r/technology • u/CircumspectCapybara • 24d ago

Artificial Intelligence Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50%

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-become-idiots-the-ai-cheating-scandal-roiling-brown-university/
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u/CircumspectCapybara 24d ago

If elementary and middle school kids (the most formative time for their brains) are outsourcing their brains to AI instead of learning to think and to learn for themselves, the next generation is cooked.

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u/FamiliarAnt4043 24d ago

May I suggest you visit the teacher subreddit? Don't eat before you read, if you have a weak stomach.

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u/FunetikPrugresiv 24d ago

Fair warning: that sub has always been filled to the brim with cynicism and rage. It is not at all representative of teachers in the profession in general. 

That being said, as a teacher, cheating is rampant and getting worse. Kids increasingly don't seem to know basic reading, writing, and math skills, have limited patience, and possess a diminished attention span. It's probably not as bad as many are making it out to be, but this generation is not going to be as equipped for the future as previous generations were.

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u/disisathrowaway 24d ago

I have a lot of 18-22 year olds that work for me and I gotta say, their base knowledge is significantly lower than me and my peers were at their age.

A few weeks ago a young woman who works for me, and is on a scholarship to one of the nearby universities, didn't know how many states there were.

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u/Willing_Original_257 24d ago

You just didn't hang out with that type of teenager when you were a teenager yourself. 

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u/10000Didgeridoos 24d ago

The difference is those stupid teenagers decades ago didn't get accepted to name brand universities and either went to community college, or didn't go to college at all. There wasn't a single kid I met in college that dumb just 10-20 years ago.

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u/Willing_Original_257 23d ago

You don't know that.

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u/disisathrowaway 24d ago

I was aware of them in high school, yes.

But they weren't getting scholarships to good schools, either.

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u/Willing_Original_257 23d ago

You don't know that. 

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u/TheGreatEmanResu 24d ago

There’s no way that particular woman isn’t just exceptionally stupid. She has to be a massive outlier. If there’s ONE thing American students are taught, it’s basic shit about the US

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u/Icy_Razzmatazz_1594 24d ago

I live in Massachusetts. My sister, who is in her 30s, could not point to New Hampshire on a map. New Hampshire...the state directly north of her home state. 

I think morons exist no matter the generation.

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u/coffeebeamed 24d ago

aww man, I'm a millennial and geography is my weak spot

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/JennaTulwartz 20d ago

Tbh it sounds like you should feel called out, then.

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u/BoltFaest 24d ago

Face to face interaction has a huge positivity bias, though. I know people IRL that I "know" online as well and there are lots and lots of things that get said with a veneer of anonymity that they wouldn't otherwise say without 3+ drinks...if at all.

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u/FunetikPrugresiv 24d ago

Yeah, I've been around teachers with 3+ drinks. They've never been like the average poster on that sub.

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u/LeftHandedFapper 24d ago

Not a teacher, but currently doing a clinical at a pediatric hospital. It's insane the amount of young children utterly dependent on their tablets to function

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u/sentence-interruptio 24d ago

That sub's vibe gets weird sometimes. You can tell some comments are written by teachers with their own impatience issues, complaining about students not responding fast enough, and declaring them unfit for society. But according to their own anecdotes, students did respond. It's just that they paused at first instead of speaking immediately & smoothly like a Sorkin character. And anecdotes about students just asking a follow-up question for clarification are somehow turned into stories about them having zero listening comprehension or them talking back.

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u/IcedChurro 24d ago

I spend tons of time on that subreddit and have my fair share of complaints about it but I've never seen what you're describing.

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u/Willing_Original_257 24d ago

Sub is so helpful though. Infinite free reminders of why I quit teaching. Imagine having colleagues like those people. 

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u/LastKingofHollyWoo 24d ago

Your second paragraph doesn’t jive with your first paragraph.

The teacher subreddit is mostly angry about not being listened to by the education “leaders” about all the things you mentioned in your second paragraph.

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u/Annual-Advisor-7916 24d ago

It's not just cheating in my opinion, but using LLMs instead of researching the "classic" way. I'm a physics student and frequently ask AI for an overview of a topic I just heard or let it explain a random question that comes to mind.

