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We live in an insane era where many companies would want to be selecting employees who had a proven ability to learn and succeed without the aid of AI tools… before then forcing them to use AI for everything once hired
Au contraire. AI is pretty good at helping understand and explaining, you just have to do the work yourself and verify everything it tells you. Which is exactly what university is mostly about. After enduring the hardship of working through every detail you really understand a topic. The problem in university is often access to somebody to ask questions and the most successful researchers are usually not the greatest at teaching which results in a lot of research and figuring it out yourself. I had to get my engineering degree the hard way which taught me alot, but it was about 15% harder than necessary.
I'm currently learning how to calculate the weight a set of beams can take safely. I'm obviously working with proper sources, but being able to clarify things makes the learning so much less frustrating. And its basic stuff like is mm^3 = (mm)^3 = (10^(-3))^3 * m^3 or is it a single 10^(-3) * m^3. Turns out the qualifier contains the dimension of the unit by convention, so the first solution is correct. Now try looking that up without asking someone or reading in primary sources for hours. AI can not only explain how and why it is but also give you a reference where to check that in a primary source which cuts down the time to properly learn by alot.
At university I never understood people that got the exam from last year to learn how to solve the problems by heart as to avoid learning to understand and instead studying to pass exams. Those people not only haven't understood why they are there in the first place but are also trusted to build bridges and buildings later on. Which is kind of unnerving.
The same applies to people abusing AI to cheat. They might have a few or a lot of human lives on their conscious in the future. They are not there to understand but to pass.
That's just the usual routine of externalising costs while extracting benefits, maybe it's just a very blatant example.
Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”
Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.
Id hate to be a recruiter or interviewer for this generation of students
they dropping the course to avoid getting a complaint to the dean, and the ones that dint show up in the final exam, was likely gauging an F is better than getting a W , since if they considered grad school in the future.
I'd hate to be a teacher. Imagine how much time you'd waste grading AI-generated papers...
thats where the teacher uses AI to read through AI papers.
Not being able to go to bed because you have to read 20 AI slop papers...that's hell
They've already made it into the job roles.
I was helping somebody (a professional with a degree) on a software and they were, among other things, struggling to manually tally over ten items with the cursor as a pointer. They kept starting back at 1 and recounting. After many attempts they asked me to count the items for them.
So I had to stop helping and explain they needed to speak to their manager about the issues. 🙁
Hot damn... Having issues because you're used to the AI thinking for you is one thing ... being incapable of counting to 10 (with repeated attempts!) is quite another thing entirely.
Its the worst one I have encountered. Typically its just a lot of not caring about figuring stuff out and hoping somebody else can do the work for them.
I'm beginning to understand why management types like it so much.
I just started a new job, and after I (imo) aced the remote interview, they brought me in for an in-person, which didn't seem unusual. I was surprised when they started asking all the same questions as in the remote and take-home interviews, but clearly they've been hitting issues with this.
they probably got into the problem where candidates were using AI to automatically fill all the questionairres for the interview.
I was hired during the pandemic and it was quite an interesting experience to get there. They had an online assessment center, several hours (with breaks) of all sorts of quizzes, questions and tasks, mostly intelligence and memory-related, combined with math, general knowledge, language proficiency and a section on personality and personal preferences, with a relatively limited focus on IT questions at the end that felt tacked on for the job. There was no surveillance during it - no webcam requirements or anything. They just sent me a link and I could complete this timed test at a point in time of my choosing, in one go. Since it wasn't very difficult at all and there was more than enough time, I had no issues with this one.
Before the interview, I was handed a 20 minute condensed version of largely the same type of questions to be completed in person (very small room, alone, under supervision, to eliminate any possibility of cheating), which I completed in no time, and finally an extensive interview (IIRC about 45 minutes) in front of what I can only describe as a tribunal of eight more or less relevant people sitting in a half-circle in front of a chair for the interviewee (at a distance due to COVID), most of which would just silently judge me with their eyes and take down notes as two to three of them switched between interrogating, I mean, interviewing me. They were actually very friendly, but it did feel quite intense. I was extremely nervous in the beginning, even stuttered a little, but as the interview went on, my nerves calmed down. None of the questions were surprising nor upsetting, but due to my initial nervousness, I still felt like I had failed.
Anyway, after they had hired me (I received a call about two weeks later), they later told me that they had done this twice with about 100 applicants each, just to hire a single person. In retrospect, I can't believe I successfully made it through all of this. I was very well prepared for the interview and had previously spent a lot of effort (several weeks worth) on the application itself, tailoring it to the job and the organization, but still.
If you have the amount of resources this large org has, I think this is a very thorough way of doing things. The simple method of repeating a portion of the test in person (with different questions, but the same kind as online) eliminates cheaters and can be done by an org of virtually any size. The lengthy interview in front of a diverse group I'm not so sure about though. With shy and nervous applicants (as well as those on the spectrum), this can be very overwhelming, but since they all have to find a consensus in the end, discrimination and personal preferences influencing the hiring decision are less likely to happen.
sounds very time consuming, although if its a high paying position it would make sense but still 8v1 interview is kinda odd, do they vote on if they want to hire someone. because if not if one even has a bias you could get axed.
