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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

#451

Post by rob_c »

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…

No, that's the quality of candidates. I wish I was joking as a PhD holder for only 15yr.

A lot of skill of is getting bled into the private sector because getting the PhD in a lot of regions doesn't mean the step up it used to. A lot of that comes from awarding them to layabouts doing "a gender critical analysis of ...".

Industry doesn't how/what/why they just wanted the 3 letters as a performance barrier to hire competants.

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

#452

Post by tialaramex »

gcanyon wrote: post #316

It's incredibly difficult at this point to "skate where the puck is going" as Gretzky is said to have done. No one knows what knowledge work will look like in five years. People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point. That said, assessments of poor critical thinking skills jump out at me more than the rest. That sort of thing seems likel…

> People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point

Do you have evidence that it ever was part of being a competent mathematician? AIUI the trope of mathematicians who can't even do arithmetic was common already before the pocket calculator was introduced last century.

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

#453

Post by cmrdporcupine »

SecretDreams wrote: post #413
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If used correctly though I think the models in fact can be useful for gaining depth. With the right prompting they can actually perform a pedagogic role. One must just resist the temptation to have them do the work for you. I've used my phone taking pictures + Codex + a PDF of my tractor manual to help me effectively diagnose and manage repairs in my tractor. (Though these models remain terrible at the physical world…

> One must just resist the temptation to have them do the work for you. We are in the instant gratification era of humanity where a dopamine rush drives most people. This is a systematic shift that happened through the introduction of smart phones and social media and then progressed for a good decade to what we have in front of us today. Asking people to "resist the urge" when they've been programmed/brought up to f…

I'm no saint. For coding projects I am absolutely in the same boat as everyone else.

My other examples have to do with current limitations of the tools. Obviously there's no Claude Code for Meatspace that just takes over and does things for you. (Yet)

What I'm trying to point out is that the tooling has been made this way on purpose and I agree substantially with your point. But I also think human agency is involved. Dario & Boris et al didn't have to write CC the way they did. They chose to play with and push a concept which reduced human agency -- in part because Dario concretely believes it's just "inevitable" that we should be put of of work. And his investors no doubt love this concept too.

And just like Facebook / Instagram etc. it turns out it's an addictive flow.

It remains the case there are other ways of applying LLMs and generative coding models. This modality is not intrinsic to the technology. It's being deployed this way. And humans have agency in how it's applied, even if it's hard sometimes for us to exercise it.

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

#454

Post by conductr »

everforward wrote: post #445
conductr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been severely diminished within only 5-10 years. Just simple arithmetic and percentages that I could rapidly do in my head became dependent on calculators/spreadsheets. For all other trivia type knowledge, my brain has offloaded it to the internet RAM in my pocket…

I think some people are okay with communication that’s less involved. Like meme-y BSing where everyone involved knows everyone else is putting like 12% of their thinking power into sending a response. I don’t really enjoy that, so I find having that many threads stressful and annoying. I just take a hard line and will unilaterally downgrade communications (while politely letting the other party know). I have all my f…

Agree. I mute every group chat and notifications for almost everything. Same reasoning. My wife just talks to me when something reaches a point of me needing to know. Broader holiday planning or group travel planning chatter, it seems like any family gathering requires a minimum of 1000 messages.

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

#455

Post by HWR_14 »

conductr wrote: post #140
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 not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been severely diminished within only 5-10 years. Just simple arithmetic and percentages that I could rapidly do in my head became dependent on calculators/spreadsheets. For all other trivia type knowledge, my brain has offloaded it to the internet RAM in my pocket…

There is a massive difference between remembering how to do something and learning how to do it.

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

#456

Post by rckt »

afavour wrote: post #377
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…

> For adults the cognitive decline won't be as measurable since there's no exams, and overall output volume will still be fine due to LLM help The leading indicator for me is the amount of emails and, god forbid, more personal messages (like birthday wishes!) I see that are obviously AI generated. It just keeps on rising. If you’re not able to dash off a quick message without the help of AI I have to assume you’re us…

> They’re going to land an in person interview

Not necessarily. It can be either an AI interview or a record that will be analysed by AI later. So there’s a chance to cheat here as well.

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

#457

Post by Hasz »

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…

Counterpoint, I think this is true for some archetypes of people, but certainly not everyone. I personally use it like the socratic method. I am an intermediate user, I spend a ton of time with LLMs at work and personally, both prompting and letting some crappy agents try to automate boring work. I primarily use Gemini and ChatGPT models, along with some Chinese smaller weight models (eg qwen) locally.

If you treat the model like an excellent bluffer, it has never been more fun to challenge a model. To me, there is something deeply intellectually satisfying about "proving" it incorrect, and I like being deeply critical of what the model spits back out. I find that refinement process (with the constant sycophancy turned down in the system prompt) creates a really good loop of critical evaluation that would be hard to get in anywhere else. You can treat it just like the Socratic method, but instead of a benevolent teacher, you get a probabilistic bullshit artist. Lots of fun, highly recommend.

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

#460

Post by kopirgan »

plewd wrote: post #395
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.

I'm frankly not sure in both cases, just commenting on how over the ages things change but remain the same. If the broader concern about AI blunting thoughts, introduce laziness etc is true, so are things like calculators, although I agree on much smaller scale.

I do share some of the concerns, though I don't have kids of school going age.

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