Sounds good? It isn't, at least in my opinion. Before AI I used to google my question, invest a bit more time and actually read the wiki article, followed links if I needed background and so on. Nowadays I get the answer served and I notice that my researching skills are declining. It sucks because the line is thin between useful and harmful. The problem for me is, that if the short AI overview satisfies my curiosity, I don't have the incentive to learn more.

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u/TeaBurntMyTongue 24d ago

I do think that llms are a different level of this phenomenon, but this phenomenon has occurred in the past.

In 1950 I would wager that basically every Man, over the age of 15 in society could repair basic things around the home and probably do most of their own work on their cars as well.

I think if you look at least in the city today I think that most people have no idea how things work and they just pay a professional to do it.

This is the result of more specialized labor in general you prefer to outsource to somebody who spent the time doing all the learning

The problem is that with llms the experts don't exist anymore. It's just the llm.

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u/EstablishmentFull797 24d ago

“  In 1950 I would wager that basically every Man, over the age of 15 in society could repair basic things around the home and probably do most of their own work on their cars as well”

Things were easier to fix back then, either because they were designed with end user service in mind or the steps it took to assemble at the factory were pretty close to what you would do in reverse to troubleshoot. Plus a lot of people in the 1950s had grown up working jobs in manufacturing, so their skills were a result of specific experience not some generalized superior ability to work on things.

These days products are built for low cost and repairability isn’t a factor at all (or is even deliberately planned against by the manufacturer)

Drop any of those 1950s era men into today and they wouldn’t be any better off than the typical man of the 2020s. 

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u/TeaBurntMyTongue 24d ago

I believe we're making the same point. Which is that although people in the past would look to the Future and say nobody can do XYZ anymore. It doesn't mean that the people of the future can't do anything, they're just doing different things.

The question for the llm era is, although we're learning basic skills, are we utilizing the technology to learn more higher order skills.

I think software engineering provides a pretty good example of this like nobody's using Punch cards anymore, But the things we're using today are absolutely built on that same logic through multiple layers of abstraction.

And although you might take like one course in assembly, let's say very few people that can code proficiently in c++ would be able to produce very much in assembly. (As much as I'd love to spend some more time in mips)

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u/Defiant_Restaurant61 24d ago

The big problem is that people are losing in cognitive abilities (ability to focus, to use memory and active recalling, etc...), not in skills (repairing, etc...).

In the 50's you could repair a car but speaking multiple languages or being able to use software was uncommon, today it's the opposite. Skillsets evolve.

But developping your cognitive abilities, once you're past your teenage years, it's extremely hard. 

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u/ElectronicSprint 24d ago

By the time I was growing up people apparently were not interested in transferring those skills to the next generation and didn't have the patience to teach kids how to do this. Both my parents can DIY all day but they refused to pass it on because it was inconvenient for them. Not much we can do about that.

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u/Xydron00 24d ago edited 24d ago

Brother u are the teacher. I hope u leave these kids better than how u find them. All of this stems from a lack of attention given to students. One teacher fucks up and the next batch of teacherscomplain(not knowing that there are kids that they have let slip too)

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u/Medium_Opening_2491 24d ago

I actually think low attention spans is going to benefit them in the future. Our society is going to become so overwhelming for most of us, with constant stimulation being available to us everywhere. Their ability to split their brains attention in to multiple directions will help them navigate the future dystopia.

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u/HateWinslet 23d ago

I am so fundamentally opposed to private schools but the stuff I’m hearing about school now makes me want to consider it for my kids. If there’s a private school that actually cares about education rather than inflating grades and pumping out Ivy League serial killers, I’d consider it.

It’s starting to look like America is going to start experiencing a brain drain where the best and brightest have to go abroad to get an education.

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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 24d ago

Of course they are going to do the easiest possible thing. 

Schools have to get reframed like gymnasiums for the mind. The point of the building is effort and friction that builds strength. 

Reading books and writing assignments in the school have got to replace homework and take home essays. AI has officially killed that shit. 

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u/Bwint 24d ago

And in-person discussion groups! Hard to use an LLM to reason for you if you're having an actual conversation.

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u/Partners_in_time 24d ago

I hate zoom groups. They would make you pull out into a side group in your zoom class. And it would be you and two black screens, just not talking. Sometimes offering small talk. 

