students

A teacher suspected that his students had cheated with AI. He took the exam in person and his grades dropped by half.

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In December 2025, a shooting on the campus of Brown University caused the death of two people. One of them had just introduced herself to one of the professors at that university, the Spanish Robert Serrano. The tragedy made Serrano, an economics professor at said institution, make a decision that would later have a unique ramification: the growing role of AI in academic teaching. Exams from home. That event made Serrano decided to change the evaluation method of its spring 2026 course. The always demanding ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams in both the midterms and the final exam. The subject, with a reputation for being “a bone”, normally attracted few (but extraordinary) students, and Serrano once had classes of 8 students. This spring, upon learning of the new testing method, 86 enrolled. Brilliant students looking for shortcuts. Brown University is part of the prestigious Ivy League, a group of private universities in the northeastern United States. All of them are famous for their theoretical academic excellence and social elitism, and also theoretically those who access it are brilliant students. The thing is that these students tend to be especially ambitious and competitive, and that is where AI comes in: it is an attractive shortcut to overcome the overload of assignments and exams. Too many outstanding. In the midterm exam on March 5, the average grade was absolutely extraordinary: 96 out of 100. In fact, 40 of the 86 students obtained a perfect score of 100 out of 100. These grades were, as Serrano said, surprising because the average grades in previous courses ranged between 65 and 80 points out of 100, “and this exam was more difficult than the ones I took in the past because doing it at home is an opportunity to pose a greater challenge to the class, since you give students unlimited time. Something doesn’t add upto. It wasn’t just that the notes didn’t add up: it was that some of the answers, even though they were correct, were strange. According to Serrano “they had a very convoluted style.” What Serrano then did with his teaching team was try to answer those same questions with ChatGT. There they discovered that the answers were very similar to those they had seen in the exams. In-person exams. With that suspicion already created in Serrano, the professor decided to take the final exam in person. He notified all his students by email: if the distribution of grades in the final was similar to that of the midterm, he would consider the latter valid. Otherwise, it would annul those grades and what would really weigh in the final grade would be the result of the final exam. This notice had an immediate effect: 18 students abandoned the course suddenly, and another nine did not even show up at the end. Of those 27 students who failed the subject, 22 had gotten a perfect 100 on the midterm. The note collapses. Once the remaining students took the final exam, the results spoke for themselves. The average grade plummeted to 48 out of 100, half of what it had been when students were allowed to take the exam from home. The conclusion was clear. The University removes iron. Serrano went blind at age 17 due to retinal dystrophy and still graduated from Harvard. He had no intention of just letting this go, and although he reported it to the Brow administration, the institution’s response was rather lukewarm. Reporting the situation to the media. To make the problem known, he began talking to media outlets such as TheChronicle, The Country either Inside Higher Ed. In this last medium you can see how the students’ grades dropped: of the 59 who appeared, half passed, but only four got 80 out of 100 or more, and only 17 surpassed 60 points. It was then that the academic committee suggested Serrano file an individual complaint for each suspicious student, something he described as “ridiculous.” The dean pointed out that students who cheat “almost never do so from a malicious place,” but rather due to specific pressure. It is not an isolated case. What happened in Brown is not an extraordinary event. The arrival of AI in university classrooms has transformed evaluation methods themselves. in Princeton They just ended a 133-year-old tradition why teachers left the classroom during final exams, since they trusted the honor code signed by the students. A former chair of that Princeton honor committee acknowledged that “there is a feeling that people cheat on homework exams and that people just use ChatGPT,” and the more people believe they cheat, the more they are encouraged to cheat. Image | Magnificent In Xataka | “We exploit the weaknesses of AI”: teachers’ lonely struggle to reinvent homework and exams

Madrid is a black hole of workers and students who live outside Madrid. And they just took away their transport pass.

