My main gripe isn’t so much with cheating, but with it being so easy to avoid learning anything fundamental with LLMs and then getting stuck when things get more advanced. This is very common with programming, where intro level students are now able to pass easily by relying on tools like co-pilot, but get absolutely destroyed once they reach more advanced courses.

With LLMs kids don’t feel like learning, studying or developing critical thinking skills in fundamentals classes because they are constantly spoonfed ready answers, and so they are woefully unprepared later on. As with most “successful” inventions in the smartphone age, it turns humans into passive observers and consumers rather than engaged actors with skills for investigation. I am genuinely worried for what sort of professionals and scientists we are forming today.

100% agree that education focuses way too much on test scores. I went through alot of college realizing that “I dont have to actually learn this stuff, I just have to know what questions will be asked on the test and have good answers for those”. When you approach it that way as a student, you dont actually go through the process of really learning the material and cultivating your mind. After spending alot of time out of college and reading alot more, I realize that true education is having the space to acquire knowledge and wrestle around with it until you really understand it, and socializing with others about the material. You kind of do this when studying for tests, which is why I guess tests have been around for so long. In my time though there was the internet, which was just kind of like an extended library that was easier to search, and I realize that it saved me the hassle of needing to socialize with people about the material, which I think is pretty important when learning. LLM’s are probably going to result in worse outcomes, though maybe test scores will remain the same.

I had a friend in college who I thought was very intelligent, because he would basically take every assignment or exam and distill it down to what needed to be done to fit in with the grading system. I realize now just how harmful that approach is to truly educating yourself, yet it seemed right at the time because that is how the education system is designed (and it relates to capitalism because people want to use education to get a job and to get a good job you need good grades etc.)

It’s also pretty telling whenever I ask someone if they ever studied for a test and forgot all the material on the subject right after. That is contradictory to the whole purpose of education.

I think this is a bit overplayed. It’s the same argument as focusing on its potential utility over how it’s actually used. Sure under absolutely perfect conditions, the details of which are unknown yet assumed, AI could become more useful. So what? Such conditions will never arise from “progress.”

I admit to overplaying it a bit, but the part that is “overplayed” is the fact that we don’t even need these “absolutely perfect conditions” to reap the benefits of AI, especially considering that these automated computer technologies have existed for a long while and are continuing to advance and have already benefited our lives. Just like in the OP, it’s about who is owning it that makes this advancement troubling. My question though: If these advanced conditions will never arise from progress, what will they arise… from?

Further, idk why people treat education as some monolith.

You go off on a bit of a tangent here but I don’t believe any of the assumptions about teachers and students being made here, and if you are progressive to any degree, you wouldn’t treat education as a monolith. That’s kind of the crux of what I was even pointing out. Because education is not a monolith, attempts to standardize and overly centralize education creates populations of people who are alienated from the institution that is the education system. Just because there are educators within this system who try to do the best they can with what they have on an individual level does not mean it is enough to completely overcome what educators and students are subjected to on a systemic level. It’s not about forgoing responsibility, it’s about putting experiences into context and realizing that not every person is starting at the same position. Cheating often has to do with leveling the deficit and understanding the context of what a student might be deficient in allows you to reach the real root of the problem rather than morally ostracizing people and not offering any real material solution for their situation.

Regardless of class context, “I cheated because capitalism” still makes you a failure with useless ethics and a worthless education.

You can have a student who is a total idiot, benefited from nepotism to get into an ivy league school just to use AI on their assignments because they don’t care. You can also have a student who is crammed between 5 difficult classes, working on the side to keep themselves afloat, assignments due in a similar time period, and trying to squeak by using AI to finish their assignment just so they can pass. In this stereotypical example, I would not view the latter as being a “failure” possessing “useless ethics and a worthless education” because they are clearly doing the best they can and having to drown societally because you used AI to get by is exactly what is wrong with the institution at large. Pretending like merit truly has anything to do with anything in a capitalistic system is simply naïve. If you have an unethical capitalist society designed in a way where capitalists need a reserve army of labor to constantly cycle through continuous market crashes, of course the education system itself and how people apply themselves to the system will be in a way that they are seeking out schooling for connections, exposure, and a career. From that view, naturally, the work you do in school with the time frame of degree paths that you are given, will be viewed as an obstacle rather than enriching knowledge to gain wisdom and insight from.

