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A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

openai.com

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Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#221

Post by low_tech_love »

RobinL wrote: post #2

I think this is pretty good advice. I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything (write all the code, write the whole essay). The advice in this article largely mirrors - by analogy - how I use AI for coding. To rubber duck, to generate ideas, to ask for feedback, to ask for alternatives and for criticism. Usually it cannot write the whole thing (essay, program )in one go…

I teach basic statistics to computer scientists (in the context of quantitative research methods) and this year every single one of my group of 30+ students used ChatGPT to generate their final report (other than the obvious wording style, the visualizations all had the same visual language, so it was obvious). There were glaring, laughable errors in the analyses, graphs, conclusions, etc.

I remember when I was a student that my teachers would complain that we did “compilation-based programming” meaning we hit “compile” before we thought about the code we wrote, and let the compiler find the faults. ChatGPT is the new compiler: it creates results so fast that it’s literally more worth it to just turn them in and wait for the response than bothering to think about it. I’m sure a large amount of these students are passing their courses due to simple statistics (I.e. teachers being unable to catch every problematic submission).

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#222

Post by tayo42 »

mav3ri3k wrote: post #215
owenpalmer wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to suspect that people generally have poor experiences with LLMs due to bad prompting skills. I would need to see your chats with it in order to know if you're telling the truth.

There is no easy way to share. I copied them in google docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GidKFVgySgLUGlcDSnNMfMIu... One with ChatGPT about dbms questions and one with claude about socket programming. Looking back are some questions a little stupid ? Yes. But affcourse they are! I am coming with zero knowledge trying to learn how the socket programming is happening here ? Which functions are begin pulled from…

is english not your first language?

Also Im surprised you even got a usable answer from your first question asking for a socket program if all you asked was the bold part. I'm a human (pretty sure at least) and had no idea how to answer the first bold question.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#223

Post by tayo42 »

jaimex2 wrote: post #183
jancsika wrote: post #163

Anecdote-- every single high school student and college student I've talked to in the past year (probably dozens) use chatgpt to write their papers. They don't even know how to write a prompt, or in some cases even what "writing a prompt" means. They just paste the assignment in as a prompt and copy the output. They then feed that as input to some app that detects chatgpt papers and change the wording until it flows…

The real hack is you give it an example of previous work you have done and ask it to write in that style.

that assumes you actually did some previous work though hah

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#224

Post by Eisenstein »

wrp wrote: post #202
Eisenstein wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is trivially easy to spot AI writing if you are familiar with it, but if it requires failing most of the class for turning in LLM generated material, I think we are going to find that abolishing graded homework is the only tenable solution. The student's job is not to do everything the teacher says, it is to get through schooling somewhat intact and ready for their future. The sad fact is that many things we were…

Does pedagogy have established and verified methodology that will result in a completely PHYSICALLY developed student, if only the student does the EXERCISE as prescribed? No, but we still see the value in physical activity to promote healthy development. > many things we were forced to do in school were not helpful at all I've never had to do push-ups since leaving school. It was a completely useless skill to spend…

You haven't proved that it made a difference or that doing something else wouldn't have been as or more effective, which is my point. You did it, so these students must do it, with no other rationale than that.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#225

Post by 8note »

wcfrobert wrote: post #120

Lots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning? For example, I have zero qualms about relying on AI at work to write progress reports and code up some scripts. I know I can do it myself but why would I? I spent many years in college learning to read and write and code. AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my jo…

> But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it.

YMMV, but I didn't ride a bike for 10ish years, and then got back on and I was happily riding quickly after. I also use zsh and ctrl+r for every Linux command, but I can still come up with the command of I need to, just, slowly. Ive overall found that if I learn a thing, it's learnt. Stuff I didn't learn in university, but passed anyways, like Jacobians, I still don't know, but I've got the gyst of it. I do keep getting better and better at the banjo the less I play it, and getting back to the drumming plateau is quick.

Maybe the drumming plateau is the thing? You can quickly get back to similar skill levels after not doing the thing in a while, but it's very hard to move that plateau upwards

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#226

Post by 8note »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #125
QuarterReptile wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all parts require it, but none are about it. That's how background knowledge works. If you can't get over the drudgery of learning scales and chords, you'll never learn music. The fact that many learners never understand this end goal is sad but doesn't invalidate the methodology needed to achieve the progression.

> That's how background knowledge works. If you can't get over the drudgery of learning scales and chords, you'll never learn music. Tell that to drummers

As a drummer, you need to learn your scales and chords. It still matters, and the way you interact with the music should be consistent with how the chords change, and where the melody is within the scale.

Your drumming will be "melodic" if you do so

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#227

Post by mav3ri3k »

tayo42 wrote: post #222
mav3ri3k wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no easy way to share. I copied them in google docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GidKFVgySgLUGlcDSnNMfMIu... One with ChatGPT about dbms questions and one with claude about socket programming. Looking back are some questions a little stupid ? Yes. But affcourse they are! I am coming with zero knowledge trying to learn how the socket programming is happening here ? Which functions are begin pulled from…

is english not your first language? Also Im surprised you even got a usable answer from your first question asking for a socket program if all you asked was the bold part. I'm a human (pretty sure at least) and had no idea how to answer the first bold question.

No, english is my second language.

I had already established from previous chat that upon asking for server.c file, llm's answer was working correctly. Rest of the sentence is just me asking it to use and not use certain header files which it uses by default when you ask it to generate server.c file.Thats because from docs of , I thought it had all relevant bindings for the socket programming to work correctly.

I would say, the sentence logically makes sense.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#228

Post by 8note »

nonameiguess wrote: post #78
ratedgene wrote: post #25

I was talking to a teacher today that works with me at length about the impact of AI LLM models are having now when considering student's attitude towards learning. When I was young, I refused to learn geography because we had map applications. I could just look it up. I did the same for anything I could, offload the cognitive overhead to something better -- I think this is something we all do consciously or not. Tha…

I think at a certain point, you either value having your own skills and knowledge, or you don't. You may as well ask why anyone bothers learning to throw a baseball when they could just offload to a pitching machine. And I get it. Pitchers who go pro get paid a lot and aren't allowed to use machines, so that's a hell of an incentive, but the vast majority of kids who ever pick up a baseball are never going to go pro,…

The five paragraph thesis format isn't about learning to learn, it's about learning how to format ideas.

Just learning a thing doesn't mean you can communicate it

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#229

Post by nxobject »

bondarchuk wrote: post #15
cmontella wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach at the university level, and I just expect more from my students. Instead of implementing data structures like we did when I was in school, something ChatGPT is very good at; my students are building systems, something ChatGPT has more trouble with. Instead of paper exams asking students "find the bug" or "implement a short function", they get a takehome exam where they have to write tests, integrate their pr…

Wouldn't it be unfair towards the students who want to learn without LLMs?

In the same sense that there are many ways of thinking left behind by modern CS curricula – as it is now, the way we teach CS is unfair towards students who want to learn flowcharting, hand-assemble and hand-optimize software, etc. They're very worthy things to master and very zen to do, but sadly not a crucial skill anymore.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#230

Post by treflop »

margalabargala wrote: post #172
treflop wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours. The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.

For replacement like I described, sure. But it will be very useful long before that. AI that writes a bash script doesn't need to be better than an experienced engineer. It doesn't even need to be better than a junior engineer. It just needs to be better than Stack Overflow. That bar is really not far away.

You’re changing the goal post. Your original post was saying that you don’t need to know fundamentals.

It was not about whether AI is useful or not.

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