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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
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For sorting out >= B/3.0 grades, a curb can work since you are getting evaluated against your peers to see he is standing out vs just doing acceptable. I'm still not getting it. For a standard course, the criteria for what is "good" vs "great" should be pretty clear, and it should be independent of your peers. You have a syllabus, and a set of abilities for each grade level. If you hit those targets, you get the gr…
> For a standard course, the criteria for what is "good" vs "great" should be pretty clear, and it should be independent of your peers. Do you think upper division college classes are somehow like high school classes with well developed curriculum and teaching professors who teach the same thing every quarter? Now you expect the professor to not only come up with new test material, but also extensively calibrate it b…
> Do you think upper division college classes are somehow like high school classes with well developed curriculum and teaching professors who teach the same thing every quarter?
I repeatedly said "standard course", which implies it is a commonly taught course (be it upper or lower division). In my undergrad, Analysis I, II and Abstract Algebra I, II were upper division courses. In the engineering departments, stuff like Electromagnetics I, II were upper division.
Anything that is not an elective (and even some popular electives) were standard courses.
Now I'll grant that in CS, some material like machine learning changes rapidly. But in most engineering, very little in the undergrad material changes. Even my semiconductor courses in undergrad haven't changed much in decades.
So yes - for most of those classes (and that means the vast majority of undergrad engineering) classes, the curriculum is relatively standard.
> Now you expect the professor to not only come up with new test material, but also extensively calibrate it before students take it, maybe for a 15-hour per week class (3 hours of teaching + 12 hours of studying), with maybe 15 students?
First: In my very average undergrad university, professors were always careful not to reuse old homeworks/exams. It wasn't a huge burden. Professors who don't do this (e.g. most professors in top universities) signal very clearly their lack of interest in pedagogy.
Second: You want to do a curve on And as I already said, for a lot of electives where the material isn't standardized, professors lean towards lenient grading. They offer those classes because they want people to take it, and grading via a curve discourages it.
> since you mentioned an Intro to Analysis course
That was an upper division course. Yes, I know some universities have it as a lower division, but many (most in the US?) treat it as upper division.
> BUT these are also usually weed out classes, with the idea that they only have N spots for students to proceed on to the upper division course, so curving serves an actual purpose that is aligned with the intended result.
It was not a weed out course. Neither my undergrad nor grad math departments had weed out classes. I saw that concept only in the engineering departments. My EE department had only Circuits I, Circuits II and digital logic as "lower division". Circuits II was the weed out course, and you were not allowed to take anything else (e.g. E&M, Electronics, etc) unless you got a B or higher.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#623Earlier 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.
The university I went to basically eliminated "B"s for pre-med and pre-law students, which made most courses effectively pass-fail: If you get an A, you move on, if you get a "C", you're encouraged to find a different career path. IMO, it's a reasonable response to an unreasonable system.
Likewise, they had a system where disciplinary records could be appealed at any time while you were at school, but they only held evidence for a year. So if you get caught drinking underage as a Sophomore, you could appeal as a Senior, argue that since there's no evidence that you committed the act it should be removed from your record, and win. Like the obfuscated pass-fail system, this was basically only for the students trying to get into Med/Law school, and IMO was a kind of underhanded way to working around an unreasonable standard.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
They would also likely get that skill back faster than a brand new golfer. I noticed it myself with cycling. Took 8 years off the bike, when I started up again I was nearly back to my old FTP in about 2 months despite starting from basically zero. Muscle memory is real, where I am now as a returning cyclist would take a pure beginner cyclist at least 4+ months to get to, fitness wise. That said, you do have to work s…
People could also regain some cognitive skill back rather fastr when they worked to regain it. But the issue is, many people just lack the motivation to do so. If you golf or cycle, it's likely a passion or hobby. Most people don't view their cognitive health this way, they view it as work. It's why most people don't read much after their schooling, learning and being smart was only ever an ends to a means (diploma,…
I think part of the problem is also that many people simply work too hard or have too much going on in their lives to have any kind of cognitive energy left for this sort of maintenance work, even when they reason/plan that it is useful. This also seems to be encouraged somehow (by society?), to keep going like a freight train, or maybe it doesn't get discouraged enough (i.e. it doesn't get recognized as a problem).
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#625It'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.
https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/ca...
"It was said that when doing astronomical calculations that required logarithms, which are typically 10 digit numbers in log tables, [C. F. Gauss] would often just recall the logarithms instead of bothering to look them up."
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#626I 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 have some sympathy for these kids.
where do you see kids? This is a university. These are adults. 100% their fault.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unpopular opinion: turning public universities into an academic hunger games is diametrically opposed to their purpose for existing, which is to create an educated populace. Intentionally lowering the quality of instruction, as well as deliberately trying to trip students up on exams, is not improving educational outcomes for anyone. People who complain about "grade inflation" have completely lost sight of why public…
Even more unpopular opinion: universities don't exist to create an educated populace. People don't need universities to learn, they can read textbooks on their own. Universities exist as gatekeepers and credentialing bodies. Their purpose is to certify that a person has studied some topic in depth and is an expert in it. They promote education indirectly, by giving people an incentive to study. A good university is o…
People can read textbooks on their own, but how many actually do? Even among the subset of the population that does have the drive to educate themselves, most will end up focusing on the immediately applicable, or at least immediately engaging.
You see this with Physics all the time. Even the people who are sufficiently motivated to try and teach themselves tend to neglect foundational knowledge (especially mathematics, but even stuff like Mechanics and E&M), try to jump into the advanced material (Quantum Quantum Strings Quantum Black Holes Quantum), and then fall into two camps: They either complain about how Physics using too much "jargon", or they read a bunch of "qualitative" pop-sci descriptions of the topic and then think they have an understanding of it.
At least with software, you can get pretty far just learning whatever tool is immediately useful to you, but fully self-taught developers still often end up with random holes in their knowledge.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#628Earlier 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…
Absolutely university has to change. But it's not a simple change. I say this as a professor for Physics: My colleagues say "We must fully embrace AI as a tool". I agree. But how do you teach it? It's a moving target, and you can't even give homework like: "Research with an LLM of your choice, and submit the transcript" because they can do that, or they can just copy the task into an LLM and have the LLM do it. It be…
>Of course, none of this scales. Some of our intro courses have a thousand students.
Any ideas are much appreciated.
Oral exams graded by LLMs? Scale with the improving models. Based on GPQA Diamond results they're mostly at PhD level for subject trivia anyway.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#629I feel like a lot of the lament expressed in the comments is grounded in loss aversion. We really don't like losing things—regardless of the objective (or subjective) value of that loss. We know this intellectually, but we still feel it emotionally.
I'm feeling effects of using LLMs day in and day out, but I am not yet convinced that it's overwhelmingly negative, the way much of HN seems to lean.
I derive a lot of joy from shipping outstanding code for my clients and fixing problems they're experiencing. My joy has only increased as I can now ship better code, faster, with fewer bugs. No, I don't intimately understand the code the way I used to, but I understand it enough to accomplish the end goal.
The premise of this article takes a presumed position that the grades we were posting before really mattered a whole lot. I'm not convinced that's true.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#630I feel like a lot of the lament expressed in the comments is grounded in loss aversion. We really don't like losing things —regardless of the objective (or subjective) value of that loss. We know this intellectually, but we still feel it emotionally. I'm feeling effects of using LLMs day in and day out, but I am not yet convinced that it's overwhelmingly negative, the way much of HN seems to lean. I derive a lot of j…
Sure sure whatever suits you. But I personally have a very strong aversion to losing my intelligence.