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How University Students Use Claude

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#101

Post by light_hue_1 »

bko wrote: post #35
dtnewman wrote: post #14

> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used. I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem. Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous…

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc.

I'm the polar opposite. And I'm AI researcher.

The reason you can't answer your kid when he asks about LLMs is because the original position was wrong.

Being able to write isn't optional. It's a critical tool for thought. Spelling is very important because you need to avoid confusion. If you can't spell no spell checker can save you when it inserts the wrong word. And this only gets far worse the more technical the language is. And maps are crucial too. Sometimes, the best way to communicate is to draw a map. In many domains like aviation maps are everything, you literally cannot progress without them.

LLMs are no different. They can do a little bit of thinking for us and help us along the way. But we need to understand what's going on to ask the right questions and to understand their answers.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#102

Post by hackyhacky »

srveale wrote: post #95
dtnewman wrote: post #14

> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used. I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem. Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous…

IMO it's so easy to ChatGPT your homework that the whole education model needs to flip on its head. Some teachers already do something like this, it's called the "Flipped classroom" approach. Basically, a student's marks depend mostly (only?) on what they can do in a setting where AI is verifiably unavailable. It means less class time for instruction, but students have a tutor in their pocket anyway. I've also talked…

> it's called the "Flipped classroom" approach.

Flipped classroom is just having the students give lectures, instead of the teacher.

> Basically, a student's marks depend mostly (only?) on what they can do in a setting where AI is verifiably unavailable.

This is called "proctored exams" and it's been pretty common in universities for a few centuries.

None of this addresses the real issue, which is whether teachers should be preventing students from using AIs.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#103

Post by gwervc »

bko wrote: post #59
noitpmeder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an insane take. The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart. The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it. I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.

Maybe 40 years ago there were programmers that would not work with anyone that use IDEs or automated memory management. When presented with a programming task that requires these things and you're WITHOUT your IDE or whatever, they will fall apart. Look, I agree with you, I'm just trying to articulate to someone why they should learn X if they believe an LLM could help them and "an LLM won't always be around" isn't a…

A lot of developers of my generation (30+) learned to program within a code editor and compile their project in command line. Remove the IDE and we can still code.

On the other hand my master 2 students, most of which learned scripting in the previous year, can't even split a project in multiple files after being explained multiple times. Some have more knowledge and ability than others, but a signifiant fraction is just copy-pasting LLM output to solve whatever is asked from them instead of trying to do it themselves, or asking questions.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#104

Post by tristor »

hackyhacky wrote: post #70
kibwen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Like, Socrates may have been against writing because he thought it made your memory weak, but at least I, an individual, am perfectly capable…

> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn. I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, bu…

> I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS.

Why not? I mean that, quite literally.

I don't know how to make an ASIC, and if I tried to write an OS I'd probably fail miserably many times along the way but might be able to muddle through to something very basic. The rest of that list is certainly within my wheelhouse even though I've never done any of those things professionally.

The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks. Specialization can also be valuable, but specialization in your career should not prevent you from gaining a breadth of skills outside of the workplace.

I don't know how to do any of the things in your list (including building a web site) as an /expert/, but it should not be out of the realm of possibility or even expectation that people should learn these things at the level of a competent amateur. I have grown a garden, I have worked on a farm for a brief time, I've helped build houses (Habitat for Humanity), I've taken a hobbyist welding class and made some garish metal sculptures, I've built a race car and raced it, and I've never built a toaster but I have repaired one (they're actually very electrically and mechanically simple devices). Besides the disposable income to build a race car, nothing on that list stands out to me as unachievable by anyone who chooses to do so.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#105

Post by Zambyte »

kibwen wrote: post #57
bko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Like, Socrates may have been against writing because he thought it made your memory weak, but at least I, an individual, am perfectly capable…

For what it's worth, locally runnable language models are becoming exceptionally capable these days, so if you assume you will have some computer to do computing, it seems reasonable to assume that it will enable you to do some language model based things. I have a server with a single GPU running language models that easily blow GPT 3.5 out of the water. At that point, I am offloading reasoning tasks to my computer in the same way that I offload memory take to my computer through my note taking habits.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#106

Post by chalst »

dtnewman wrote: post #14

> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used. I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem. Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous…

Students who do that risk submitting assignments that show they don’t understand the course so far.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#107

Post by hackyhacky »

theLiminator wrote: post #96
hackyhacky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn. I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, bu…

I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs. IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in th…

> IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process.

The (as yet unproven) argument for the use of AIs is that using AI to solve simpler problems allows us humans to focus on the big picture, in the same way that letting a calculator solve arithmetic gives us flexibility to understand the math behind the arithmetic.

No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#108

Post by atoav »

As someone teaching at the university level, the goals of teaching are (in that order):

1. Get people interested in my topics and removing fears and/or preconceived notions about whether it is something for them or not

2. Teach students general principles and the ability to go deeper themselves when and if it is needed

3. Giving them the ability to apply the learned principles/material in situations they encounter

I think removing fear and sparking interest is a precondition for the other two. And if people are interested they want to understand it and then they use AI to answer questions they have instead of blindly letting it do the work.

And even before AI you would have students who thought they did themselves favours by going a learn-and-forget route or cheating. AI jusr makes it a little easier to do just that. But in any pressure situation, like a written assignment under supervision it will come to light anyways, whether someone knows their shit or not.

Now I have the luck that the topics I teach (electronics and media technology) are very applied anyways, so AI does not have a big impact as of now. Not being able to understand things isn't really an option when you have to use a mixing desk in a venue with a hundred people or when you have to set up a tripod without wrecking the 6000€ camera on top.

But I generally teach people who are in it for the interest and not for some prestige that comes with having a BA/MA. I can imagine this is quite different in other fields where people are in it for the money or the prestige.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#109

Post by noman-land »

user432678 wrote: post #98
papichulo2023 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is helping me do that projects that would otherwise take me hours in just a few minutes, soooo, shrug.

What kind of projects are those? I am genuinely curious. I was excited by AI, Claude specifically, since I am an avid procrastinator and would love to finish tens of projects I have in mind. Most of those projects are games with specifical constraints. I got disenchanted pretty quickly when started actually using AI to help with different parts of the game programming. Majority of problems I had are related to poor u…

I was able to use llama.cpp and whisper.cpp to help me build a transcription site for my favorite podcast[0]. I'm a total python noob and hadn't really used sqlite before, or really used AI before but using these tools, completely offline, llama.cpp helped me write a bunch of python and sql to get the job done. It was incredibly fun and rewarding and most importantly, it got rid of the dread of not knowing.

0 - https://transcript.fish

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#110

Post by mbesto »

noitpmeder wrote: post #44
bko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

This is an insane take. The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart. The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it. I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.

Do you work with people who can multiply 12.3% * 144,005.23 rapidly without a calculator?

> The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart.

The parent poster is positing that for 90% of cases they WILL have their AI assistant because its in their pocket, just like a calculator. It's not insane to think that and its a fair point to ponder.

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