Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

independent.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 175 posts

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#71

Post by chongli »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #32
chefandy wrote: post #18

CS50 was a gigantic intro class designed to whet non-comp-sci students appetite for coding and computer science, generally. (I took it when it was C/PHP, so they may have changed things.) While the lectures are very straightforward, the smaller 'sections' lectures with the dozen-or-so teaching fellows were more intensive, and p-sets were pretty challenging for newbies. The weekly help sessions ended up being a millio…

> The weekly help sessions ended up being a million lost students in a giant hall waiting to see one of a few dozen TAs offering uneven pedagogical quality. The assignments were often automatically graded upon submission and you often have some equivalent of a unit test to see if you got it right before submission, so you know if you got it wrong, but not how wrong. Just having a resource for sanity checks and walkth…

I have been a TA for first-year intro CS on multiple occasions. I have written the test suites that auto-grade student submissions.

The problem with first year CS students is that, unlike math, they’re allowed to have a huge range of possible prior experience in the subject. Some have zero programming experience whatsoever, while others started programming in diapers and competed in numerous programming contests (and even won) before enrolling.

Yes, we do offer an advanced version of the intro course that is far more challenging and would be appropriate for many of those advanced students. But the advanced course is optional so no student can be forced to take it. Many of the advanced students opt to take the standard intro course in the hope that it would boost their grades.

So the course is dealing with (essentially) a strongly bimodal distribution of student ability and the professors don’t want to give the advanced students a free ride. That means the course is actually somewhat challenging for all but the most elite programmers and therefore extremely challenging for total beginners.

What this meant was that Monday office hours (assignments were due Tuesday mornings) typically had several hundred students (out of a total of about 1800) scrambling for help from a dozen TAs. Of course, my school only has a tiny fraction of the funding of Harvard, but there you go.

I doubt that Harvard would want to spend proportionally more on TAs for their course (which would mean more TAs than students), so even though their course may be way more “well-funded” than ours, it’s not at all so relative to endowment.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#72

Post by robblbobbl »

RyanAdamas wrote: post #60

This is a terrible indication of what is to come. Cheap, accessible, and fully featured instructors that would otherwise be free and open source, contained and used for profit by in-name-only institutions, organizations and corporations for the purpose of increased profit from the reduction in human labor. Every ounce of AI should be open source and free to the public. This is absolutely technological terrorism on th…

Sad but true. You made a point here Buddy.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#73

Post by Topfi »

ekianjo wrote: post #64
Lio wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with LLMs so far is that they very confidently give you an answer and very convincingly explain that answer but for certain portion of the time that answer is very wrong. You can even get it to break its reasoning down into little convincing but, none the less, incorrect steps. If I was running this course I would make that "artefact" part of the process. i.e. I would tell students that the chatbot will…

> My experience with LLMs so far is that they very confidently give you an answer and very convincingly explain that answer but for certain portion of the time that answer is very wrong. This is true of humans just as well

Whilst that is true, I feel that if that human is an educator employed by a reputable institution, answering questions in their field, the expectation of most is going to be that they provide accurate information. As this is an introductory class, any arguments that even experienced teachers can occasionally cling to incorrect or outdated information becomes moot in my opinion.

LLMs as of now simply appear not reliable enough for an institution like this one to attach their name (which brings credibility in the eyes of the public), especially as their comments on the need for users to be vigilant ("they should always think critically when taking in information as input") make it sound like they did not in fact find some new way of reliably grounding output in accurate information.

Mind you, this is coming from someone who has great hopes for the future of LLMs in education as they can more effectively deal with students on an individual level. I just feel that currently LLMs are still too error-prone for an institution such as Harvard to incorporate them into an introductory course to assist. Until these insitution stop putting the majority of responsibility on students finding erroneous output, I feel this is not ready for wider educational use.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#74

Post by carlossouza »

thumbuddy wrote: post #66
RyanAdamas wrote: post #60

This is a terrible indication of what is to come. Cheap, accessible, and fully featured instructors that would otherwise be free and open source, contained and used for profit by in-name-only institutions, organizations and corporations for the purpose of increased profit from the reduction in human labor. Every ounce of AI should be open source and free to the public. This is absolutely technological terrorism on th…

Imagine going to an ivy League school and paying 10,000$ for a chat bot to teach you. What a racket

I think most people do not pay for teachers' quality. People pay for the diploma's brand. (Which is a proxy of the probability of landing a good job after graduation.) For that use case, as long as the chatbot teachers don't degrade the university's brand name, I think most people won't care. They might even actually prefer it. (I graduated from the top engineering university in my country and I'd certainly prefer ChatGPT over the vast majority of the TAs I had).

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#75

Post by logical_ferry »

This sounds dystopian.

I went through a distance learning course and I don't see this being far from it. I mean, it's not like anyone will have to come to the brick and mortar classroom just to sit there and listen to this AI thing talk about CS, everyone will do it from their room.

So on one hand you have a lack of proper instructor and on the other hand lack of social contact. Imagine being 18 and sitting at home alone just you and this AI.

Sounds ok if you are older, but not for the amount of money Harvard is asking for it. I am not even sure what you are paying for here.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#76

Post by wil421 »

eesmith wrote: post #69
vanviegen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading is that this class just has a huge number of students, each bringing in a bit of funding. This allows for relatively large investments in the quality of the teaching materials, but teacher/student ratios will probably not be great. Hiring capable teachers is hard, especially at scale.

I must be missing something. Harvard has 7,153 undergrads says Wikipedia. At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year. But surely not everyone is taking the course? So why does it need to scale? Harvard tuition is $54,269, says https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees . Assuming it's a 3 hour class with a 120 credit hours to graduate, that's 30 hours per year, so each student pays abou…

My coworker’s kid just graduated from Harvard. He said it cost about $315,000k. Does your number include all the fees and such most colleges tack on to tuition?

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#77

Post by willcipriano »

latexr wrote: post #28
userbinator wrote: post #3

Professor Malan said students would be warned of the pitfalls of the AI, saying they should “always think critically” when presented with information. I want to believe that this will actually happen, but my experience with people blindly trusting what a tool (not even an AI-based one) says, including but not limited to students, suggests that's not going to happen.

“Always think critically” is poised to become the “drink responsibly” of AI. A convenient and counterproductive way to push responsibility onto the users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_advertising#Drink_resp... https://youtube.com/watch?v=DnSp2S7vzH4&t=31s

Always think critically, but whatever you do don't do your own research.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#78

Post by chongli »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #56
latexr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Always think critically” is poised to become the “drink responsibly” of AI. A convenient and counterproductive way to push responsibility onto the users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_advertising#Drink_resp... https://youtube.com/watch?v=DnSp2S7vzH4&t=31s

Yes. Definitely users are responsible for knowing this. And it is one of the key things that education needs to teach.

I’m generally skeptical of the critical thinking movement. There is not much evidence that students can be taught to transfer their critical thinking skills from one subject to another. I think much of what people refer to as critical thinking is more aptly called subject expertise.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#79

Post by agentgumshoe »

carlossouza wrote: post #74
thumbuddy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine going to an ivy League school and paying 10,000$ for a chat bot to teach you. What a racket

I think most people do not pay for teachers' quality. People pay for the diploma's brand. (Which is a proxy of the probability of landing a good job after graduation.) For that use case, as long as the chatbot teachers don't degrade the university's brand name, I think most people won't care. They might even actually prefer it. (I graduated from the top engineering university in my country and I'd certainly prefer Ch…

This is not the solution you think it is. How do you determine how knowledgeable the chatbot is?

Or is 'the computer told me so it's correct' good enough these days?

Post reply on HN