this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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Percentages are somewhat misleading here. That's around 2 in 25, enough to falsely accuse a student or 2 in a fairly standard classroom for example.
I remember somebody mentioning a quote along the lines of "A 95% success rate sounds good, until you become the 1 in 20 that it kills"
In matters of life and death, the alternative choices are always important to consider...
5% chance of dying vs a 99% chance of living a horrible life of immobility and pain?
We all die eventually.
Getting your degree or being kicked out and banned from your college and still requires to pay back the loans. IS life or death.
It literally can determine the quality of life of a person for the next 30-40 years. If not forever. This is NOT something to take lightly.
I lived that perspective roughly from high school through sophomore year in University... after sophomore year I took a different view: "I am good enough, regardless of what arbitrary ratings these sad little men put on my transcripts."
My reality is: I got a teaching assistantship - the D I received in Calc II didn't weigh on that decision one iota - in contradiction of the admonishments of several "advisors" I was required to see while selecting course schedules for the coming semesters; then, I got a good job out of school and nobody ever read my transcripts to see that I had a 3.45 GPA undergrad and a 3.75 GPA in grad school. Nobody outside my review committee ever looked at my Masters' Thesis, and I think one of them never really read the whole thing.
Once I "let go" about grades and ratings and all that bullshit, I got another C in Statistics I from a sad little man whose "son hates him too, like me." Any amount of stressing about that grade and my performance in the class would not have changed the outcome - we were an Honors class of 3.3 GPAs and up, many 3.9s and up in there, and he gave all but one of us C or lower. Elsewhere - and overall - I believe I performed better academically due to not stressing about it.
The parking gestapo started patrolling a week earlier than their announced end of "free parking for summer" period and wrote me a ticket, I appealed, they denied, I decided to see where this led without me paying. For a $20 fine, they sent me about 100 collection letters (postage far higher than $0.20 on each one) over the following years, and told me that "my transcripts are FROZEN and will not be released to anyone until the fine is paid." Welp, here we are, 40ish years later, and nobody has denied me employment or promotion or any other thing because they can't get a copy of my transcripts. One new employer 12 years after graduation asked me for a copy "to have on file" and I gave them an earlier copy I had pulled before the parking ticket, didn't show degree conferred, they didn't care - gave me Masters' degree pay rate anyway. Nobody else, anywhere at any of the dozen employers I have had in the last 40 years, ever asked me for transcripts or other proof of my education.
By the time you've had something impact your quality of life for 10 years, that is an impact to your entire quality of life. If the University actually expells you over an AI infraction, my take is that they probably wanted to expell you for other reasons already, and your academic career at that institution would have been an unpleasant uphill battle even without the AI flap.
One other thing I learned during my Teaching Assistantship: a couple of my students were demonstrating absolutely zero understanding of the material being taught and making zero effort to improve their understanding, resisting my offers to help. I gave them a failing grade. My advisor was called to the Dean's office, when he returned he sat me down for a lesson: "These are paying customers, if they show up to class they get at least a C." I suspect that is true of almost every private university in the world.
Holy the ignorant self-centered anecdote. Too long, no relevance, do not recommend. I‘d probably give it a failing grade.
And after age 19 or so, I wouldn't care.
Traits of the ignorant, as one would expect.
Your failing grade has no negative impact on my life... caring would be the ignorant response.
That‘s the actual critique. But of course you‘d focus on the grade given.
You remind me of little doodles I would do on my physics assignments back then, irrelevant comets in the orbital calculations.
And now you‘re trying to impress the empty ether with your irrelevant doodles from back when.
Just like you keep dwelling on your own trivial creations, you keep lingering in conversations you should’ve put behind you eons ago.
My humble guess is: the massive gravitational center of any orbit you’ve ever calculated has always been your ego.
I didn't realize my 'trivial creations' required a full thesis review from you.
Who keeps lingering in conversations they should’ve put behind themselves eons ago?
If my ego has a gravitational pull, I suggest you stop orbiting it.
Calling a one-liner a thesis after trying to make an argument with long-winded, but ultimately empty autobiographical babble — like an ugly accident one cannot look away from, this just keeps pulling me in.
So, how does the anecdotal, badly written life story of a self-absorbed ego going through a midlife crisis relate to the reality of people getting their lives fucked through some automated allegation machine? Would you, maybe, condense your point into a simple sentence? So that even irrelevant comets are able to get it and to also showcase your moral blindness towards systemic dangers, just because you managed to get through, back in the good ol’ days. Dangers that, as pointed out already and contrary to you own experience, will have life changing consequences for other people. That’d be great.
The reality is: you are fucked with or without the stamp of approval from academia. Get over the ratings game, nobody cares if you got an A+ in Algebra III or a higher than 3.75 GPA. They (that would hire you) usually don't care about what school you went to except to make football conversation. If one boots you, there are 4000 more out there just as willing to give you another chance.
