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How University Students Use Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#11

Post by moffkalast »

tmpz22 wrote: post #8
stv_123 wrote: post #2

Interesting article, but I think it downplays the incidence of students using Claude as an alternative to building foundational skills. I could easily see conversations that they outline as "Collaborative" primarily being a user walking Claude through multi-part problems or asking it to produce justifications for answers that students add to assignments.

Direct quote I heard from an undergrad taking statistics: "Snapchat AI couldn't get it right so I skipped the assignment"

Well if statistics can't understand itself, then what hope do the rest of us have?

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#12

Post by j2kun »

They use an LLM to summarize the chats, which IMO makes the results as fundamentally unreliable as LLMs are. Maybe for an aggregate statistical analysis (for the purpose of...vibe-based product direction?) this is good enough, but if you were to use this to try to inform impactful policies, caveat emptor.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#13

Post by DickingAround »

boredemployee wrote: post #4
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #3

AI bubble seems close to collapsing. God knows how many billions have been invested and we still don't have an actual use case for AI which is good for humanity.

I think I understand what you're trying to say. We certainly improve productivity, but that is not necessarily good for humanity. Could be even worse. i.e.: my company already expect less time for some tasks given that they _know_ I'll probably use some AI to do tasks. Which means I can humanly handle more context in a given week if the metric is "labour", but you end up with your brain completely melted.

I think the core of the 'improved productivity' question will be ultimately impossible to answer. We would want to know if productivity was improved over the lifetime of a society; perhaps hundreds of years. We will have no clear A/B test from which to draw causal relationships.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#14

Post by dtnewman »

> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used.

I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem.

Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous issue. For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".

I think the issue is that it's so tempting to lean on AI. I remember long nights struggling to implement complex data structures in CS classes. I'd work on something for an hour before I'd have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts. With AI, I can simply copy/paste my code and say "hey, what's wrong with this code?" and it'll often spot it (nevermind the fact that I can just ask ChatGPT "create a b-tree in C" and it'll do it). That's amazing in a sense, but also hurts the learning process.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#15

Post by j2kun »

j2kun wrote: post #12

They use an LLM to summarize the chats, which IMO makes the results as fundamentally unreliable as LLMs are. Maybe for an aggregate statistical analysis (for the purpose of...vibe-based product direction?) this is good enough, but if you were to use this to try to inform impactful policies, caveat emptor.

For example, it's fashionable in math education these days to ask students to generate problems as a different mode of probing understanding of a topic. And from the article: "We found that students primarily use Claude to create and improve educational content across disciplines (39.3% of conversations). This often entailed designing practice questions, ..." That last part smells fishy, and even if you saw a prompt like "design a practice question..." you wouldn't be able to know if they were cheating, given the context mentioned above.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#16

Post by dmurray »

I am surprised that business students are relatively low adopters: LLMs seem perfect for helping with presentations, etc, and business students are stereotypically practical-minded rather than motivated by love of the subject.

Perhaps Claude is disproportionately marketed to the STEM crowd, and the business students are doing the same stuff using ChatGPT.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#17

Post by stv_123 »

dtnewman wrote: post #14

> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used. I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem. Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous…

Yeah, the concept of "productive struggle" is important to the education process and having a way to short circuit it seems like it leads to worse learning outcomes.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#19

Post by amiantos »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #3

AI bubble seems close to collapsing. God knows how many billions have been invested and we still don't have an actual use case for AI which is good for humanity.

Your statement appears to be composed almost entirely of vague and ambiguous statements.

"AI bubble seems close to collapsing" in response to an article about AI being used as a study aid. Does not seem relevant to the actual content of the post at all, and you do not provide any proof or explanation for this statement.

"God knows how many billions have been invested", I am pretty sure it's actually not that difficult to figure out how much investor money has been poured into AI, and this still seems totally irrelevant to a blog post about AI being used as a study aid. Humans 'pour' billions of dollars into all sorts of things, some of which don't work out. What's the suggestion here, that all the money was wasted? Do you have evidence of that?

"We still don't have an actual use case for AI which is good for humanity"... What? We have a lot of use cases for AI, some of which are good for humanity. Like, perhaps, as a study aid.

Are you just typing random sentences into the HN comment box every time you are triggered by the mention of AI? Your post is nonsense.

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