[jeffwass]

This was going on long before LLMs.

When I took quantum mechanics in grad school, I struggled through the weekly (and intense) homework sets. My TA was a hardass, I’d spend hours on some problem, several few pages of math work just for one problem, and make some dumb mistake in an integral somewhere, being off by a factor of 2 at the end and only getting 2 of 4 points.

It was painful, and I felt like a dumbass seeing the other kids regularly getting perfect scores.

Then the midterm came and I blew them all out of the water. I hadn’t realised they somehow had the solutions manual so just got perfect scores all along but clearly didn’t learn the material like I did.

[pnutjam]

Yeah, I'm not a frat guy, but don't groups like Fraternities build "Study Guides" that are often just brain dumps of tests with correct answers?

[merolish]

We called them "bibles" in undergrad and they were collections of homework and tests from previous terms.

[Verdex]

Yeah, I had this happen to me in an algorithms course. Tests were 80% of the grade and we had the guy who had been organizing mass homework "study" groups taking up increasingly larger sections of the class time desperately trying to figure out how to convince the professor to switch up the grading to be more homework based.

I figure that the professor had to know what was going on because he kept giving the same philosophical handwavey reasons for why the tests were staying at 80%.