Kyzyl
28112
955
11
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-become-idiots-the-ai-cheating-scandal-roiling-brown-university/
Jul 9, 2026 7:25 PM
Kyzyl
28112
955
11
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-become-idiots-the-ai-cheating-scandal-roiling-brown-university/
SunnyKontucchi
They didn't have them testing in person and they just now assumed they were cheating ?
bippityboppitybuttsex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl8Z7Dl7P9A
anjeleyezjr
The vast majority of ivy league students are rich, not intelligent. Rich.
DangerTrain
They're not intelligent by definition, they're usually just very rich.
Rathan5
“Competitive, ambitious, and over-scheduled” is an odd way to spell “lazy, entitled nepo-babies and fraudsters”
Bundalicious
If I was in school rn, I would definitely be accused of using AI. I have been accused of cheating many times during my school years, because apparently brownnpeople can't be as smart as I am.
idiotsonfire
Force them to retake the class, if their performance isn't similar to that score at the start, permanently suspend all of them.
GarmBlack
Easy fix, return schools to places of learning instead of profit and sport. Not every person needs a degree. Making it impossible to afford doesn't make people value it more,but makes them takes risks to not waste the money. Focus on sports leads to inequities in the academic standards and budgets by dept. Make education tax funded, take the pressure off enrollment by readjusting what jobs actually require a degree vs on the job training, and return schools to those actually seeking knowledge.
spangolio
and dump all the administrative bloat
TheWombatStrikesAgain
Really just "return schools to places of learning instead of profit". The sport only becomes a problem when profit sneaks in.
idiotsonfire
Further, there is no provision for what happens to those athletes when they get injured. You get halfway crippled by six dudes weighing a combined total of 1,200lbs between their weight and that body armor, suddenly its not the university's problem anymore.
VinchVolt
and also reintroduce the uk law where the "failures" in the education system would get sent to art school instead of a center. genuinely, the reason why british rock had such a huge golden age in the 70s is because they were all juvenile delinquents and dropouts who, thanks to britain's postwar education reforms, studied painting, sculpting, and graphic design instead of hitting the streets.
NightOwlRally
https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1aHB2OW40ZTJ6M2RvaDc0bmcwNW9sdm55d21raHVjcGV6dnpnbTA4OCZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/5xtDarmwsuR9sDRObyU/200w.webp
justfillingthespace
You're asking a lot from a world where you could say "Don't kill this child" and one person will agree with you, one person will say they don't care, and the third will try to kill the kid just to spite you.
BurnieCinders
"Don't tell me what to do"
SuperNintendoEntertainmentSystem
Yup. As a college grad who also works for a university and greatly values education, I agree. College should be free (or close to it). That way, if you want to pursue a career that requires higher ed, you can do so without a money barrier. Or perhaps you just want to learn a subject because it's a passion of yours. Then you could actually do that. I desperately wish college was a place of pure learning. Either for a career field, or just for the sake of learning.
SuperNintendoEntertainmentSystem
It really bums me out to see it reduced to a transaction - here's a piece of paper in exchange for decades of crippling debt. At the same time, on the student side, I'm frustrated by the wave of cheating and viewing as literally nothing more than money -> degree. If you cheat your way through and learn nothing, you'll be a useless, ignorant moron in any future job who actually thought your degree meant something. It's bad for you, for the business, and for the college.
DemSumBigAssRidges
How have we not moved past "ivy league schools mean smart" as a people? Ted Cruz went to ivy league. George Bush 1 and 2 went to ivy league. Donald -the fuck- Trump went to ivy league. The only thing going to an ivy league school means is that you probably bring it up in conversation all the time.
Hawkgirl203
If your father gives an Ivy League school enough money for a building, you will get into that school. Trump didn’t get into Wharton because he smart. His brother had gone there before him and was respected, his father donated money. Suddenly Trump got in and transferred there from a local college. Kushner’s father gave $$$$ to Harvard.
SixSixxtySix
The author clearly hasn't interacted with students at an Ivy League school. Dotard for example.
