Proof # 4.962,77 that the school system does not prepare children for the actual, grim realities they will be facing in the future, but rather raising them to be competitive beings who obey orders, instead of accompanying them through the process of learning to think by themselves.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Sure as hell ain't my students; it's been a steady decline since ChatGPT came out and I think I may have failed more students than ever over unfinished projects. You can't GPT the semester long project, there's a paper trail and data to collect can it becomes super clear who is AI brained now...
Edit: PS, grade inflation has been a thing for a few decades now, btw; the As aren't the problem so much as the mush brain.
You are unfair, you don't let them use ChatGPT during tests 😉
They're not grading ChatGPT performance either
I think they are saying add chatgpt in because if everyone adopts it outside and then they cant do it on the test then the test now does not effectively tell how the person is able to think to solutions because the test itself is "out of spec" of the typical person needing to do the things on the test.
Its like when calculators were allowed then disallowed then allowed again and now we can't go without them a lot of the time while everyone now does more complex math and gets into higher level data sooner as a result of technological adoption.
The nature of the tests and teaching/learning now must change since we are looking at people who can do the combo of themselves plus chatgpt.
Solution:
Warn the students throughout the year "If you use AI all year for your schoolwork, you will fail the exams every month or two". Teach AI literacy, how it works, and the dangers of not learning the material and how it's a snowball effect. Teach the "why" it's important to use your brain to solve the problem, and state that they should be using their own words/math/etc. Students suspected of using AI should have a note sent to their parents early on to hopefully correct their path early.
Exams are paper and pencil only. No computers. No phones. No smart glasses. When students are getting an A on their homework and flunking their exams, it'll be pretty obvious. Even a student who has anxiety about exams can get a C.
Even before AI was a big thing, I really wish we had some kind of class, or at least an explanation from our teachers on the basics of how learning works. So much unnecessary drama could have been avoided if the kids had a better understanding of why their teachers were asking them to do things this way instead of just saying "do it this way because if not I'll give you a bad grade." Obviously younger kids aren't going to be equipped to handle all the neuroscience, but I'm sure there is some simplified explanation that could be given that would get the point across.
This was an extreme example of this, but it was emblematic of the general way my teachers handled students who didn't understand the point of the assignments or teaching methods: I forget which grade I was in, but in one of my math classes there was a day in class where I was solving the problems but not doing it exactly the way the teacher was teaching it. When he insisted, I asked why I had to do it that way if it works either way. He said something like "Because I have the big desk." Basically just an appeal to authority without any further explanation. "You're a dumb kid and I'm an adult, so do what I say."
That would require a number of teachers that actually understand or care about FoI which we don't have.
What is FOI in this context? The closet thing I found to something that makes sense would be Freedom of Information, but that doesn't seem quite right, or I'm not understanding the connection.
Fundamentals of Instruction.
Ah. Thanks!
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That would be great if the system wasn't rewarded for passing students.
they went from failing students often, to starting with participation to barely passing in 2000s, to unable to fail students in HS now. remember referrals they were bad mark on a students record,.
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My wife is a teacher, she has shown me vibed handed in assignments abd its incredibly obvious.
Right off the bat, if she gives an assignment to make, say, a slideshow on "Topic" and they talk about a examples A, B, and C in class, and the assignment goes off on tangents about topics F, G, and H instead, it's an instant red flag.
This happens cuz the student just copy paste the assignment blurb into gpt, but gpt has no context for what was discussed in class... so it goes off the rails instantly.
Its also easy to include poison pills in the middle of an assignment if they copy paste it straight into gpt.
Also theres all the usual markers. Emoji, em dash, and the assignment having way higher verbosity than you know damn well the kid has the vocabulary for. Suddenly they're speaking at a grade 7~8 levels higher than usual? Uh huh. .
From her and her teacher friends, Ive been told its extremely obvious to spot still. And its pretty trivial to setup the assignment to poison pill the AI.
Imagine handing in a paper with emojis... I just can't
What if the kid lies and says they didn't use AI? How successful have they been in convincing admin and parents of their ai usage? While I agree its all damning, its still circumstantial evidence.
Back in the day just one instance of plagerism was very serious. If you got caught doing it more than once you could get expelled.
Now apparently everyone is using the plagerism machine including the professors. So much for academic integrity.
I had a sustainability class where the professor used AI to write the course syllabus, assignments, and feedback. a fucking sustainability class.
I contacted the office of the president about it at my university but nothing ever happened of it. academia in general has gone off the rails with AI recently. I used to assume those with doctorates we're bright enough to avoid AI but evidently that's not the case.
Never underestimate how fucking lazy humans can be.
professors are often to busy with thier labs or research, so they relegate thier writing/teaching to AI. before it was only done with power-points that barely gave substance to a lectures those were the bad teachers when they just read off or give little context to the powerpoint slides, comes time for a midterm, students were like wtf was she teaching in those lectures.
and then professors using AI to sniff out your AI. resumes are being done by AI, and employers are also using AI TOO. Also research papers are apparently done with AI too, some how sneaking into journals.
