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Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
41–50 of 828 posts
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#42The 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…
If the removal of standardized testing in 2021 was the real reason, then why is there a sudden spike of failure rates happening right now?
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#43The 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…
If the removal of standardized testing in 2021 was the real reason, then why is there a sudden spike of failure rates happening right now?
It takes time for students to work their way through the system.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As an educator, this is exactly what I struggle with. I'm pulling out all the stops to give students every chance to do the hard work and not lean on AI. But there's a good chunk of the class who don't listen to reason. I haven't figured it out yet. They know, logically, they can't pass an interview, but that's apparently a "tomorrow" problem.
The smart ones either use it not at all, or use it to positive effect, like you're saying.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#45I 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…
Do any of said PhDs gain anything positive from LLM usage? Or does it only lead to declining thinking skills in your view?
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#46Sorry, 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…
I try to lecture as little as possible. No slides. Quick highlights discussion of the reading, maybe a coding demo, and then students work on coding challenges in class, in groups if they want. I circulate and help out. I'm lucky to have small class sizes at this university. I couldn't pull it off in a class of 300.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#47> 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.
In my uni, rates of honor code violations in introductory CS classes were high even before AI. I was a section-leader for the CS106 series at Stanford, and the honor code violations were common. In 2015, ~20% of one intro class was suspected of an honor code violation [1]. Often, the CS department comprised the majority of honor code violations in a given quarter.
There are several reasons for this:
1. Cheating in CS is easier to detect. MOSS [2] (authored by CS professor Alex Aiken) is a very effective tool at detecting plagiarism in coding assignments. Personally I witnessed more honor-code violations in math problem sets, but there was no feasible way for professors to detect this.
2. Problems in programming assignments are (usually) very tangibly wrong. I can bullshit my way through an essay with shoddy research, I can hand-wave a proof that is definitely wrong but will probably garner at least some points. But when your program is crashing or not compiling, and the due date is approaching, it produces a very immediate and undeniable sense of failure and pressure to cheat. The thing is, many students would get a decent chunk of credit even for failing code, but this is not immediately obvious.
3. The ability to cheat is more available. Math problem sets tend to change quarter by quarter. It's basically impossible to cheat on a prose essay short of straight up paying someone to write it for you, or fabricating sources. But for CS classes, especially at prominent universities, there are plenty of solutions online. Much of it is people who aren't event at Stanford implementing the assignments for fun or self-learning, and sharing it with their peers. Which, to be clear, isn't unethical or bad - it's the responsibility of Stanford students to refrain from looking at those solutions. But nonetheless, it's a contributing factor.
1. https://stanforddaily.com/2015/03/29/increase-in-cs-106-hono...
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#48AI has a way of exposing people. In this example, students who are there to get a degree from a prestigious institution, rather than to learn, are prone to take perceived shortcuts and proceed to come unstuck when their AI isn't there to do their work for them, such as in an exam.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody know how many students take CS 10 in a typical spring semester?
Or how many are normally caught cheating? Did they use AI to detect AI using cheaters?
When I was a section leader (not at Berkeley, though) we used MOSS: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/
It's not AI, its a deterministic program that analyzes compiled code for similarity.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#50I 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…
> Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own
Sorry, but I highly doubt that. Has a very "old man yells at clouds" vibe.