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Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

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Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#31
post #23

> Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the center for student conduct,” Garcia said. According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were caught cheating on take-home exams in spring 2026.

Anybody know how many students take CS 10 in a typical spring semester?

I believe it’s still a single section, so probably around 250 (at least that’s about what it was when I was there a long time ago). Compared to the 1000+ who take 61A.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#32
Sorry, but I don't think AI is entirely to blame here. When I graduated from a CS program at a top-10 school, I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone. Like in the movie Good Will Hunting, you could have learned nearly all of it and more by borrowing those books for free from the library. Or, just opening a complex OSS project and learning to contribute.

And quite honestly. It shows in the CS grad population too. A lot of us are condescending toward anything that doesn't make sense to us. But, I digress.

The best engineers I've worked with are all non traditional backgrounds, non degree or degree holders from non elite schools. They think differently, they tinker, they are incredibly nice and patient, and do it for the love of connecting humans to technology.

Look up the names mentioned in the article. Garcia, Ranade, Nelson. All of them are involved with highly theoretical mathematics and scientific computing. Just because you're good at 1 thing does not mean you are qualified to teach. And none of these professors are trained or taught or graded or performance managed on how they teach. For most of them, its just required that they spend 10% of their time in the classroom lecturing.

Let's be honest about another thing. 99% of EECS graduates, even from elite schools, are wrangling objects and their relationships to a graph. Simply put, we're all just a bunch of glorified JSON massage therapists. It just so happens that we get paid well for it, and we hold that over people. The same happens in the classroom.

I think in order to facilitate a healthy, educational environment for young adults, we as adults must encourage, motivate and make that environment fun and practical. We force feed binary trees and the compiler AST's, but we need to make it fun. It's like the commonly accepted saying: Schools kill creativity :(.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#33

Sorry, but I don't think AI is entirely to blame here. When I graduated from a CS program at a top-10 school, I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone. Like in the movie Good Will Hunting, you could have learned nearly all of it and more by borrowi…

> According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F’s did not exceed 10% for either class.

I don't think instruction would've changed drastically in the last year though.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#34

Sorry, but I don't think AI is entirely to blame here. When I graduated from a CS program at a top-10 school, I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone. Like in the movie Good Will Hunting, you could have learned nearly all of it and more by borrowi…

> I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone

+10000. The goddamn slides. If I were a student now going to engineering school, I'd basically take the slides and throw them into NotebookLM and get way better lectures. Then I'd ask claude or GPT all my hard questions. Hell, I'd get the PDF version of my textbooks and do the same.

The number of lectures actually worthy of your time was so low.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#35
I have some sympathy for these kids. If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests.

Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without an LLM present doing 90% of the work. Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own, which is a required skill for producing original thought.

For adults the cognitive decline won't be as measurable since there's no exams, and overall output volume will still be fine due to LLM help. But I do believe it's already happening absolutely everywhere around us. Honestly, I wanted to be in denial about it before but it's too obvious to ignore now.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#36
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like the greatest teacher. Plus it’s not toxic like social media. Banning it would be a shame.

Its not teaching. These people cant pass a the class. They never went through the friction needed to learn

It depends how you use it. You can either get it to explain a concept, or do your homework for you. Its a bit like the decision students have to make as to whether to review their material before exams or go out partying.

Overall it just seems like a huge waste of money to piss away the huge tuition cost your parents probably paid.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#37
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like the greatest teacher. Plus it’s not toxic like social media. Banning it would be a shame.

Its not teaching. These people cant pass a the class. They never went through the friction needed to learn

You can use an llm to get out of doing homework but you can also use it to ask every question you would ever wanted in a 1-1 tutoring session. The problem is kids will use it to cheat on their homework. If we can’t deal with that problem then a ban is necessary. But these things can be phenomenal teachers if you use them properly.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#38
In unrelated news

"More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and mathematics applicants, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students."

https://archive.ph/18spS

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#39
The likely 'real' reason is hidden in one paragraph within the article and has nothing to do with the implication of the eye-catching title: "Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. The petition and its accompanying open letter detail similar concerns with students’ mathematical preparation."

Around COVID times many top universities experimented with removing test requirements from admissions, under an argument largely related to equity. It's been a failure everywhere, with many, if not most, universities already reversing it. As Yale put it, "Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT." [1]

That link is for an archive because that page has been removed. That's because they briefly experimented with a new 'test flexible' strategy where they allowed students to submit test scores or not, but then scrapped that altogether and went back to simply requiring test scores.

[1] - https://archive.is/8zxfo

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#40
post #12

At this point I would support a ban on generative AI by anyone under 18, or even perhaps 21 years of age. A bunch of science fiction stories had "first connection to cyberspace" as a coming of age event, maybe those authors were on to something.

It’s like the greatest teacher. Plus it’s not toxic like social media. Banning it would be a shame.

They are great for self-teaching and great to cheat and not learn anything, depending on how you use them.

Main problem is that the technology was very disruptive for education and nobody has figured out yet how to utilize it at scale for schools and universities.

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