She just failed the assignment, because it didnt actually meet the requirements lol
Thats the thing, if you simply design your assignment well, AI will just... fail at it, and you dont have to prove they used AI, they simply just didnt pass.
What if the kid lies and says they didn't use AI?
Have them re-do the assignment in a classroom with the teacher (or any other procror) present.
I don’t teach kids, so I don’t know the answer to this, but I imagine what you’d do is add guidelines to the assignment that cause them to either lose significant points or fail if they don’t specifically mention things discussed in assignments and the classroom.
I’d also like to point out that, yes, we know when kids and adults lazily insert a prompt and lazily paste its response, but anybody with half a brain knows they only need to spend an extra 15 minutes re-prompting and editing it to make it nearly unnoticeable.
The answer is probably to test them in person with no computer of any kind in front of them.
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Ah. Good old days in the 80's when teacher didn't even read what you wrote. Grade was given according who you were, did the teacher like you and what your previous grades were. No sudden inspirations to do better.
Replace "teacher" with "management" and you're describing every workplace.
This happened to me. I was a pretty good kid; brainy too, but one history test kicked my ass. The teacher was the husband of my grandfather's sister. A distant family cut me a break.
This phenomenon can continue into adulthood too.
However, after a certain point it's not about the grades you make. It's about the hands you shake.
Education needs to change. Including punishment for using LLMs.
Before you can punish for using LLMs, you need to be able to reliably detect the use of LLMs, including guarding against false positives.
Current AI checkers are woefully inadequate and prone to errors.
A teacher I know says it is easy to determine if a student wrote their paper if you interview them about it. You're right that automated methods are risky.
That's it. As a teacher who has been dealing with this in the last 2-3 years, the only reliable way I have found is to do short interviews.
Students hand in their work, I grade it, then I ask them verbally a few easy questions about what they mean in specific sections of their work. How they score on these questions is used as a coefficient that I apply on the grade to get the final score.
So they can use LLMs, but they have to understand its output.
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Before you can punish for using LLMs, you need to be able to reliably detect the use of LLMs, including guarding against false positives.
You can tell they're using an LLM if they have a computer out during the pen-and-paper test.
How is that allowed?
Hell, back in my day, teachers were even very picky about what kind of calculator you could use. And if it was a graphing calculator, you had to show them yourself wiping the memory at the beginning of the test.
(Except for one algerbra teacher, who was really cool about it. He'd allow custom programs to stay on the calculator if you programmed it yourself. On the theory that if you can write a computer program that reliably solves these math problems, then you must have a very good understanding of how to solve these math problems. And, yes, I was one of the few kids who actually did that. Ah, writing my own custom software for the TI-83 on the TI-83, because that seemed easier than actually doing the math problems by hand ... good times.)
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As someone who works in ed tech these days, I’m kind of down for them as a study tool. For example, synthesizing notes and turning them into flashcards, practice tests, etc. I find that stuff to be suuuper handy if I’m trying to learn something.
But for cheating, yah, fuck that noise. A lot of classes are moving back to pencil and paper because of this, and I totally support that.
I feel like synthesising notes and turning them into flash cards how i learn things.
Exactly. Taking notes in class during a lecture. Copying something the instructor wrote on the board. This is all part of the learning process. The act of doing these things helps you learn.
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We are allowing LLMs for all of our homeworks. As long as you can solve the problems in the indicated way with a reasonable answer.
In case you are not sure about the "indicated way", there are practice questions with detailed step-by-step solutions for each hw problem that you just have to change the numbers/equations a bit and you'll get points.
What we've noticed is that the year-after-year averages are significantly higher, especially this year. However, students are bringing in details that we explicitly didn't go over in lecture and putting that on the homework (e.g. Delayed branching in Computer Architecture, because it's a random quirk of MIPS that even assembly programmers don't have to deal with). None of these details are ever mentioned in lecture or the practice homeworks (in a few cases, they are mentioned with the explicit wording "do not worry about this now")
We can only assume people are copying the homework into LLMs and copying the results straight down. The latest exam had a question where students were asked to analyze a specific chunk of assembly code to deduce certain properties about it. Approximately 20-30% of the students didn't know the FORMAT to answer it, despite it literally being item 1 on last week's homework.
And when I say format, I don't mean exactly "you must write these exact words or you lose points". It's literally just point out "line A and B have this property X because of attribute Y". Just including ABXY as shown in the practice homework is enough. But apparently people are too lazy to read a 10 bullet point answer...
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Isn't that how it is suppose to work?
At the end of class you get a grade.
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The good students are still getting A grades naturally. And the bad students are getting A grades with ChatGPT. A grades for everybody! (Until we get to the closed-book, in-person test at the end of the year...)
Surely this won’t cause any problems at all
'A' grades are suddenly everywhere, as introduction of stochastic parrot as a service reveals the education system is geared towards training parrots instead of teaching humans. What a surprise.
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In some schools, teachers look the other way, so their pay doesn't suffer even more. The administration refuses to admit reality, so their funding doesn't suffer.
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