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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

#641

Post by smcg »

SoftTalker wrote: post #425
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…

Most/all of my university-level math knowledge is gone, atrophied from never having needed to use any of it professionally. I don't even really recall needing it for any of my CS coursework, honestly. It was just required for the degree.

I used linear algebra to implement PageRank in my Information Retrieval class. I also used it extensively in my AI and ML classes. You can't pass a ML class without a good foundation in linear algebra. Not to mention, discrete mathematics is the fundamental building blocks of CS. Surely you were using algorithms and graphs. I hope you computed an algorithm's efficiency with big O notation. I hope you have used probability before.

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

#642

Post by littlexsparkee »

loneboat wrote: post #391
quietbritishjim wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actual…

It's not the best phrasing but it's still quite clearly the latter

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

#643

Post by rahimnathwani »

jventura wrote: post #241

CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang"…

So all groups outsourced their thinking to an LLM. Will they have learned anything they can apply to different types of projects in future?

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

#644

Post by dyauspitr »

arjie wrote: post #473
ap99 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

The very real downside is if you just provide equal opportunity then you would still end up with an all white/East Asian/Indian class. You can argue that this is fair and meritocratic and you would be right but I believe there are a lot of people that see value in affirmative action that makes classrooms look more like the racial distribution of the country and provides an easy step up for traditionally poor/downtrodden communities to improve themselves. Affirmative action isn’t only an American thing btw, it’s in China, South Korea, India etc. as well.

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

#645

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> Around COVID times many top universities experimented with removing test requirements from admissions, under an argument largely related to equity. It's been a failure everywhere, with many, if not most, universities already reversing it.

It's the universities that have failed. They've restricted admissions to a set of people who would learn no matter what the schools did, which is what makes them lazy.

When confronted with a set of students who haven't been provided with an enormous amount of childhood reading material, and the time, encouragement and social acceptance to indulge in it (the most faithful test predictor is childhood pleasure reading, the next best is parental income), they fail horribly.

The purpose of elite colleges for students is credentialism and networking, the purpose for the schools themselves is to force cultural conformity onto smart or extremely pressured students. They generally just tell you to go learn things by yourself. They have no particular insight into teaching, because they are supplied with students who don't need to be taught.

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

#646

Post by danso »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #640

The grade data come from https://berkeleytime.com/grades I was worried they may have cherrypicked courses that support their chosen narrative. So I plotted the % of F grades (red line) for all CS courses still offered, and sorted the chart in descending order of the # grades given out (light blue vertical bars) in the most recent semester when the course was offered. My worry was borne out. See the first few charts.…

The article says they looked at CS 10 and 61A, which IIRC are the intro classes at Berkeley. Why do you think that amounts to “cherry picking” versus being a reasonable starting point for analysis (esp if those classes, as they are for one of the quoted professors, aren’t graded on a curve)?

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

#647

Post by timmytokyo »

epgui wrote: post #637
overgard wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a really underrated problem. I don't think my actual cognitive skills have declined by using AI, but I do notice that my patience and attention span are a lot lower. I'm learning a new code base for a new job right now, and I'm finding AI to be a really double edged sword for it. One one hand, it's extremely valuable for asking questions about the code base. On the other hand, if I'm not careful and I just let i…

> I don't think my actual cognitive skills have declined by using AI I'm not speaking about you but... I know most people would not have much awareness of their cognitive decline. I know this because that awareness gap is there with or without LLMs, across all age groups and cultures.

Especially since attention -- which the parent commenter says has been diminished by LLMs -- is a key part of cognition.

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

#648

Post by littlexsparkee »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #134

All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs is atrophying their skills in real-time. I have yet to meet a single person for whom it's not the case. But I essentially completely stopped using them for software engineering (why isn't really relevant, but it's not because od this skill atrophy). So as the skills of everyone else is diminishing,…

That thought came to me early but it feels like a pyrrhic victory - if society is dumbed down, increasingly unstable what kind of win is that? is the excellence you've maintained even valued at that point? standards even within tech, both technical and moral, have withered. this is a function of its popularity and openness but still

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

#649

Post by ofjcihen »

vannfreed wrote: post #468
cj wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know far more about muscle building and retention than you I am a competitive bodybuilder… > I train just as hard to maintain them as I did to get them there. Are you enhanced? Were you enhanced when you built the 20” arms? If so, yes I agree. Edit: With 20" arms, there's nearly 0% chance you're natural. You can't compare your enhanced experience to naturals.

[flagged]

Oh the irony.

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

#650

Post by krull10 »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #640

The grade data come from https://berkeleytime.com/grades I was worried they may have cherrypicked courses that support their chosen narrative. So I plotted the % of F grades (red line) for all CS courses still offered, and sorted the chart in descending order of the # grades given out (light blue vertical bars) in the most recent semester when the course was offered. My worry was borne out. See the first few charts.…

Alternatively, many faculty may be simply adjusting their curves to avoid failing too many students because they are incentivized to avoid giving too many low grades. Lower grades generally result in lower course evals, which can impact raises and promotion, and low grades can also result in additional attention from admin that no professor wants to deal with…
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