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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

#231

Post by blharr »

owenpalmer wrote: post #176
mav3ri3k wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A current 3rd year college student here. I really want LLMs to help me in learning but the success rate is 0. They often can not generate relatively trivial code When they do, they can not explain that code. For example, I was trying to learn socket programing in C. Claude generated the code, but when I stared asking about stuff, it regressed hard. Also, often the code is more complex than it needs to be. When learni…

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.

I mean. Likely, yes, but if you have to spend the time to prompt correctly, I'd rather just spend that time learning the material I actually want to learn

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#232

Post by fcatalan »

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…

I've seen my 15 year old use ChatGPT for her homework and I'm ok with most of what she does.

For example she tends to ask it for outlines instead of the whole thing, mostly to beat "white page paralysis" and also because it often provides some aspect she might have overlooked.

She tends to avoid asking for big paragraphs because she doesn't trust it with facts and also dislikes editing out the "annoying" AI style or prompting for style rewrites. But she will feed it phrases from her own writing that get too tangled for simplification.

Also she will vary the balance of AI/own effort according to the nature of the task, her respect for the teacher or subject: Interesting work from a engaging lecturer? Light LLM touch or none. Malicious make-work or readable Lorem Ipsum when the point is the format of the thing instead of the content? AI pap by the tons for you. I find it healthy and mature.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#233

Post by interludead »

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…

Agreed! Using AI as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement is the best approach

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#234

Post by bobnamob »

8note wrote: post #226
CuriouslyC wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Not mention tuned drums

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#235

Post by TSP00N3 »

abduhl wrote: post #214
kamaal wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. Well that is because you ask a calculator to divide numbers. Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way. Ask the smallest possible for loop and if loop that AI can generate now you have the pocket calculator equivalent of programming.

>> Well that is because you ask a calculator to divide numbers. Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way. Is it? What is 5/2+3?

There is only one correct way to calculate 5/2+3. The order is PEMDAS[0]. You divide before adding. Maybe you are thinking that 5/(2+3) is the same as 5/2+3, which is not the case. Improper math syntax doesn’t mean there are two potential answers, but rather that the person that wrote it did so improperly.

[0] https://www.mathsisfun.com/operation-order-pemdas.html

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#236

Post by low_tech_love »

Eisenstein wrote: post #186
wrp wrote: post #154

I have been working with colleagues to develop advice on how to adapt teaching methods in the face of widespread use of LLMs by students. The first point I like to make is that the purpose of having students do tasks is to foster their development. That may sound obvious, but many people don't seem to take notice that the products of student activities are worthless in themselves. We don't have students do push-ups i…

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…

As a (senior) lecturer in a university, I’m with you on most of what you wrote. The truth is that every teacher must immediately think: if any of their assignments or examinations involve something that could potentially be GPT-generated, it will be GPT-generated. It might be easy to spot such a thing, but you’ll be spending hours writing feedback while sifting through the rivers of meaningless artificially-generated text your students will submit.

Personally what I’m doing is to push the weight back at the students. Every submission now requires a 5-minute presentation with an argumentation/defense against me as an opponent. Anyway it would take me around 10-15 min to correct their submission, so we’re just doing it together now.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#237

Post by eyegor »

margalabargala wrote: post #156
sbuttgereit wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come..." "You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply." These two ideas are closely related and really just different aspects of the same basic frailty of the human intellect. Understanding th…

In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value. In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator. In a world where…

I don't honestly think anyone can remember bash array syntax if they take a 2 week break. It's the kind of arcane nonsense that LLMs are perfect for. The only downside is if the fancy autocomplete model messes it up, we're gonna be in bad shape when Steve retires cause half the internet will be an ouroboros of ai generated garbage.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#238

Post by nitwit005 »

owenpalmer wrote: post #190
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simpler explanation is that LLMs are not very good.

I can get an LLM to do almost anything I want. Sometimes I need to add a lot of context. Sometimes I need to completely rewrite the prompt after realizing I wasn't communicating clearly. I almost always have to ask it to explain it's reasoning. You can't treat an LLM like a computer. You have to treat it like a weird brain.

You're not exactly selling it as a learning tool with this comment.

If the premise is that you first need to learn an alien psychology, that's quite the barrier for a student.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#239

Post by TSP00N3 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #181
skeeter2020 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ideally you look and fail and exhaust your own efforts, then get unblocked with a tool or assistant or expert. With LLMs at your finger tips who has both the grit to struggle and the self discipline not to quit early? at the age of the typical student - very few.

Do you advocate that students learn without the help of teachers until they exhaust their own efforts?

That actually is an approach. Some teachers make you read the lesson before class, others give you homework on the lesson before lecturing it, and some even quiz you on it on top of that before allowing you to ask questions. I personal feel that trying to learn the material before class helped me learn the material better than coming into class blind.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#240

Post by mbsa_cs »

Fomite wrote: post #203

I mostly teach graduate students, and in my first lecture, one of the slides goes through several LLMs attempts at a fairly simple prompt to write a seminar introduction for me. We grade them in terms of factually correct statements, "I suppose" statements (yes, I've worked on influenza, but that's not what I'm best known for), and outright falsehoods. Thus far none of them have gotten it right - illustrating at leas…

Falling an exam is many things but "catastrophic".
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