Comet260
I love that word.
Birdnose
Since when are finals not taken in a classroom?
exbenedict
Yeah. Anyone in higher Ed knows this already. If you’re still allowing online or take home ANYTHING, you’re grading AI. Everything I do is pen and paper now because it’s the only way to be sure.
DrSparken
You're still gonna get a bunch just asking ai to write it then copying it over
exbenedict
Not when it’s being done in front of me during a test. The only thing I grade now are in person tests. All the homework’s and prep stuff is worth maybe 5% of the overall grade. If they want to use ai to do that but not actually practice/learn it then they fail the in person test. That’s on them.
EverNotRelevant
#1 "Ivy league college students are, by definition, intelligent"?
Lol. It would be more accurate to say they're rich.
DevilsAdvocat
talk about face planting at the starting line..
TheMayorOfTittyCity
most aren't. The majority of students at ivy League universities get scholarships, which are offered exclusively based on family financial need. a quarter get entirely free rides due to being very low income. certainly very rich people want their kids to go there, but they are in the minority. maybe higher than other public universities, that I don't know, but it's not just a bunch of rich kids.
LordofGoats
But rich people are by definition smart! /S
lightfoot2
I have my students write a couple of paragraphs in class on why they want to be in Cybersecurity. That way I have a sample of their writing and can see if they are cheating. I also explain that if you want to cheat you could get away with it, but to be honest eventually it will catch up with you and the Cyber community is VERY unforgiving of frauds. Go into another line of work.
electronicbovine
ain't they just asking mythos to hack the gibson these days
nelllybellly1
"He went blind from retinal dystrophy at age 17 and had to make a choice about what the rest of his life would LOOK like"
LostCaterpillar
You can tell the journalist was confident he'd never see this line.
broccolismoke
... All of my finals were in person.. ? Am I not understanding something
Snooj
I was in a class where we did a group project slideshow and everyone was responsible for a couple slides. There were members of my group who couldn't read some of the words on the slides they had "created". It was fucking pathetic.
CedricDur
This is the way. Allowing to take exams home is stupidity. It's not *just* exams, it's future professionals with their knowledge missing when it'll come time to put it to use.
Comet260
Depends on what the exams are for. IT? Almost all of my IT exams were open book/open note except for the Cisco class.
Comet260
Now, if it's something like EMS or nursing? Yeah, fuck take home exams.
PoorSucker
Brown university, former PM of Thailand got a degree without speaking English, daughter of Thakin Shinwatra most corrupt politician ever in Thailand
nasukkin
As someone who graduated back in the late 2000s... wut? The idea of a final of any course not being in-person is completely wild to me.
xj4low
I finished up college in about 2004. All tests occurred in person. Papers had to be submitted online to check for plagiarism against other papers. If you didn't know the subject from studying, then you failed.
AI has made it so people grow up using it and don't have to remember anything. I fear for our future.
sabrinadiesatdawn
Princeton University has a long, very serious tradition of actually trusting their students to follow the honor code. One of my friends from grad school got his undergrad there and says his math exams were frequently designed to take 8-10 hours. Ain't nobody going to proctor a 10 hour long exam
B3N15
Once I got out of basic level courses, most of my finals were essays. Hell most of them had less than 10 grades overall: Mid-term essay, Final Essay, and a couple of open note quizzes scattered throughout the semester.
tokenhooker
With respect, you didn't have turnitin.com or plagiarization checkers either...a friend of mine got her masters by plagiarizing
SOLARvsFACISM
I have a friend who got his BA in 2006 and MA in 2010 and the last time he wrote a paper without plagiarizing was 1999. He always took at least 2 separate papers he found online and combined them.
PurplePenguin87
I graduated in 2014. There was no AI, but we had to submit our papers electronically so they could check for plagiarism. Guess I was right in the middle where I actually had to learn something/write my own papers.
nasukkin
To provide a bit more context, a lot of the courses I took at SFSU had me present my drivers license as proof of who I was when I sat down to take my finals at the end of the semester.
