Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), because I actually want to learn.
There are many college students for whom none of these tests would pass. They would not attend if there was no diploma, they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class.
What made us think these students were ever interested in learning in the first place? Instead, it seems more likely that they just want a degree because they believe that a degree will give them an advantage in the job market. Many people will never use the information that they supposedly learn in college, and they're aware of this when they enroll.
Personally, the fact that they can now get a degree with even less wasted effort than before doesn't bother me one bit. People who want to learn still have every opportunity to.
If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.
If employers no longer look for the diploma-signal in an employee, what will be the reason an employer will hire an employee?
I think this story will become true, and society will radically shift into one where critical thinking skills will actually be the only skills employers look for in employees, since the grunt work can be automated.
What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?
In the computer engineering industry, you increasingly have to demonstrate the same: either as a part of your prior work for hire, or a side project, or a contribution to something open-source.
A diploma is still a useful signal, but not sufficient, except maybe for very junior positions straight from college. These are exactly the positions most under pressure by the automation.
LLM cheaters might incidentally be doing society a service.
This is already true to some extend. Not apprenticeship taking place of college, but the last couple of places I worked hiring generally happened based on: I already know this person from open source projects/working with them in a company/etc.
In certain companies, degrees were already unimportant even before LLMs because they generally do not provide a very good signal.
Now if students can shortcut the education process, they can spend less time in it and this may force colleges to reinvent themselves and actually rethink what education looks like in the new era.
Four year degree is a very expensive investment in the current environment. We should push younger people to face the real world as soon as possible. Apprenticeship is indeed a great way to achieve that IMO. As a great side effect the young people won’t have to start out their careers saddled with huge debt.
Amen.
I look forward to the era where we train professionals the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.
In many countries, regardless of how learning it was achieved, you still need a paper to prove that you actually did it.
And in countries like Germany, better keep all those job evaluations close at heart because they get asked for as part of many job interview processes, additionally have them reviewed by lawyers, as they legally can't say anything negative, there is an hidden language on how to express negativity which to the reader sound positive on first read.
That's why the universities of Oxford and Cambridge give Master's degree to everyone that gets a Bachelor's degree after five years, without further examination or coursework (note that these are MAs only, not MRes, MPhil or MBA degrees, which typically require 1-2 years of studies, exams and theses).
Historically, the academic Master was seen as equivalent to a Master in a craft (e.g. philosophy <=> carpentry).
I hire people now and where they went to school means little to me. The first priority is “can they do the work?” which is a niche programming. After that is established, I barely take note of school.
I don’t personally count a CS degree as an indication the person is a good programmer, or thinks logically, or has good work ethic.
For company I work for we hire 1 dev per year and I believe last year we did not even hire a single person.
So I do have time to check up the candidate do 3 rounds each 1 hr so that candidates can see what company are we and what person is the candidate. We also are small company so we don’t get that many applicants anyway.
I cannot imagine how it goes when someone needs to hire 20 devs in one quarter. Especially for a company that is any way known and they can get 1000CVs for a single position. They need to filter somehow.
One could in theory establish the value of a thing or person by comparing it with similar things but if everyone does that the process becomes senseless.
If a working car is worth 5000, the same car from the same year with a defect that costs 1000 to fix should be worth 4000. If the repair costs 6000 there is no car.
No, it has value because it gatekeeps class mobility. Degrees haven't signified learning or problem solving longer than I've been alive. The attitude is that if you pay for an education, you're entitled to a degree. The education aspect is optional.
I think this is already the case.
No. It has value, because companies value it. It sets the starting point for your first salary and then for every salary negotiation moving forward.
As someone who did not go to university, but has the same knowledge self-taught I can tell you that this piece of paper would have opened so many doors and made life so much easier. It took me 15 years to get a salary, that people get with the piece of paper after graduating. And not because it took me 15 years to reach that level of knowledge. I had that by the time the other graduated.
I had a friend who always cheated in school, and now he works for a big car company and earned a fuck ton of money.