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No Autonomous Community lost as many inhabitants as Madrid in 2025. No Autonomous Community gained as many inhabitants as Madrid in 2025. It may seem paradoxical but is what the data says. Madrid has become a labor and economic black hole. And the consequences are obvious. It is the region that attracted the most population last year, adding more than 100,000 new residents. But it is also the one that lost the most population, with just over 12,000 people who have gone to live outside the Community of Madrid. The increase in house prices and the day-to-day cost of living is expelling some of its workers from the city. Some of them simply go to live far enough away to find more affordable housing with the promise that a quick train connection allows them to be just over an hour from their work. A good example is Valladolid. Those, perhaps, are the luckiest. Others have simply grown up outside the region, in a rural environment, and have come to Madrid to try their luck to get one of those jobs. statistics place only in large cities. Workers who, perhaps, simply They arrived in Madrid during their university days. and they have ended up staying. Unlike when they were in their twenties and returned to their place of origin every summer. Or workers who do not appear anywhere because they are irregular immigrants who have arrived in Madrid with the same promises as any other profile we have talked about before but that remain outside of any type of statistics. Madrid has decided to remove their transport pass from all of them. Or make it much more complicated. Unnecessarily unnecessary registration All the previously mentioned profiles could have access to the transport subscription of the Community of Madrid without any type of hindrance. All that was necessary was a DNI, a residence permit or a passport and to pay the corresponding fee each month. This transport pass allows you to take Metro, bus and Cercanías throughout the Community of Madrid, which is divided into zones. These areas even reach the closest towns in Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León and They range from 32.70 euros to 79.00 eurosdepending on the extension we seek to cover. Obviously, the pass is especially useful for those who travel by public transport to go to work or school, since it is a flat rate that in zone A is compensated after 40 or so trips. That is, if every week you take a train, a subway or a bus twice a day, the investment is already worth it. Much more if we take into account that the cost of the youth subscription (from 15 to 26 years old) is just 10 euros. But the Community of Madrid has announced something: you will have to be registered in the region or in one of the municipalities covered by the transport pass. (even if they are in one of the Castiles) to enjoy the flat rate. That is, this leaves out all those who have left the city to more distant municipalities, the students who do not register in the city because they return to their places of origin once the school year ends. Or immigrants who cannot prove their stay in the city. And the latter is what, everything indicates, has served as fuel for the Community of Madrid to make this decision. When the Government of Spain opened the door to the regularization of thousands of immigrants in April, some conditions were placed. One of them was to demonstrate certain rootssuch as receipts for rent, purchases… or being the holder of a public transport pass. The latter, because it is the simplest, filled the transportation offices with immigrants who wanted to get said transportation pass.. In response, in the Community of Madrid the requirements to obtain this card have changed and now they require proof of registration (unless you are a large family) in a municipality in Madrid or in surrounding regions. The result is that, automatically, immigrants in an irregular situation cannot get this transport pass but, as we said before, neither can workers expelled by the city itself, those who come to try their luck for a few months or university students. In The Country They point out that the Community of Madrid estimates that around 200,000 people are affected by this change, which will also be extended to all renovations in the future. That is, if you are not registered in Madrid and you renewed your transport pass last year, you will not have problems in a decade but it will be more complicated for those who renew it next year. The measure has sparked great controversy. And there are those who have pointed out the measure as “racist and exclusive”, as Oscar Lopezminister of the government of Spain and general secretary of the PSOE in Madrid, and of course numerous associations in defense of immigrants such as Regularización Ya, as reported in the newspaper. From the Community of Madrid they defend that The measure has been approved since 2011 and that has been delayed due to technical issues but in addition they have already opened the door for some autonomous communities to co-finance Madrid transport so that Your students can benefit from this flat rate. Those 200,000 affected barely exceed 3% of Madrid’s public transport users, but the economic hole is especially harmful to them. Right now, a university student who lives and goes to class within the city of Madrid pays 10 euros. If you take a bus and a subway each day there and back, you will make a minimum of 80 trips a week (Monday to Friday only). Without registering, you will start paying 58.40 euros. If you live in Madrid but study in another area beyond the city, you will pay at least 85 euros. The punishment is even greater if you combine the metro and/or the municipal bus with the Cercanías service. The situation is … Read more

PAU students have become obsessed with Gardening FP. It actually makes complete sense.

