Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 - June 2026 (728 comments)

And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.

This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.

Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.

But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]

https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...

"we cannot choose to become idiots"

Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.

It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.

Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs.

If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.

Oh.. he’s blind.

and the rest are lying.

(With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)

I stopped reading after the first sentence.