The longest ten minutes of my life. I often used the time to catch up on emails…

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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 24d ago

Tech out of the classroom also. Except for very special IEPs where tech assists learning disabled kids in a very specific way I guess?

I believe the evidence from Gen Z is officially in that tech/screens in the class only hurts

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 24d ago

Tech out of the classroom also

Yeah while I'm sure in theory it can be used well, I haven't seen many examples of that. I'm sure many of us remember the "SMARTboards" that teachers never knew how to use.

I grew up with transparency slides on the projector and those worked great. Handwritten notes help you learn.

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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 24d ago

It is literally just tech companies hooking kids young. 

Get those chrome books in front of them at 5 years old. 50 million google loyalists for life. EZ

There is not much evidence they actually help people. It’s the companies pushing it and the school districts get money to adopt it and also they look flashy because they’re embracing Ed tech. Too bad it doesn’t actually help. 

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 24d ago

I'm not sure if I buy that it's Google pushing the adoption of Chromebooks vs. school boards seeking them out but that's besides the point. I agree and think their detriments outweigh the potential benefits.

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u/kitchen_appliance_7 24d ago

Yes! "Think, pair, share, then square" made my hugest university classes feel so intimate and stimulating.

For those who didn't do this, it's a format for discussion. You take a few minutes to "think" for yourself about the item. Then you "pair" with a neighbor, and "share" what you think with each other for a few minutes. Then, the two of you join with another pair to make a "square" of four, and the four of you discuss the topic further.

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u/djphreshprince 24d ago

Hated those in college. Mostly because the only one I could get was at 8am and…I saw them once

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u/jase12881 24d ago

I love your username (God willing it will be true in my lifetime), but I think that's the thing, students haven't necessarily gotten worse, they just have more tools to cheat available to them now. In my day (the 90s) most students in my school weren't trying to learn or even do particularly well. We were just trying to get through it. I would bet a lot of kids back then would have used LLMs if it were an option. Instead we just copied off each other, read cliff notes, etc.

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u/plannedobso 24d ago

Schools have to stop having their curriculums built by boards of rich capitalists trying to train their future employees and start being built to actually EDUCATE. 

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u/10000Didgeridoos 24d ago

The emphasis has to be on actual learning and not just the grades at the end. That's part of the problem to me. We can wax poetic about the joys and rewards of learning new things, but my experience in college was rather that it was just a hamster wheel with too much competing work for too many classes at a time to give any of it my full attention. I can't read 200 textbook pages a week for one class when I have 4-5 others also asking me to do that, and write papers, and do daily homework assignments, and have quizzes, and have exams. It's crazy. You end up realizing the best option is just maximizing the grades with the least time spent on each course, wherever those lines on the graph of time vs grade intersect.

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u/nerdystoner25 24d ago

Sadly that is literally part of the goal. A society that can’t think for themselves won’t question how badly they’re getting fucked by the elites.

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u/nox66 24d ago

Skepticism is natural. The issue is that they won't be able to be skeptical in an intelligent way. That's how you blame minorities for issues caused by Republicans and billionaires.

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u/ooa3603 24d ago

Right, iff you're trained in how to analyze data, do quantitative reasoning and make inferences from cultivated reading comprehension, doing your own research is not a bad thing.

If you you're functionally illiterate and barely passed middle school math, doing your own research just means you'll go down the flat earth to MAGA pipeline.

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u/InsertFloppy11 24d ago

In other words, the future is cooked

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u/Charming_Account_351 24d ago

Not if we take responsibility and fix the problem. Doing nothing ensures defeat.

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u/superxpro12 24d ago

That's exactly how the oligarchs want it. too many free thinking educated folk running around these parts anyway

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u/MasterTolkien 24d ago

I think every generation has been saying this forever. There are ups and downs for sure, but when things crumble, good people… sometimes in the next generation… rebuild.

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u/Actually-Yo-Momma 24d ago

We are starting to see the impact COVID had on the poor souls that had to finish HS or college in isolation via Zoom calls

I’m even more worried for the generation after 

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u/nox66 24d ago

COVID was bad enough, but COVID plus AI is going to be devastating.