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Everyone manages their nerves as best they can (or knows how). A few weeks ago, while thousands of young people were preparing the PAUthe old ‘Selectivity’, a tiktoker called Ikero800 published a comic video in which he joked about the future that is presented to students with bad grades. The piece, which lasts just 15 seconds, shows a telephone with an incoming call that reads “FP de Jardinería” while the tiktoker hum those three words over and over again to music Joseph Haydn background. Funny or not, has gone viral. But… Does it make sense? Reducing tension. To understand it you have to go back a few weeks back, when thousands of young people from all over Spain were glued to their desks reviewing the last lessons before the PAU, the test in which many risked access to their dream career. To relieve tension and pulling sarcasm, Ikero800, a tiktoker with almost 11,000 followers, he published a video in which he jokes about the outlook that was presented to those who failed. What panorama? The average cycle (FP) of Gardening and Floristry. Or at least that’s what Ikero800 slides into his video, in which he hums over and over again “Efepé gardening…” while a Haydn trumpet concerto plays in the background. In the image we see the young man dancing, the capture of an incoming call in which the same thing is read (“Gardening FP”) and a text that explains: “POV: you fail all the course exams and see how the gardening FP is approaching.” As a video says more than a long explanation, here we leave the link: @ikero800 Did you like my gardening FP song? ♬ original sound – Ikero800 @danistudyy 😭🤣all of us who have exams right now😭🫣 This would have been my lucky case that proxus.es saved me from this and helped me get good grades, I hope I don’t get caught in the body and paint exam students university high school humor ♬ original sound – Ikero800 15,900 videos (and counting). The truth is that the sketch it worked. So much, in fact, that Ikero800’s video is on its way to 87,000 likes and his joke has transcended far beyond his account. The original audio of his piece, in which the tiktoker humming out of tune ‘gardening ephepe’ while Haydn plays in the background has already been used around 16,000 times. The staging changes, but the ‘soundtrack’ is always the same. Same as the message: most people use it to joke about their PAU or their grades. “POV: there is one day left until the PAU and it starts to ring,” one publishes while recording himself studying. “We when we see the language exam tomorrow,” shares another in a video in which a group of teenagers are seen in a garden with a pot and a shovel. The list goes on and on (and on and on). Why is it important? Beyond its viralitythe joke is interesting because it reflects a reality that transcends TikTok, networks or the Internet: accessing the dream university career is increasingly difficultwhich translates into an extra burden of anxiety for students who are risking their future. It has always been like this (the Selectivity already left similar scenes), but the situation seems to have worsened due to the pressure endured by the most in-demand degrees. Last year elEconomista.es did a study analyzing a selection of degrees and universities and concluded that in just one decade the cut-off marks had risen on average by 24%. From the 7.78 average in the 2015-2016 academic year, it had gone, according to the newspaper’s calculations, to 9.63 in 2025-2026. elDiario.es did a similar exercise and although their data do not coincide, the general trend does: their estimate shows that in just one decade it went from 6.85 to 8.05. Racing inflation. If before there were only four careers that required a outstanding grade 13 (or higher), last year that was already the price to pay to access some 70 degrees. a few weeks ago The Mail did a similar exercise in Galicia and concluded that in almost 80 formations the cut-off score had suffered the effects of ‘inflation’, that is, it had increased in just a couple of years (2023-25). In another hundred the trend was the opposite. The pressure it is not the same in all training courses and stands out above all in double degrees, Mathematics, Computer Science and certain training courses in the scientific field. With this data, we can better understand the TikTok publications in which students show their reactions upon learning about their PAU grades or jokes like that of Ikero800, who, given the success of the video on the Gardening FP, published other similar videos (the music changes) about the Plumbing FP, Welding FP, Sports FP, Cooking FP or even “FP of Churrero”. Are FP that bad? Not at all. What’s more, the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services of Madrid recalls that in certain cases FP has become “a much more attractive path than university” in the eyes of students who finish the Selectivity. At least if we talk about employability. According to a study cited by the agency, last year between 73% and 79.5% of VET graduates were in active employment, a percentage that drops to 66% among university students. Of course, the membership rate depends a lot on the type of training we are talking about. For example, according to U-Ranking in the degree of Medicine or Computer Engineering it exceeds 90%. What Social Security says. The disclosed data in 2025 by Education show that the average affiliation rate in the first year was 36.2% among those who graduated in 2020-21 in Intermediate Vocational Training and 51.1% among those with Higher Education. These percentages grow as the years go by. The third year is around 63.5% among higher graduates and 72.1% in dual modality. If we talk about university degreesIn general, the average affiliation rate is 49.6% after the first year, 65.6% in the … Read more

College students are rapidly losing a critical skill: reading.

