So it is a blow that the first impact of Large Language Models at scale was to usher in the Homework Apocalypse. Cheating was already common in schools. One study of eleven years of college courses found that when students did their homework2 in 2008, it improved test grades for 86 percent of them, but it helped only 45 percent of students in 2017. Why? Because over half of students were looking up homework answers on the internet by 2017, so they never got the benefits of homework. And that isn’t all. By 2017, 15 percent of students had paid someone3 to do an assignment, usually through essay
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