this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Reap what you've sown, assholes.
What are you on about? This is about how universities have a hard time managing AI use and misuse by students. Have they sown those AI tools?
The essence of an academic paper is that a student shows that they have learned all the goals that were set for that course or courses. If a student lets tgere paper be generated by AI, they can not prove that they have learned those goals. That is why universitues have (or should have) strict AI guidelines, so that students know which kinds of use are allowed and which are not.
This is a hard nut to crack. Of course you will see overfitting and underfitting until someone somewhere fimds a universal approach. I personally think AI-detection tools are shit, but you cannot fault universities for trying it. My university handles AI fraud manually, with a committe. That is very labor intensive. We only have a couple hundred students, but if you have thousands, it quickly becomes impossible.
A lot of unis give students free AI access. Companies like Microsoft bundle Copilot into their education packages, so that students will graduate without learning to write essays on their own. Then they'll be working, paying professionals who can't go without AI because they didn't actually earn their degrees. It's in the business model.
I thought that they were trying to get at the hypocrisy of using ai tools to detect ai writing, which has a dismal success rate and ends up with a crazy amount of false positives.
I see that the growth of computer/digital testing directly led to student abuse of ai. Once students were no longer called on to write a blue book or even just generate responses to short answer questions, we failed our students. I understand that term papers and larger writing assignments have their place, but there really is nothing like being able to sit down and show your knowledge in an on the spot essay (at least for a lot of humanities courses where I see ai being abused).
A systemic issue in this space comes from universities and licensing entities giving testing companies carte blanche to race to the bottom in terms of effective testing tools. For licensing, apprenticeship/mentorship and observation are always better indicators of on the job performance, but that doesn't have the ease and profit margins of big bullshit testing, so companies would never go for it unless states mandated such pathways. With regard to a lot of current digital university testing, a lot of that was Frankensteined from existing licensing exam tools/strategies and similarly does not effectively assess student/candidate aptitude.
Even if this was not the intent of the commentor, my argument is that carelessness and disingenuous/gatekeeping testing practices from universities and licensing institutions certainly bred a significant level of disengagement in students which leads to them phoning it in with ai slop. If we wanted rigorous work from our students, we should have kept the same standards for ourselves, collectively.
You pretty much got it. I'm a little surprised more didn't tbh.
Can you elaborate?
Universities started pushing AI as a learning tool. They pay for subscription AI services for enrolled students. So I'm not sure this isn't them doing this to themselves.
These places that went all in on hyped up "AI" and dystopian surveillance can take their lumps. They're "realizing" what they've been told from day one.
Happy cake day!