Live data from Hacker News

AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

github.com

71–80 of 176 posts

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#74

This seems somewhat sensible to me - the genie _is_ out of the bottle, and students absolutely will use AI agents to finish assignments without learning a thing, but there is some value to showing how agents can be used as teaching tools and what healthy use _can_ look like

They're only cheating themselves in a world that increasingly cares about knowledge (market trend of seniors being preferable hires to fresh out of school juniors) and not the piece of paper that "proved" you had such knowledge.

I agree with you that they are cheating themselves. Unfortunately, a bunch of 18-22 year olds also don't tend to have the maturity to realize that fact. I imagine that the university is trying to nudge them to do the courses in a way that helps themselves because they know otherwise the students won't be wise enough to do that.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#75
post #37

This seems somewhat sensible to me - the genie _is_ out of the bottle, and students absolutely will use AI agents to finish assignments without learning a thing, but there is some value to showing how agents can be used as teaching tools and what healthy use _can_ look like

Same issue as with cliffnotes. Easy way out means the easy way will be taken. Unless, you actually design a decent assignment or exam. In person essays or exams, heavily weighted, you are simply screwed if you didn't study the old fashioned way. A couple of my more serious classes were like this: no homework, no projects, entire grade based on 3 exams. That put the fear of whatever diety you subscribe to into you lik…

3 tests was already better than the traditional Spanish university class: 1 exam. which is probably written by the department head, not your teacher, and he isn't in any way interested in a high pass rate. Failing 90% of the class might even be positive for them. At that point classes aren't even important: You purchase the tests from the last 10 years, and then you have a prayer of knowing what the bar might be this year.

Teaching, fairness and measuring student performance might seem like similar goals, but it's just so very easy to make sure you succeed at one while messing up the others.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#76
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same issue as with cliffnotes. Easy way out means the easy way will be taken. Unless, you actually design a decent assignment or exam. In person essays or exams, heavily weighted, you are simply screwed if you didn't study the old fashioned way. A couple of my more serious classes were like this: no homework, no projects, entire grade based on 3 exams. That put the fear of whatever diety you subscribe to into you lik…

The insidious thing here is that students can think they're studying and practicing by chatting with an AI "tutor", which shifts them into a passive observation role that's no better than watching YouTube videos. It turns out that it's much less memorable if you're too "clear and helpful", so nothing helpful sticks for students. A good teacher (tutor, educator, pick a word) challenges students and makes them the righ…

These resources often suck for the college major level anyhow. Youtube and such is all dumbed down usually. Or if it isn't dumbed down, you risk studying beyond the scope of the lecture. Every class I took, the professor would say something like "anything in lecture could end up on the exam." And indeed, every exam was comprised of something that came from the slides, and nothing that didn't come from the slides. Even if there was an assigned textbook, there would be so much skipped over, either subtopics or entire chapters. Emphasis can vary by lecturer for the same class as well. The class might fall behind or run ahead of whatever is outlined on the syllabus; that is more an aspirational goal than a solid plan of what to expect.

The best tutor, as always, is your TA or professor, during office hours that you already pay for in tuition. No one takes advantage though, well the students who were getting As already do just to validate their understanding. The students who really ought to go never go.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#77

As an employer, I want AI to be fully allowed for assignments, and the assignments to be made trickier to compensate. Let's train people to use all the tools available to solve the hardest problems, rather than solving toy problems with a slide rule.

What a ridiculous take. Just because solutions exist in the llm training data, doesn't make these problems 'toy' or 'easy'. The human 'engineering hardness' scale doesn't align with what an llm can and can't do.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#78

As an employer, I want AI to be fully allowed for assignments, and the assignments to be made trickier to compensate. Let's train people to use all the tools available to solve the hardest problems, rather than solving toy problems with a slide rule.

You have to balance that with teaching the skills needed to understand the domain sufficiently to take over when the model gets things wrong.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#79
post #75
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same issue as with cliffnotes. Easy way out means the easy way will be taken. Unless, you actually design a decent assignment or exam. In person essays or exams, heavily weighted, you are simply screwed if you didn't study the old fashioned way. A couple of my more serious classes were like this: no homework, no projects, entire grade based on 3 exams. That put the fear of whatever diety you subscribe to into you lik…

3 tests was already better than the traditional Spanish university class: 1 exam. which is probably written by the department head, not your teacher, and he isn't in any way interested in a high pass rate. Failing 90% of the class might even be positive for them. At that point classes aren't even important: You purchase the tests from the last 10 years, and then you have a prayer of knowing what the bar might be this…

I tested out of all but the last required Spanish class so I probably skipped over some early stuff and avoided the deeper stuff. But at that level I remember we'd do oral exams with the TA 1 on 1 maybe 15 mins in the hallway. I forget the logistics of it all now. I remember making presentations and class participation in spanish being important. I can't remember how the written exams went.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#80
post #10

Hah, I like that these are presented as a CLAUDE.md. (They have the same content duplicated in an AGENTS.md as well - I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.)

> I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.

Surely such a trivial feature could be implemented in seconds using e.g. Claude? It's not about them not "hurrying up".

Post reply on HN