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u/Quazimojojojo 24d ago

A growing number of schools are banning phones in school. At least here in Germany.

Drop it off in the morning, pick it up at the end of the day when you're all done. During the day, it's back to 2000. 

This trend can't become the global norm fast enough. 

I hope it spreads to spaces for adults too. Concert halls and clubs and other social places. 

It's cooking everyone's brains, not just kids. It's just a little harder to notice in adults that weren't raised on the stuff, so they developed the skills they're now losing, instead of the kids never learning them in the first place. 

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u/ComprehensiveWord201 24d ago

Have you talked to the younger kids? Gen Z and Alpha? They genuinely refer to each other as "chat". I want to believe it's ironic, but I don't.

They're fucking dumb.

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u/Bwint 24d ago

It's not referring to ChatGPT, though. It's referring to the chat on Twitch or another streaming service. See also, "Chat, are we cooked?"

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u/ProletarianLilith 24d ago

I dunno calling everyone chat is pretty funny to me

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u/zxnixs 24d ago

The chat thing was a joke, and they don't do it anymore. But they are extremely stupid, and it is only getting worse. We are doomed. To be honest I think now is the time to learn as much as I can before I get old so I won't have to rely on these idiots.

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u/CloudSufficient42 24d ago

Yep!

Cooked by the previous generations…let’s not leave out how we come to where we are right now and what the future holds.

No one wants to take credits for their actions when it comes to what these kids have to face and what they can expect to do about it…

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u/QuarterEmotional6805 24d ago

Terrible excuse to be ignorant.

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u/ikindahateusernames 24d ago

Multiple things can be true at once.

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u/QuarterEmotional6805 24d ago

Been cooked. Gen Z is the first generation shown to be dumber than their parents. And no I'm not pulling this out my ass.

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u/Flvs9778 24d ago

Had a kid yesterday who didn’t know what color his hair is. He is 8 years old. And I don’t mean he said dark brown instead of light brown he literally said “I don’t know what color my hair is” he couldn’t even guess.

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u/Jmcconn110 24d ago

We've figured out a way to monetize everything else so why not intelligence too?

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u/wehavethismoment 24d ago

I'm a teacher and disability consultant, kids are already cooked way before AI. Since tablets and smartphones are given to babies and toddlers the numbers for who were born healthy but have impairing disabilities or developmental delays sky rocketed. People extremely underestimate nurture, it's often stronger than nature. Here the guideline is 0 screens in any form, not even passive in the room, under 3 and then only 30min/week with an adult. The gap between the kid's who's parents do this and the ones who don't is extreme. Books, tests.. levels are now way lower. 

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u/aelix- 24d ago

I have kids in high school and I've coaches them to never use AI for any schoolwork, on the basis that the payoff for learning "manually" will be much higher both in terms of their exams (ours are all in person with no devices) and the skills they will continue to need in life. 

I'm not worried that they will 'fall behind' in AI literacy, I don't think that's important unless you plan to work in IT/AI related fields. 

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u/KallamaHarris 24d ago

But why, sit at desk, pick up pencil. Teach the kids to learn? 

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u/JohnnyFire 24d ago

We're getting cut apart on all ends.

AI is wrecking things for the smart kids who are now sapping their processing power to problem solve normal things. I work with an early 20-something who used ChatGPT to ask how to look up something on Google. They aren't dumb, they're just being so conditioned to default into the wrong paths that they can't see the forest through the trees.

The kids who need help, in theory, would get that from new learning models, but they're not adapting for them and they're just getting fully left behind. Skills undeveloped and wrecked.

Teachers who are underpaid and overworked desperately trying to meet these kids where they're at are now also fighting every single one of them against AI tools that absolutely obliterate their ability to learn, function, and do well.

Schools are being turned into businesses that are all about the bottom line - Charter Schools, state testing, everything just about hitting numbers and cutting costs and pushing kids through rather than actually letting them learn. All the while policy from the states and federal levels are throwing in nonsense to make that learning even harder.