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My students can’t read. It is the title of the opinion column in which Tyler Jagtuniversity literature professor, narrates the situation currently found in his classrooms. Many students are not able to read or maintain the plot of a 20-page text. He believes that AI and mobile phones are to blame. 20 pages is too much. This teacher says that he has been assigning the same task to his rhetoric and writing students for five years: reading a 20-page article. However, this year none of his students finished the work and they were not repeaters, but rather university students who had passed the entrance exams. One of them was honest and admitted that the text was too long and “constantly missed the point of the article.” Jagt acknowledges that the complaint that students do not know how to read is common among teachers, but according to him this time things are serious and there is data that corroborates it. The tests. According to the results of the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), students in grade 12 (equivalent to a 2nd year of Baccalaureate in Spain) obtained the lowest score on the reading test since the assessment began in 1992. A third of the participants reached the basic level, which means that they are likely not able to “draw general conclusions based on concepts explicitly presented in a text.” Younger students are even worse off. According to a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation70% of fourth grade students (like fourth grade) are not able to read fluently. That is in the United States, but in Spain the situation is not ideal either. According to the OECDat least a third of the Spanish population has level 1 reading comprehension, which means that “they can only understand very short texts with a minimum of distracting information.” A report from the BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie)Spaniards between 25 and 34 years old, who have studied more than their parents, advance much more slowly in basic skills. It’s technology’s fault. Or at least that is what the author maintains, specifically the emergence of smartphones and, more recently, AI. The idea that technology makes us stupid has been accompanying us for decades and with the emergence of AI, technological panic has intensified. That students are using AI to do their jobs is something we already knew. What is still not clear is what consequences it can have on a cognitive level. There is no evidence that technology produces cognitive damage (yes changes), but it is also true that until now we have not had a technology capable of doing everything that AI does. Debt and cognitive surrender. They are two concepts that emerged from recent studies. The first, cognitive debtcomes from a MIT research titled “Your brain on ChatGPT”. Participants who used ChatGPT had the worst brain performance when completing a task that involved writing essays. The researchers conclude that using AI as a complete substitute for mental effort can weaken our neural connections. The idea of cognitive surrender is mentioned in a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania. According to researchers, cognitive surrender arises when we delegate our thinking to AI and accept its answers too confidently. Another study from the University of Oxford saw how If we use AI and then it is taken away from us, our performance worsens. not so fast. There is an important nuance and that is that the concept of “using AI” is very varied. We can use it without checking the answers and accepting everything it tells us or we can use it as a tool in our creative process. In fact, in several of these studies, participants who used AI as support obtained scores very similar to those of the group that did not use AI. Therefore it is not whether we use it or not, it is how we use it. However, the arguments in favor of using AI in educational environments are becoming fewer and fewer. There was a study that said using chatbots like ChatGPT had a positive impact on learning, but was recently withdrawn due to “concerns regarding discrepancies”. Come on, the biggest argument of the defenders of educational AI went down the drain. The other culprit. As we said, this professor also points to smartphones as responsible for this situation. Appointment a 2017 study in which they verified how the simple presence of the mobile phone reduced the “available cognitive capacity”. He also cites another 2022 study in which they saw that reading on a smartphone was associated with prefrontal overload and decreased concentration. Tiktokize the school. The problem is not cell phones, but social networks and doomscrolling that hijacks our attention. We have become accustomed to consuming pills of information in the form of tweets, posts, reels and tiktoks. In this context, a 20-page text is much, much. Tyler Jagt is adapting to this reality by dividing work into two, so they have to read less, and assigning specific tasks so they don’t lose track as much. Image | Siora Photography in Unsplash In Xataka | “I can’t stop”: the addiction to talking to AI is already here and there are even support groups to quit it

College students are getting more A’s than at any other time in history. There is a suspect

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Some already call it “grade inflation.” It is a phenomenon that should make us happy—what grades our young people get—but that is increasingly worrying in the educational world. University students have never gotten as many A’s as they have until now, but in reality the credit is not theirs. Using ChatGPT and other AI tools It is distorting its capacity and putting the educational system at a global level in check (again). Note inflation. Igor Chirikov published in May 2026 a study in which he talked precisely about how artificial intelligence is causing grade inflation. In his research, he analyzed the data of half a million students in 319 subjects at the University of Texas, and detected something surprising: since 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the number of outstanding students at that institution has grown by 30%. But not everyone gets the same grade. In his conclusions, Chirikov explained how “these increases” in the grade “were greater when homework had a greater influence on the grades, which is consistent with the theory that AI is replacing the student’s work, and not improving learning.” The effect is greater, for example, in courses such as Economics or Journalism, where there are many written assignments to be submitted, but also in Computer Science courses and others in which programming subjects are taught. Both ChatGPT and other AI models are an increasingly popular (and effective) tool for students who want to improve their grades at all costs. perfect homework. The researchers indicate that a displacement of cognitive tasks is occurring here. The student no longer uses technology to support the learning process, but rather completely delegates many of the tasks that he should do to the AI. Essays, research papers and programming practices What should they give to teachers? They are becoming more and more perfect. Mirage. That theoretical brilliance is a mirage. Controlled studies like this one reveal that students who systematically use AI in their assignments end up suffering a 17% drop in their grades when they are subjected to a classic in-person pencil and paper exam on the same subject. ChatGPT becomes a superpower, but without it, grades drop clearly. The problems grow. Grade inflation is not a new phenomenon. In the US, university centers suffer structural pressures: if they are strict, they receive criticism from students, which jeopardizes future students wanting to attend them. This contributed to the fact that at Harvard, for example, A’s went from representing 24% of grades in 2005 to 60.2% in the spring of 2025. ChatGPT, write me my TFG. In Spain and Europe the panorama is similar. 89% of university students admit to using AI to write reports or Final Degree Projects (TFG), according to a recent GoStudent survey. Meanwhile, 61% of teachers confess that they do not have tools or software to confirm that whoever has done a job has not done it with AI. They are all too good students. When the outstanding becomes something totally normal and so frequent, this grade loses its power of differentiation. The filter previously made it clear which students were exceptional, something that was also vital for companies’ search for talent. Now those looking for these talents have reacted: in the US, job portals such as HandShake show that job offers that require a minimum GPA (average score of the university degree) of 3.5 out of 4 have skyrocketed from 9% in 2020 to 25% in 2026. As all university students are exceptional, companies look for the most exceptional among the exceptional. No more A’s. This distrust of job and homework qualifications has made some institutions prefer to return to the past. harvard will apply a notable reform in fall 2027 and will limit outstanding grades to a maximum of 20% per course, while honors enrollment will also depend on a certain percentile instead of via grades. 85% of the students opposed to these measures, but at Harvard they will continue with the measures although they indicate that they will review their application three years after the start of their application. everyone cheats. At the prestigious Princeton University the phenomenon is equally worrying. About half of its students They used AI to write their essays. 15% admitted to using AI to cheat in school, and 65.5% “knew a classmate was cheating and did not report it.” Everyone seems to be cheating at the university, as indicated in an article in The New York Intelligencer as early as May 2025. The university has just approved a proposal that would allow supervised exams, something that would break a 133-year tradition in which the students themselves monitored each other to prevent others from cheating. The “Code of Honor” of this institution has not been able to with the avalanche of AI. Image | Christian Lendl In Xataka | Something is happening in the computer science major in Silicon Valley: enrollment falls for the first time in 20 years

