> In the AI era...

Back in my day, you could also just Google the problems and find the solutions. What mitigated cheating at UVA was the honor code and each professor's faith and trust in our integrity. That culture was enough to not cheat.

Imo, the fix should be to work on culture. Cheating should always be a tempting choice, so that the student may challenge their integrity, which is a muscle that can atrophy.

> What mitigated cheating at UVA was the honor code and each professor's faith and trust in our integrity. That culture was enough to not cheat.

The decline of actual consequences for cheating has played a big role.

When I was in college, people who got caught cheating found themselves in a world of trouble. Repeat offenders faced severe consequences like failing courses, which could delay their graduation date if it was a critical-path course. This has a real dollar amount attached to it because you start working later.

Now it seems universities avoid addressing cheating problems at all costs. The professor in this article complains about how hard it was to draw attention to the cheating problem, with no response within his own department.

Students know this. As cheating gains critical mass and you see that nothing bad is happening to the cheaters, you start feeling like you're at risk of falling behind if you aren't cheating. The cheaters are getting higher grades (100% for many in this case) and they get to go out partying while you're still working through the material. You're really screwed if grades are distributed on a curve.

So temptation spreads. Anecdotally, I've seen a few young people lie to themselves and think that they're just going to use ChatGPT to check their answers and learn from it, but they don't realize how superficial it is to have ChatGPT fix your problem and then skim the correct answer. They put less effort into checking their work because they know they have a button to push to check it for them. When they get put into a situation where they can't rely on that button, it all falls apart

I agree with the sentiment, however I think the erosion of the honor system is inevitable given the rising cost of college. Somewhere in the last 20 years college became a luxury good, and with it a natural sense of entitlement from their customers.

Couple that with increased awareness that classroom instruction (delivered by tenured research facility who seem annoyed at the idea of teaching) often has little relevance to workplace skills, I think kids have correctly surmised that the smart thing to do is say fuck the code and focus on checking boxes.

> Imo, the fix should be to work on culture.

We can’t even agree on what’s wrong with it. We aren’t going to be able to fix it.

"Fixing" the culture includes a much much broader context than just what an individual professor preaches about to a set of students. It includes the entire intergenerational contract, earning the trust of students as well, getting their buy-in. There's a lot of cynicism and distrust against it all and a lot of disengagement because they just don't buy into it anymore with sincerity. It's not simply about scolding them a bit more and telling them that actually cheating is bad, mkay.

One place to start is to question seriously who actually needs a university degree and why, how this credentialism has been stealing years of productivity from young people. Though at least the deal was that in exchange you could expect some middle class job, even if gated behind a totally unrelated bachelor degree. But then this deal also got soured.

The culture comes from the role of the institution and the degree. The fact is that the primary role of the degree is as a gatekeeper to high paying job opportunities, regardless of what anyone idealistically thinks it should be.

This creates some problems. Let's say that you go to university and major in X to get a job in Y. So you assume that the companies are requiring you to get the degree to prove that you are competent in X which is necessary to do job Y. But when you get to university you realize that most of your classes required to get a degree in X actually have nothing to do with X. Furthermore you also notice that students who just cram for the test and have no functional knowledge of X are still getting As and graduating.

Then you get a summer internship in a job doing Y. You notice that learning to do job Y really has nothing to do with what you learned about X in school. You notice that your mangers an the company who are really good at job Y (and all majored in X) have basically forgotten everything they know about X and know much less about it than you, but are excellent at job Y. You finish your internship and now know that you are perfectly capable of doing job Y. But, of course you can't get job Y yet because you don't have your degree in X. You have to go back to school and learn more about X before anyone will hire you even though you already know more about X than the people who do job Y and who you can see really don't need knowledge in X to do the job.

So you are being forced to get a degree in X to get job Y, but job Y doesn't really require knowledge of X. And on top of that, a degree in X doesn't even really mean you have any functional knowledge of X! Everybody just learns Y on the job anyway!

So now you have an exam in X, so you decide fuck it, why would I spend time on this? This whole system is retarded, I'm just going to use ChatGPT.

This was basically my experience in college. I never cheated, both because it was harder before LLMs and because I didn't really need to study much to get As, but I find it hard to fault people who do. I really struggle to see how integrity plays into this system. The system itself has no integrity, so having integrity inside it almost seems like being a sucker. If you want to change the culture to promote integrity, the education and the degree have to mean something besides an arbitrary bureaucratic gatekeeping device.

Back in your day education was not sold as a financial transaction to a prosperous life. The honor system is idyllic and requires idyllic circumstances: people who pursue education for no reason other than curiosity or self improvement. If you want the honor system back then you need to offer more stable safety nets. It's not "kids these days", it's the natural result of the systems adults have made.

The world is getting more competitive. Integrity goes out the window when cheating in a test can mean meaningful better life outcomes and when you believe everyone else will be too.