So, before you get the wrong impression, I'm 40. Last year I enrolled in a master program in IT to further my career. It is a special online master offered by a university near me and geared towards people who are in fulltime employement. Almost everybody is in their 30s or 40s. You actually need to show your employement contract as proof when you apply at the university.
Last semester I took a project management course. We had to find a partner and simulate a project: Basically write a project plan for an IT project, think about what problems could arise and plan how to solve them, describe what roles we'd need for the team etc. Basically do all the paperwork of a project without actually doing the project itself. My partner wrote EVERYTHING with ChatGPT. I kept having the same discussion with him over and over: Write the damn thing yourself. Don't trust ChatGPT. In the end, we'll need citations anyway, so it's faster to write it yourself and insert the citation than to retroactively figure them out for a chapter ChatGPT wrote. He didn't listen to me, had barely any citation in his part. I wrote my part myself. I got a good grade, he said he got one, too.
This semester turned out to be even more frustrating. I'm taking a database course. SQL and such. There is again a group project. We get access to a database of a fictional company and have to do certain operations on it. We decided in the group that each member will prepare the code by themselves before we get together, compare our homework and decide, what code to use on the actual database. So far whenever I checked the other group members' code it was way better than mine. A lot of things were incorporated that the script hadn't taught us at that point. I felt pretty stupid becauss they were obviously way ahead of me - until we had a videocall. One of the other girls shared her screen and was working in our database. Something didn't work. What did she do? Open a chatgpt tab and let the "AI" fix the code. She had also written a short python script to help fix some errors in the data and yes, of course that turned out to be written by chatgpt.
It's so frustrating. For me it's cheating, but a lot of professors see using ChatGPT as using the latest tools at our disposal. I would love to honestly learn how to do these things myself, but the majority of my classmates seem to see that differently.
Remind yourself that, in the long term, they are cheating themselves. Shifting the burden of thinking to AI means that these students will be unlikely to learn to think about these problems for themselves. Learning is a skill, problem solving is a skill, hell, thinking is a skill. If you don't practice a skill, you don't improve, full stop.
When/if these students graduate, if their most practiced skill is prompting an AI then I'd say they're putting a hard ceiling on their future potential. How are they going to differentiate themselves from all the other job seekers? Prompting an AI is stupid easy, practically anyone can do that. Where is their added value gonna come from? What happens if they don't have access to AI? Do they think AI is always going to be cheap/free? Do they think these companies are burning mountains of cash to give away the service forever?? When enshittification inevitably comes for the AI platforms, there will be entire cohorts filled with panic and regret.
My advice would be to keep taking the road less traveled. Yes it's harder, yes it's more frustrating, but ultimately I believe you'll be rewarded for it.
Don't worry about it! The point of education is not grades, it's skills and personal development. I have a 25 year career in IT, you know what my university grades mean now? Literally nothing! You know what the thinking skills I acquired mean now? Absolutely everything.
My friend cheated his way through a comp sci degree and wouldn't you know it, when it came time to interview for jobs he spent a year doing it and couldn't land one. And this was back when the jobs were prolific and you could practically trip and fall into one. Nobody would hire them.
Absolutely this. Ai can help you learning new stuff but you still have to have the motivation to learn. I recently had to write a parser for an init file in C (which I have never used before) so I thought to myself "let's ask an Ai, it should get something this basic done right". Yeah, it didnt work. So I started actually diving into how C works, writing the first lines and also editing an existing Parser I got to fit my use case. If I encountered an Error I tried to fix it and if I couldn't I would ask an LLM why this Error was happening. This way I learned way more than if the Ai would have actually given me something that worked out of the box. Especially the rewriting and debugging part taught me a lot and the AI was very useful, since it acted like an interactive teacher that could spot the Errors in your code and explain why they appeared.
While I agree learning and thinking is important, going to expensive schools and anlong with some other certification is becoming the low bar.
Unfortunately, at least in my area, it’s not easy getting past the AI resume scanner that will kick you to the curb without missing a beat and not feel sad about it if you don’t have a degree.
Im excited for when it all gets locked behind a pay wall and the idiots waste their money using it while those of us with brains wont need it. A lot like those of us with no subscriptions because it's clearly corporate greed and total shit vs owning your media. I am the .000001% I guess.