from a student’s idea to real research

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Take a week-long trip with a cabin suitcase In winter it is an art that not everyone can match. Traveling to Mars with a spacecraft in which each extra kilo can mean very expensive amounts of fuel, is a problem. Therefore, it is not enough to put socks inside shoes and replace the filling of the cervical pillow with T-shirts. In these cases it is better to travel light and try to take advantage of the destination’s resources later. A destination that, let us not forget, is the most inhospitable. Still, science is developing proposals as interesting as the one published this year by a graduate student at the University of Arkansas: 3D printing tools directly on Mars. A brilliant student. Zane Mebruer was an undergraduate engineering student when he had an interesting idea. Could metal tools be printed on a 3D printer, taking advantage of the main gas in the Martian atmosphere? He communicated the idea to his teacher Wan Shou and together They set off to check it out.. Typically, when making 3D prints with metallic materials, it is necessary to use a chamber with a protective atmosphere of argon, as this gas prevents oxidation. However, we have said that we do not want to take a lot of luggage to Mars: neither the tools, nor the argon. The Martian atmosphere is made up of 95% carbon dioxide, so it could be that this gas is a good substitute for argon. They did the relevant tests and, indeed, it could be a good option. It is true that argon gave better results, but carbon dioxide also turned out to be a quite acceptable option. Background. It should be noted that these scientists have not been the first to propose 3D printing to avoid having to take a lot of luggage to Mars. In fact, it is something that worries NASA so much that in 2015 issued a challenge to companies and universities to try to print a complete habitat. They were offered a succulent prize of $800,000, which in the end went to a team from the company IA Space Factory. In your case, they used as materials a mixture of basalt fibers extracted from Martian rock and bioplastics. They also wanted to take advantage of materials from the neighboring planet. The new. The materials proposed by that team would not be as useful for printing tools. In that case, metals would be a better option. To do this, Mebruer and Shou proposed using a printing technique known as selective laser fusion. To begin with, this consists of spreading a layer of metal powder on a plate. A laser beam then heats the powder and fuses it onto the plate. When this is ready, the plate is lowered, a new layer of powder is dropped and the procedure is repeated. Layer by layer, the piece of metal hardens and enlarges. The problem is that, in this process, the material is very exposed to oxidation. If it oxidizes, it doesn’t fuse properly, so the result is not as good. That is why a protective gas is needed. Microscope proof. These two scientists carried out the 3D printing in three different conditions: with argon, with carbon dioxide or with ambient air. The result was then analyzed under a microscope in search of any imperfections. It was seen that the best result was obtained with argon, but that with carbon dioxide a hardened, resistant material with few imperfections was also achieved. Much better than with ambient air. Only the metals would be missing. We already have the printing method and the protective gas. Only the metal would be missing. For that, other scientists have proposed recently travel to the asteroid belt and use it as a mine. That’s another story. For now, we wanted to check if printing is viable on the red planet and the answer is clearly yes. Image | Mebruer et al/Magnific In Xataka |Growing lettuce on Mars is NASA’s great challenge to colonize the planet. We already have a “shortcut” to achieve it

Eric Schmidt warned young university students that AI will change everything. Response from the university students: boo him

