"Why is it a problem if students use AI to get through college"
Because if you demonstrate to me that you're willing to set aside concern for truth, evidence, and verifying things with your own eyes whenever it happens to be inconvenient for you, I have a solemn responsibility to make sure you don't get into medical school.
"oh, but this course is just a distribution requirement, it's not for my major"
Does saying things that are true and that you know are true only matter when someone is giving you a little prize for it?
Tumblr doesn't like to do this kind of ethics, so I have to phrase this carefully, but it's a question of character. And a person's character is clearest when they're being asked to do the right thing even when it doesn't matter to them.
I don't want to live in a world in which doctors and lawyers and politicians just ignore the responsibility to research and verify when it's inconvenient for them. When they're busy. When they have something they'd rather be doing. The world I live in is already too full of those people in positions of power. I'll be damned if I let there be more of them.
Some of the responses to this have been, in essence, "well, it's not our fault for being raised in a bad educational system that prioritizes grades over comprehension". And you're right, it's not your fault.
But you freely admit the system is bad. That it values the wrong things.
So why do you limit yourself to only achieving what it values? Do you not aspire to be better than a system you know is wrong? Don't you want to change the world?
An analogy: suppose youβre a retail worker. When youβre not busy, you can stand or sit. The customers donβt care if you sit, and youβre not doing any particular harm by sitting, but youβll be fired if the manager catches you. By sitting for a minute when the manager isnβt looking, youβre not doing anything immoral, just risky.
By the same token, by not spending hours on bullshit homework that doesnβt teach anything or show anything, all youβre doing is risking getting drummed out of school. I donβt pass moral judgment on that. You canβt ChatGPT your way through tests that actually check whether you know things.
Before the obligatory βyouβre just saying this because you want to cheatβ: I didnβt know how to cheat when I was in school. I just happened to be good at generating useless bullshit, and I refuse to place myself on some kind of pedestal for that.
It's not hard to pinpoint exactly where this analogy breaks down: it's at the 'bullshit homework that doesn't teach anything or show anything' part. Maybe you could make the case that some homework in elementary school is like that, but I guarantee you that no homework in university is like that. University professors aren't giving homework for no reason. Someone has to grade it, after all, and that someone is usually. We're not wasting our own time for no reason.
If you think the work you are being assigned in a university course is pointless, that means that you have not understood the point of it. It will be easier to do the assignment (and get the benefits of doing so) if you understand what the point of it is. I recommend going to your professor's (or TA's) office hours to ask (nicely) for an explanation of what the assignment in question is designed to achieve. I promise, we think long and hard about this before we design an assignment. There is an answer to that question.
But if you just assume that anything you don't feel like doing must be pointless busywork without ever checking, then, well...
