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The AI zombification of universities

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Re: The AI zombification of universities

#131

Post by llbbdd »

Funes- wrote: post #100
Lerc wrote: post #51

If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost. AI is an easy, but possibly high risk approach to gaining the certification without work, but the tried and tested approach is doing the bare minimum, cramming, then forgetting everything after graduation. If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem…

>If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost It's been a lost battle for decades, then.

All time.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#132

Post by gobdovan »

the_af wrote: post #72
overgard wrote: post #64

I can't help but wonder if the fundamental problem is just that we spent decades pretending that a university degree was some sort of useful job training in the first place. As a professional software developer, I think my computer science degree is not actually all that important. Sure there are some relevant concepts, but they're ones you'd pick up on the job anyway. I don't regret getting my degree (back in 2009),…

For Computer Science in particular: it's not supposed to be job training. CS is an education closer to math or science (in fact, at my university it belongs to the department of hard sciences and math). If you like that (and I sure did!) it'll be worth your time. If you're just looking for job training, you're looking in the wrong place. My university CS program didn't even teach programming in any of the major class…

What program was this? It sounds much closer to what I wish my CS degree had been. In my CS program, the courses I actually enjoyed were the math-heavy, but always optional, like computability/decidability/complexity, cryptography, etc.

The mandatory "practical" courses were often much worse. For example, I studied relational algebra on my own, plus a few chapters from Kleppmann's Data-Intensive Applications book, and it was painful to realise how shallow it made the mandatory database course look.

I agree that CS should not be mere job training. I think many CS programs are neither rigorous enough to feel like math/science and prepare you for proper academic work, nor practical enough to be good vocational training. They sit in a bad middle ground, where academics teach industry-lite.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#133

Post by nradov »

jnovek wrote: post #18
0xkvyb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but how would you do that? what about homework and coursework? students will just transcribe claude slop on paper and submit that.

Requiring them to write it in longhand at least removes the instant gratification. I think that will work for some students.

Oh how I hated having to write in longhand throughout my schooling. It was always so slow and painful no matter what I tried in terms of pens or techniques. Typing is much faster and more fluent. In the real world no one writes longhand any more: it's all keyboards, swiping, and dictation.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#134

Post by llbbdd »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #124
sheept wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For US undergrad, with all the resources available online, going to university just for education doesn't justify the high tuition. Research is mostly limited to graduate school anyways.

The course material isn’t really what your undergrad tuition pays for. You’re paying to be surrounded by smart kids that will ensmarten you too and for access to the school’s career networks.

Abbreviated:

- Surrounded by other kids who have access to the same internet you do

- Access to the school's career networks (LinkedIn)

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#135

Post by [deleted] »

cjs_ac wrote: post #68

> There is an extreme idealist view of education that might see the threat of AI as good precisely because it could transform those kids — the former connoisseurs of SparkNotes and Mathway, the ones snickering in lectures and inking formulas onto their palms before exams before the rise of generative AI — into zombies lurching and stumbling their way into the “permanent underclass” (as the tech bros say), leaving the…

[deleted]

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#137

Post by materielle »

taude wrote: post #57
drmanhat wrote: post #46

Oddly enough my reaction to this is that it's a broader societal problem as opposed to an A.I. problem. Why shouldn't universities switch to examinations where no technology (apart from say calculators) are allowed; and this is strictly enforced? This was certainly the norm when I went to university. I agree that A.I. trivializes (or changes how you approach) a lot of take home work; but people who wanted to cheat co…

i always found it funny when people complaied about white board coding tests. Back in school, I had to write C code in those little blue books. :) EDIT: I meant writing in blue books before this era of copying words out of the claude app on your phone

As recently as 2015 when I attended a middling CS program, we had in-person timed exams where we had to write down DSA implementations on a blank sheet of paper in Java.

We were deducted points for trivial syntax mistakes.

If these stories I keep hearing are true, then university programs have really taken a nose dive recently. This isn’t a “back in my day” thing, but within the past 5 years.

The pace of the purported decline makes me question if some of these stories are sensationalist. But I don’t know, I keep hearing about them.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#138

Post by Loughla »

john_strinlai wrote: post #103
Funes- wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost It's been a lost battle for decades, then.

indeed. a certification is required for ~every non-manual-labor job. even if not listed as a requirement, you're almost certainly competing against people with degrees. so, the primary function of going to school is to get a job, not for self enrichment.

Manual labor jobs require certifications in today's world as well.

It's a shit show everywhere.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#139

Post by pvillano »

I'm a big fan of the fact that the following quoted sentence has 25 words before the verb. An LLM would never. I probably wouldn't.

> Whatever your conception of the modern university, whether grand or grim, understanding the current landscape of campus-wide AI use, much less its intensification, should destroy it.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#140

Post by AlexCoventry »

technothrasher wrote: post #83
paulorlando wrote: post #42

Profs can push back on this if they want. Not all of them want to (or want to justify pushback given their pay). For me when I teach, no laptops or phones in class along with in-class handwritten paper quizzes on course readings and concepts has helped a lot.

Clearly not all of them want to do so. My son just finished up his freshman year at college. A couple months ago he called me and told me about an interaction he had with his English composition professor. She asked the class how they were integrating AI into their writing process. When she got to him, he said he didn't use AI, as he wanted to use the assignments to learn to write better. Her response was, "Well, you…

Sounds like bitterness and resignation, to me.
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