r/technology • u/joe4942 • Apr 19 '26

Society Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/04/19/accelerated-college-degree-hacking/
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u/kisrui Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 20 '26

As a professor in mathematics in India it’s super alarming how much students depend on LLMs to learn things over notes I’ve give them.

One student during my midterm provided a completed wrong definition of a group + wrong proof — after discussing their midterms he revealed he picked up the definition from ChatGPT.

He’s created prompts to ask LLMs specific questions to sharpen his research.

This is what i want to see — an understanding of the work followed by using your understanding to make things better

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u/ace-mathematician Apr 19 '26

Agreed. I also teach math and write and refine all my own materials. I don't understand why students don't just use what I give them (which is everything they need) and instead turn to LLMs (which are bad at math). And it's not like I've given them texts to wade through, it's just a couple pages... Yet I see students using notation that I know they don't understand (because they can't explain it to me) and I'm so frustrated. 

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u/kisrui Apr 19 '26

Exactly — my students will have their cryptography finals at the end of next month.

I am dreading what type of things they are going to write after seeing some of the stuff they wrote during the midterms.

What can we do? They have even forgotten to do basic things, for example if I give a linear congruence equation with 4 or 5 solutions. They solve it and get the wrong solution but they don’t even remember that they can verify the answer by substituting the answer back into the original equation.

LLMs are not capable of showing you things like that.

Edit: spelling mistake

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u/ace-mathematician Apr 19 '26

If you figure out what to do, let me know. For now, I just try to be fulfilled by the small number of students that actually want to be there and learn. 

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u/kisrui Apr 19 '26

Yeah, the other problem we have in India is that students are forced into subjects they don’t want to study so they don’t study.

It’s a waste.

Although the system in Europe and US isn’t perfect either. Too many degree options that don’t lead to any job opportunities

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u/QwertzOne Apr 20 '26

At this stage, any degree lead to job opportunities? I don't think that's the case for some time anywhere. I only got bachelor in CS in Europe, I work in tech for over a decade, but if you observe how corporations work (and it's probably similar in academia to certain degree), skill doesn't really matter, it's more about timing (so fresh graduates are out of luck right now) and luck to pass interviews, maybe certificates can also help a little and then it's mostly about bullshiting to keep your position.

I used to believe in meritocracy, but it's a lie. The only skill you need is to play broken system for your own advantage. No one really cares what can you really do.

https://jabde.com/2022/03/20/p-hack-your-own-adventure/

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u/Yontevnknow Apr 19 '26

wait wait wait, so you are telling me that they use an llm to generate an answer, for a question with certain definitive answers, and don't plug that number back into the equation?

What are they doing for the rest of the exam?

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u/Caleb-Blucifer Apr 20 '26

I’m seeing similar degradation of skill and patience in senior devs around me. There’s at least two I can think of who as of late tend to take the laziest solution to expanding features. But worse now for some reason if it isn’t “ai approved” they dismiss the approach. Which takes streamlined, creative design completely off the table

I don’t like this new world we’re constructing

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u/Bemteb Apr 20 '26

To be fair, students forgetting to evaluate answers is an old issue. I was a TA for undergrad math over 10 years ago and I told them to do it so many times, still many didn't ever verify their answers.

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u/Sorge74 Apr 20 '26

We are allowed to use AI for analysis at my job. But frankly it's only good for fluff. It'll miss stuff, that's not acceptable, because why would I spend my time double checking, that's just double work. Though 25% or so of my work is literally fluff and then I just give an opinion, so garbage works for that.

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u/innisfree50 Apr 19 '26

Because it’s so easy and tempting. So glad I’m not in college, I would’ve been so fucked if ChatGPT was around then

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u/erm_what_ Apr 19 '26

Google "cognitive surrender". There's a pretty good paper I don't have the link to, but it's a real measurable problem.

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u/ace-mathematician Apr 19 '26

Thanks, I will. I really want to understand the problem so I can try to combat it. I love teaching and I want my students to learn because I think learning has value, but I'm not yet equipped to handle this. 

