People have been able to cheat their way through a STEM degree for decades, this is a known major problem, and only with the advent of AI has this even been noticed by the humanities, who have decided to melt down and reinvent the wheel instead of just asking their peers how they cope with it.
“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate…Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.
The majority of CS graduates cannot write or maintain code at all. This is not an AI issue, it’s been true for decades, that’s why all the tech companies needed to develop interview processes to filter these people out because the degree is not a reliable signal of skill or competence.
May 7, 2025 15:47so like, STEM didn't really solve it at all? or are there solutions other STEM disciplines use that are actually effective?
a sufficiently motivated and intelligent cheater is too hard to weed out and generally will be just as successful as a lower-tier non-cheater, the goal is to get rid of the lazy and stupid ones.
It’s also why I was able to get a job working for a software company without any degree. I went to college long enough to learn to code and troubleshoot and I got hired based on my interview and years of experience, with no degree.
This is a related problem, which is that CS tries to be a theoretical framework and not work training, while the industry desperately needs work training and cannot organize it.
I'm fairly sure people hiring quants don't have it so bad?
School: Write a program from scratch that generates a maze.
Work: This website crashes every other Tuesday, fix it.
While you’re correct about CS, this is not the case for other fields (at least, it wasn’t for chem. engineering when I was in school).
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The other problem is that every graduate took at least some "Data Science" or "CS Minor" or "Philosophy with STEM" program with the plan to get a job engineering software.
I'm not saying a modern CS or even Computer Engineering degree is perfect, but two terms of python and numpy don't cut it.
