Hacker News Reader

Comment by legutierr | Hacker News Reader

What a travesty. Why even go to school, then? Are getting good marks that much more valuable than the actual education you would receive if you didn’t cheat?

Any institution that produces this outcome has its priorities completely out of whack. And any student who willingly and energetically participates in such a system must be completely vapid, short-sighted and materialistic.

It would be a real shame for your country if this kind of behavior were common throughout. It would surely result in a situation where the most powerful and highly esteemed are without integrity.

View on HN

Especially with low level degrees, fewer associate going to college with bettering oneself as much as meeting a checklist for a job interview or a parent's requirement for continued financial support. Many of these jobs don't inherently require being educated it's more a "well, why wouldn't we hire the person with the degree if we can" kind of situation and jobs tend to drive the family requirement more than the "fluffier" stuff about education. In these cases going to college is seen as an required obstacle by the student, not an opportunity. Any way to get out of as much of it as possible is valued more than going to learn. After all, the interest was in meeting some external requirement, not getting educated. Not to mention, for a great deal of people (by volume) getting a degree at all is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task. Getting one and having high grades to stand out can be seen as having more reward given by society than genuinely getting a degree and having poor grades.

It's not great by any means, obviously more people interested in educating themselves is better. At the same time, it shouldn't be a mystery. It, particularly, shouldn't be something one assumes is related to a particular country/culture rather than an everywhere thing. That's not to say there won't be variance between location, rather that it's a pretty common outlook everywhere.

Also, the ability to appropriate someone else's work to further your own goals is actually a very useful life skill. It is arguably the foundation of capitalism.

In liberal economies you buy someone else’s work. In communism it is appropriated by the state. Source: I have family who grew up and lived in a non-capitalist worker’s utopia.

Sure. But people pay to use GPT, and people pay to have others do their homework for them. Compensation is orthogonal to the question of whether someone else did the work.

The word "appropriate" as a verb in colloquial American English most often implies without permission or compensation.

Certain domains, such as budgeting, use it as a synonym for "allocate" but given the context it was first used in your comment it definitely implied "taking without consent".

Yes, I know. The point I'm trying to make is that there is no salient difference between an employer hiring an employee to do the work and a student doing the same. Students typically do not actually steal the work that they pass off as their own, they usually pay for it. But for some reason, when a student does it it's considered underhanded whereas when an employer does it it's considered a normal business transaction.

This carries the assumption things like "school work" and "business work" are inherently fungible on the basis they are both types of work. Dropping the assumption for a moment, it seems reasonable there may be more than one goal of or type of work, and that these goals/types might not be interchangeable with each other. This view of the difference is only possible if you start with the earnest question of "what's the difference supposed to be" rather than asserting a conversation along the lines of "these are the same, so why are we treating them different".

Taking this approach, many might find school work is, largely, effort done to grade a level of understanding the individual has of the content. On the other hand, one might find business work is, largely, effort done to accomplish a customer's request. Additional less common types of each may come up as well, and there are, of course, exceptions to the main theme of each. In general though, I think you'd agree swapping the goals to say "school work is effort done to grade whether someone understands the content while business work is effort done to see if the particular person you make the request to is able to complete it on their own" seems rather unlikely in comparison. Because of this, swapping who does the work in each case results in different treatments. Not because it's a question of whether work gets done rather what the goal in doing the work is.

> This carries the assumption things like "school work" and "business work" are inherently fungible on the basis they are both types of work.

No, the assumption is that the purpose of education is to prepare you to be able to function in the real world. IMHO learning how to get other people to do your work for you is the single most valuable skill one could possibly acquire.

There can be more than one assumption carried so why not judge each on their merits instead. Taking this other line of thought, it could definitely be truer in a vocational college or work placement type education but less so in a typical college education. Traditional college doesn't even come with the assumption you'll ever leave academia to go out into "the real world" to make your living, or that you have an actionable goal beyond being interested in the first place, let alone the assumption it should be the only goal ever considered. An easy way to see this take is not the actual primary goal of college is the self-apparent conflict of such activity being seen as underhanded in the first place.

Even if we took this line of thought as the truth though, also came to an agreement this is the most valuable skill of all to teach, and also took it as being universally good to do regardless of context, what's the reasoning for assuming college only seeks to teach and grade success on a single skill in the first place?