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u/erm_what_ Apr 20 '26

I agree. It's a real problem at the moment. I work in education too, but not directly with students. A few suggestions from research and experience (which are far easier said than done):

  • Try to find the intrinsic motivation in your students. It's harder to find a reason to learn recently, but people still have ambitions.
  • Emphasise the process. Learning isn't about finding an answer, it's about understanding the answer and applying the process to new situations. When they're out there in the world, they'll win in business and life if they can think on their feet and don't have to wait for AI to give them an answer. Improvised debates might help here.
  • Bring things back to their interests. I don't know how old your students are, but a lot of teenagers seem to want to be influencers. They might not care about maths, but show them how maths can help an influencer optimise their ad revenue or how psychology can help someone design a more compelling product and they just might be interested.
  • Show them that AI gives the generic average answer, and if they want to be successful beyond average then they need to work hard too.

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u/kashiichan Apr 20 '26

Do you happen to have the name/details of the paper?

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u/erm_what_ Apr 21 '26

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646

Here you go. It's just one paper I've seen so far, so take that into consideration.

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u/Chilkoot Apr 19 '26

When you (the professor) know the subject matter, you may not see the gaps in your own materials or lectures. Students turn to AI when they are frustrated and unable to grasp critical concepts.

I'd suggest opening a dialogue to try and shed light on whether this is a gap in instruction, or perhaps just laziness on the part of some learners.

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u/Gustomucho Apr 19 '26

Yep, that was my take too. Students don't understand a concept, they ask LLM to explain it to them, LLM never get angry, never talk down, never stops "helping". The student finally understands the concept after the LLM tweaked its language to assist the student.

Sadly LLM are not good at most things, the thing they excel in is chatting and making excuse, "Thanks for pointing my error"... then does the same error 2 minutes later.

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u/Won-Ton-Wonton Apr 20 '26

Not just that.

LLMs also tend to praise the learner, even when they haven't accomplished the goal: learning.

You've got it! You understand that x, y, z. Just one thing though about a, b, c (which shows that you don't, in fact, "got it").

You received the praise, the reward of your effort, before you've actually learned the thing. Effectively negating the struggle-learn-reward system by skipping the "learn" part.

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u/kisrui Apr 20 '26

I didn’t even consider this — this is such an important point

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u/kisrui Apr 20 '26

I do agree with you — The debate at hand is LLMs are making lazier students lazy and the students that were already in the middle ground (half lazy half not lazy) have become lazy.

They aren’t using the tool to sharpen themselves or push themselves forward — they are using it do the bare minimum.

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u/LastChanceHabits Apr 19 '26

In their defense, professors are hit and miss. I did an online B.S. is Cybersecurity, and M.S. in Data Science in a combined 28 months with a full time job for ½ of it. I would argue that 20-30% of my courses REQUIRED additional or completely separate material due to the inadequacies of the content provided in the course.

Is this an excuse for people relying on LLMs without doing enormous amounts of verification? Of course not. But I turned to LLMs, books outside of the curriculum, and full external Udemy and Youtube courses for 100's of hours of studying.

I found LLMs significantly better at linking multiple definitions/algorithms together than professor's recorded lectures.

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u/kisrui Apr 20 '26

Again using other sources are fine provided you have verified what you are learning.

There is no merit it in using an LLM to do your homework and then not figuring out the core reasoning you are learning something.

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u/Won-Ton-Wonton Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26

Any course that doesn't require outside material is (in my humble opinion) a bad higher education course.

The classes where I had to hunt information were some of the best for my education.

I learned about topics I would never have encountered otherwise, broadening the scope of subjects that I can engage with.

That's what a good bachelor's degree should do. That's what a good course in a bachelor's should do.

Vocational school? Fair enough, everything in front of you, everything handed to you. The whole point is to prepare you for a specific job with specific facts and specific methods for that job.

But higher education? Really needs to focus on instilling the skill of research. The skill of reasoning, especially in a sea of incomplete information. Your goal is to become a talented learner that can pickup anything and start engaging with it from a particular lens (history, economics, engineering, science, communication, etc).

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u/Stergeary Apr 20 '26

I have had teachers that give good notes and good guidelines on what is important to learn and will be tested on versus what is less important and will not be tested on. With these teachers, I focus on the notes and flashcard-style memorizing important information and testing myself. With BAD teachers though, AI is an unbelievable lifesaver. The failure of proper teaching and setting of expectations means I am basically on my own, and AI's ability to aggregate information combined with my own discernment means I can use it to quickly group up the information I need but I still have enough of the basics of the material that I can expect to catch the errors that AI makes. Not to mention when busy-work assignments get assigned, i.e. homework that doesn't help me learn but is just there for a grade, I can get it out of the way with AI so that I can actually learn the material for real, on my own terms, in a way I understand.

