starting to wonder if the "epidemic" of students submitting papers that teachers think are AI-written, really are just the next wave of systemic public education failures being noticed by professors
more and more I'm running into posts clearly written by humans that read like an AI wrote them but are consistent in tone, posted in like a shopify listing or pseudo-wiki.
looping circular topics, things that could have been caught in an editing pass but people probably aren't given enough time or paid well with to do a good job with the formulas they were taught were the only way by the schools
I went to a pretty good US public school, and by the late 2000s when I was graduating, a lot of the techniques taught to me were suddenly:
- useless compared to giving me an intuition for what problems actually used the thing (compared to knowing how to solve it once presented)
- and
- use largely the same strategies LLMs do. take tests by analyzing multiple choice answers and ruling them out so you don't need to know as much about the thing. cram and forget because you're never given enough time. only produce low quality first drafts because if you do well on it you'll have to do twice the work. editing is someone else' job. Google until you find the first thing that supports what you want and then find sources from there, because everything else is too much for the allotted time. Classmates didn't seem to notice that much.
and im starting to dread that what I saw at the tail end of it has become the norm, for the schools that have funding, and much worse everywhere else, but we're only really seeing it now. especially when teacher salaries basically haven't changed in those 15+ years but student debt has.
I guess it's no surprise education is being ruined by consultants and lobbiests, it pays at least 4x better for domain expertise, and you don't have to deal with high school students.
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