It's an old enough tradition that there are jokes that rely on you knowing the tradition.

My favorite: professor known for being VERY strict tells class repeatedly in weeks leading up to exam, "You will have exactly two hours to finish your exam, and no more. I will not accept exam booklets turned in even one minute past the two hour mark: they will score a zero. Be warned."

Exam day comes, and all but one student are in their seats with the blue exam booklet in front of them when the professor says "Begin." He arches an eyebrow at the empty desk, but says nothing.

Fifteen minutes later, the tardy student rushes in. "Family emergency," he says, "sorry." The professor tells him "You have one hour forty-five minutes." Student says nothing, but opens his book and starts writing furiously.

The two hour mark comes up, and everyone except the tardy student turns in their booklets and leaves the room. The professor reminds him "Time's up," but he just keeps writing in the booklet.

At the 2:12 mark, one hour fifty-seven minutes after he ran into the exam room, the student closes his blue book and walks up to the desk where the other books are stacked up in a messy pile. The professor is reclining in his chair with his feet up on the desk. "Nope," he says, "you're late. I won't accept your exam booklet, and you're going to get a zero on the final exam."

"That's not fair," said the student, "I had to drive my mother to the hospital. I shouldn't be punished for that. I took no more time than anyone else."

"Nope, you knew the rules," says the professor.

"Don't you know who I am?" says the student, raising his voice.

"Nope, don't know, don't care," says the professor.

"Good!" says the student. He slides his exam book into the middle of the messy stack, straightens it up neatly, and before the professor has gotten his feet off the desk, walks briskly out into the hallway.

> as evidenced by how hard it was for this professor to even get attention to the matter within his department

This is the crux of it. The incentives don't support cracking down on AI cheating much. At least in the short term, for individual department administrators. Overall it will likely hurt the universities collectively to hand out degrees like candy this way, but grade inflation was already a problem and universities treat students like paying customers and they also want good statistics, fend off possible discrimination accusations etc.

So it's really not just about AI, the AI is simply exposing this underlying misaligned incentive. Professors complain about it all the time. It was similar during covid and cheating in online exams and that was solidly before ChatGPT.

You have to test to make sure the student who you are giving the grade to is the student who did the work.

Without certifying someone’s abilities, the degree doesn’t mean much.

CS is a science of computation curriculum, not programming. You can have automation do all the work for you in the labs.

I remember having 7 day take home open book open internet exams in my math classes in college. We were also expected to typeset all our answers.

Those exams probably took the median student 30 hours and had a median score of 50% including partial credit.

Sad to think current students will never get that experience, because a chatbot could write something good enough to get a 50% in 10 minutes, for many of those classes.

And physics