (at least in the US, UK, AU, where I have some experience).
Trades are critical but looked down on. Manufacturing is gone (which isn't in itself a bad thing). The service industry doesn't pay a living wage (thankfully it's reasonable here in AU). Apprenticeships don't pay enough. And pretty much all knowledge work jobs expect a degree from the beginning at a junior level.
We should be planning for a system where <20% of people go to university, instead of expecting >60% to go. Robust minimum wages, good trade schools, apprenticeships that pay enough for a wide range of roles, and changing the culture to not look down on folks that take these paths.
But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
I'm not sure you should think it is shrinking. There are a lot of people in this world that hate to learn, and literally are incredibly apathetic about any topic. To such, learning anything is work, never a joy.
Before AI they had to learn to succeed. Now they see a shortcut. You said half showed they were learning, that's not so bad. I think you should be glad it's that high. I am.
How is this even a debate? Before Covid most tests were in person right? Sure some classes had final projects that were take home, but in person tests were very norma. So what’s all the hand wringing about? Just do in person tests and move on?
You jest, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a thing somewhere, it’ll take its toll, and eventually fail from its own flaws. Then, chances are, there will be some lessons learnt - although, most likely, not on the first try. But that’s just a futuristic speculation.
My point was, however, that in modern age, where we’re literally on the verge of redefining humanity, we might be forced to redefine “cheating” as well. It’s all surely starting to slowly crack at the seams for the last half a century, and the pace is only increasing. When I was a kid, electronic calculators were banned (but not the slide rule, heh), nowadays, I’ve heard, even programmable ones are becoming accepted.
Yeah, I’m enrolled in an online degree program and use of AI in exams would be quite difficult.
The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify you. Only one screen is allowed and smartphones and smart watches are banned. A proctor is watching you and you’re being recorded the whole time. I have no idea how one could slip something like AI use past all this.
I’m not sure why that’s controversial - I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way. The only other common characteristic is that they almost always had some form of privilege. Either rich parents, or adults around them who worked very hard to get them to that level.
I agree that they are intelligent, just don't know about the "definition" part. A typical Ivy Leaguer isn't a dumbass. What's wrong with calling one intelligent?
Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average. Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.
Hey, a typical person should be intelligent because we human have used ourselves as a de-facto definition of intelligence anyway. That sentence probably means something like "no intellectually disabled person here". Even though we don't normally feel so because higher educations seem "typical" to us.
I didn't attend an Ivy League, but I think I went to a good school. I was very nervous before I left for school - a little intimidated, so I talked to an academic mentor. He told me something I'll never forget: "You're gonna be around a lot of really smart kids. No doubt about it. But, mostly, what you're gonna find is you're surrounded by a lot of rich kids." He was 100% correct. Lots of smart kids, and lots of kids from well-to-do families. I think I met, maybe, 2 other kids that were as broke as my family.
The first time I attended a selective school was graduate school. Like you, I was extremely nervous. “They’re all going to be smarter than me. I’m going to feel like an idiot.”
And it turned out to be true. Many of the students I went to school with had far better preparation than I did. And not only did I feel like an idiot, another person called me an idiot in front of everyone. Suspicion confirmed.
The thing is, once I accepted that, yes, maybe my preparation was worse, and that it was possible that I was admitted by mistake, I found a way forward. After all, if literally everyone is smarter than you, then in a way, you’re the luckiest person there: you’re surrounded by smart people, and almost any conversation you have with your peers will benefit YOU more than it benefits THEM.
Over time, I realized that the thing that mattered most was “time on task.” Unlike my peers, who had better instruction, because they went to better schools, had private tutors, etc. I had to work for everything. And I started graduate school late: I turned 30 the year I enrolled. So I was not distracted by social events, finding a romantic partner, or deep questions like “what do I want to do with my life?” I was all-in. I may have started a bit behind, but I finished well ahead of most of my peers.
