Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don’t need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But they also tend to be competitive, ambitious, and overscheduled, so AI can look like an easy shortcut that makes more time in their lives for things that can’t be done by a chatbot. When the pressure is on, which approach do they choose?
A new scandal at Brown University reveals that huge numbers of these students are likely to cheat.
A recent survey of Princeton students found that 29.9 percent admitted to cheating with AI on at least one exam or assignment. But the situation at Brown gives us a better sense of what this kind of cheating looks like in one particular class—and just how much it may be substituting for actual learning.
The lesson: Humans are lazy & AI will take over the world.
Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”
“A Clockwork Orange” is a modern book that describes a dystopian future England. It’s not written in Old English. It is peppered with invented future slang words which the reader is expected to puzzle out.
HA! A Clockwork Orange. Read the book, saw the movie. Even more, I worked for a short time at a health center on the concrete jungle of a housing estate (Thamesmead, SE London) where scenes from the film were shot. As grim as place in real life as portrayed on film.
Totally bizarre. Beowulf was written in old English and is essentially unintelligible to modern speakers. Picking out a word or two is the best most of us can do.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was written in middle English which is mostly unintelligible to modern speakers. Same thing. A typically college student wouldn’t be able to understand it.
Shakespeare wrote in modern English, but still requires some interpretation.
A Clockwork Orange is written in modern English, but includes made up slang, which is up to the reader to decipher.
I’ve told the story before, but it’s been a while.
My father taught a post grad course at Steven’s Insitute of Technology. The first year each student was allowed to choose a topic and write a paper which would be graded. There were a few quizzes, and a final. For that, my father passed out Blue Books (remember those?) and each person was asked a question which directly related to the paper he had turned in earlier in the semester.
Of course in those days fraternity houses kept file cabinets bulging with papers that had come from previous years, along with the grades they received and so on, so it was trivial to climb to the attic, pull out a paper, retype it and turn it in.
In that first year of teaching several of the students looked at the question in the Blue Book, closed it, and left the room. They failed, obviously. He never had the problem again.
There is nothing new under the sun. A change in form, maybe, but not a new issue.
Every Christmas I give my nephew a book. He has read “1984”, “Animal Farm”, “Robison Crusoe”, and “Tom Sawyer” to name a few. This year probably “I, Robot”. Ironically, none of these books were read in school or on summer reading lists.
Personally, the greatest thing to happen has been the Libby App. If your local library system participates, you can download books to your Kindle/iPad to read. Some like to hold a physical book and there are some advantages but eBooks work fine for me.
I read continuously. If I paid for all the books I read it would become a major budget item.
Let me second your nomination of the Libby app. Also, my local library (North Olympic Library System, nols.org) has a web site for downloading books to Kindle.
As my eyes become weaker with age, I use the Kindle because of its adjustable font size. Every book becomes a large-print book. Not to mention that heavy books (more than about 300 pages) are fingertip-light when read on a Kindle.
Almost the only books I read in physical form are the ones that have pictures…or haven’t yet been published in Kindle format. So I do visit the library and I do take out paper books.
Libby is amazing. Many libraries have reciprocal agreements so you can get multiple library cards. I have access to 14 libraries across the state. Some do require you visit in person to get the card. Libby handles multiple libraries pretty cleanly. I often find
books in one library that others don’t have or have waiting lists.
ReciproCard shows you libraries with agreements with your home library and also lists libraries where can get a card for a fee.
Books Unbanned has a list of libraries that give teens free Libby library cards. For example, the Brooklyn Public Library gives a free card to US residents age 13-21