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Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

independent.co.uk

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

#111

Post by rocho »

wil421 wrote: post #76
eesmith wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You probably mean $315k.

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

#112

Post by chefandy »

eesmith wrote: post #22
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…

I find it hard to reconcile "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." with "very, very well-funded class". Why didn't the funding go to hiring more staff? My experience in a state school had far more access to education staff than what you describe, and for less funding.

Harvard is bizzaro land. I don't know what CS50s setup looks like internally, but after taking the course, and working there for a couple of decades— one full time— I think I'm pretty close.

I learned that they always have money for stuff but rarely for staff. The class seemed to have significant corporate support from Facebook and Microsoft, and probably others— both Zuck and Ballmer have given guest lectures— but I'll bet that Harvard's governance rules didn't let them hire academic staff with outside funding or something like that. They def could use it on regular staff positions— I spent years in a full-time, permanent staff position that was funded through a project partner.

The support academics in CS50 are all done by student TAs at the lowest level, or teaching fellows— grad students maybe— for lecturing or more advanced help. The staff are for things like video production, technical infrastructure, etc. There's only so many qualified students willing to do that work and no way you're getting existing faculty to do it. I'll also bet that they have rules about hiring staff to do anything resembling instructional work.

Like I said, though, I don't know what the situation is exactly but I'm pretty familiar with Harvard.

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

#113

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

imtringued wrote: post #49
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #14

What does the chatbot say, when asked to do a complete course assignment question?

The TA can just look at the chatlogs to see if you cheat.

The answer would be: use another chatbot, where's the problem?

i think that's one of the real danger of this stuff: society used to put some real value into your intellectual efforts - that was the stuff that promised "the Future", that's a real return on investment. Now these large language models started a kind of inflation in this area of endeavour. I would guess that the younger ones will have to ask themselves the following question: "why bother, if the LLMs will catch up on all of your efforts within five years, or so?"

Earlier generations didn't have to ask themselves this question.

I am trying to teach my kids some stuff, but this question is always lurking somewhere in my mind: I think this effect of a general demotivation is the real danger to our civilization - not these unrealistic notions of a 'robot takeover'.

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

#115

Post by michaelt »

p-e-w wrote: post #83
michaelt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are challenges and there are challenges. A professor teaching about evolution will answer students' questions within reason - and students with a religious background might have heard some anti-evolution gotchas the professor will be happy to explain - like how something as complex as the eye could evolve. But that doesn't extend to debating bible verses, allowing so many challenges that it disrupts the c…

That you leap from "basic challenges" to anti-science fundamentalism really shows how deep-rooted this problem is. Most educated people today earnestly believe that the only ones who would disagree on basic issues with the high priests of academia are fanatics, conspiracy nuts, and quacks. The idea that academics are on the right path has turned from something that must be continuously demonstrated to something that…

I don't know how you arrived at that interpretation of my post.

I chose evolution merely because a substantial and politically important group of Americans earnestly disagree with the academic consensus; it's an area where there has been genuine public debate; it's foundational to some academic fields; and it would believably come up in first year compulsory classes.

I might disagree with academics about whether mailing a survey to mentally competent adults counts as human experimentation that needs ethics board approval, as outside of academia people use surveys all the time. But that's hardly something an academic would refuse to discuss.

I might disagree with academics about feminism or marxism or underwater basket weaving - but that stuff's all elective, why would I have taken an elective module from a teacher I thought was full of shit?

I might disagree with the high tuition costs of universities, and the money wasted on sports, overpaid administrators, and overpriced journal subscriptions. But most academics would actively agree with me, they just can't change it.

I might disagree with details of how a course is taught, like whether Java is a good language for an introductory CS class. Or whether we really need so much math in the CS curriculum. But that's not really a fundamental belief.

I might disagree with academics because I think the moon is made of cheese, but that would be a straw man argument.

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

#116

Post by joker_minmax »

RyanAdamas wrote: post #105
joker_minmax wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're saying about Latin usage being a barrier to understanding "legalese". However, in medicine it's absolutely justified, because it allows us to be more specific than using English alone. A lot of the English words for body parts are loanwords from Latin that mean something else because English does not have its own word for it. Cervix, for example, means "neck". English took the Latin word to describe…

That's fair, there are legitimate reasons for much of the complexities we deal with today. How far can that body of knowledge grow before a human can't actually understand it? Similar to maths, at what point do they advance so much that no one person, without bionic assistance, can learn it all? Consider the fact we call small pants "shorts" and current events "news"; the sophistication of our language is indeed lack…

I would like clarification: you are advocating that we use AI to come up with new words in English? Using what parameters, Anglo-Saxon root words? Are they still adding and creating new terms from Latin in the legal system? Either way people still have to learn new words, and AI generated new words would be hard to implement if they stray from the roots we have learned to recognize (especially Greek and Latin root words we are taught to recognize in school early on).

In the current case "uterus" and "cervix" are now considered to be the English words for those body parts. Is using a loanword really "jumping ship" when much of English's influence history comes from Old French anyway? I think this would be better dealt with in the hands of a linguist.

Elitism and access is an issue, but to me it strikes that the access issue is more about access to education, than access to the language itself.

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

#117

Post by chefandy »

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…

Not that many students on campus. From Wikipedia "The on-campus version is Harvard's largest class with 800 students, 102 staff..." they probably have that many or more online students but they aren't the ones in annenberg, the freshmen dining hall, waiting for TAs. (That hall is a dead ringer for the great hall at hogwarts.)

At the events, there were Facebook and Microsoft logos everywhere. I'm pretty sure corporate sponsorship took care of a lot of it.

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

#118

Post by chongli »

fn-mote wrote: post #85
chongli wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. HN readers: universities that teach a so-called "How to Design Programs" curriculum [1] have discov…

My university uses that exact approach! I have first hand knowledge with students who refuse to follow the design recipe approach and insist on muddling through the code until they figure it out.

We even hand-mark their design recipes in the course! The students just do them after the fact.

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

#120

Post by joker_minmax »

chongli wrote: post #71
Paul-Craft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Couldn't they just distribute the class ability level correctly using a placement test?
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