A.E. — Artificial Education?

Why Universities Embrace AI Cheating

Speed running is what Usain Bolt is famous for. But “speedrunning” is what kids do when they compete to finish a video game in the fastest possible time. For example, the current world record for speedrunning the popular children’s game Minecraft is 6 minutes, 50 seconds from start to finish.

True lovers of the game can spend a lifetime playing it, but for those in a hurry, there’s always a shortcut.

It’s the same with education. True lovers of learning can spend a lifetime reading books and accumulating degrees, but educational speedrunners can now finish an online Bachelor’s degree in under eight weeks, then do Master’s in another five.

And no, university speedrunning is not limited to dodgy, unaccredited degree mills.

In the US, many reputable public universities offer online degrees that are designed to be completed “at your own pace.” Most don’t publish statistics, but one—the University of Maine at Presque Isle—was brave enough to divulge its completion rates to the Washington Post.

Out of a recent cohort of 291 undergraduates in UMPI’s “YourPace” program, 27% finished within 8 weeks and 49% within 16 weeks of starting. Over 90% finished their four-year Bachelor’s degrees in under 1 year.

Nor is the 123-year-old UMPI the only American public university to offer such degree pathways. Purdue University in Indiana and Western Governor’s University in Utah are both well-known for letting students finish as quickly as they can turn in the work.

In less entrepreneurial countries like Australia, it might take you a whole year to finish your Bachelor’s degree. That’s the snail’s pace advertised by Open Universities Australia, the online front door for 26 accredited Australian universities.

Most Australian universities now offer “accelerated” 2-year Bachelor’s pathways, with the degrees only taking so long because they won’t let you register for enough classes to finish any faster. But Open Universities offers a helpful work-around to that limit. They suggest that students simply register to study at multiple universities at the same time. Through their own online portal, of course.

Where there’s a will (and a dollar), there’s a way.

Large language degrees

How is it possible to finish a Bachelor’s degree in a year? While working full-time? Amusingly, not having time to attend school due to conflicting work commitments is the number one reason students give for speedrunning these online degrees.

Obviously, the answer is that the students are cheating. They’re not really studying at all. They’re letting AI do all the work for them.

What most of us call AI (artificial intelligence) is actually a class of online tools known as “large language models.” These models include ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and dozens of others.

Large language models are essentially writing agents. They scan the internet for examples of writing that they can mimic on demand. Tell them the topic, and they can instantly deliver high-quality, fully-referenced university research papers to suit any need.

The more examples there are online of any particular kind of writing, the better these AI agents can write it for you.

Thus with literally millions of university students taking basically the same subjects and writing similar papers all over the world, AI writing agents can churn out first-class essay answers on any likely assignment topic. What’s more, the inherent randomness of large language models means that every essay they write is unique.