Fuck AI

Yeah, it's a fun toy that's definitely not worth any money (at present, possibly forever).

In all fairness, recently duck.ai has been adding a "settings" portion to help you prompt the LLM to get much better results, but again, that costs $0 to use. The couple times I've used its "tech support" setting, it's been fairly helpful, but I wouldn't trust it on anything serious (due to how often LLMs hallucinate).

I was using Notability and it let me have a preview of that, and I tried it on a ~40+ page reading I had for class. I feel like it worked well at picking out trivia (‘what is the definition of x’, ‘who did this thing’, etc), but it felt pretty shallow. If you’re preparing for a multiple choice quiz or refamiliarizing yourself with something then I’d say it’s probably okay, but if you’re studying for the essay portion of a test it’s not enough.

Sure is disheartening and I don't much understand it beyond 'path of least resistance'. I'm not in the US though, I'm in Australia and our university fees are far lower for citizens.

I'll add that it's not universal, and I haven't met nor worked with all the students in my course as there's hundreds. But so far in my experience it's the international students (China, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Philippines) that have GenAI most ingrained in their workflows - its just presumed by them that everyone is using ChatGPT for their work in assignments. Conversely, I have worked with a German international student who wants very little to do with GenAI (like myself).

Worth mentioning that the international students pay 'full fees' for the courses, no government assistance like citizens - that means they pay 5-6 times as much for their courses, so I would have thought they'd have additional motivation to get value from their time studying, but that doesn't seem to be the reality of the situation.

The purpose of college today isn't to learn, it's to get a degree.

Because being more intelligent than before isn't the point anymore. It's to get a $50k certificate that says you can do jobs unrelated to what you studied. It's shows that you are breakable and thus likely to be a good worker.

Unless you’re in college for STEM, every degree is just a piece of paper with very little educational value behind it. You start learning after the degree, once you get the job that you need the degree to get.

College used to be optional. Most people didn't go, you went there because you wanted to learn, or you wanted to go into a particular field that required higher knowledge.

Now, college is just a paywall that gets in the way of having a normal job that can pay you an ok amount of money if you're lucky. This is especially true now for when it comes to the prerequisites. Kids aren't there for knowledge. It's so they can get a job. No one cares about those college level English courses being forced on them when they're going to end up as middle management at an insurance agency. Especially now, when their PC will tell them their grammar sucks before they send out that email.

Because they're not going to college to learn, they're going to get a degree. The prevailing mentality is "I'm paying for this so that I can go through the motions and graduate so that I'll meet the minimum qualifications for an entry level position."

It's a result of the commodification of education: treating universities like a business rather than as centers of learning. Everything's transactory.

Professors are afraid to fail students because the administration wants the best retention ratings, and cause bad reviews might mean they lose their jobs.

Oh, and because expecting college students to actually learn something is elitist, apparently...

Don't get caught forming coherent thoughts in complete sentences with proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Someone might accuse you of being petite bourgeois and get your professor fired for playing favorites...

I think my brother's has like, a 6 in it? Maybe an ampersand...?

Lol yes that is worrying. She could have just been having a brainfart though.. Everyone has those sometimes.

I've been to hospital quite a bit (visiting and assisting people mostly) and the standards have been very high for nurses, doctors, technicians etc. I hope that can comfort you somewhat.