I have finally finished midterms but this past midterm week made a few things apparent to me, important enough to make me think about it for more than just a few minutes. I had two midterms in two comp sci classes, both being quite primitive and integral classes to the degree: Analysis of Algorithms and Computer Organization. Not only were people walking into these exams with the intention of cheating, but I directly heard from multiple people that they did not even study, and had the full intention of using other people's exam papers, ChatGPT on their phone, or snuck in cheat sheets just to pass the exam. I have heard of cheating in the past, but I saw enough this week alone that I was personally worried. By no means do I attend a prestigious university, which in my mind makes it all the more worse. These are classes that can be easily passed with even a high-level understanding, and after hearing people say that it was all too difficult and their only chance was to cheat was disheartening. I personally love to study and learn, and had spent countless hours that week studying only to have students around me using anything in their means to not learn the material.

I feel that I could potentially get pat this idea if it were only a small subset of the population of these classes cheating in this manner, but attending one of my classes the lecture following the midterm, I repeatedly heard of a group of students who had access to the exam in advance and communicated this way in order to get an advantage on the exam.

This personally raised the question, because for the first two years of my undergraduate experience I spent a lot of time trying to achieve the highest GPA possible, why care about a GPA when it can be easily fabricated. I believe the grade can only show so much, especially when courses are barely standardized throughout different universities and the only thing every student would end up recieving would be a degree. I think for a Computer Science student, projects and actually building/showcasing your knowledge may be the only differentiating factor, if even, amongst the current capabilities of LLM's. I think a restructure to the system is in dire need.

../blog