Jordan Grollman(@Jordan_Grollman):Hot take: Students didn't "cheat" here. Yes, the in person knowledge gap is real and it matters. There's still a floor of stuff you have to hold in your own head, like knowing when the tool is giving you a wrong answer. But all but 3 realized the take-home let them use modern tooling to do the task better than they could alone. I don't do mental math when a calculator's right there. I don't hand build a model when Excel exists. Using an LLM to get to a real answer isn't cheating, it's how every job works now. The take home is a far better representation of most careers than the in person final. We should lean into that, not push against it.

2026.07.09 13:50

Hot take: Students didn't "cheat" here. Yes, the in person knowledge gap is real and it matters. There's still a floor of stuff you have to hold in your own head, like knowing when the tool is giving you a wrong answer. But all but 3 realized the take-home let them use modern tooling to do the task better than they could alone. I don't do mental math when a calculator's right there. I don't hand build a model when Excel exists. Using an LLM to get to a real answer isn't cheating, it's how every job works now. The take home is a far better representation of most careers than the in person final. We should lean into that, not push against it.

Paul Graham@paulg

2026.07.09 01:35

A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all but 3 cheated on the midterm.