The idea that you can take a final without being watched like a hawk is completely foreign.
xj4low
Even now, when I take licensing exams for my job, I have to go to a test facility, leave everything in a locker (keys, phone, watch), prove who I am, get wanded with a metal detector then go sit at a computer that is monitored in a room with plenty of cameras.
Racealistic
I'm European, but pretty much the same. Had to present valid ID and had volunteer teachers patrolling in each lane in between seating. though that was only for the written test and i also had a big exam behind a pc because of my major. That was locked into a software and any tampering or alt tabbing would kick/lock you out and it was an immediate fail.
DYLANLEE79
Ahh the end result of monetizing an education. None of these kids want to learn this information they only take the class to get the job to make the money.
unluckyandbored
They'll go on to get their MBA, then get hired at their dad/s/uncle's/etc company where they'll fuck everything up and the people under them will be forced to fix all their stupid mistakes.
SavageDrums
"ivy league students are, by definition, intelligent"
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Bunch of legacy, trust fund dipshits
INeedMoreGifMeMoreJustOneMore
That very first sentence is just so, so, so stupid.
Grimlinnan
Why the hell would you not have an in person TEST? We know Ivy League School create a path for rich kids to cheat. The fact that you had any test that was not in person is pathetic.
LostCaterpillar
Because there was a school shooter and people were scared. It was a gift to ease stress on the students that was badly abused.
kaijuuGold
legacy graduates is chopped good thing they grew up with money
B0ardski
can you even imagine an ai and phone free campus, maybe your gramma can.
ThrowAwayAcct0000
Just make them take all exams in person, and write all essays in person. This will, of course, require professors to actually care about teaching and reading and grading the exams in a timely fashion though.
Infamousprevert
I am non-tenure track at a tiny university. If I put in the MINIMUM amount of work needed to produce a decent class it works out that I get paid around $20 an hour. I usually have 25ish students in an in-person class. It takes a decent amount of time to grade all those paper quizzes- around an hour or so. That takes away time I could be putting toward creating engaging class material. I DO care but It's tough to make the extra time worth it. Online quizzes are instantly graded and recorded.
ThrowAwayAcct0000
Hey, I get it. I was a teacher for a number of years myself, & for me, it averaged out to be about $15/hr. But, once you've established your curriculum, the amount of work you have to re-do each year or semester drops dramatically, & for lots of professors, they don't even change the questions from the tests year after year (which is how students cheated for YEARS). Plus, most professors have teaching assistants & lab assistants that do most of the grading & actually working with the students.
VagabondEngineer
*shrug* I had to show I could do Calc and Diff Eq long hand LONG before I could use a TI applied classes. Now I will almost always use a calculator, but have the gut checked when it is goofed. I also recognize I am hella dumb compared to the Apollo era engineers. AI just creates a new iteration of this same problem. Obtaining an answer is useless if you don't actually understand it.
Emjayen
This was already a fundamental problem in software; 20 years ago the barrier to entry was dropped on the floor to fill demand.
Since then (and due to other factors-) the competency of programmers has been on a rapid downhill trajectory -- the vast majority these days are little more than monkeys gluing together libraries (read: fancy copy&pasting) they have no understanding of, let alone the ability to critically evaluate the implementation of.
Slop has is just an enabler and amplifier.
Harbltron
Software is a field in which you should also be constantly learning, and in that respect I truly understand the desire to have AI help fill in the gaps, but if you are just handed the answers without any understanding of how or why your software operates, how will you deal with bugs? Or scale? Or anything?