I think it’s easy for students from my kind of background to wither under the pressure of an elite environment. As a faculty member, I’ve seen it happen many times, sadly. But there IS a way through it, and largely, the way forward is to value oneself, to develop one’s internal compass for good work, and to not let the social pressures overwhelm. I don’t mean to make this sound easy, but it IS possible.
'
“56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,”
'
and the rest are lying.
(With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)
Recent and related:
Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 - June 2026 (728 comments)
The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way?
Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.
It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.
This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out.
And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.
The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc.
I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something.
Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees.
Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots.
You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again.
If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing.
How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.
Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.
This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.
Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.
But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]
https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...
You don’t even need to go that far. If they just expelled cheaters instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and ignore it that would go a long way.
>so that there is dignity in the degree again.
How far back do you need to go to get to a time when degrees mattered?
> measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.
It still does if the test is in person
What's even worse than so many students cheating with AI is that I suspect a substantial portion of them don't even think that's "cheating".
At-home testing is dead.
It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back then—they were—but they also had the odd side-effect that, if it was a class you cared about, the test itself could be a learning experience.
For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote.
The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol, i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases.
I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact.
I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
My experience as a student has always been that most of the class will cheat given the chance. I remember in high school being one of maybe a dozen in a grade of over 200 who actually read the assigned novels. Everyone else used cliff/spark notes not just to familiarise themselves but also to plagiarise essays.
For most people, college is a box to check off. And individual classes are even more so.
The majority of people with this mindset should not go to college and should just get a trade job or manufacturing job like they did 100 years ago. People were like this a few decades ago as well when I got my degree. I didn't have consistently great classmates until honors and accelerated grad courses in my 3rd and 4th year, along with various domain specific student orgs like groups for hardware hacking, computer security, etc.
Obviously this can't happen without some structural change (virtually impossible in the US due to its political ossification and indefinite deadlock) because a degree is now just a way of gatekeeping the middle class, but dull and incurious minds made ideal manual laborers in the past, and, at some point, we lost sight of that and started rotting our corporate world out with them.
College is a box to check off because we have lost the ability to support a workforce without college degrees (at least in the US, UK, AU, where I have some experience).
Trades are critical but looked down on. Manufacturing is gone (which isn't in itself a bad thing). The service industry doesn't pay a living wage (thankfully it's reasonable here in AU). Apprenticeships don't pay enough. And pretty much all knowledge work jobs expect a degree from the beginning at a junior level.
We should be planning for a system where <20% of people go to university, instead of expecting >60% to go. Robust minimum wages, good trade schools, apprenticeships that pay enough for a wide range of roles, and changing the culture to not look down on folks that take these paths.
But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
I'm not sure you should think it is shrinking. There are a lot of people in this world that hate to learn, and literally are incredibly apathetic about any topic. To such, learning anything is work, never a joy.
Before AI they had to learn to succeed. Now they see a shortcut. You said half showed they were learning, that's not so bad. I think you should be glad it's that high. I am.
That would be good.
https://www.baneproctoring.com/
I clicked expecting Bane Proctoring, where Bane monitors your exam and if he catches you cheating...
it would be extremely painful
... I'm sorry I couldn't help it
How is this even a debate? Before Covid most tests were in person right? Sure some classes had final projects that were take home, but in person tests were very norma. So what’s all the hand wringing about? Just do in person tests and move on?
Just wait a few decades until brain-machine interfaces will become a mass-market thing.
Can't wait for the EU brain control bill.
We support our citizens right to free will so long as they don't think anything bad.
You jest, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a thing somewhere, it’ll take its toll, and eventually fail from its own flaws. Then, chances are, there will be some lessons learnt - although, most likely, not on the first try. But that’s just a futuristic speculation.
My point was, however, that in modern age, where we’re literally on the verge of redefining humanity, we might be forced to redefine “cheating” as well. It’s all surely starting to slowly crack at the seams for the last half a century, and the pace is only increasing. When I was a kid, electronic calculators were banned (but not the slide rule, heh), nowadays, I’ve heard, even programmable ones are becoming accepted.
Have you never had a home proctored test before?
You cant even sneak paper on to your desk, where do you plan to hide the LLM?