> Traditional college doesn't even come with the assumption you'll ever leave academia

Yes, and this is exactly the problem, because in point of actual fact most people who go to college do eventually leave. And if you think about this even for a moment, it has to be that way because someone has to do the actual work required to maintain the the civilization that makes college possible in the first place.

It is interesting that in Finnish university there was actually possibility to enter a track aiming at PhD from the start. With more rigorous math and other things. So you could work towards just Master's Degree or PhD from start. With different course load.

Someone else baked my bread, made may car and built my house and I paid for all of them. So are you saying a reasonable description of the state of affairs is that I appropriated those things?

Liberal economics is based on several freedoms. To sell one’s labour, to buy the labour of others, to own property and to freely associate with others on economic activities. Put together, and with a fair legal system to regulate it, and that’s capitalism. Which of those freedoms do you disagree with and why?

> Someone else baked my bread, made may car and built my house and I paid for all of them.

That's true. But, with the possible exception of the bread, you did not pay the people who did the work, you paid someone who appropriated their work and sold it to you as their own.

And that person paid, someone, who, paid someone, etc, who paid them. As it happens, I’m directly paying people to work on my house right now.

I’m reading definitions of appropriation, and I don’t see the applicability. The bit about ‘without permission’ doesn’t seem to apply. I’m not taking anything, they offered their labour for sale.

Can you describe how a civilisation might function without appropriation as you define it?

There isn't a word in English that expresses the meaning I'm trying to convey. The point is that if a student hires someone to do their homework for them, that is considered "cheating" while if an employer does the same thing it isn't. If you have a suggestion for a better word to describe what the student is doing that captures the negative connotation associated with "cheating", I'm all ears.

> Are getting good marks that much more valuable than the actual education you would receive if you didn’t cheat?

The problem here is the incentive structure. The nature of grades is that some people will get As and some people will get Cs. If you get Cs, you might like to get As, but maybe you can't for some reason, from lack of intelligence to other time commitments to alcoholism.

Then your choice is to get a C on your own or maybe get a B+ by cheating. Given the same amount of learning, getting a better grade is better, so the only real incentive not to do it is the risk of getting caught. Some of the old methods for this were pretty unambiguous. If you submit the exact same essay as another student, or one that has been on the internet for ten years, what other explanation is there?

Rich kids would avoid this by paying someone else to do it for them. That has always been a problem. But now the cost of getting "someone else" to do it is approaching zero when the someone else is AI, so the problem spreads. But attempting to detect it with methods that have false positives is worthless.

On the other hand, testing students on their ability to do something that ChatGPT can do just as well? Maybe that's worthless too, because that's no longer a marketable skill when your future boss can get ChatGPT to do it too. So what they need to do is change the test to test for the thing the student is expected to be able to do better than the AI.

>what they need to do is change the test to test for the thing the student is expected to be able to do better than the AI

Do such expectations still exist? Are they expected to remain for very long?

Clearly they do.

Have you taken some time to play with these things? Try the biggest LLaMA model that will fit in RAM on your computer. (128GB of DDR4 is around $200 and will just fit the big one without quantizing, though it won't be super fast.)

There are things they're good at. Search engine-like tasks in particular, if you're willing verify the output. They're great at providing hints for further reading.

Now try to get it to develop a new kind of battery with a longer service lifetime or lower manufacturing cost per unit energy storage. Ask it to write code to do something complex and uncommon instead of something similar to what it was trained on a thousand examples of. Have it describe a new class of security concern, like Spectre or rainbow tables before they were known.

People can do those things, and have done, and those are some of the best things we can teach people how to do because they're incredibly useful. Maybe writing minor variants on common existing boilerplate code isn't something we need people to spend a lot of time on anymore, and so isn't the thing we should be testing if they know how to do.

From talking to a handful of people it is usually to fulfill someone else's expectations. If the goals aren't aligned ethics don't matter, the student doesn't want to be in that school anyway.

Cheating is the easy way to get away from that situation. And if the student is behind, it's the only way.

Why? Presumably it's the gate to the job they want. And they want the job so they have to cross the gate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com