It boggles my mind that there are people out there vibe-coding enterprise software while I'm out here reading docs and learning trig
spontaneous9
In my Nat. Resource Conservation degree program in 2004, I was very surprised to learn that I was the only student in my class capable of doing long division.
klawheart
My recent experience wasn't in a college course, but it was in a very competitive professional certification program which you had to pass, and then pass registry exams, to join the profession. The main person in charge of our classes/exams/passing or not was in their mid-30s, and had strong words about not using AI and giving presentations with limited words on the slides and having to explain your points without reading off of them. Her obvious favorite did all of that and got the best 1/2
klawheart
scores. It was very kind of this professor to try to give his students some grace, and he tried to compensate by making his midterm more difficult. However, anyone in a position of credentialing/signing off on/passing people preparing for any workplace or position of responsibility needs to first and foremost be consistent in evaluations and be absolutely sure of their ability to judge a person's competence. This man picked up on his mistake quickly, others don't. Teachers with students that 2/3
klawheart
have access to things like generative AI need to have strict assessments and punish cheaters severely. People have been overscheduled, ambitiuous, and competitive since long before generative AI and they still managed to actually effing learn. What a stupid excuse.
wargames
ivy league students are not by definition intelligent or smart, they just pay to attending a college for wealthy
diemajorthrilldie
Yeah, incredibly mediocre test results has never been an obstacle to them before but at least now we have evidence that they're not even willing to put in the barest minimum.
Which isn't much comfort because I'll probably never run into one of them to point this out and laugh in their faces.
ihavethelowground
It's mostly just a networking club
possumattack
I mean, they are pretty hard to get into. Intelligence can't be perfectly correlated but it's also gotta be pretty high.
CelestialSea
Many are "legacy" students who get a rubber stamp no matter how shit stupid they are, see Bush, George W.
wadatahmydamie
There’s a better, more recent example of that. Bush was reasonably intelligent, he just played dumb for the rubes
GlutenFreeCocaineWaffles
Seriously. You can be Summa Cum Laude and have a full doctorate from Harvard you earned after winning a scholarship due to prior academic excellence, and you'll still have less social status than the C-average ivy league frat douchebag who got a four year "communications" degree before his rich daddy got him a job straight out of college, because you didn't come from a "money" family. A meritocracy, this ain't...
AnnualBeachVacation
May summa cum laude get me my granted phd from my ivy of the south
BofusTeefus
I came here to post this.
hsalonen3000
Well, in Finland they mostly are. That is because we have grade limits and entrance exams, and you cannot get in with poor grades. And the etrance exams are in-person, as are our national matriculation exams.
tentacularfleshscape
Laundering privilege into merit
SuperSickRobot
except MIT. Every one of those students is smart as he'll. MIT also not an Ivy so maybe thats why
TheMayorOfTittyCity
this is a gross misunderstanding of how ivy League admissions work. ivy League students are, by definition, highly credentialed. that means they have very high test scores, recommendations, past achievements. whether those are truly earned could be questioned, but on paper they are very intelligent. most ivy League students have need-based scholarships, a quarter pay nothing in tuition due to being low income. legacy students are much more likely to get in, but still only make up about 10%.
tatHo
As someone who actually went to an ivy on full scholarship (financial need based), the vast majority of people i met were incredibly intelligent regardless of their wealth. Sure, there are exceptions, but it is far from the country club stereotype. I graduated about 10 years ago now, but I doubt it has changed that drastically.
GimcrackGewgaw
I've been an adjunct and a visiting lecturer at schools of various ranks and there is a real difference between the elite schools and the non-selective ones. Not all are there on pure merit, but I can say for sure that the average Ivy league student is way more smart, dedicated, and capable than the average community college student. Money talks, but so do your transcript and test scores.
wadatahmydamie
Money also pays for tutors, for time that other students spend working to cover costs, and a lot more.
I’m not going to try and invalidate your experience, but the data is pretty clear on the subject. Ivy League students are no more intelligent than anyone else, and the education quality is no higher than at a regular college.
GimcrackGewgaw
I would never claim that money isn't a factor. Cal lit smarts or something else, but having taught at multiple levels and having hired from various pools, the kids at the fancy schools are, on average, more capable. The work product is better. I've hired and fired enough people to say there's a correlation. Kids who fight their way to the top of a mediocre school are gold. Average ivy league kids are smart in specific ways. Average no-name college kids don't survive in my shops.