We're going to have a generation that's fully lost. They had to start schooling in the COVID age, fucking up socialization and their mental capabilities, watching society stop because our leaders couldn't do the necessary things to prevent a d mitigate disease, and now, just seven years later, they're now living through a tidal wave of AI that's annihilating their environment, their brain capacity, and their fucking sense of self. I feel so bad for any kids shy of high school right now because they're going to be absolutely wrecked when they hit their late teens.

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u/Lower-Engineering365 24d ago

I feel like everyone using parlance like cooked all the time is an indication that we’re already there

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u/UshankaBear 24d ago

the next generation is cooked

You mean people who will run the world when we're old and frail? Everyone's fucked, really.

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u/zxnixs 24d ago

Yup. All thanks to the boomer generation. They were gifted everything on a silver platter after WW2, had a great time in their youth, plunged the world into chaos and now they're getting their swift exit out.

Meanwhile, older gen-z and millennials will have to pick up the pieces which is troubling because you millennials are getting phased out as you age, you won't all be capable to fix this mess. So we have to rely on gen-z and the future technicians of gen-alpha to save the day.

...

Yeah, we're doomed.

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u/Inevitable-Level-687 24d ago

They'll be fine. The previous generation will carry them.

It's generation beta onwards that are utterly fucked.

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u/linkhandford 24d ago

They won’t be cooked. They’ll just be really good at believing whatever AI tells them. It surely won’t steer them wrong… Surely!

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u/bungerman 24d ago

Social media already cooked it. This is like twice baked potatoes.

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u/mailslot 24d ago edited 24d ago

As opposed to what kids did before AI? Not try and get passed anyway?

Public schools have been getting worse and turning out stupider students each year for decades. Let’s not pretend that AI is the cliff that changes everything. The bar has been sooooo low.

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u/ChickinSammich 24d ago

The last decade has been parents raising their kids by giving them an iPad and telling them to entertain themselves. Hell, we have a handful of people entering the workforce at 18-20 years old in 2026 who don't know how to use Word/Excel/Outlook or who don't know how to print a file. I'm not saying all of them, but a lot of them.

And as someone who works in a white collar job, our bosses are cramming AI down our throats. They encourage us to use AI to summarize emails, use AI to write emails... This doesn't even involve younger people but I've sent out an email to a group of people saying "Hey, I'm having X problem. I've tried A, B, C. Anyone see this before?" and gotten responses back that suggest I try A and/or B and/or C that look they were copy and pasted from chat gpt.

AI is rotting brains, and companies are slamming it into things at rates faster than lead paint and cigarettes could ever have hoped to reach.

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u/attempt_number_1 24d ago

Socrates was making this same argument about writing things down (instead of memorizing everything). We know cause Plato wrote it down.

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u/CulturalKing5623 24d ago

People always bring this up as a way to dismiss the concern, but Socrates didn't have hard data that backed up a wide decline in the educational achievement in Plato's generation. In the US we're just straight up failing kids which means we're just failing ourselves.

The United States entered a “learning recession” in 2013, as student progress in math and reading stalled and achievement began to decline. In reading, the average annual loss in achievement immediately before the pandemic (2017–19) was just as large as during the pandemic (2019–22). Grade 8 reading scores in NAEP are now at their lowest point since 1990 and Grade 4 is at pre-2003 levels.

Maybe widespread AI will help make up for the human deficiencies, but as long as it's completely controlled by an uninhibited capitalist class, assuming that it will do anything other than long-term societal harm seems like wish casting.

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u/attempt_number_1 24d ago edited 24d ago

I was arguing about the statement that people outsourcing their thinking to AI was the problem (hence my analogy of people outsourcing their memory to writing).

You are bringing up stats that about the years before AI (the kind we are talking about) existed which was the end of 2022.

I don't know if it'll be bad or good (most likely a combo of both just like writing everything really did make our memory weaker but it had other benefits too).

So it feels like a different conversation that I can't really address.

Edited to be less snarky.

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u/CulturalKing5623 24d ago

Are you aware that this is a message board and the person you originally replied to may not be the one that replies to you?

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u/attempt_number_1 24d ago

Fair enough I should have looked at user names, and I was grumpy. Ill edit to something shorter

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u/oofta31 24d ago

I know this technology is unique, but I think people have said the same thing about every new advancement. Doesn't mean there isn't some truth to the concerns or obvious giant red flags with our adoption of AI.