I read an article recently of a survey they did in swedish schools where most kids were using AI to "help" with their homework. According to the article 54% of the 1000 students between the ages 15 to 24 they had asked said that they've used AI in a way they don't think is allowed. Whereas 40% said they weren't sure if there's any rules against using AI, 33% said there are rules and 27% thought there weren't any.
Needless to say it made me think about the situation here on Hive but this post isn't going to be about that. I do have to say, though, that curators in my opinion have gone through great lengths in the history of the chain to reward effort, even if grammar and spelling hasn't been perfect and even if many have just been okay with an english automated translation as long as there was trust that the original language post was original. I guess it says a lot about those who keep threading the needle between using AI to improve their grammar/language or to avoid placing as much effort as others into the content. Up to you to decide if it's worth the risk long-term.
Anyway, the reddit post in r/sweden talked about how past generation used to cheat as well, if it's possible, people will find a way. Some mentioned how they used to find places on the early days of the internet with essays and other writings of things you'd normally get to work on in schools and are supposed to research and write them down in your own words to hand in and that it some times became awkward when several students had written about the same thing and most of it was word for word copy between all of them. I remember of such pages existing but at that time it was already so well known we figured the teachers were well aware of them and would find out easily, even when just rewriting/wording/adding typo's, something that may still exist on Hive here and there and often something newcomers find themselves doing.
Anyway, without making this post about that, the real reason I started writing it was to share a story of my time in college. It was quite a small school with only about 30 students in the same year, maybe 80 students in total in the whole college. Which makes what we noticed kind of weirder. In our first year we had exams coming up and everyone was pretty stressed about them cause it was the first ones of the first semester and I guess everyone wanted to make a good first impression towards the teachers as it may affect their future grades. Somehow one of the students mentioned that an older one he was friends with had told him to just read through his exam of that semester when he was in the same year and that the teachers barely ever changed them. I can't remember exactly if it was a friend of his of the second year or third as it could be the teachers would switch them up every other year but that there was definitely a pattern where they wouldn't create new exams each year but re-use old ones over and over. Whether it was due to laziness or what is unsure but this quickly became the default of what students would do. I think they would grab a copy of both 2nd and 3rd years exams of the first year and it would quickly get copied over to anyone who wanted one.
Exam time and what do you know, it's the exact same questions as the copy we had been learning by heart. Most students aced it with many giving answers exactly the same to the dot. Teachers didn't think much of it because for many of the questions it was quite straight forward answers I guess, this was also something that bothered me with the way college worked in my opinion. Students learned more how to cram for the exams at highest efficiency than to actually learn and get a deeper knowledge or interest of the subject. This was evident when we'd pick up Biology again the next year for instance and a majority had forgotten close to everything they had learned the first year when the teachers did a quick recap to check what the students remembered. Before we get there though, something happened already in the first year.
Someone had snitched. No one knew who but suspicions existed and it created kind of a dislike over some students even without proof or proof ever coming to light. The way we found out someone had snitched was cause the exams all across the board were suddenly completely new, by that I mean all subjects and from all teachers, fresh exams with new questions. If I could pay 10k Hive today to have security footage of the students in that class that day as they went through the questions to see their faces, I'd probably easily pay up. I remember the shock and horror in some of them while me and some others would just smile about it knowing it was inevitable eventually. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't smiling cause I had crammed for this exam either way, I'm pretty sure I barely passed it cause at the time I wasn't focusing too much on my grades for reasons I'm not going to get into in this post. It was kind of funny, though, how a majority of students, all working together to cheat were caught red-handed simultaneously.
The day of the results arrived and as expected, the average score dropped harder than the crypto markets after bankman-frind ftx'd it up. There were some 6's, or what you guys would call F's as well while some had done pretty good, which is what raised suspicions of the snitches even more, especially when some of them weren't naturally "smart" like a couple students in our class everyone just knew and agreed had photographic memory-style smartness. The weird thing was that the teachers never brought it up, they said something along the lines of "guess you all had an off-day, huh" and everyone just moved on while adapting to the changes. It's as if the teachers knew they had some fault in it all by never changing the questions and re-using the same couple exams year after year so they kind of just hoped everyone would move on and forget about it.
Anyway, come second year things were kind of back to normal and many of us would look back and think about our collective decision to just go the easy way and how compared to cramming for exams was even worse because it meant we had learned even less than we should have. Some were even interested in the subjects and actually read up on everything and did their homework but obviously didn't wanna get a lower score than others with the cheatsheet so they got themselves one too. Was kind of a weird time in general. I guess people will most often choose the easy way out, especially when "mob mentality" hits it takes a lot for the few who didn't fall for the peer pressure to stand by it but I think they all got a lot of respect by the others and obviously did way better in the upcoming exams since they remembered things from the first year.
Going back to Hive, I think it's important that the stance we've taken against AI, reworded content and all this other low effort things like buying votes I'm seeing slowly but surely start up again. It's important cause people like to compare on Hive, we hear it often and it's one of the main "weapons" people like to use if they ever get downvoted, "ye well why aren't you downvoting this similar account/content/abuse?!", which means if they see some kind of "bad" activity or "cheating" go unnoticed/unhandled they may copy the activity.
Anyway, just a random share from a past memory. Thanks for reading.
Images from Pixabay.com: 1 , 2