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We are living a curious moment in daily technological life. Well, in many ways, really, but obviously artificial intelligence is something that takes up a good part of the conversation and it seems that there are no half measures. Or wild optimism about how good this technology is for humanity (for the few who are striking gold, rather) or criticism and opposition. Because while Big Tech and technology gurus evangelize about the benefits of AIthere are more and more They oppose this technology and the gluttonous infrastructure it needs to function. And nothing represents that duality as well as the loud booing that Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, received when he spoke about AI in his graduation speech at a university. Schmidt’s speech. In large American universities it is common for them to invite personalities to give the graduation speech and, in Arizona, the chosen one was billionaire Eric Schmidt who commanded Google and Alphabet. He took the stage and, in front of 10,000 students, gave a speech that addressed several topics, but focused on the impact of modern technology on society. Last December, Time magazine selected its person of the year for 2025. And this time, they were the architects of artificial intelligence. So today we find ourselves on the verge of another technological transformation. One that will be bigger, faster and more impactful than what came before. It will affect every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship they have. I know how many of you are feeling about this. I can hear them. There is a fear. There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written. That the machines are already coming. That jobs are evaporating. That the climate is being destroyed. That politics is fractured. And that you are inheriting a disaster that you did not create. And I understand that fear. It’s rational. And it is amplified every day by social media platforms with algorithms that have learned with great precision that fear drives clicks and anxiety drives engagement. But I want to tell you something tonight in the clearest way possible. To talk about the future as if it had already been decided is to give up on the only thing that really matters. They are giving up their ability to act. The future doesn’t just arrive. It is built in laboratories, in college dormitories, in startups, in classrooms, in legislatures. And the people who will build it will be you and people like you. The booing of Schmidt. Depending on whether you are on the most optimistic side or the most critical side of the current situation of artificial intelligence, you will imagine the fragments in which the public could react to the speech, but one thing is clear: graduates do not seem to like being reminded of the world they are inheriting, that a technology that is far from perfect is going to impact all aspects of society (already is doing so, in fact) and that, with a certain hypocrisy, the blame is placed on the social media algorithms that serve as speaker of certain currents of thought. Whatever path you choose, AI is going to be part of it – Eric Schmidt Especially from a person who was in positions of responsibility at Google and Alphabet for more than 15 years, and Google works the way it works. In his speech, the former CEO addressed other issues such as that the same tools that connect us are the ones that are isolating us and more that “the question is not whether AI will shape the world: it will. The question is whether you will have been part of artificial intelligence.” The new Industrial Revolution. The video of Schmidt’s booing is not framed in a vacuum and has not been the only one that has gone viral in recent weeks. a few days ago, Gloria Caulfield received the same treatment from graduates at the University of Central Florida. Gloria is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Tavistock and Executive Director of the Lake Nona Institute and hit a nerve when she compared artificial intelligence and the moment we live in with the Industrial Revolution. Glory commented that we live in a time of profound change and, unlike Schmidt, he had to stop a couple of times due to the force of the boos. In fact, he reacted by pointing out that it was evident that there was a division of opinion and that he loved the passion of the students. He commented that, in his day, his generation had the same problems with the birth of the Internet and insecurity about the future, but it did not seem to convince the students. There was also applause, of course. Weird climate. These types of positions by personalities who give speeches about AI, as we say, are not isolated. Someone very active in this sense is Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia and a person extremely involved and interested in the development of AI, who also gave a talk recently at Carnegie Mellon University in which he commented that there is no better time to start working on “the job of your life”, which AI is a positive network for humanity because it provides opportunities that favor young people and that AI “will create many new jobs and new industries.” “AI is not likely to replace you, but someone who uses AI better than you could” – Jensen Huang Another example is that of monumental anger of the graduates of calartsone of the most important universities in the world in the arts segment, when the president of the institution began to praise artificial intelligence. The problem here is that, again, young people are not so convinced that AI is going to change their future… for the better. As they point out in Guardiana recent study suggests that about half of young Americans are more worried than excited about the rise of AI in … Read more

Princeton had not monitored its students in exams for 133 years due to an “honor code.” AI just broke that pact

