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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

#471

Post by conductr »

yonaguska wrote: post #405
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 don't think it's just you or your age, per your pre-internet comment. People that grew up in this just don't understand why they're overwhelmed. And I don't think they're even aware of what their missing out on in terms of focus or mental acuity.

Good point. I do have context and self awareness that it all seems unhealthy. Feels like a common sense evaluation to me but I can’t properly place myself in a younger generations experience.

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

#472

Post by SecretDreams »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #453
SecretDreams wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> And humans have agency in how it's applied, even if it's hard sometimes for us to exercise it.

It needs to come top down from CEOs and governing bodies via regulation if we want improvements. We can't rely on the individual to not use the big red button that says "do this with no effort". We're on course for a WALL-E future if we're lucky or something far less great if we're not.

I appreciate your argument for human agency, but these types of systematic issues can't be solved bottom up.

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

#473

Post by arjie »

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?

The book SAT Wars has arguments for and against and the striking thing for me was that some in admissions believe in a concept called crafting a class: the applicants are input into the admissions officer’s artisanal contribution to producing a class that they believe would be good for the university to have.

The idea of a standard bar and so on does sound like it would interfere with such a process.

I always did find it interesting that US notions of anti-racism required treating individuals not as individuals but as racial representatives. It’s a local quirk of the culture of the land, I suppose, that one’s primary identification here is one’s skin colour.

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

#474

Post by abustamam »

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…

As an aside to this I mute ALL notifications on my phone. I still get notifications of course, but they never ping or vibrate.

For important threads like calls or messages from important people/group chats, I have my watch vibrate.

Otherwise, I just go through my notifications once I have downtime.

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

#475

Post by greenavocado »

Hasz wrote: post #457
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 t…

> 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.

Yes, but eventually the intellectual whack-a-mole gets tiresome unless you get really, really good at simultaneously cornering it and not letting it concede to your point.

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

#476

Post by BobbyTables2 »

MeteorMarc wrote: post #233

Could it be that CS attracts a different population of students in the current genAI era?

My biased view is CS attracts a large “wannabe” group that wants high salaries without learning any hard math or putting forward a lot of serious effort.

Even a lot of CS research journal papers feel more like role play — the same way startups try to pretend to be real companies with executive headshots, flashy offices, and all the other nonsense. (Instead of analytically modeling something to prove an idea, they’ll build a simple simulation and focus on its “Architecture”)

Engineering departments effectively weed out such in the first ground of engineering courses. Looks to me CS has no equivalent.

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

#477

Post by pseudocomposer »

kibwen wrote: post #434
pseudocomposer wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re in a world where LLMs are basically going to be extensions of how we think. An additional thing we use to do a lot of thinking tasks. As a piano player, it’s important to work hands separately. Sometimes your right hand will carry the melody and your left hand the harmony, sometimes vice versa. Sometimes there may be more than just two “voices”/melodies/lines between your two hands. Even as a very good (as in g…

> An additional thing we use to do a lot of thinking tasks. Which is to say, an additional thing you're going to be forced to pay a lifelong tithe to a trillion-dollar company in order to do a lot of thinking tasks.

I’m rather optimistic about the future of smaller open-source models and market competition actually doing its job here, honestly. I myself, again, err on the side of doing things with my own brain. But there are many things LLMs are useful for, and they’re definitely better than a “rubber duck” if you don’t trust them blindly.

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

#478

Post by Jtarii »

le-mark wrote: post #394

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 c…

It will just be similar to physical fitness. Some people go to the gym, the vast majority do not. Humans are wired to take the path of least resistance.

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

#479

Post by jknoepfler »

One thing that bothers me about these conversations: failure is an important signal that what we're doing isn't working as well as we thought it would, not a sign of the apocalypse.

Kids need to understand how to adjust and grow from failure more than they need to always be on the happy-path of straight A's and easy money.

How we respond to failure is how we teach response to failure. Hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and finger-pointing aren't valuable life skills.

Personally it's easy for me to be contemptuous - I opted into an accelerated math program that banned calculators when I was in Junior High. It helped me cultivate an very crisp intuitive/conceptual understanding of basic mathematical concepts that's carried through to today. I think we should do more of that kind of education, but it's expensive and requires amazing educators and a tolerance for student struggle.

Get the machines out, absolutely. But respond to failure compassionately, as part of a natural learning process.

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

#480

Post by alistairSH »

jplusequalt wrote: post #438
phantom784 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

How does this scale in practice? We already require students be at school for 7 hours a day. If they now have to watch 3-4 hours of lectures at home every day, then students are left with little time to do anything else. What about those students who don't have stable home environments? How are they supposed to find multiple hours a day to watch lectures? How does this address the underlying issue of students off loa…

We’re discussing university, right? It’s supposed to be a full-time effort, at least for a normal pace undergrad or any post- graduate program.

For secondary school, I do agree with you - homework load can be problematic for some students. But at the same time, my honors classes all came with hours of homework and I’m not sure I would have been as prepared for uni without it.

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