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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

#391

Post by loneboat »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #244
loneboat wrote: 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.

Imagine an elementary school teacher told you that many of her students had failing grades, so she had implemented a new reading curriculum.

If she told you that afterwards the failing grades had "soared", it could easily be read either way:

- The (previously failing) grades had increased, so the program must be working very well.

- The percent of grades that count as failing had increased, so the program must actually be terrible.

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

#393

Post by ItsBob »

They worry me. A lot.

My son is 15 and I use Google Family Link to control what he does on his phone: it's pretty open for the most part (I receive notifications of installs) but Gemini is a hard-ban.

We've spoken at length of the dangers.

He says his pals use LLMs frequently and I suspect that's the reason for their test scores: some of them are in the 20% - 40% range for tests whereas my son is 80%+ because he studies past-papers and answers questions in his revision.

I worry for the future coz you can be sure that the AI providers don't care if a schoolchild is using their LLM to answer the homework questions.

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

#394

Post by le-mark »

Perhaps the future will belong to those who learn to use llms to enhance their capabilities. Neil Stephenson Diamond Age was an interesting take on this very same topic [1].

So the Claude web app has this “learn” option that turns the session into a Socratic dialog of sorts. One could easily imagine enforcing this on an age based or parental controls set up. Maybe it can be prompted around but at the very least the concept could be a path forward.

As others have said there is a way to use llms to increase learning, but autodidacts will always autodidact.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

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

#395

Post by plewd »

kopirgan wrote: post #371

Long long back, when I was a kid even ball pens were banned because they screwed up handwriting. Just the same things in different ways.

Is that really a fair comparison though? Were there any stats showing that ball pens directly impacted metrics like grades?

I understand that it's harder to see things without the benefit of hindsight, but we must agree that AI's impact on students (or society, to be even more vague) has a much larger scope.

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

#396

Post by jjice »

phantom784 wrote: post #287
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

My Cryptography professor did this during COVID, since the classes were split in person. It was an interesting model. I'm not sure if I loved it or not, but it was at least a change of pace. Getting 100% of the class time to ask questions was really nice, but it ended up with him re-teaching most of the online lecture in class because some quarter to half the class just didn't watch the lectures.

If done more stringently (if you didn't watch the lecture, I'm not reteaching it), it maybe would've had a bigger impact, but I'm not sure.

Office hours remained king for serious Q and A for the class.

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

#397

Post by el_io »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #330
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. You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study. Doing the homework and the tests are just the "goalposts" to check for yourself whether you made progress on this. So, as long as you are not under time pressure (which you in…

> You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study. Doing the homework and the tests are just the "goalposts" to check for yourself whether you made progress on this.

There is only one classmate in my class who came to study CSE because they are interested in CSE. And since we all enrolled after AI became somewhat good at everything none of them know how to code. After two years of study I had to explain someone how to swap two number by drawing boxes. This are the things you learn in the first week if you're interested in programming.

My point is very tiny percentage of people study something because they're genuinely interested in that subject.

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

#398

Post by SOTGO »

jvanderbot wrote: post #279

> “I’m a strong, strong opponent of what Harvard is doing to say that only a fraction of students can earn A’s,” Garcia said. “I think you should have clear standards for what an A means, and then give tons of opportunity for people … to get to that A bar without lowering the standard. So everybody who’s curving is hiding that effect. It’s completely hiding that effect, and it’s pretending as if nothing’s wrong, and…

I think curving has its place. One of my math professors explained that in his opinion an effective test should differentiate performance as much as possible. The top students should score very well and the bottom students should score very poorly. If all the scores are clustered near the top (>80% for example) then it's hard to tell who really mastered the material and who just muddled through. Then, once you've sorted the students you can apply an appropriate curve. He did not have pre-defined thresholds, for each exam he would evaluate when he felt like the quality of work changed from an A to an A-, A- to B+ etc. The curves were very fair; he wasn't trying to force some number of As Bs or Fs, but it did increase my stress levels not knowing in advance how well I needed to do on each exam

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

#399

Post by shevy-java »

Folks, we have more and more data now.

Skynet is making mankind dumber - dailycal.org just added yet-another piece to all evidence here. It is a simple but effective strategy; Kyle Reese will stand no chance because prior to that, the other humans were already dumbed down into submission. Skynet version 15.0 will make no more mistakes here.

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

#400

Post by deaton »

As someone who graduated college in 2025, and so saw college both before and after the AI era, it is really frightening how quickly people became dependent on AI. Hell, I myself found myself asking AI questions that I would've researched deeper before. To some extent not expending that time is nice, but I do think its eroding critical thinking skills (my own included), and its getting worse. There are people I know now who basically let AI control their life. It glazes the user, it's almost always available, and to someone who doesn't know better, and it is extremely good at looking like it knows what its talking about, even when its completely wrong (but its right often enough to have some baseline level of trust). If that's not a recipe for addiction I don't know what is.
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