Beefkins
Dubya went to Harvard, that should tell people all they need to know.
turtleninja5
Kind of like fraternities and sororities right? Pay for your friends (connections), fuck the academia.
cuddleskunk
That really depends. The students paying full-price? Yeah. But the students who get in on full or majority scholarship? Yeah...they're smart.
wadatahmydamie
Not any smarter than kids at other colleges. “Ivy League” is just a label. The education isn’t superior, their purpose is to keep the landed gentry alive for generations.
I’m not saying every ivy leaguer is an idiot, I’m saying that at best, their students don’t have a superior education to anyone else with the same degree and at worst, they fart out blobs like Trump
astrangehop
Yes, the pointbis to make connections with other people of generational wealth.
cuddleskunk
I mean...different schools get different ratings, reviews, and professors. Ivy leagues aren't inherently better, but when your school can afford to pay professors a higher salary, the biggest experts in the field are probably more likely to the schools that will give them either the biggest grants/research budgets, salaries, or both. I'm a graduate of UC Berkeley, and so many people call it a "great school"...and it was. My English program was probably better than a student at most other unis.
cuddleskunk
Do I look down on anyone for going to a different school than me? No. Should we pretend that all schools are equal? No.
HamSlamwich
Guess which 50% brought down the curve.
ChiLLeCheeze
Can't think of anything. Must be DEI.
CurlyBruce
Also not necessarily true, plenty of rich/influential kids get scholarships because having them there is good for business so they'll get a free ride to entice them to apply (see the recent bullshit with Jennifer Lopez's kids and how they "got accepted into every college with full scholarships"). Some absolutely get into the school based on merit but you can't make any assumptions due to the fuckery that goes on in "high society" thumbing the scales.
TheMayorOfTittyCity
not true with Ivys. All ivy League colleges have exclusively financial need-based scholarships. a quarter of students do get free rides, but that is because they're very low income. More than half of students at ivy league's are low income and receive financial scholarships based on family income.
scrumbles666
But you also have to be wary of anti-intellectualism masquerading as class politics. The Ivys aren't deploma mills and a lot of rich kids are legitimately good students because they were taught to be through a whole elite primary school system. The problem is just more complicated than 'daddy bought me a diploma.'
RedDeadPrevention
Is there a way that Imgur can take the above comment and just amplify it? Make the font huge, give it flashing colours, pin it to the top of this post?
There has to be some way to rebutt the fucking stupid premise that Ivy League attendees are there because of their intelligence.
lighterletter
It's mostly the network and access to investing capital for those that excell
Rathan5
Ah, but if that happened they might be required to actually learn and not just skate by on their parents’ money. Can’t be having that
Blud4BludGod
I got in an argument with someone here once because they INSISTED that Amy Coney Barret MUST be an extremely intelligent person, because she was part of some prestigious sorority and attended an ivy league. I could tell they got personally offended when I said "those are actually things I consider red flags when it comes to assessing someone's intelligence or competence."
Arbitrarynamehere
One of my professors, a department head, tried getting me into one of those fraternity things and I was like hell no lmao
Eyeetsass
The only people that give a shit about Ivy League degrees have Ivy League degrees. It’s like those assholes covered in Harley merch. Nobody gives a shit. It’s a dog whistle that you come from established wealth.
OddlyPacific
Get into the “Is Tom Morello really a political expert?” debate and suddenly Ivy League BAs are the highest level of education and intelligence.
LuminoZero
You're being downvoted, but you're right. People love painting with broad brushes because it is intellectually simple. Real life is complicated.
Look, guys, if you want an absolute truth just stick to saying "Republicans are fascists". At least that one is true.
Badprenup
Except they're not right, because very few people say Morello is a political expert solely because of his Ivy League BA.
They say it because he's been politically active for over 40 years, and because when he speaks in detail about politics he demonstrates a clear understanding and deep knowledge of the topics being discussed, AND because he ALSO has an Ivy League BA that's directly related to politics.
Sphinctergoatface
They must be super intelligent if they chose to be born rich./s