Life is unfair and companies only care about the paper your diploma is printed on. If students would ask me for advice, I would tell them to cheat whenever possible.
I am not arguing on the merit of having a diploma is a bad thing - the colleges these days have turned their backs on the people as well.
Average $100k to get a piece of paper (LLMs are not the issue here the useless degrees that the colleges offer). Invest that $100k at an average 15% return - it becomes a lot of money 25 years from now.
Or get a piece of paper (if your major is useless) and pay the banks 100k + interest.
No. That's how it should be, but the reality looks different: it has value because it shows that someone spent 3+ years doing what they were told to do, enduring all the absurdities they were subjected to in the meantime. Whatever means they used to cheat don't matter, since they still worked on what someone told them to and produced results satisfying the expectations.
There are, perhaps, institutions where learning and problem-solving are seen as the most important while "following orders" and "staying in line" are deemphasized. For the students of all the others, putting up with an utterly absurd environment is often one of the biggest barriers to learning. Yet, it's a requirement without fulfilling which you can forget about graduating. Hence my conclusion: the diploma from most learning institutions certifies you as a good corporate drone - and that's enough of a signal in many situations, so why bother trying to fix it?
From what I remember it was 4 years of learning stuff I signed up to learn, occasionally being quizzed on said stuff, and then they gave me a paper that claims I know the stuff.
Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.
I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.
The course I'm interested in gets kinda hard, and my "just pull up an LLM" muscle is very, very strong, (and besides, I'm not used to struggling! and why should I get used to it in the classes i like?! I can't afford a C in my major!) so ... I use LLMs on my "I'm interested in it" class too and... we're back to the original argument.
I find a lot of these comments more disturbing than the concerns about AI.
They are in some countries, you get at the vocational programs or apprenticeships alongside the highschool, and in the end you might get the opportunity to apply to the university or just carry on with your job.
That is how I did mine in the 1990's Portuguese education system, and how I was already coding and understanding the big boys computer world at 16y.
The music industry is built on the back of people with music degrees. They don't get the name recognition of headliners. But song writers, arrangers, and session musicians are all very likely to have formal training in theory and maybe performance.
Producers and engineers less so. Those are more of a track record who-you've-worked-with occupation.
For the exact reasons you state, pre-AI homework was often copied and then individuals just crammed for the tests.
AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many students are only in it for the diploma.
If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment from a classmate or previous grad.
And I imagine the students who really want to learn are still learning because they didn't cheat then, and they aren't letting AI do the thinking for them now.
In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.
1. Students given bad incentives to be thrown into a system with a completely different purpose than their main goal. Then those jobs turning face to suddenly say "schools teach you nothing" and even refuse to hire the newest generation.
2. Students in general not being stimulated by primary school and given direction and vision on what to do in life. Simply being pushed by parents to "be successful".
3. The crippling reality as of late that a job doesn't even guarantee keeling a roof over your head anymore. Leading to discouragement to even bother trying.
4. Connected to #2, the decline of various apprenticeships, internships (which are now a college recruiting pipeline), and other ways to invest in employees. Even if they complain about new grad output, they are still content outsourcing such training instead of investing in their employees for a career.
There's a lot of systems failing which can arguably cause an entire collapse in the country. Then no one will get an opportunity to properly learn.
You have this option with things like mits open courseware. Some colleges are OK with you just wanting to learn
Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.
> then she could issue a degree in piano.
Being able to play moderately hard pieces from dots and sight-reading are the entry level requirement. It's taken for granted you can already do that.
The degree part means learning music history, theory, and performance styles, working on performance projects, solo and with other musicians.
The analogy with ChatGPT is that it's taking over the entry-level part of the process. You can't expect to get onto a music degree if you only know how to prompt ChatGPT to produce a MIDI file for your entrance exam.
And in CS, you can't produce good code if you barely know what a server is.
It's all very Dunning Kruger. If you use an LLM to produce course work to get your piece of paper at the end, you don't even know what prompts you should use to do an unfamiliar job, never mind having the skills to do it yourself.