Yikes! Either that recruitment process is incredibly inefficient, or they’re hiring someone to take over the security of a nuclear weapon factory.
There was also a background check involved, which I forgot to mention. But overall, it's very much the former and not even close to something like the latter.
Hopefully you didn't have to go through all of that just to flip burgers or carry boxes in a warehouse.
I’m looking forward to my next round of technical interviews. The people who depend on AI usually end up looking very foolish. Especially on the questions designed to make various LLMs hallucinate.
Other than this hot take
Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent.
It's an interesting read.
Ivy League college students are, by definition, people who attend classes at an Ivy League university ... nothing more and nothing less.
If you want to claim they're anything other than that, you're using different arguments -- it can't be justified definitionally. You'd think someone who was actually intelligent might know that...
Author was Ivy educated I take it?
nate anderson, so its probably slop that slipped by. at least, that's easier for me to understand than a human being actually writing something like that since 1980.
GOOD. If you use a clanker to think for you instead of putting in the barest minimum effort and actually learning, you do not deserve the honour of being qualified.
What is the point of paying for college when you squander it this way?
tale as old as time, if it wasnt for AI, it would paying for someone to write your papers, or do your take exams(although you need to find it), although people have allegedly done this with degrees with licenses like being a lawyer, MD when the newly hired couldnt even write a letter or prompt they were quickly laid off. if its a take home essay, you would try to find "Writing prompts" with the exact same subject matter you are asking and just changing the words around.
40 years of telling kids a degree is a job ticket rather than explaining the value of a liberal arts education.
Every time I see k12 education discussion focused on "preparing kids for the job market" I cringe. Its the cart before the horse and just as agile.
they mean the job market as the low-wage, medium wage jobs that supplies most of sectors. not the bougie white collar jobs. to the end they also dumb it down enough that people end up joining the military as cannon fodder.
To put it on your resume I guess
I had a guy who sat next to me when I took some community classes after work he would show up late and from the corner of my eye could see him scroll when I'd scroll and answer a question on quizes when I did.
I imagine he continued on and now makes more money than I do
The amount of scorn for degrees here is spectacular.
Medicine happens, in part, by experience. Even so, would you want your doctor or nurse working on you either of those roles without their degree(s)?
Psychologist?
Your lawyer?
The engineer designing that bridge you cross every day?
Who has scorn for degrees? All I said is I noticed someone cheating their way through some classes and it sucks knowing that people like that usually fair better monetarily
Not you. All the people posting with a shrug saying it’s just a piece of paper that doesn't mean/do much except help getting a job. Like there’s no useful information there they can’t learn all by themselves & that they have the personal discipline of a 4 year dedicated college curriculum in conjunction with using AI to complete everything.
The article is really discussing bachelor degrees, and this is mostly true for those. Masters and doctorate degrees (or med school or law school, etc) are where specialized learning that actually sets you up for specialized roles happens.
The pre-med student who stopped after getting their bachelor's is not meaningfully better prepared to be your doctor or psychologist than someone with no degree. You wouldn't trust either one.
It's mostly just a piece of paper required for most white collar jobs to even pass on your resume to a real person. That's the only reason I got a degree. I already had tons of experience, but couldn't get a decent full-time job because the job postings all had a degree as a requirement and the automated systems take that as a hard requirement because it's objective and thus easy to filter on.
thats not the only thing they want, they have screen out specific keywords too, or look for X amount of experience, in this specific skill. even beyond your general i have "x amount of general experience". plus they also use other metrics like, just looking at 10-20 resumes and trashing the rest.
resume reasons, especially ivy league schools. ivy schools tend to select students based on historical alumni reasons if they aren't top cut, and people who grew up in wealth usually had better resources growing up to be smart (but it doesn't by default mean they are smart)
This is why I'm nervous about going back to school too. I've seen people find out their professors are just using AI and it feels so...gross. You pay a lot for school! What's the point if it's all just phoned in? And then to top it off you aren't guaranteed a good job afterwards even if you do well.
I wish there was a better solution to all of this because I would like to change my life trajectory as I've grown tired in my current position
before AI it was a software(s) to screen out your writing in non English classes. it was literally try to "guess" if you are copying from somewhere or making the essay vague or not or , which i find it wierd, because its very subjective. usually in a stem class, thse prof dont have time to read your paper, or a small article, so they use a software to assume you arnt just copying from a site, or it thinks your paper may or may not show relevant details.
You have the right attitude and I hope you are able to successfully shop around. Some institutions are paying below living wages to overworked and precariously employed instructors. Of course they phone it in. Those places are not worth your money and just trying to cash in on the "diploma" =="job ticket" mentality.
Find a place that actually gives a shit about education and you should find professors interested in actual education that will see your attitude as refreshing.
apparently IVY league schools arnt immune to AI slop- dumbing down. i think covid made both professors and STUDENTS lazy to the point they would just try to AI(likely to just search the answers online). from what ive seen colleges are pretty stingy at hiring people once they get enough tenured, they avoid paying more by having temporary instructors, either adjunct PHDs, MS holders, and the rare BS holder.
probablly better of starting at CC first taking all your GE classes, then looking at 4years to transfer to, this gives you time to research schools.