Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 - June 2026 (728 comments)
And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.
I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something.
Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees.
Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots.
You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again.
If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing.
How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.
can anyone here think of some better ways where we could decouple the education process from the work process? To me this seems like the main problem. It seems that we've decided that "get good grades == good employee" collectively. I know I'm a bad employee (which is why I work for myself now but that's another story), but I got great grades in school. I don't know, I just feel like school was rarely about actually learning / growing and was mostly about vocational work most of my time in undergrad, and I wish we could de-couple that some? But maybe I'm naive here...
Recently I saw Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) on one of those market shows (CNBC I think? Something like that) and he was upset at Dario's doom trolling. Why was he upset? Because he was worried that the populist rage towards AI was going to result in a wealth tax! And the thing is he's probably right! The thing these people fear the most, socialism, is the thing they're ironically probably going to make popular in the united states.
This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.
Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.
But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]
https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...
How far back do you need to go to get to a time when degrees mattered?
It still does if the test is in person
Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.
It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.
For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote.
The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol, i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases.
I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact.
I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.
Obviously this can't happen without some structural change (virtually impossible in the US due to its political ossification and indefinite deadlock) because a degree is now just a way of gatekeeping the middle class, but dull and incurious minds made ideal manual laborers in the past, and, at some point, we lost sight of that and started rotting our corporate world out with them.
Trades are critical but looked down on. Manufacturing is gone (which isn't in itself a bad thing). The service industry doesn't pay a living wage (thankfully it's reasonable here in AU). Apprenticeships don't pay enough. And pretty much all knowledge work jobs expect a degree from the beginning at a junior level.
We should be planning for a system where <20% of people go to university, instead of expecting >60% to go. Robust minimum wages, good trade schools, apprenticeships that pay enough for a wide range of roles, and changing the culture to not look down on folks that take these paths.
I'm not sure you should think it is shrinking. There are a lot of people in this world that hate to learn, and literally are incredibly apathetic about any topic. To such, learning anything is work, never a joy.
Before AI they had to learn to succeed. Now they see a shortcut. You said half showed they were learning, that's not so bad. I think you should be glad it's that high. I am.
We support our citizens right to free will so long as they don't think anything bad.
My point was, however, that in modern age, where we’re literally on the verge of redefining humanity, we might be forced to redefine “cheating” as well. It’s all surely starting to slowly crack at the seams for the last half a century, and the pace is only increasing. When I was a kid, electronic calculators were banned (but not the slide rule, heh), nowadays, I’ve heard, even programmable ones are becoming accepted.
You cant even sneak paper on to your desk, where do you plan to hide the LLM?
The proctoring service my school uses requires a special browser with admin permissions and an external webcam with your entire workspace, screen, and face clearly visible (wide angle webcam preferred). Prior to the exam you have to photograph the entirety of your room, and if there’s even an open door that can disqualify you. Only one screen is allowed and smartphones and smart watches are banned. A proctor is watching you and you’re being recorded the whole time. I have no idea how one could slip something like AI use past all this.
(True or not, a story is a story.)
I stopped reading after the first sentence.
Do you know what "by definition" means?
> I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way.
You probably wouldn't meet the dumb ones, because they're probaly not in your social class:
> rich parents
It’s yours anyway. You don’t owe society anything just because you have privilege.
Everyone else, put on a helmet! Welcome to life.
All men are created equal. Civic duties apply equally to everyone. Once people have met their legal obligations (say, paying taxes and obeying the law), any additional generosity is voluntary, not owed, so having more privilege does not automatically create greater moral obligations.
Say, I am beautiful and you are ugly. That’s my privilege. Do I owe more than you? No. It sucks for you. Sorry but that’s life. Stop whining and keep making the best you have with your God-given privileges (maybe you are say, taller or have more money).
Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average. Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.
Yes, that's the point.
> A typical Ivy Leaguer isn't a dumbass.
But that's not what the quoted sentence said.
> Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average.
I've been to Walmart. Does that make me average? (You say literally anyone.) Do you think that Ivy Leaguers never go to Walmart?
> Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.
You say this in the same paragraph where you rip on Walmart customers.
Either way, an odd statement shouldn’t normally instantly invalidate the whole article.
And it turned out to be true. Many of the students I went to school with had far better preparation than I did. And not only did I feel like an idiot, another person called me an idiot in front of everyone. Suspicion confirmed.
The thing is, once I accepted that, yes, maybe my preparation was worse, and that it was possible that I was admitted by mistake, I found a way forward. After all, if literally everyone is smarter than you, then in a way, you’re the luckiest person there: you’re surrounded by smart people, and almost any conversation you have with your peers will benefit YOU more than it benefits THEM.
Over time, I realized that the thing that mattered most was “time on task.” Unlike my peers, who had better instruction, because they went to better schools, had private tutors, etc. I had to work for everything. And I started graduate school late: I turned 30 the year I enrolled. So I was not distracted by social events, finding a romantic partner, or deep questions like “what do I want to do with my life?” I was all-in. I may have started a bit behind, but I finished well ahead of most of my peers.
I think it’s easy for students from my kind of background to wither under the pressure of an elite environment. As a faculty member, I’ve seen it happen many times, sadly. But there IS a way through it, and largely, the way forward is to value oneself, to develop one’s internal compass for good work, and to not let the social pressures overwhelm. I don’t mean to make this sound easy, but it IS possible.
and the rest are lying.
(With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)