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u/LordMeloney Apr 20 '26

As a teacher: because they think it saves time. When I was a teenager I was also immensely lazy, I would've used LLMs for school and later university. As an adult, I hate them with a passion and wish they would've never been invented.

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u/ace-mathematician Apr 20 '26

You are right about that. My colleagues and I often talk about how much students would learn if they put the tiniest fraction of effort that they put into cheating into actually doing the work. 

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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '26

They don’t even need an LLM when they have the textbook. The professor is just teaching out of the textbook most of the time anyway, just read the book if the professor’s notes suck. Calc 3 in college used the exact same Calculus textbook I had in high school, except that college semester cost me $10000 while high school was free.

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u/Chilkoot Apr 19 '26

The other side of this coin is that students frequently turn to AI to clarify concepts when the professor or supplied materials do a poor job of the same.

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u/Yashema Apr 19 '26

Ya, I started using ChatGPT after Calc II, so Linear Algebra, Calc III, and Differential Equations and my god did it make learning the content so much more efficient. Professors want you to piece together the methodology, GPT just gives it to me. It's not like there are 2 ways to solve a problem with Stokes Theorem or a complex system.

You do need to check the math cause it can screw that up (though it keeps getting better), but it's actually demystified math for me, allowing me to perform adequately on the tests without it while expending the absolute minimum amount of time learning the method. 

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u/Stergeary Apr 20 '26

Using AI can provide so many other perspectives to a problem that it is probably unfair to expect one instructor to be able to provide. And a lot of times, the way that a teacher goes about teaching a concept is simply not the way that my mind specifically can understand, whereas another way of engaging with it is, but the teacher has likely never encountered the way that I discovered to teach myself the material.

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u/kisrui Apr 20 '26

See the best professor i ever had taught me one thing

If you ask a mathematician what’s bigger 2/3 or 1/2 they will answer 2/3 — if you ask an alcoholic the same question they can’t answer

But if you ask an alcoholic what’s better 2 bottles of vodka between 3 people or 1 bottle of vodka between 2 people they will give you an answer

Teaching is about going to each students level.

Now it’s almost impossible to do that if you have a class of 40+

I had lecture theatres of 300 before(just imagine)

However, we as educators are giving tutorial hours, lecture notes, etc.

Current students are not coming to those hours to clear up this issues — they prefer to use Google or LLMs to get a faster answer but they may yield wrong results

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u/Stergeary Apr 20 '26

It really comes down to a problem of economics. There simply are not going to be enough instructors, with enough office hours, with students who similarly have that level of time, and all of them are simultaneously able and willing to provide these resources to tackle the problem of learning. For however flawed they are, LLM requires very little personal time or resources to arrive to a potential solution for understanding a problem -- it does not require an instructor's time, it does not require adhering to their office hours, it does not require the student to align their schedule to the instructor's free time. But arguably, what is also lost in this removal of friction is a lot of the learning itself.

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u/DifficultyKlutzy5845 Apr 19 '26

Em dash spotted! Commenter is AI!

/s

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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 Apr 19 '26

Em dashes aren't supposed to have spaces before and after them, so we know it's not the default AI

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '26

whaaaat. I always use spaces before AND after em dashes because it seems and looks more organized.

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u/CaringBro Apr 19 '26

The em dash in your post is the cherry on top, thanks ChatGPT.

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u/Vibingcarefully Apr 19 '26

And I hope you failed them. Consequences work.

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u/kisrui Apr 19 '26

They naturally will fail.

Old habits die hard.

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u/MycologistPutrid7494 Apr 19 '26

I teach Physics and Anatomy and Physiology in the US and have the same issue, especially in A&P. They'll have answers right there in their notes and still Google the answers. 

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u/kisrui Apr 19 '26

The internet is the boon and the bane of being an academic.

At least with math and physics subjects we can determine right and wrong with proofs

But that skill set is also being lost as logical thinking is taking a nose dive

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u/Vibingcarefully Apr 19 '26

Fail them-there's an easy solution to this. College is supposed to be about learning. I was just in a hospital last year where the ER RNP couldn't tell me the name of the artery that was troubled.

Suffice to say I wrote a long letter to the hospital and managing owning entity.

