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Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
161–170 of 175 posts
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they get the same access to the courses they are enrolled in. An extension student doesn’t have access to the full course catalog, and doesn’t live in one of the undergrad houses, doesn’t develop the same network of friends etc. But they do attend the same morning graduation exercises in Harvard Yard and get the same lifetime benefits (if they carry through to graduation, that is).
> access to the full course catalog That would (to me) only make sense if the extra $3,000 for the CS course subsidizes the other courses. > and doesn’t live in one of the undergrad houses Which is why I only compared tuition, and did not include the housing fee.
Not all of the classes are the same quality— though many are. Harvard College summer classes are all done through the extension school. I think extension students can actually enroll in the full undergrad catalog once they get to a certain point in their degree program if they're preforming well. Not positive though.
However, your degree options are very limited, you don't get access to the same interaction with the big famous names (though you can usually work some magic through side channels for genuine collab interests,) you don't really interact with the Harvard College undergrads, you don't get the same internship opportunities, you can't join the sports teams or go to most undergrad-specific events, you don't live in the Harvard buildings or eat in the Harvard dining halls, your email address is extension-school specific... etc etc etc. Even if there are undergrad specific things you technically can take part in, nobody is going to make sure you know about them. You DO get the same access to the online resources, all of the clubs, and all SEVENTY TWO libraries (some are like office-sized.)
Harvard knows how much cachet a Harvard degree has, and with the extension school, they must walk the razor-thin line between marketing that to extension students, and making the Harvard College students feel like ubermensch. You actually get a different degree from the extension school— a "Bachelor of Liberal Arts (ALB) in Extension Studies concentrating in XYZ" rather than the "BA/SB concentrating in XYZ" to differentiate it even more. Lots of extension school students try to push it on their resumes because most employers don't know the difference, and lots of Harvard undergrads get mad about it and feel like that cheapens their degree. In reality, the connections, outlook, exposure, and experiences uniquely available to them in Harvard College are the real secret sauces.
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're considering doing something similar in my department. Based on some back-of-a-napkin math, it won't (yet) be cheap though, at about $0.40 per query. This is assuming the use of gpt-4 (chatgpt would be a lot cheaper, but it doesn't follow system level instructions very consistently, often spilling answers instead of replying with feedback, hints and leading questions). Also, projected costs per query are high be…
Could you possibly reduce those costs by fine-tuning the model with the assignment text and reference code, rather than including them in the prompt?
OpenAI only offers finetuning for the pre-chatgpt models, so I doubt we'd get good enough results from that.
Something like this might work with a self-hosted (llama) model though. We do have a (small) database of student work and teacher feedback for each assignment we could use for training (privacy permitting).
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're considering doing something similar in my department. Based on some back-of-a-napkin math, it won't (yet) be cheap though, at about $0.40 per query. This is assuming the use of gpt-4 (chatgpt would be a lot cheaper, but it doesn't follow system level instructions very consistently, often spilling answers instead of replying with feedback, hints and leading questions). Also, projected costs per query are high be…
So the course changes to a game of prompt injection for students aware of the state of LLMs
That's exactly what we're afraid of.
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If they lived in off-campus housing in Cambridge then $315m would be on the low side.
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, not exactly helping with my prior of "college is a massive, societal level scam"
College is great and very useful, it's just heavily abused by our society. I think that a lot of well-meaning people in the 80s and 90s saw that people with college degrees were better off, and confusing correlation with causation, insisted everyone needed to go to college so they could also be better off. Well, now we have way more people with college degrees than we need.
They've taken on debt that their (government-employed) guidance counselors insisted would pay for itself. Decent paying white collar positions for non-degree holders, like administrative assistant, now require them because of lazy recruiting. And income inequality is worse because you can't resolve structural economic issues with credentials.
So you have someone with an expensive English degree from BU answering phones in a CS pool for 35k, and the 'dumb' kids who went to trade school and became electricians have to turn away work at hundreds of dollars per hour because they're in such high demand.
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a solution to that too: Have the placement exam counted as a proficiency course in the student grades, like foreign language requirements or scientific prep courses in graduate-level schools for those majored in a different field.
My school is a public university. They’re not allowed to introduce mandatory placement exams like that. They have to work within the government-set high school curriculum. They also don’t want to allow the advanced students to “test out” of the intro course, as some schools do, because the advanced students may be highly skilled at programming but totally lacking in introductory CS knowledge.
I went to a public university and they determined which mathematics class you started in by your ACT/SAT or AP test scores. I guess I'm just struggling to see why a programming course would be any different, or why a placement test would be prohibited when they're already using the standardized test scores as a placement test of sorts. Unless things have changed in the last five years.
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I learned that they always have money for stuff but rarely for staff.
(By "they," I mean Harvard, generally. I have no reason to believe CS50 is exempt from this, but I have no special insight, here.)
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Feom what I understand of these universities with endowments they use money to hire administrative staff and to "last forever". Teaching staff is secondary to those.
Yes. They lay off scores of staff in nearly every economic downturn. There's a whole lot of 'blah blah blah' about why they can't use the endowment to avoid screwing people who've given decades of their professional life to Harvard, but I think it mostly comes down to their wanting a big shiny endowment balance long after everyone on earth right now has died.
Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
#170Earlier 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…
Couldn't they just distribute the class ability level correctly using a placement test?
(to be clear, I was never a Harvard College undergrad. I was a degree candidate in a Harvard Extension program before transferring, and I worked for Harvard for over two decades, one of them full-time.)
Firstly, a big part of the allure of CS50 is the fact that it's one big ol' nerdy computer party and you're invited!
Secondly, and I'm not trying to sell the Harvard mystique, but considering that Harvard's acceptance rate is 4%, the students handle brick-wall challenges gracefully.
Additionally, they don't necessarily want students that are going to do poorly in CS50 to pursue computer science at Harvard, so I'm sure it also serves as an effective bouncer for all of the students who haven't decided on their concentration deciding that they'll do CS because tech is sexy right now. The lectures look pretty straightforward, but we had to write code involving basic data structures and memory management in C on our paper midterm exams, with no reference, administered in a lecture hall. It's probably tough for kids that are used to acing everything, but it's a lot easier to find out you don't like CS in CS50 than it is to find out after choking on discrete math or a compiler class.
And as my first-year expository writing professor said after assigning like 70 pages of close-reading Kant for a weekly assignment, "Will it be difficult? Yes. Reading Kant is like running in sand. But that's why you decided to go to Harvard."