Every breath I take is tyranized by capital. So what? Is this the attitude a union or party should have about education? That expecting it’s members to take responsibility for their education is “idividualizing” the problem? My job is to make students successful and awaken them to understanding themselves as scholars and intellectuals that can see how power impacts their lives and shapes their identity, not give in to every excuse to justify our collective failures and justify AI use.

Continuing from my last point, that’s what I mean by “individualizing the problem”. It makes it seem as though AI use and cheating in school is a moral and ethical failing rather than a thing that happens contextually, affected by a larger structure in itself. It’s not giving into excuses to justify AI use, but it is understanding why certain individuals would go that route and correcting it accordingly. From my previous example of the nepo-student and struggling student, assuming neither of them get caught, it would still fall on them and the circles they run in to let that person know “cheating is not cool, take your education seriously, etc.”, the classic stuff people say. But if we are going to talk about ethics, not every person is starting from a similar ethically pure position, making someone who benefits from nepotism more ethically unsound than someone struggling to maintain their GPA. It appears you would have things reversed in the sense that the collective failures is not on the students or teachers but the institution of education, making that the problem in question being individualized onto the students. Teachers and students didn’t make the system a huge corrupt money sink geared towards pushing people into the job market to be exploited, it’s the capitalist society. On that same token, it is not simply because capitalism exists that it is directly making someone cheat or use AI for school, but capitalism creates the conditions under which it is indeed persuasive to someone who wants to skip certain parts of the grind that exists when moving through the system. If there was no incentive to cheat or use AI, no one would use it. But the insurmountable expectations coupled by an often choking toxic environment makes it an attractive option for some people. I think selling drugs is wrong and destroys the community, but I also understand why some people resort to doing that; further, I am willing to bet that some of the same drug dealers would also agree with my moral statement. Ethics and morality mean nothing in a system that is hardly sticking by these standards to begin with and individually casting a blanket moral judgement on students is classic divide and conquer. With all of that said another question comes to mind: If a system of “absolutely perfect conditions” will never arise from progress, “the details of which are unknown yet assumed”, implying a sort of idealism, what makes holding dynamic populations of people under an oppressive structure to a strict moral and ethical code not idealism?

Yes solving math problems is masterbatory and can feel ungrounded in anything you do. So is practicing a musical instrument, or any other number of things that very well may be worth doing.

A certain standard of math is required for most people to pass multiple levels of schooling. Practicing a musical instrument is not, not unless you choose to major in that yourself. You often learn to play an instrument because you want to play an instrument. You often learn math because you are forced to learn math. That “masturbatory” and “ungrounded” feeling is alienation, which, once again, is why people are often compelled to cheat to just get it over with.

there is just a lack of perspective among students due to lacking guidance through metacognition. It’s not impossible to teach in a way that highlights how and why what you teach is needed or important. Students often have to be broken out of their neoliberal assumptions that if something won’t guarantee them a career that education has no value and can’t be grounded in anything.

The material application of this knowledge is definitely not hard to incorporate into the curriculum and breaking students out of their neoliberal assumptions is paramount. The issue arises when they have to enter a neoliberal world and are faced with the reality that they have to adapt regardless. This leads back to the systemic critique. It’s not just blaming capitalism for all of your problems and then sitting on your hands. It is identifying the problem so that, like you mentioned, a union or a party, can then offer solutions that will materially affect sweeping change within the system and not just local remedies based on individual deeds. It then falls on a need for systemic policy change on the institution of education itself to solve that grounding issue, rather than relying on every teacher to have the magical ability to inspire every student through every year of schooling to understand the worth of engaging in parts of education that feel ungrounded. It is this institution of education that works in tandem with other neoliberal institutions that uphold capitalism and further entrench students in a mindset that what they learn needs to be applicable to a job.

Using AI doesn’t fill the gap, it doesn’t ground students, it does not add any meaning or practically to your studies. It only intensifies these things.

And yes, this is true. Though, I would not say it intensifies these things, I would say it is symptomatic of these things. It’s still the human labor applied to the studies that they will get anything out of it, so I don’t think anyone believes AI usage is somehow making them a brilliant student, they know they’re just trying to rush an assignment in or have it do all the work for them, but that’s the point. Their usage is not the issue, it’s the constraints they face as students that are the issue as it incentivizes cheating and cutting corners, and placing all the blame on students as bad actors ignores the structure as a whole which creates this environment. Finding cheat sheets and looking up summaries online have long since been common methods of cheating that people have done forever and AI is not a completely different thing from that, it speeds up the process at which they can execute all of those methods.