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For more than a century, Princeton has based its academic trust on an honor code, an oath its students signed not to cheat on exams. Even the teachers left the classroom. Nobody watched, because honor was enough guarantee. That model just disappearedand artificial intelligence is largely to blame. What has happened. Princeton faculty voted earlier this week to have all in-person exams proctored starting July 1. The measure throws away a policy that dates back to 1893, when students themselves asked to eliminate supervision in exams. With only one vote against, the decision ended up being practically unanimous, making it the most significant change to the university’s honor system in 133 years. Why now. Generative AI has radically transformed students’ ability to copy without detection. According to the proposal presented by Michael Gordin, dean of the faculty, tools such as ChatGPT They allow copying in a way that is almost impossible to identify with the naked eye, especially during an exam. If before cheating required some effort (finding someone who would let you cheat, taking a cheat sheet in the middle of the exam, etc.) now there are a thousand and one ways to do it digitally. Numbers. In one student newspaper survey Of more than 500 seniors, almost 30% admitted to having cheated on an exam or assignment during their time at Princeton. 44.6% claimed to have known people who had violated the code, without telling them. Only 0.4% filed complaints. The number of cases investigated by the Honor Committee reached 60 this year, and the president of that committee, Nadia Makuc, believe They are just the tip of the iceberg. Nobody says anything. Princeton’s honor system historically relied on students themselves denouncing their peers. That doesn’t work anymore. According to the approved proposal, the fear of being publicly pointed out on social networks or in anonymous applications such as Fizz (the campus social network) discourages any complaint. Additionally, the way the AI ​​works makes the traps much less visible to whoever is sitting next to you. There are no more little papers or little glances or those stories. What exactly changes. According to account the faculty newspaper, professors will be present in the classroom during exams, but not to actively intervene. Their role is as witnesses, referring any possible infractions to the student Honor Committee if they detect something. On the other hand, the code oath (“I promise on my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this exam”) remains. The difference is that now there will be someone watching. Trust. Professors such as David Bell or Anthony Grafton, from the Princeton History Department, have recognized that the change alters the relationship of trust with their students. The former dean of the faculty, Jill Dolan, counted to the student newspaper that “I think it’s a shame, but it’s necessary.” AI has forced a spiral that is difficult to break. And the more people believe that others copy, the more tempted people feel to do it. Christian Moriarty, professor of Ethics and Law at St. Petersburg College in Florida counted to the Wall Street Journal that “what is at stake is not just the soul of education, but the genuine development of critical thinking.” Further supervision. Princeton has more measures than proctors to supervise the work of its students. In the last year, the number of at-home exams has been reduced by more than two-thirds. Furthermore, according to they count at The Atlantic, the Economics department will introduce oral defenses of term papers. Other teachers have also started to require that essays be written in Google Docs, to be able to review the editing history and verify that the text has been written progressively. Cover image | Roxana Crusemire and Ben Mullins In Xataka | Some Chinese humanoid robots are already going to “school”: the mission is to teach them to work in real life

Suddenly, all the papers students hand in at universities look like the same job. There is a suspect

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AI has caused an earthquake in the education sector. Students use it (many times indiscriminately) and teachers try to adapt to the change reinventing homework and exams. As the years go by, its use becomes normalized and the effects are already beginning to be seen. One of them is that all students They’re starting to sound the same. When AI gives its opinion for you. They tell it in cnn. AI chatbots have become another everyday tool in university life, but it is not only that they are used as support to write a paper, there are more and more students who turn to AI for everything, even to know what to say in class. They tell the case of a Yale student who admits that during a class debate “the conversation stopped, I looked to my left and saw someone frantically typing on their laptop.” He was asking a chatbot the same question his teacher had just asked. I myself am doing a university master’s degree and the situation is not strange to me. There are many students who turn to a chatbot to answer questions that are precisely looking for a critical and personal answer. Homogeneous thinking. It is one of the consequences that are being seen as a result of the use of AI chatbots. According to a study published in March of this yearLLMs narrow the diversity of human expression in three dimensions: language, perspective, and reasoning strategies. The reason is that training data contains bias cultures and overrepresented positions. The authors of the study claim that AI models tend to reproduce Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic points of view. In a context like the university, the result is that the students’ language is generally more polished, but the responses and reasoning are similar and ends up eroding the diversity of opinions. Hallucinations. These biases in the training data also partly explain the phenomena of hallucinations and flattery. When an LLM invents an answer or agrees with us even if we are wrong, it has to do with the fact that Positive and accommodating interactions prevail in your training data. That is to say, his training tells him that it is more important to give an answer rather than its truthfulness. Cognitive surrender. It is a concept taken from an experiment we talked about recently and refers to the phenomenon whereby we stop thinking and checking for ourselves when using AI, accepting its answers with little or no critical review and adopting its security as if it were our own. Delegating part of the cognitive process to AI is not a bad thing if it is done with a critical vision, the problem is when it is done indiscriminately and without any scrutiny of the answers. AI is making us dumb. A MIT study from 2025 pointed in this direction, but we already saw that It’s a very simplistic statement. of what is happening. Whether AI makes us lazier and impairs our critical thinking depends on how we use it. It would be comparable to using a calculator to do a very complex operation or using it to multiply five by six. Well used, AI can save us a lot of time and can be a very powerful tool to shape complex ideas, always without losing that critical thinking. Critical thinking is learned. This is the real problem of the indiscriminate use of AI in the educational environment. We are talking about people who have not yet developed this skill and who are delegating reasoning to an external tool may cause them to never learn it. In front of the prohibitionist stancevarious authors have pointed out the urgency of starting conversations with students from early stages to teach them to use AI critically and responsibly. Image | Xataka with Freepik In Xataka | A university used an AI to hunt down students who used AI. The result was a predictable disaster

5,000 Stanford students have given their love lives to what an algorithm decides. And it’s consuming the university

