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How University Students Use Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#81

Post by karpour »

hervature wrote: post #68
karpour wrote: post #21

My take: While AI tools can help with learning, the vast majority of students use it to avoid learning

This has been observation about the internet. Growing up in a small town without access to advanced classes, having access to Wikipedia felt like the greatest equalizer in the world. 20 years post internet, seeing the most common outcome be that people learn less as a result of unlimited access to information would be depressing if it did not result in my own personal gain.

I would say a big difference of the Internet around 2000 and the internet now is that most people shared information in good faith back then, which is not the case anymore. Maybe back then people were just as uncritical of information, but now we really see the impact of people being not critical.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#82

Post by ryandrake »

dyauspitr wrote: post #66
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…

I’m pretty sure you can assume close to 100% of students are using LLMs to do their homework.

And if you're that one person out of 100,000 who is not using LLMs to do their homework, you are at a significant disadvantage on the grading curve.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#83

Post by zebomon »

The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense.

The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking.

You'll soon notice the downsides of not-thinking (at scale!) if you have a generation of students who weren't taught to exercise their thinking by writing.

I hope that more people come around to this way of seeing things. It seems like a problem that will be much easier to mitigate than to fix after the fact.

A little self-promo: I'm building a tool to help students and writers create proof that they have written something the good ol fashioned way. Check it out at https://itypedmypaper.com and let me know what you think!

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#84

Post by technoabsurdist »

I'm an undergrad at a T10 college. Walking through our library, I often notice about 30% of students have ChatGPT or Claude open on their screens.

In my circle, I can't name a single person who doesn't heavily use these tools for assignments.

What's fascinating, though, is that the most cracked CS students I know deliberately avoid using these tools for programming work. They understand the value in the struggle of solving technical problems themselves. Another interesting effect: many of these same students admit they now have more time for programming and learning they “care about” because they've automated their humanities, social sciences, and other major requirements using LLMs. They don't care enough about those non-major courses to worry about the learning they're sacrificing.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#85

Post by proteal »

I’m about to graduate from a top business school with my MBA and it’s been wild seeing AI evolve over the last 2 years.

GPT3 was pretty ass - yet some students would look you dead in the eyes with that slop and claim it as their own. Fast forward to last year when I complimented a student on his writing and he had to stop me - “bro this is all just AI.”

I’ve used AI to help build out frameworks for essays and suggest possible topics and it’s been quite helpful. I prefer to do the writing myself because the AIs tend to take very bland positions. The AIs are also great at helping me flesh out my writing. I ask “does this make sense” and it tells me patiently where my writing falls off the wagon.

AI is a game changer in a big way. Total paradigm shift. It can now take you 90% of the way with 10% of the effort. Whether this is good or bad is beyond my pay grade. What I can say is that if you are not leveraging AI, you will fall behind those that are.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#86

Post by moojacob »

How can I, as a student, avoid hindering my learning with language models?

I use Claude, a lot. I’ll upload the slides and ask questions. I’ve talked to Claude for hours trying to break down a problem. I think I’m learning more. But what I think might not be what’s happening.

In one of my machine learning classes, cheating is a huge issue. People are using LMs to answer multiple choice questions on quizzes that are on the computer. The professors somehow found out students would close their laptops without submitting, go out into the hallway, and use a LM on their phone to answer the questions. I’ve been doing worse in the class and chalked it up to it being grad level, but now I think it’s the cheating.

I would never do cheat like that, but when I’m stuck and use Claude for a hint on the HW am I loosing neurons? The other day I used Claude to check my work on a graded HW question (breaking down a binary packet) and it caught an error. I did it on my own before and developed some intuition but would I have learned more if I submitted that and felt the pain of losing points?

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#87

Post by defgeneric »

After reading the whole article I still came away with the suspicion that this is a PR piece that is designed to head-off strict controls on LLM usage in education. There is a fundamental problem here beyond cheating (which is mentioned, to their credit, albeit little discussed). Some academic topics are only learned through sustained, even painful, sessions where attention has to be fully devoted, where the feeling of being "stuck" has to be endured, and where the brain is given space and time to do the real work of synthesizing, abstracting, and learning, or, in short, thinking. The prompt-chains where students are asking "show your work" and "explain" can be interpreted as the kind of back-and-forth that you'd hear between a student and a teacher, but they could also just be evidence of higher forms of "cheating". If students are not really working through the exercises at the end of each chapter, but instead offloading the task to an LLM, then we're going to have a serious competency issue. Nobody ever actually learns anything.

Even in self-study, where the solutions are at the back of the text, we've probably all had the temptation to give up and just flip to the answer. Anthropic would be more responsible to admit that the solution manual to every text ever made is now instantly and freely available. This has to fundamentally change pedagogy. No discipline is safe, not even those like music where you might think the end performance is the main thing (imagine a promising, even great, performer who cheats themselves in the education process by offloading any difficult work in their music theory class to an AI, coming away learning essentially nothing).

P.S. There is also the issue of grading on a curve in the current "interim" period where this is all new. Assume a lazy professor, or one refusing to adopt any new kind of teaching/grading method: the "honest" students have no incentive to do it the hard way when half the class is going to cheat.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#88

Post by Hasu »

bko wrote: post #59
noitpmeder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an insane take. The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart. The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it. I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.

Maybe 40 years ago there were programmers that would not work with anyone that use IDEs or automated memory management. When presented with a programming task that requires these things and you're WITHOUT your IDE or whatever, they will fall apart. Look, I agree with you, I'm just trying to articulate to someone why they should learn X if they believe an LLM could help them and "an LLM won't always be around" isn't a…

> This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"

People who can't do simple addition and multiplication without a calculator (12*30 or 23 + 49) are absolutely at a disadvantage in many circumstances in real life and I don't see how you could think this isn't true. You can't work as a cashier without this skill. You can't play board games. You can't calculate tips or figure out how much you're about to spend at the grocery store. You could pull out your phone and use a calculator in all these situations, but people don't.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#90

Post by [deleted] »

noitpmeder wrote: post #44
bko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

This is an insane take. The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart. The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it. I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.

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