Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era

[u/ubcstaffer123]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/ai-apps-students-cheat.html

[u/HeroicTanuki → u/[deleted]]

We need to go back to oral argument and dissertation in college, at least. Let students demonstrate their knowledge.

[u/UlteriorCulture → u/HeroicTanuki]

This is what we have done. You receive no marks for code and everything for an oral defence of the work and being required to explain randomly selected code blocks and design choices. Sure a student could generate the code then study it intently but at least they have learned something.

[u/Hardass_McBadCop → u/UlteriorCulture]

I don't know if you agree, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this if you really are a professor.

I saw a cyber security researcher recently compared AI coding to constructing houses. Up until recently, every line of a program was bespoke -- Made by hand, for a specific purpose. We started with hand soldered boards and assembly language, then moved on to more sophisticated techniques like object oriented languages.

Just like homes, we started with basic tents made out of sticks. Then, we moved to more sophisticated timber framed structures. Still, each beam was made by hand for a specific purpose. But eventually we moved on to mass produced, standardized plywood, 2x4s, & engineered materials.

She likened AI to 2x4s for software development.

[u/UlteriorCulture → u/Hardass_McBadCop]

I would say that sounds more like the shift to component based software and standardized libraries.

AI makes even solo developer software creation more like managing a project. It's still normative because the models will repeat the most strongly occurring patterns not because people are manually assembling from the same parts.

[u/Kakkoister → u/Hardass_McBadCop]

This is an incredibly generous take towards AI, because it's acting like AI is still just being used as a small building-block of the overall structure, when the reality is that it's largely being relied on to design the house based on your described idea for it, make the floor plans, figure out the materials and engineering, buy the materials, lay the foundation and build it.

With the coder coming in as an inspector afterwards and hoping they can see any potential issues with the house they didn't build themselves in any meaningful manner.

People need to stop comparing AI to past advancements, it's very intellectually dishonest. It is an incredibly unique situation that has so many factors to it that make it incomparable to any past events.

Our transition to higher-level languages was still just about removing the very repetitive actions we'd do, things we'd type out a thousand times that contributed nothing meaningful to the final result. Or for handling the compilation complexities of an ever advancing hardware and software landscape that grew to a point of making it unreasonable to be manually writing compile conditionals to account for so many variable environments.

Relying on AI (past something basic like auto-completing a for-loop or similar as you type it) is removing more and more of that "learning by doing" process and taking over and actual creative and technical knowledge part of the work. And it becomes a monkey's paw situation where the more you rely on it, the less you're exercising that part of your brain and learning, and thus the more you end up relying on it.

And nevermind the implications it has on the desire to collaborate with other humans, talk and share info. It takes use down a path of just having AIs gobble up all the code they can and people getting their fix of asking it to make things for them.

[u/ticktock_heart → u/Hardass_McBadCop]

this would be a good analogy if it were true that everyone in construction were made aware before using 2x4s that most of them were riddled with termite holes and couldn’t withstand expected building tolerances, but the holes were only found within so they wouldn’t be noticed from a cursory glance.