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I hated it when teachers would get narcissistic. But in universities it becomes a huge issue. There are computer science majors in my campus that are bored by math and programming so use chatgpt.

They are bored by the degree they chose themselves. So instead of changing degree plan or learning to enjoy it as a hobby like you would normally do, they just cheat.

Professors' workarounds are worse. Universities do not execute any "academic dishonesty" actions because they are the ones giving students free chatgpt account after a deal with openai.

So professors either use AI flaggers that give false positives and give everyone 0, or more commonly just give extremely hard exams to offset homework grade inflation.

People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars.

I did this for my last company. We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants. I got a severance which was basically equal to what I would have been eligible to get from unemployment, which meant I didn't get any unemployment but at least I didn't have to pretend to look for work for six months.

I did it with no illusions about what my reward might or might not be. I just don't like being involved in any way with project failures.

Except, the nerd will probably do the school work correctly.

It's called git gudding now.

My youngest (now 27) has a bit of a problem with that. The issue is that he's smart and most things always came easy to him. He'd do those giant writing assignments the night before that are supposed to be worked on for weeks and still get the high grade. Hardly ever seemed to study, but got solid A's. But when something comes along that he's not automatically good at, he gets super frustrated. He wanted to learn the guitar in high school (I play a little), so we bought him one and some basic instruction, but he hated it because it didn't come naturally. It's a decoration on his wall.

I will give him this though: he decided a few years back that he wanted to learn to draw, and that didn't come naturally, but he's continued to work at it and has gotten pretty decent. So it's something a person can get past.

Teach him to fail. Those kids are afraid of failing because somewhere in life someone traumatized them so they don't like to ever fail at anything.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee

Edit, in the same spirit: "The difference between a novice and a master is that the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried." - No idea who

Follow me for more Karate Kid-level inspirational quotes.

I'm a pilot and flight instructor. When I was a teenager, I would neglect English and Math homework to read my private pilot textbook.

See, there's this guy named Edward Thorndike who described several basic principles of learning, including the Principle of Readiness. See, learning is an active process, takes effort to do, and effort sucks. So people will only endure the suck of effort if they genuinely believe they'll get anything out of it. Students will best learn a lesson if they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. No, "you'll never know when algebra will save your life" is not good enough. No, "Someday this might come in handy" isn't good enough. Because of quiz-based game shows with million dollar cash prizes, that applies to literally everything from Mayan architecture to the seventh season of Friends.

My lived experience with essay writing is it was almost always an exercise in pointless pedantry. Thirteen years of public school and five years of college, I was almost always graded on punctuation, grammar, spelling, and strict adherence to the MLA style guide. One of the few essays that was graded for content was in an engineering class I took. We were to research a notable engineering failure, where something bad happened and an engineer was at fault. I chose the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 cargo door and the two in-flight emergencies it caused. I cited the actual NTSB reports and the Applegate memo. Of all the essays I wrote for English teachers, I don't remember the topic of a single one, my memories of writing them involve "Okay when it's a periodical, the title is italicized, but when it's in a journal..."

When teachers answer "Why do we have to learn this" with "it's required for your diploma" literally don't learn it. It is a mandatory waste of time designed to either be a bullshit tolerance exercise or included because it aesthetically resembles academics.

That doesn't happen in aviation curricula because flying a plane fucking matters and there's a point to everything we teach. Under part 61, anyway. Part 65 is full of horse shit. I went to mechanic school and learned there's no such thing as an aircraft that's safe to fly. I build furniture now.

What were we talking about?

Yep.

Parts of Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A, will 100% seriously tell you that learning basically anything other than how to prompt ChatGPT is a stupid waste of time.

They'll all go feral when they can no longer afford it or the power goes out or the system crashes for a significant amount of time, as they've never learned how to think, nor anything useful to think about.

In the U.S., the issue is that our education system is already fundamentally broken and doing a terrible job of teaching kids. Adding LLMs to that is like striking a match in the tinderbox.

I teach collegiate intro programming classes, I can say it definitely seems that way. My office hours will be an absolute ghost town, nobody has any questions for me in class, and then when a project is due about 1/3 of the submissions are AI slop.

I know cheating has always been rampant, but I've never seen it this bad before.

Also: being able to draw hands is the most important identifier of not being an ai.

That's honestly how everything works. Nobody starts good at anything. If you want to be good at something, you have to suck first. You have to fail over and over and over again and learn a tiny bit each time as you hone your craft.

It works for everything. My dad made me tie a thousand knots because my shoelaces kept coming untied and now as an adult I am super in-demand in our local bdsm scene.