Friend of mine did 20 years in the Coast Guard. Was the quartermaster for entire 250-foot cruisers and shit. He's got a little GI Bill left and discovered they will pay him to go get (another) associate's degree, and since he's got a '50 Chevy in need of restoration, he's doing auto body repair.

He called me up despairing because they spent half an hour talking about how to sweep.

"Dude," I said, "You're in among a bunch of community college students who in the Year of our Lord 2024 thought they had a bright and shining future in Bondo." He laughed but it calmed his ass down. Apparently he'd never heard "green side up" as an epithet.

I dunno what Oregon is like but in Washington, the state legislature set a ceiling for community college salaries. It's the same in Yakima as it is in Capitol Hill. End result is that the folx teaching community college around here are either old and jaded and been doing it for a thousand years and are now looking for the door, or they're the youngest, dead-endgingest dead-enders you've ever seen. Guy who was ostensibly teaching me CNC was making $21 an hour. As a junior in college, halfway through a mechanical engineering degree, I was making $26 an hour in 1995.

Into this mileu? throw "Hey Siri, write my essay so I don't have to learn anything."

It's gonna take ten years before academia has figured out how to deal with the fact that the essay, as a fundamental tool of evaluation, is gone. There's simply no way to make the exercise use more bandwidth than the protection of the exercise. People are still gonna learn but the easy ways we have to ward against cheating are fuckin' done.

And it can't go away fast enough. The thing about all this plagiarism shit is that it's not about "did you pass someone else's ideas off as your own" it's about "did you properly cite the APA style guide for the year your research was published." Nobody wants to admit that 99.999% of all theses are dumb boring bullshit that nobody is ever going to read again; you might as well write "I want a fucking Ph.D" a million times across the chalkboard since it's fundamentally a hazing ritual anyway. The advent of the Internet has simply made it easier to weaponize decades into the future.

And no - I don't disagree with you. If the game is "did you dot your i's and cross your t's a million times" then those who can't drive spellcheck don't pass. As far as I'm concerned society should solve this particular problem by putting Claudine Gay, Neri Oxman, a chainsaw and a halberd in Thunderdome and let the one who leaves with a pulse rule triumphant. To me? The problem is not plagiarism, the problem is thesis advisors going "nice research be a shame if I published it under my own name and set you back years." Of the six women I know well with advanced degrees, five had their research stolen by their advisor.

It's all tedious rich people bullshit and if this is the petard they're going to hoist themselves on, sell fucking popcorn.