Big talk about academic integity has been exactly that for 50+ years: big talk, very little action in reality. If you're a one in a million victim of terrible application of technology - you've got a good chance of winning a fat discrimination lawsuit, if that's how you want to live your life.
No, but I'll give you a couple of links to read: let me know what you think AFTER you've gotten at least 1/2 way through: https://rmst202.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2022/04/illich_deschooling-society.pdf https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/Illich_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf
Thankfully, I am not your pupil. If you're not able to make an argument without sending people off to read into your own philosophies, you ultimately failed to make an argument.
You're' making a categorical error, as this thread is about an Automaton having direct, tangible real-world consequences for people's live trajectory. It's not about the legitimacy of the educational system itself, not about the relevance of grades. If it was, I would probably even agree with you.
Now, that your initial, ideological take has been rebuked after the very first try, you keep arguing a strawman from a privileged position of survivorship bias, with an outdated anecdote and an absolute refusal to acknowledge differential vulnerability, by reducing your pompous deliberations about systemic rot into individual failure. Effectively a cruel form of victim-blaming disguised as enlightenment. And probably one of the most US-American things to do.
But what is it now, the failure of the system or of the individual? Because your argument seems to be condemning the system as irredeemably corrupt, yet simultaneously you blame individuals for not transcending it. If the system is so rotten, how can individual failure to escape it be a moral failing? Of course you can't escape that contradiction without exposing your very own misanthropic disgust for those that didn't manage.
You, the irrelevant comet in my orbit, only drift further off into the void now, by distorting the problem of a 7% false-positive rate on a life-altering accusation into a one in a million (0.0001%) chance of terrible application of technology. Mixed with unfounded empirical claims about the material conditions about the labor market in the 21 century and spiteful jabs at potential live choices of the ones falling through the cracks.
Your attempts to claim authority are merely furthering your illegitimacy as a serious person. You're dismissed. Off you go, lil' irrelevant comet.
Okay so what I'm taking away from this is that you were lucky to find gainful employment without proof of a degree and didn't have any debt to pay off? Because the context here is people having all the debt and none of the credentials required for jobs where they make enough to pay off that debt. If your card is declined, how you feel about it doesn't matter.
I had student loans, luckily they only amounted to 4-5 months' gross income - lucky because scholarships stepped up and I only had to take a loan for one year instead of all six.
I got news for you: you can have all the credentials in the world available from the best Universities, and when a place isn't hiring, they aren't hiring. I've gone job hunting in Melbourne Florida after Columbia burnt up on re-entry, the entire town wasn't hiring - that's not about me, they weren't hiring anyone.
I interviewed in Manhattan with a fresh Honors degree from a good school, the employment agents there dumped all over me about how worthless I was, until... I wandered into an office where the interviewer had a glass table, she looked down through it and saw my shoes were freshly shined, my silk tie was bright red ($2 from a street vendor), and I had a goofy-trendy $50 haircut that was in-style, she gushed: "oh, I know exactly who will hire you: Kidder Peabody, you'll so fit right in." She barely glanced at my resume' "you do computer stuff, right? Yeah, they're always looking for more computer guys, they're just gonna love you!" Transcripts were never mentioned.
After .com hit, any remotely computer related degree, straight out of school was a ticket to more than double what I made starting out with the best computer degree for .com, those kids left school making more than my boss with 25 years experience was making 5 years' earlier.
Market gets saturated, hiring stops again. It's different in different fields, but still much the same: cycles. Personal referrals beat the HR screening circus. The place I work today, I had applied to 4 times in the previous 15 years, HR never even called me back. Personal referral got me a work from home spot at a company this company ended up buying, since they bought me I bypassed the HR filters. Once I was past the HR filters they offered my an 8 month salary signing bonus to stay with them at least 1 year, my base pay has increased faster than inflation for 12 years straight now, and the annual bonus runs about 2 months salary.
I'm not revealing any useful "secrets" here... truth is: the system sucks, when it's not blowing chunks. But, that's the world - and trust me when I tell you: academics A) don't know everything about how the rest of the world works, and B) what they do know they tend to distort for their students in various ways, for various reasons.
Any rant against academia this long deserves this link: https://rmst202.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2022/04/illich_deschooling-society.pdf
Still more than you should have had (education shouldn't put you in debt imo), but definitely far less than other people have. Particularly people studying in the last few years. .com is long gone, prices have gone up and the margin between net income and cost of living is slim for many people.
That's my whole point: you shouldn't downplay the impact that being thrown out can have if you've got $50k in student loan debt. If you cheated, sure, that's on you. But if you were falsely accused by a detector that turns up false positives for one or two students per class, on average, that just sucks like an open window in space.