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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

#241
CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang" - ask for clarifications until they follow unintended paths that lead nowhere.

To fellow professors, when you're suspicious my suggestion is to appeal to their honesty (like "let's be honest, how much of this code is yours, and how much is ChatGPT's?") and offer some empathy and understanding (like understanding they may had multiple deadlines in the same week, etc.). Nevertheless, don't miss the chance to give them the lesson on how is the correct way of doing things. The way to catch these students is to find the same signs of yesteryear copying from other students (which in essence is what copying from an LLM is, although the number has increased because they found us professors unprepared for the volume).

The other two groups also used LLM but in a high-level and architectural way. They were clearly responsible for the code (even if they didn't wrote it 100% manually) and could explain their reasoning and strategies used to solve the problems.

Me and my colleagues still have a lot of projects to review, and I asked them to keep the score of the number of projects like these, but so far, the score is 1 in 3 (33%).

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

#242

A famous MIT professor did a sabatical at our AI lab. He said it was "a joy to teach here, as you can rely on students being proficient in basic math as opposed to the US where you have to teach those explicitly or lose the class completely". That was in the 1980s. My first math exam as a CS undergraduate, 123 out of 129 students failed. The math department professors refused to dumb down their classes for CS student…

Can I ask, just out of curiosity, where the AI lab was?

[deleted]

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

#243
post #237

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 totally agree about school-level homework: it was many years before my pre-frontal cortex developed enough that I could have forced myself to do the work. That said, though, one thing I don't understand about the heavy users of AI in academia and software development is that the thinking and coding is the fun part . And that's the part so many people seem to be so keen to automate away.

Isn't the fun part having the thing work how you wanted it to? Why shouldn't I be keen to automate the process away?

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

#244
post #2

What a terribly ambiguous title. "Failing grades soar after xyz" makes it sound like xyz has helped what were previously terrible, failing grades become good ones.

No matter how many times I read it, I can't interpret it the way you're suggesting. "x soars after y" always reads as "x increases a lot because of y". I don't really get what you're saying.

Are you maybe saying that "soars" might mean "get better", so "failing grades soar" might mean there are actually less failing grades? That's not how I've ever understood that word.

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

#245
post #238

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…

As much as I hate to admit it, using agents for too long makes me less able to think for myself. I am dedicating 30 mins to 1 hour everyday writing and thinking without LLMs.

Shouldn't it be the opposite? 1h max LLM per day?

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

#246
post #74

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.

LLMs are making me smarter. I have more code to read!

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

#247
post #238

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…

As much as I hate to admit it, using agents for too long makes me less able to think for myself. I am dedicating 30 mins to 1 hour everyday writing and thinking without LLMs.

> I am dedicating 30 mins to 1 hour everyday writing and thinking without LLMs.

Before you did this, was literally every hour of your waking time spend thinking about LLMs?

I don't think I could do that even if I tried, and I spend all my development hours with agents, but during meals, showers, walking the dogs, enjoying a coffee outside or whatever, naturally I get time to think about other stuff, sounds out of the ordinary (to me at least) to have to dedicate 1 hour to not think about something. Reminds me of when I was addicted to amphetamines way back when.

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

#248

CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang"…

> The other two groups also used LLM but in a high-level and architectural way.

Sounds more like the score is 3/3 (100%)

Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project? If not, why is using LLM generated code different?

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

#249

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…

At this rate humans will become avatars remotely controlled by LLMs. Ironic conclusion of the consciousness debate.

Yes, ask AI to produce a plan for me to do x like design an travel itinerary. It creates the plan and I execute it.

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

#250
post #74

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.

>even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.

The same weight feeling heavier is a sign that your muscles are weaker :)

There's many areas in life were we look back a few decades and think "people use to do it that awkwardly?" And yet results were better. I think the process of removing friction have just served to destroy our ability to concentrate and tolerate difficulty.

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