Yeah, I’m enrolled in an online degree program and use of AI in exams would be quite difficult.
The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify you. Only one screen is allowed and smartphones and smart watches are banned. A proctor is watching you and you’re being recorded the whole time. I have no idea how one could slip something like AI use past all this.
Thats my experience + they are listening the whole time. A loud noise from another room disqualified a coworker of mine.
Have you heard the story of Hans Niemann? ;-)
(True or not, a story is a story.)
> Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent.
I stopped reading after the first sentence.
I’m not sure why that’s controversial - I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way. The only other common characteristic is that they almost always had some form of privilege. Either rich parents, or adults around them who worked very hard to get them to that level.
> I’m not sure why that’s controversial
Do you know what "by definition" means?
> I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way.
You probably wouldn't meet the dumb ones, because they're probaly not in your social class:
> rich parents
If you have privilege, don’t be ashamed. USE IT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE!
It’s yours anyway. You don’t owe society anything just because you have privilege.
Everyone else, put on a helmet! Welcome to life.
You owe society more than nothing, otherwise you end up with a sick society.
I agree that they are intelligent, just don't know about the "definition" part. A typical Ivy Leaguer isn't a dumbass. What's wrong with calling one intelligent?
Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average. Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.
> just don't know about the "definition" part
Yes, that's the point.
> A typical Ivy Leaguer isn't a dumbass.
But that's not what the quoted sentence said.
> Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average.
I've been to Walmart. Does that make me average? (You say literally anyone.) Do you think that Ivy Leaguers never go to Walmart?
> Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.
You say this in the same paragraph where you rip on Walmart customers.
Ars Technica has gotten very bad over the years. IMHO not worth reading for many, many years now.
Hey, a typical person should be intelligent because we human have used ourselves as a de-facto definition of intelligence anyway. That sentence probably means something like "no intellectually disabled person here". Even though we don't normally feel so because higher educations seem "typical" to us.
I think the article used a different colloquial meaning of “intelligent”, more akin to “intellectual” (the noun), as in “well educated”.
Either way, an odd statement shouldn’t normally instantly invalidate the whole article.
technically, they invented the IQ to test their IQs so, this mighe be strictly correcg.
“Rich”
I didn't attend an Ivy League, but I think I went to a good school. I was very nervous before I left for school - a little intimidated, so I talked to an academic mentor. He told me something I'll never forget: "You're gonna be around a lot of really smart kids. No doubt about it. But, mostly, what you're gonna find is you're surrounded by a lot of rich kids." He was 100% correct. Lots of smart kids, and lots of kids from well-to-do families. I think I met, maybe, 2 other kids that were as broke as my family.
The first time I attended a selective school was graduate school. Like you, I was extremely nervous. “They’re all going to be smarter than me. I’m going to feel like an idiot.”
And it turned out to be true. Many of the students I went to school with had far better preparation than I did. And not only did I feel like an idiot, another person called me an idiot in front of everyone. Suspicion confirmed.
The thing is, once I accepted that, yes, maybe my preparation was worse, and that it was possible that I was admitted by mistake, I found a way forward. After all, if literally everyone is smarter than you, then in a way, you’re the luckiest person there: you’re surrounded by smart people, and almost any conversation you have with your peers will benefit YOU more than it benefits THEM.
Over time, I realized that the thing that mattered most was “time on task.” Unlike my peers, who had better instruction, because they went to better schools, had private tutors, etc. I had to work for everything. And I started graduate school late: I turned 30 the year I enrolled. So I was not distracted by social events, finding a romantic partner, or deep questions like “what do I want to do with my life?” I was all-in. I may have started a bit behind, but I finished well ahead of most of my peers.
I think it’s easy for students from my kind of background to wither under the pressure of an elite environment. As a faculty member, I’ve seen it happen many times, sadly. But there IS a way through it, and largely, the way forward is to value oneself, to develop one’s internal compass for good work, and to not let the social pressures overwhelm. I don’t mean to make this sound easy, but it IS possible.
' “56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,” '
and the rest are lying.
(With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)