Economist Writing Every Day

A tweet that got over 2 million views and 2500 likes:

https://x.com/ianmcorbin1/status/1831353564246979017

“Why do our students (even the ones paying a jillion dollars!) *want* to skip their lessons?”

“You give us work fit for machines. You want rote answers.”

He asks why students want to cheat and what is wrong with education. Why did this tweet take off? This is obvious.

I’m not of the opinion that education is entirely signaling (see Bryan Caplan). However, anyone can see that education is partly signaling. It’s difficult to get good grades. Good grades is a noisy signal of excellence. Students want to cheat so that they can obtain the good grades and signal to employers that they are excellent. There is nothing mysterious about that.

Part of a professor’s job is to make it hard to cheat and costly if you are caught.

Now we get to the “rote answers” part. How is a professor who has over 100 students every semester supposed to monitor the students’ performance and make it hard to cheat and be fair to every student? The “rote answers” part is a technology called the multiple-choice test with auto or semi-auto (e.g. Scantron machine) grading. Multiple choice tests serve an important role in our society, and they aren’t going anywhere.

A professor who has only 10 students per semester could give personalized assignments and grade oral exams and be an Oxford tutor for the students hand-written essays or whatnot. However, that kind of education would be extremely expensive/exclusive and does not scale.

Readers are more scarce than writers. AI’s can read now. The implications that will have for education and assessment have yet to be seen.