by calepayson | 2025-11-29 20:37:49+00:00
> Our findings reveal that students perceived AI tools as helpful for grasping code concepts and boosting their confidence during the initial development phase. However, a noticeable difficulty emerged when students were asked to work un-aided, pointing to potential over reliance and gaps in foundational knowledge transfer.

As someone studying CS/ML this is dead on but I don't think the side-effects of this are discussed enough. Frankly, cheating has never been more incentivized and it's breaking the higher education system (at least that's my experience, things might be different at the top tier schools).

Just about every STEM class I've taken has had some kind of curve. Sometimes individual assignments are curved, sometimes the final grade, sometimes the curve isn't a curve but some sort of extra credit. Ideally it should be feasible to score 100% in a class but I think this actually takes a shocking amount of resources. In reality, professors have research or jobs to attend to and same with the students. Ideally there are sections and office hours and the professor is deeply conscious of giving out assignments that faithfully represent what students might be tested on. But often this isn't the case. The school can only afford two hours of TA time a week, the professors have obligations to research and work, the students have the same. And so historically the curve has been there to make up for the discrepancy between ideals and reality. It's there to make sure that great students get the grades that they deserve.

LLMs have turned the curve on its head.

When cheating was hard the curve was largely successful. The great students got great grades, the good students got good grades, those that were struggling usually managed a C+/B-, and those that were checked out or not putting in the time failed. The folks who cheated tended to be the struggling students but, because cheating wasn't that effective, maybe they went from a failing grade to just passing the class. A classic example is sneaking identities into a calculus test. Sure it helps if you don't know the identities but not knowing the identities is a great sign that you didn't practice enough. Without that practice they still tend to do poorly on the test.

But now cheating is easy and, I think it should change the way we look at grades. This semester, not one of my classes is curved because there is always someone who gets a 100%. Coincidentally, that person is never who you would expect. The students who attend every class, ask questions, go to office hours, and do their assignments without LLMs tend to score in B+/A- range on tests and quizzes. The folks who set the curve on those assignments tend to only show up for tests and quizzes and then sit in the far back corners when they do. Just about every test I take now, there's a mad competition for those back desks. Some classes people just dispense with the desk and take a chair to the back of the room.

Every one of the great students I know is murdering themselves to try to stay in the B+/A- range.

A common refrain when people talk about this is "cheaters only cheat themselves" and while I think has historically been mostly true, I think it's bullshit now. Cheating is just too easy, the folks who care are losing the arms race. My most impressive peers are struggling to get past the first round of interviews. Meanwhile, the folks who don't show up to class and casually get perfect scores are also getting perfect scores on the online assessments. Almost all the competent people I know are getting squeezed out of the pipeline before they can compete on level-footing.

We've created a system that massively incentivizes cheating and then invented the ultimate cheating tool. A 4.0 and a good score on an online assessment used to be a great signal that someone was competent. I think these next few years, until universities and hiring teams adapt to LLMs, we're going to start seeing perfect scores as a red flag.