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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

#561

Post by bmurphy1976 »

My daughter was struggling with her Math class back in January. I used Claude to build a tool that allowed me to generate very focused worksheets. The worksheets had problems designed to drill the concepts she was struggling with.

It worked, and it would have been MUCH harder to do this the traditional way.

The tool generates PDFs including an answer key and solution sets that solved the problems using a variety of techniques so I could check her work more easily and we could iterate quickly.

That's powerful. It comes back to how are you using the tool. Are you using it to make things better or to take shortcuts?

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

#562

Post by spwa4 »

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 used "AI" in the 2000's to increase my homework assignments, and to correct them.

As in I wrote code to generate random exercises, with solutions, using many tricks, to get myself hundreds of problems instead of 1 or 2.

Often spent more time on getting these programs right than on the problems. Still did better than the class. Oh and it was AI in the 1980s IBM sense. Ie. it was based around a python version (which I wrote) of a LISP math system based on maple. I even attempted (and largely failed) to rewrite it in C++.

Even attempted to have my homework read to have the computer correct the actual pages, but I never got convnets to reliably read entire lines (yes, I understand, well now, why a convolution would mostly not realize whether 2 pieces of text are on the same line or not and so get very confused if you go deep enough for recognition to work well)

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

#563

Post by thinkingtoilet »

figassis wrote: post #379

It's a strange thing that as humans, we sleepwalk into every crisis, never agreeing on anything, and then when we're there, we also never agree on the causes. When we ge too the point where we can no longer "engineer" or "science" anything we will spend the next decade arguing that the issue was not really AI, or that if it was, it was inevitable and no one (or everyone) was to blame. Rinse, repeat. Yet we're here, t…

We don't all sleep walk into these. Many people shout from the roof tops but the masses are easily manipulated.

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

#564

Post by kenjackson »

colechristensen wrote: post #332
somenameforme wrote: post #39

The likely 'real' reason is hidden in one paragraph within the article and has nothing to do with the implication of the eye-catching title: "Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. The petition and its accompanying open letter detail similar concerns with students…

But do these universities not have math placement exams? Not for admissions but just before you register for your first semester classes, a 30 minute math test should be a straightforward preventative measure. I did a test like this, I assumed they were pretty universal.

They do -- this is often how they've found that students needed additional math coursework before starting the standard curriculum.

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

#565

Post by kenjackson »

usui wrote: post #530
arjie wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

America's vapid fixation with race is ridiculous especially since it uses race as a proxy for social stratum when it could just be addressing class issues directly instead. If only there were some history of forms that parents fill out every year showing their income to the government that is more-or-less vetted to some degree—too bad we don't have such a thing that students could use to prove social stratum! Plus, w…

Unfortunately, the fixation with race in America doesn't start nor stop at college admissions. College admissions is probably the last place where it tilts in the direction of certain minority groups.

I agree that we should just stop using race everywhere and we should crack down on it -- but I think college wouldn't be where my energy would be... actually the military is where I'd start. And oddly it's the place where race based affirmative action is still permitted (military academies - where it benefits minorities) and in its halls (where I've heard that it has a strong white supremacist bent). The reason is because what is happening in colleges is more reactionary -- fix the catalyst and the arguments for the reaction largely go away.

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

#566

Post by failbuffer »

delichon wrote: post #554
jordanb wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Google Translate to not learn French in collage. Fortunately for me it was bad enough I had to carefully review all its outputs, but that still didn't help and I managed to pass two semesters without ever developing even basic language skills. Something radical needs to be done. When I was in high school there were still a lot of "no calculator" restrictions in my math classes that I chaffed at because I hated…

All that's needed is a tight feedback loop between learning and applying those skills ... the thing that Google Translate helped you evade. AI can be a tool for evading or optimizing that loop, like a knife can cut your sandwich or your throat. Your choice.

It's the "your choice" that's the problem. The quality of a society is dominated by the choices that other people make.

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

#567

Post by Theodores »

keeda wrote: post #545
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…

> Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own Plummeting attention spans has been a trend for much, much longer than LLMs and is more the result of constant digital interruptions and these days overwhelmingly social media and doomscrolling: https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/att... The effects on children have gotten most of the, err, attention, but the…

In 2002 I spoke with a lecturer in the humanities and he told me about how nobody was learning French at university level (in the UK). My own course had been cancelled due to the cost of teaching it, and the era of 'easy degrees' had set in during the early 90s.

Before that, I also noticed the decline in newspaper readership in the 80s.

It is easy to blame this general decline on the latest tech (or moral panic), whether that be LLMs or even the existence of the internet, however, the trend in dumbing down has been going on for decades.

In the context of a declining empire and financialised economies, this makes a lot of sense.

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

#568

Post by kenjackson »

lokar wrote: post #540
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #71

>In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA. As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor deval…

I read the subreddit for the UC I went to. When acceptance letters went out this year there were (as you expect) a ton of questions from accepted students. About 1/3 to 1/2 included questions about how bad "grad deflation" was, asking for comparisons to other campuses.

Unfortunately grade deflation has little positive impact for the students. Medical and law schools often (typically) don't take grade inflation/deflation from a school into account. And almost no scholarships take this into account. If you do have professional school aspirations, there's very little benefit to being at a school with grade deflation.

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

#569

Post by kashunstva »

It’s not just students; this affliction is cropping up among established academics. My wife is editor-in-chief of a journal and in some months has rejected 100% of the letters to the editor including 6 that came in from a single author because all scored 1.0 certainty of complete LLM fabrication. The author in question is no student. It’s a little more difficult to fabricate an entire original paper this way, I suppose.

It will have taken us less than 1000 years to go from scarcity of the printed word to the over-abundance, and finally to the uselessness of it.

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

#570

Post by lokar »

kenjackson wrote: post #568
lokar wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the subreddit for the UC I went to. When acceptance letters went out this year there were (as you expect) a ton of questions from accepted students. About 1/3 to 1/2 included questions about how bad "grad deflation" was, asking for comparisons to other campuses.

Unfortunately grade deflation has little positive impact for the students. Medical and law schools often (typically) don't take grade inflation/deflation from a school into account. And almost no scholarships take this into account. If you do have professional school aspirations, there's very little benefit to being at a school with grade deflation.

Probably, until it happens everywhere.

My main point was that, at least in their perception, this is something happening at many/most UC campuses

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