>> we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits > But it has been.
Let me fix it: pen and paper. There you go, bada-bing bada-bum. In our uni the exam for Algorithms and Data Structures (one that most people struggle with) is done on paper in an exam room. You better know your binary search.
People, especially wealthy, have been coasting through education paying someone to write their papers since Great Pumpkin knows how long. Now you can do same thing cheaply with LLM’s. The solution is pretty simple, let them fail. Have them show what they can do live in front of examiners. Here’s a computer without network card, only Python and SQLite installed with the Python basic documentation, build me X and prove it works in Z, Y, and Q.
I am studying my second degree and although there’s million and one ways to cheat, I won’t, since A) I want to learn this shot B) I am not sure LLM’s will be available with these capacity and with theses prices in the future, at least I won’t count on it.
Live exam, perfectly fine. You can use an LLM as support while you study, no problem, as a glorified search engine. On steroids. From the future. Then you prove you understood it.
Writing an essay, or a thesis, with LLM assist, is difficult to avoid in this scenario, though. It would require your prof, TA or examination committee to read the thing fully and understand the topic deeply. For 101 courses, that's doable, but for a PhD, that's so much work, that it'll break the system immediately.