They have to prompt it and read the output. That can't be avoided. In doing so they are learning the subject anyway.
“Learn” here, if we’re honest, is a loaded word.
The “learn” of an LLM is not at a sentient level of original thinking endemic to, well,
analogue intelligence.
Exams will need to redrafted to show more practical understanding rather than just writing essays. Anyone can write an essay and cheating at essay writing is something that has always existed. Showing understanding in a practical test with no access to the internet is more important. Such tests already exist but can be strengthened.
Do you really believe a “practical test” will stunt an LLM?
Moreover, how does one draft or craft a “practical test” for programmes and departments which exist outside the realm of STEM?
If the counterargument to this is to strip universities of their non-STEM departments, then expect witnessing a vicious, long, protracted fight from multiple, but fairly unified angles by scholars. (As it is, no LLM comes anywhere to the level of being a scholar.)
On the contrary: by limiting LLM/AI learning to STEM, it can improve research aggregation, processing, and analysis for those areas.
Also, original scholarly research — scholarship — absolutely depends on demonstrating competencies beyond multiple choice, true/false, or fill-in-the-blank responses. There is absolutely a necessity for essay writing — not least because it’s a higher-level human skill, but it’s also incredibly naïve to presume essay writing is a simple, menial-level skill aped well by LLMs.
Cream rises to the top. Even as they’ve been shown to crank out a lot of words to read as if some living person wrote them, LLMs aren’t exactly revered for pumping out the cream or renown for being, uh,
talented.
Students who rely on LLMs to write their papers may think they’re clever, but it’s substance, not filling, which differentiates abstract-level, original thinking for which AI is still at a level of infancy — limited to original, effective “thinking” in playing logic-based games like Go or chess, where the entire process is a literal, either/or, binary decision-making, projected out by tens, even hundreds of possible future turns by an opponent. That isn’t abstract thinking. It’s still locked to a binary vantage.
Moreover, this argument against the skill of writing essays fails once one considers how a routine means of examination at end of a university course’s term demands students to write long-answer/short essay responses to major exam questions in rooms where no electronic devices are permitted.
Universities shouldn't be a thing anymore anyway.
Whew… is it warm to anyone else in here, cos that was a hot take.
Since tertiary schools are 86’d, I guess the next to be canned are secondary schools, and eventually primary schools. “For their own good, we can’t be teaching these meatsacks dem learnin’s, cos it’s useless to them and also probably dangerous.”
Oh my.
The internet was supposed to abolish this outdated elitist nonsense
No, it wasn’t.
The internet was engineered to transfer information orders more quickly than by much slower means — like interlibrary loans, postal delivery, analogue electronic telephony/telegraphy, and other analogue, distance-hindered conveyances of delivering that mostly-analogue knowledge/data/information.
Once much of that analogue information was slowly but steadily digitzed, it could begin to be conveyed much more quickly than ever before, and without as much reliance on intermediary, physical means of media transfer (like the printed page or the vibration/magentic/optical element of media for something like recorded music).
and make education cheap and easy to access for everyone.
IN WHAT UNIVERSE? 🤦♀️
Would this have been the universe where capitalism never took off?
It has gone in the other direction with universities becoming more expensive, causing more student debt, foreign students have their courses paid by crime gangs to open up bank accounts in their name.
:slow clap: The conspiratorial conjecture here is, at best, entertaining, but wow. Just… wow.
If this was a serious argument being made, then it would deserve a serious, long, broken-down response in kind. But my word… it isn’t. Generously put, its reasoning is hayseed-parochial.
What causes more student debt and why universities have grown absurdly costly (in the U.S. principally, not necessarily so elsewhere) is the long, end-product of privatizing profit and socializing loss in post-1980, neoliberal economic policy tied with the disproved myth that a) trickle-down economies work; b) rising tides lift all boats; c) breaking up labour unions is good for prosperity; d) monetizing and commoditizing institutions which traditionally never existed within the financial/FIRE sector is a sustainable, noble initiative; and e) cutting funding for public institutions of higher learning is healthy for a society centred on personal wealth acquisition.
Prior to 1980, even American tuitions, accounting for inflation, were a fraction of what they became. Universities were doing as they’d been doing since the earliest ones, founded by monks and theologans within religious structures prior to the 1600s, had been doing: embracing the higher human motivation to better understand everything. The motivation wasn’t about money or profit. It was about enlightenment. It is, literally, where the “Age of Enlightenment” gets the name.
Universities are all a dirty business creating some of the worst politicians and upper class criminals.
With all due respect, universities are not some monolith. Careful with that spray-painting.
A business school and, by contrast, a history or environmental sciences department may exist within the same university system, such as a large public university (like the U of Michigan), but only one of these churns out the players to seek to do well for themselves and their shareholders, to the expense of everything and everyone else.
A political science department and, by contrast, an English or literature department tends to co-exist as discrete entities within the same university system, and that’s typically the end of it, as intra-institutional siloing of knowledge is still extremely commonplace within academia.
Likewise, folks who are accepted into an undergraduate school, but lack financial resources to begin and complete study, end up co-existing on the same campus with folks who come from money and/or have parents to pay for their full ride. The latter may have family who created named endowments for that school (in effect, making them nepo babies with all-but-automatic admission). The former are, often, on campus and doing service-based labour, like foodservice and library pages, to pay for their tuition and on-campus housing/food plan, servicing students in the latter group.
Last word:
When making these fatuous takes, maybe next time, try to fine-tune it — and use cited, verifiable examples.
It may be beyond a cynic’s vantage, but there are still people who want to continue to learn, to research, to teach, and to write after they finish high school. It’s not a conspiracy to want to pursue learning instead of pursuing political power or material wealth, nor is it illogical. They are not the people engaged in the dirty business you describe, nor should they be tarred by that brush. They seek enlightenment and understanding as probably the highest expression which humanity can ever reach.
Tar your feathers on those who treat university as a means to the end of gaining power and wealth, not on everyone else. Thanks.
