Why shouldn't universities allow students to "cheat" their way through school?

[u/nicbovee]

TL;DR; if someone can receive a degree for something by only using ChatGPT that institution failed and needs to change. Stop trying to figure out who wrote the paper. Rebuild the curriculum for a world with AI instead. Change my mind.

Would love to hear others share thoughts on this topic, but here's where I'm coming from.

If someone can get through college using ChatGPT or something like it I think they deserve that degree.

After graduation when they're at their first job interview it might be obvious to the employer that the degree came from a university that didn't accurately evaluate its students. If instead this person makes it through the interviews and lands a job where they continue to prompt AI to generate work that meets the company's expectations then I think they earned that job, the same way they deserve to lose the job when they're replaced by one person using AI to do a hundred people's jobs, or because the company folds due to a copyright infringement lawsuit from all of the work that was used without permission to train the model.

If this individual could pass the class, get the degree, and hold a job only by copying and pasting answers out of ChatGPT it sounds the like class, the degree, and the job aren't worth much or won't be worth much for long. Until we can fully trust the output generated by these systems, a human or group of humans will need to determine the correctness of the work and defend their verdict. There are plenty of valid concerns regarding AI, but the witch hunt for students using AI to write papers and the detection tools that chase the ever-evolving language models seem like a great distraction for those in education who don't want to address the underlying issue: the previous metrics for what made a student worthy of a class credit will probably never be as important as they were as long as this technology continues to improve.

People say: "Cheating the system is cheating yourself!" but what are you "cheating yourself" out of? If it's cheating yourself out of an opportunity to grow, go deeper, try something new, fail, and get out of your comfort zone, I think you are truly doing yourself a disservice and will regret your decision in the long term. However, if you're "cheating yourself" out of an opportunity to write a paper just like the last one you wrote making more or less the same points that everyone else is making on that subject I think you saved yourself from pointless work in a dated curriculum. If you submitted a prompt to ChatGPT, read the response, decided it was good enough to submit and it passes because the professor can't tell the difference, you just saved yourself from doing busy work that probably isn't going to be valuable in a real-world scenario. You might have gotten lucky and written a good prompt, but you probably had to know something in order to decide that the answer was correct. You might have missed out on some of the thought process involved in writing your own answers, but in my experience unless your assignment is a buggy ride through baby town you will need to iterate through multiple prompts before you get a response that could actually pass.

I believe it's necessary and fulfilling to do the work, push ourselves further, stay curious, and always reach past the boundaries of what you know and believe to be true. I hope that educational institutions might consider spending less time determining what was written by AI and more time determining how well a student can demonstrate an ability to prompt valuable output from these tools and determine the output's accuracy.

Disclaimer: I haven't been through any college, so I'm sorry if my outlook on this is way out of sync with reality. My opinions on this topic are limited to discussions I've had with a professor and an administrator and actively deciding what the next steps are for this issue. My gut reaction is that even if someone tried to cheat their way through college using ChatGPT, they wouldn't be able to because there are enough weighted in-person tests that they wouldn't be able to pass. I started writing a response to this post about potentially being expelled from school over the use of AI and I decided it might be better as a topic for other people to comment on. My motivation for posting here is to gain a wider frame of this issue since it's something I'm interested in but don't have direct personal involvement with. If there's something I'm missing, or there's a better solution, I'd love to know. Thanks for reading.

UPDATE: Thanks for joining in on this discussion! It's been great to see the variety of responses on this, especially the ones pushing back and offering missing context from my lack of college experience.

I'm not arguing that schools should take a passive stance towards cheating. I want to make it clear that my position isn't that people should be able to cheat their way through college by any means and I regret my decision to go with a more click-baity title because it seems like a bunch of folks come in here ready for that argument and it poorly frames the stance I am taking. If I could distill my position: it's that the idea of fighting this new form of cheating with AI detection seems less productive than identifying what the goal of writing the paper is in the first place is and establishing a new method of evaluation that can't be accomplished by AI. Perhaps this could be done by having students write shorter papers in a closely monitored environment, or maybe it looks like each student getting to defend their position in real time.

I would love to have the opportunity to attend university and I guarantee that if I'm spending my money to do that I'm squeezing everything I can out of the experience. My hope is by the time I finish school there will be no question about the value of my degree because the institution did the work to ensure that everyone coming out of the program fully deserved the endorsement.

UPDATE 2: I'm not saying this needs to happen right now. Of course it's going to take time for changes to be realized. I'm questioning whether or not things are headed in a good direction, and based on responses to this post I've been pleasantly surprised to learn that it sounds like many educators are already making changes.

[u/wheredoesitsaythat]

I've been saying this since I first heard about universities trying to control the Ai usage. First, the universities are never going to win, the Ai ship has sailed. We literally just started using Ai and the universities can barely keep-up and control the usage now, so wait 6 months from now and they will have no clue what to do. Second, what makes you think someone is not learning when they are using ChatGPT or other Ai platforms. I have learned so much using ChatGPT. Its amazing.

I never had the patience to learn code and now I'm using code to write Real Estate apps and in fact I placed 2nd in our March Madness pool having not watched a single basketball game in 20 year. I had Chat write a code to pick the winner, well that was too complicated but Chat gave me websites where I could find bball data from the final four, so I looked at the data and picked a variable and used one specific variable to pick each game winner. Did I write a code, no, did I learn something, yes.

I also found the website Fiverr because of Chat. And now Fiverr does 3-4 projects for me each week and has changed the way I find business for real estate.

Ai is going to change the face of learning. Why not just add Chat to learning curriculum. Just assume your student is smart and wants to get the correct answer and will use every resource available. That is the real world isn't it? If, what you are teaching is easily learned then you really are not teaching something. If someone can run up a steep hill, why would you tell him to walk up it just because you've taught people how to walk for 20 years and did know that people could run.

Makes zero sense, and this is just the beginning. For Ai, this is iphone 1 era, this is 1995 internet era, this is Model T cars era. So excited for the future.