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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

#281

Post by eueje »

camelmel wrote: post #104
adi_kurian wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, I can churn out a lot more stuff as can most of my peers. Experiments etc are all way faster to run with coding agents. But I think the overall creativity and originality is a lot lower. I think this is what many people are facing, if you don't use LLMs your short term productivity is worse.

“ But I think the overall creativity and originality is a lot lower.

Therein lies the trade off. Your implicit gamble is that you expect machines to continue to get better in the future. What if they don’t?

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

#282

Post by eueje »

krilcebre wrote: post #200
jerfjlejr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it varies tremendously from one role to the next. I'm a senior software engineer and LLMs, the way I'm using them, improve almost everything I do. I use them to write most of my code now, but first I spent twenty years writing code before LLMs came into existence and second writing code is like 5% of my job. Most of my job is research, investigation, and architecture. I treat LLMs just like a junior engineer.…

You cannot tell me that letting anyone do something for you does not affect the skills that you outsourced, unless you are some sort of a superhuman. As an example, I have been drawing portraits for quite a few years now, and whenever I go on a hiatus and come back after a few months, I can notice my skill not being anywhere close to where it was before I stopped using it. Sure, after 2 or 3 portraits they mostly com…

Yeah he’s living in denial.

His skills are slowly eroding. Given that he spent 20 yrs building it up it won’t happen overnight. But the trade off is happening in real time.

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

#284

Post by curt15 »

adamcharnock wrote: post #112
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've been wondering if there would be a benefit to inverting how we teach subjects now. Previously we would teach from the bottom, and build up. Semi-colon goes here, curly brace goes there, and then build up to architecture, systems, etc. But this doesn't seem to make sense when someone comes to a topic with an LLM in-hand. They need to know high-level techniques, architecture, best practice, etc. As they pursue the…

> As they pursue the topic they start to get down into the details, although probably never learn to do it fully independently.

It's hard to claim one has mastered a subject without independent command of its fundamentals. A less charitable take on this future is that students only learn to hand-wave answers and correspondingly cannot evaluate statements beyond "sounds about right".

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

#285

Post by helsinkiandrew »

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…

> 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.

I agree - I would have been toast. I wonder if the teachers/colleges need to change the way they teach and assess. Let the students use the AI tools they like (perhaps guide them how they can use them professionally), but test regularly and early on the skills/knowledge they're meant to be gaining offline and in person. Oh and don't give Fs for cheating - suspend them.

I read a few years ago about a teacher (I think highschool) who put his lectures on YouTube for students to view in their own time and then used the in class hours for interaction, questions, tests.

EDIT: Claude beat my Googling: This was 2 chemistry high school teachers in 2007 - The Flipped Classroom https://fltmag.com/the-flipped-classroom/

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

#286

Post by frankest »

1. The article itself seems like an LLM summary of a conversation.

2. No US educational institution should ever grade on a curve. Your job is not to compare students but to educate them. Grade curves hide the performance of the educators and process of education in actually improving the skills of students.

3. Both AI and the cognitive and emotional overload from social media taking away brain space may be to blame. Idea: let students report screen time statistics at the beginning of each semester and weekly or at the end. See if and how it correlates with academics.

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

#287

Post by phantom784 »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #285
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…

> 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. I agree - I would have been toast. I wonder if the teachers/colleges need to change the way they teach and assess. Let the students use the AI tools they like (perhaps guide them how they can use them professionally), but test regularly and early on the skills/knowledge they'r…

> I read a few years ago about a teacher (I think highschool) who put his lectures on YouTube for students to view in their own time and then used the in class hours for interaction, questions, tests.

That seems like a smart approach. It reverses the traditional model of "lecture in class, homework outside of class".

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

#288

Post by watwut »

36733883 wrote: post #197
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not American so maybe I am missing some context. But how did admissions work without test scores?

[flagged]

Somehow majority of Ivy League students don't have those sob stories and did not had for last years either?

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

#289

Post by yodsanklai »

yubblegum wrote: post #264
yodsanklai wrote: post #220

AI should be a formidable booster for learning if used properly. I know that some students it to prepare for competitive tests, sometimes with very good results. I've also been using it a lot recently to brush up on my math and physics knowledge from my graduate years. It has helped me clarify and understand a lot of concepts better. That being said, there is no shortcut, and to be good at anything, one has to put in…

> AI should be a formidable booster for learning if used properly. A premature technology, known to be potentially harmful in its current state of development and established guidelines as to its effective use, is pushed by powerful and wealthy elite down the throat of society. These same forces (and their unwitting helpers in the unmoneyed public) also wish to deflect with useless argumentation over "AI good" "AI ba…

> is pushed by powerful and wealthy elite down the throat of society.

Adoption has been exponential. We don't need to be AI to be pushed down the throat. People use it because it works and it's useful to them.

> The debate that we should have had: Is this tech actually mature enough for pervasive use in society.

It's too late for this debate because this tech is already pervasively used, and there's no coming back. It's part of our lives.

What we need to do is understand the risks and adapt, probably regulate, educate. So we can get the best of this tech, and mitigate its risks.

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

#290

Post by throwatdem12311 »

ap99 wrote: post #259
vladgur wrote: post #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://arc…

Who even makes the decision to drop having a standard bar to verify students? And what possible benefit would that have?

Why else does anyone in California get rid of anything? Because it’s racist.
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