One popular Substack, How I Make Money Writing, interviews writers on how we patch together a living—or a living of sorts. One of my ways is helping kids apply to college, coaching them on essays and applications. (They often come to me in this state):
Wearing that hat (which I’ve worn for 17 years), I bring sad news about Harvard, where many students I work with dream of going because of its sterling resources and reputation.
According to a Crimson survey, cheating there with AI and LLMs is widespread. Is the same true at other top universities?
I’m even sadder to see that an editorial in the Crimson thinks it should be up to professors to “incentivize” students not to cheat this way! In other words, some of the smartest, most hard-working, and ambitious kids in the country need to be “prevented” from cheating--or else they will cheat? This trend doesn’t quite jive with the VERITAS logo or the 3-4% acceptance rate to Harvard College.
Does this trend comport with what you’re hearing and experiencing elsewhere? And what do you think of these findings and this advice from the student journalist editors? I’m really curious. I hope everyone reading this is too!
From the editorial: “Moving forward, Harvard should implement more in-person exams, physical copies of readings checked for annotations, oral exams, and oral defenses of essays and research to demand that students genuinely understand the work they produce.”
Two more important paragraphs:
“If one thing is clear from these results, it’s that AI has become a problem. In response, Harvard must shift its pedagogy to one that demands active, intellectual participation from students, rather than allowing AI to replace meaningful work.”
“The survey results reveal the disheartening reality that a swath of Harvard undergraduates offload their educational tasks to large language models in ways that are explicitly disallowed. More than just a symptom of the times, the statistic represents a moral failing among Harvard students.”
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Last year, I juried applications for a residency. A few of the applications were from folks with impressive academic backgrounds. They’d won prizes. I found those applications well written, but lacking insight. Something was off. This year, the director told me they’d suspected AI. If those Harvard students want what they say they want, it’s up to them.
As a former student journalist myself (Boston College) and a Harvard grad too, I’m disappointed to read this. Maybe they should bring back those little blue exam books and have exams written by hand!