alt Hacker NewsAt some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.
If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they actually learn in college then what the students are doing is rational.
If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.
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It starts at admissions where learning is not a rewarded activity. You should be making impact in the community, doing some performative task that isn't useful for anything except making you different to your class mates who naively read the books and do the classwork honestly.
For elite colleges, it is a pithy aphorism that the hardest part is getting in.
> Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.
This topic comes up all the time. Every method conceivable to rank job candidates gets eviscerated here as being counterproductive.
And yet, if you have five candidates for one job, you're going to have to rank them somehow.
> At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.
I think this is mostly accurate. Schools have been able to say "We will test your memory on 3 specific Shakespeares, samples from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc" - the students who were able to perform on these with some creative dance, violin, piano or cello thrown in had very good chances at a scholarship from an elite college.
This has been working extremely well except now you have AI agents that can do the same at a fraction of the cost.
There will be a lot of arguments, handwringing and excuse making as students go through the flywheel already in motion with the current approach.
However, my bet is it's going to be apparent that this approach no longer works for a large population. It never really did but there were inefficiencies in the market that kept this game going for a while. For one, college has become extremely expensive. Second, globalization has made it pretty hard for someone paying tuition in the U.S. to compete against someone getting a similar education in Asia when they get paid the same salary. Big companies have been able to enjoy this arbitrage for a long time.
> Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies
Now that everyone has access to labor cheaper than the cheapest English speaking country in the world, humanity will be forced to adapt, forcing us to rethink what has seemed to work in the past
College is wildly useful for motivated students: the ones who go out of their way to pursue opportunities uniquely available to them like serving as TAs, doing undergrad research, rising up the ranks in clubs and organizations, etc. They graduate not just with a credential but social capital. And it's that social capital that shields you from ChatGPT.
College for the "consumer" student isn't worth much in comparison.