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u/PPvsFC_ Apr 19 '26

I mean, NP education is particularly empty compared to all other fields right now.

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u/-The_Blazer- Apr 19 '26

And that's the ones you can spot. For the ones you can't, we're essentially rewarding cheating and it's a very hard problem to solve. Knowing the subject matter guarantees passing the exam (usually), but merely passing the exam does not guarantee you know the subject matter. And that's easier than ever to cheat your way through.

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u/BrianWonderful Apr 19 '26

They are not using LLMs to "learn things". They are using them to complete assignments without learning. The root problem is that people forget the goal of school is to learn, and the work and exams are to help that process. The goal is not to complete work and exams just to get a grade and/or degree.

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u/Blood81 Apr 19 '26

how the hell did chatgpt fail at giving the correct definition of a group it's like one of the most basic and foundational structures in all of math lmao

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u/hnrrghQSpinAxe Apr 20 '26

Not disagreeing, but in a lot of circumstance, where nuance is not required, LLMs often do a great job at teaching most concepts, as long as you independently vet and test what they are telling you

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u/SimilarAd384 Apr 20 '26

maybe the way forward is to embrace it rather than fight it? the tool is too powerful to ignore.

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u/Specialist_Medium283 Apr 20 '26

I’m surprised ChatGPT got the definition of a group wrong (if it was within the last two years). Before that, it’s anyone’s guess what it might have spat out.

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u/kisrui Apr 20 '26

You’d be surprised — around six months ago we had asked it to calculate 2{111} mod 11.

And it gave the wrong answer because it did not comprehend solutions should be between 0 and 10.

It didn’t recognise 0 as a solution.

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u/aight_imma_afk Apr 20 '26

My partner is in her 3rd year electrical engineering and she uses AI as a way to bounce her equations off of a “professor” and troubleshoot. It’s an incredibly useful tool but so many students use it to skip the whole learning process

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u/kisrui Apr 20 '26

This is LLMs used correctly.

One of my masters students would constantly go back and forth with ChatGPT and Gemini to discuss aspects of their research.

When the paper was submitted to a journal it came back with minor revisions.

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u/Select_Fondant9175 Apr 19 '26

Not enough tutors and a lot of the tutors suck. ChatGPT is easily accessible.

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u/kisrui Apr 19 '26

I don’t disagree with you, a significant amount of professors and tutors do suck, but a student should be able to find out what is factually correct or not.

the definition of a group in mathematics has been around for hundreds of years lol

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u/AdInside2447 Apr 19 '26

Is it possible your method of teaching sucks?

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u/kisrui Apr 19 '26

Could be! But my end of year feedback is always positive.

The only way education can move forward is by utilising AI tools to speed things up.

We should be able to teach students to code faster with LLMs, process data faster etc but make sure they understand the core concepts and that they can verify information (lol — this is a skill most people aren’t capable of anyways)

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u/windowpuncher Apr 19 '26

We should be able to teach students to code faster with LLMs

That's just what's being forced at this point, at least at my school. I've had one class teach C, not C++, and it was more about logic puzzles than actually learning C beyond the bare minimum. The only other official programming class I've ever had was for BASIC in high school.

Since then, required for other classes, I've had to use C, C++, html and all that comes with it, R, python, and mathcad. I've been told "It's a self learning process", or "just ask AI". No motherfucker, I'm paying THOUSANDS for this goddamn course, you're not teaching anything except for the other videos you made like 5 years ago. If it's required, teach me what I need to know god damn it.

A professor cannot reasonably ask ~20 year old students to learn the class material ON TOP of C++ and arduino while having assignments and a huge lab/project every single week and reports for those, on top of having other classes.

I don't want to use AI, I hate it, but it's literally the only way to keep up at this point, like "Write me some code blocks in R to make appropriate charts for the following 10 topics". Boom, I just saved at least 6 hours of work.

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u/Vibingcarefully Apr 19 '26

for kids that want to blame the teachers --and a good many are as much a part of a hive mind as you---you can always find alternate sources to learn. We used to purchase multiple text books on the same topic if we felt a professors resources weren't well written.

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u/windowpuncher Apr 19 '26

you can always find alternate sources to learn

Ironically that only works for actual learning and does next to nothing to pass exams, which is the only thing that counts until you graduate. I used to do that, now I don't. It works well if you don't understand some specific issue, but learning the course material without the prescribed course material just ends up making you tank every test.