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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

#71

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

>In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA.

As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor devalued if Cal went the direction of e.g. Yale and started handing out 79% A's and A-minuses: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/professors-face-grading-d...

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

#73

Post by dosisking »

adi_kurian wrote: post #45
camelmel wrote: post #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…

Do any of said PhDs gain anything positive from LLM usage? Or does it only lead to declining thinking skills in your view?

It depends on the field, but an Economist with a PhD is a huge red flag and anything they say should be ignored.

Other fields may be different. YMMV

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

#74

Post by qsort »

camelmel wrote: post #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…

I'm dumb as a rock and I don't have a PhD, but since ~1 year ago I started forcing myself to do small bits of coding and math manually.

I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se, but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.

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

#75

Post by sandeepkd »

cootsnuck wrote: post #62
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're incredibly more productive. LLMs are amplifiers, so where they'd have branched and tried out N things, they can easily try 5N pathways of RnD. LLMs are extending the frontiers of science fast -- math -> phy -> chem -> bio in that order.

I'm hearing different from PhDs. The bottleneck with much research isn't "trying out ideas" so much as it's all the bureaucratic minutiae, grants, mentoring PhD candidates, collaboration with other researchers, etc. I've heard LLMs can be helpful in limited targeted ways. But not as some kind of "game changing" accelerant.

Understanding in what ways it can be useful and in what ways it can be counterproductive in long run requires a certain degree of experience itself.

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

#76

Post by threatripper »

camelmel wrote: post #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…

I'd argue that this is an adjustment period that society has to go through. The way we are using electronic devices today, in some years it will probably be looked at like smoking cigarettes. And I'd argue that a lot of the "decline" is due to a shift of skills away from things that mattered more in the past toward other things that are not measured/perceived by the older generation.

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

#77

Post by HanayamaTriplet »

lelanthran wrote: post #52
HanayamaTriplet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's always a lag between cause and effect in education. Works the other way too - if you introduce something positive in grade 1, you'll only see the results a few years later.

If it's a lagging effect, then why is the year-over-year spike in failure rates happening not just in 1st/2nd year classes, but also in a 3rd/4th year class at the same time?

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

#78

Post by sndgndgndgndy »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #71

>In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA. As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor deval…

Unpopular opinion: turning public universities into an academic hunger games is diametrically opposed to their purpose for existing, which is to create an educated populace. Intentionally lowering the quality of instruction, as well as deliberately trying to trip students up on exams, is not improving educational outcomes for anyone. People who complain about "grade inflation" have completely lost sight of why public education exists in the first place.

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

#79

Post by toast0 »

Animats wrote: post #59
thraway3837 wrote: post #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 borrowi…

I really wonder if it's important to learn all that low-level stuff at this point. Most programmers today will never write a binary tree or a hash table. Modern high-performance ones are generic components you get from libraries. Even MIT gave up on teaching from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I got all that stuff. I've wired up a 4-bit adder on a solderless breadboard for an architecture class. I…

IMHO, I think it's good to have some exposure to low-level stuff. There's a good amount of work you can't do without understanding the low-level stuff, but there's more work you can't do well without having at least an idea of the low-level stuff.

Start the kids off with high level stuff, but make them do some embedded systems on their way through. At least for an engineering degree. Also, do a bit of lower level communications somewhere in there; expose them to tcpdump/ wireshark, but they need not develop expertise.

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

#80

Post by contubernio »

Professors suddenly realized everyone was cheating and started paying attention, but the cheating isn't new ... A lot of faculty are happy when their students get good grades because they interpret it as I'm such a good teacher instead of I should pay more attention to how they cheat. AI woke some of them up to reality.
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