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
I’d hate to be a teacher. Imagine how much time you’d waste grading AI-generated papers…
Not being able to go to bed because you have to read 20 AI slop papers…that’s hell
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.
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.
Yikes! Either that recruitment process is incredibly inefficient, or they’re hiring someone to take over the security of a nuclear weapon factory.
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. 🙁
its that SEVERE?, its likely someone unable to finish grad 1-5. they likely used AI all the way to graduation, or most of thier education was spent online during covid, which dint help things.
That’s the worst one I’ve encountered. Usually its just disengagement. Like they ask for help, our techs start showing them the solution steps, and rather than watching the steps as we go, they are on their phone checking Instagram. Like they think help is somebody else doing their job for them.
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 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.
Do you have an example of the type of questions that will cause hallucinations?
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?
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.
To be fair, jobs and degree value is 90% regional. There are states with less degrees and states with more degrees. The PNW, for example, has a glut of Bachelors degrees, meaning your Bachelors will give you very little if any traction for jobs. Why would it when there’s double digits in those degrees applying for every 1 job requiring one? Many Midwest, flyover states do not. When there’s no one applying to those degrees positions and then That One Guy shows up, he’s almost guaranteed at least a try in that position.
Sometimes you have to take your degree and move or it will hold little value. People don’t like to hear that, and that’s fair, but it’s also the reality.
You’ll have a cheaper house, cheaper COL, and be very competitive in a job in a flyover state, but because you don’t want to leave the city of Seattle or its surrounding beauty, you stay and bitch about it instead. Or San Francisco. Or [next high COL/housing place]. No one really likes Ohio or the ass end of Illinois but there are both job openings and cheaper housing there.
An in-law earned a safety degree. They could stay in their state for $80k or move to a degree bereft state, with cheaper houses even, for $125k. They moved, and on the company’s dime.
Some of what’s happening here is based in the human principle of: I don’t wanna.. “Don’t wanna” rules the day most of the time.
Don’t wanna keeps you in a crowded expensive place bitching about your finances.
that is where most of the jobs are though, nobody wants to live in a rural area or a poor red states, they dont have jobs there at all. you will be hard pressed to find a tech job in misso/ohio that pays you 100-200k tech+job out of college where you can eaisly find one in seattle/cali,etc. you sound like a boomer conservative to be honest
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.
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
Adding context, the nearly-perfect-marks midterm was a take-home exam. Not that chatbots aren’t a big problem in schools right now, but this same thing would’ve happened 15 years ago.
Not the same at all.
Take home tests are usually formatted in a way where it doesn’t matter if the student has access to textbooks, or even the internet, since they still need to synthesize a response (thinking specifically of essay questions here, but it’s not exclusive to them) that shows they understood the material.
LLMs can now do that now. Or at least emulate that.
Depends on the material. We had quasi take home exams in math because there was no reasonable expectation for you to be able to determine a series of proofs in an hour. We’d get a list of like 8-12 problems and like 5 would be on the exam for you to regurgitate your proof.
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
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.
