How University Students Use Claude

I want to take an exception to the term cheat. Because it is only cheating the student in the end. I didn’t learn my times tables in elementary school. Sure, I can work out the answer to any multiplication problem, but that’s the point, I have to work it out. This slows me down compared to others who learned the patterns, where they can do the multiplication in their fast automatic cognitive system and possibly the downstream processing for what they need the multiplication for. I have to think through the problem. I only cheated myself.

The problem is, everybody does that, and it lowers the bar. From a societal perspective, we will have a set of people who are less prepared for their jobs, which will cost companies, and the economy at large, and so me and you. This will be a real problem for as long as AIs can't do the actual job but only the college easy version.

As a society, we should mandate universities to calculate the full score of a course based solely on oral or pen and paper exams, or computer exams only under strict supervision (eg share screen surveillance). Anything less is too easy to cheat.

And most crucially let go of this need to promote at least X% of the students: those who pass the bar should get the piece of paper that says they passed the bar, the others should not.

This is a serious problem.