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It’s Tuesday at 9:00 p.m. in Palo Alto and the silence of the Stanford dormitories is broken by a simultaneous notification: it’s Date Drop. In seconds, the hallways are filled with students who, according to The Wall Street Journalthey “huddle” on their screens with a mixture of anxiety and hope. Ben Rosenfeld, a residential assistant, describes the phenomenon as an “all-consuming force”: Students talk about nothing else while they figure out whether their destiny that night is a free drink date at the On Call Cafe or an anonymous complaint on the forum Fizz. What began as a simple class project has escalated into a massive sociological phenomenon that has hijacked campus social life. The numbers are compelling: in a university of approximately 7,500 undergraduate students, more than 5,000 have already surrendered their love lives to the decisions of this algorithm. From a class assignment to a startup millionaire. The architect of this obsession is Henry Weng, a computer science graduate student who coded the platform in just three weeks. As detailed TechCrunchwhat Weng started as a tool to help his colleagues has transformed into The Relationship Company, a startup that has already raised $2.1 million in venture capital. The list of investors includes Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga and of the first investors of Facebook), Elad Gil (of the first investors in AirbnbStripe and Pinterest) and Andy Chen (former partner of Coatue). Success. The premise has been so successful that it has transcended the walls of Stanford. The service has expanded to ten other elite universities, including Columbia, MIT, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. Weng, who curiously took a subject called “introduction to clowning” that taught him to “delight in failure,” seems to have found a winning formula far from failure. “Our matches turn into real dates at ten times the speed of Tinder,” assures TechCrunch. Optimizing love in the age of fatigue. The success of Date Drop It is not a coincidence; It is symptomatic of an exhausted generation and an environment obsessed with efficiency. As they point out in The Wall Street Journal, It’s a very Stanford solution to a very Stanford problem. On a campus where students are high achievers (high achievers) obsessively focused on academic and professional success, organic social interaction has atrophied. “People have difficulty starting conversations in general, and much more so for romantic interactions,” student Alena Zhang explains to the outlet. But the problem goes beyond Stanford. An analysis of Forbes reveals a general crisis In the world of digital dating: 78% of users report emotional or mental exhaustion from using traditional apps. He ghosting (suffered by 41% of those surveyed) and the feeling that the profiles are a catalog of lies have created chronic fatigue. Added to this is the “Paradox of Preparation” (Readiness Paradox). Generation Z wants to find love more than any generation before it, but they feel paralyzed by the fear of “public failure.” They have replaced asking for a face-to-face date with asking on Instagram, entering a cycle of infinite “testing.” Date Drop it seems to break that paralysis by externalizing the decision: you no longer have to choose and risk public rejection; the algorithm chooses for you. Goodbye to Swipehello to the data. The application is radically different from the mechanics of Tinder. There are no photos to compulsively swipe left or right. The process, detailed on the website itselfbegins with a 66-question questionnaire designed to capture the essence of the user. It’s not just about superficial tastes, but about deep values ​​and political stances: “Is having children essential for a fulfilling life?”, “What are your core values: ambition, curiosity, discipline?” Weng explains that the system uses standard economic “matching theory” combined with an Artificial Intelligence that is trained with feedback (feedback) of the appointments that occur. However, the most innovative—and Machiavellian—feature is the social component. The platform allows friends to play Cupid. Wilson Adkins, a freshman cited by him WSJdiscovered that his friends had “conspired” through the app to match him with a girl from his residence. The algorithm validated the conspiracy with a compatibility score of 99.7%. Not everything is perfect in data heaven. Despite the enthusiasm and millions of investment, the road is not without obstacles. Date Drop It’s not the first attempt to automate love at Stanford. In 2017 he was born The Marriage Pact, a similar project which has already generated 350,000 matches. According to the WSJthe creators of this original project sent a “cease and desist” letter to Weng in November, alleging that the marketing of Date Drop It seemed too familiar to them. Furthermore, technology has limits compared to logistical reality. Gabriel Berger, another student, says that, although he had a great connection with his matchestheir schedules were incompatible: he was vice president of his fraternity and she had dance rehearsals. “We are not interacting well,” they concluded. For her part, Mila Wagner-Sanchez, freshman interviewed by Business Insideradds a note of realism: the novelty fades. After a fun first date (with a friend), and a second matches who never wrote to him, the pressure of midterms caused the app to take a backseat. “I would be open to trying again,” she says, but academic life sometimes outweighs algorithmic curiosity. Optimizing loneliness. Henry Weng has ambitious plans. He sees his company as a “Public Benefit Corporation” intended to facilitate not only romance, but “all meaningful relationships,” including friendships and professional connections. Perhaps the best summary of this phenomenon comes from Madhav Abraham-Prakash, a junior who helped bring the app to campus. Although Date Drop He hasn’t gotten him a girlfriend, he has given him connections on LinkedIn. His justification for The Wall Street Journal sums up the spirit of a generation that doesn’t want to leave anything to chance, not even fate: “I would be sad if my soulmate was here and I couldn’t find it. Or if my co-founder was here and I couldn’t find it, or if my business partner was … Read more

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