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How University Students Use Claude

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#121

Post by [deleted] »

hackyhacky wrote: post #102
srveale wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#122

Post by vonneumannstan »

dingnuts wrote: post #52
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…

> That's more or less accepted today. Bullshit! You cannot do second order reasoning with a set of facts or concepts that you have to look up first. Google Search made intuition and deep understanding and encyclopedic knowledge MORE important, not less. People will think you are a wizard if you read documentation and bother to remember it, because they're still busy asking Google or ChatGPT while you're happily codin…

I am 100% certain people said the same thing about arithmetic and calculators and now mental arithmetic skill is nothing more than a curiosity.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#123

Post by c22 »

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…

Specialization is over-rated. I've done everything in your list except make an ASIC because learning how to do those things was interesting and I prefer when things are done my way.

I started way back in my 20s just figuring out how to write websites. I'm not sure where the camel's back would have broken.

It has, of course, been convenient to be able to "bootstrap" my self-reliance in these and other fields by consuming goods produced by others, but there is no mechanical reason that said goods should be provided by specialists rather than advanced generalists beyond our irrational social need for maximum acceleration.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#124

Post by zebomon »

ketzu wrote: post #117
zebomon wrote: post #83

The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense. The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking. You'll soon no…

> The writing is irrelevant. In my opinion this is not true. Writing is a form of communicating ideas. Structuring and communicating ideas with others is really important, not just in written contexts, and it needs to be trained. Maybe the way universities do it is not great, but writing in itself is important.

Kindly read past the first line, friend :)

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#125

Post by johndough »

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…

Use it or lose it. With the invention of the calculator, students lost the ability to do arithmetic. Now, with LLMs, they lose the ability to think.

This is not conjecture by the way. As a TA, I have observed that half of the undergraduate students lost the ability to write any code at all without the assistance of LLMs. Almost all use ChatGPT for most exercises.

Thankfully, cheating technology is advancing at a similarly rapid pace. Glasses with integrated cameras, WiFi and heads-up display, smartwatches with polarized displays that are only readable with corresponding glasses, and invisibly small wireless ear-canal earpieces to name just a few pieces of tech that we could have only dreamed about back then. In the end, the students stay dumb, but the graduation rate barely suffers.

I wonder whether pre-2022 degrees will become the academic equivalent to low-background radiation steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#126

Post by 0xffff2 »

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…

>For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".

Does that actually work? I'm long past having easy access to college programming assignments, but based on my limited interaction with ChatGPT I would be absolutely shocked if it produced output that was even coherent, much less working code given such an approach.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#127

Post by janalsncm »

karpour wrote: post #21

My take: While AI tools can help with learning, the vast majority of students use it to avoid learning

I agree with you, but I hope schools also take the opportunity to reflect on what they teach and how. I used to think I hated writing, but it turns out I just hated English class. (I got a STEM degree because I hated English class so much, so maybe I have my high school English teacher to thank for it.)

Torturing students with five paragraph essays, which is what “learning” looks like for most American kids, is not that great and isn’t actually teaching critical thinking which is most valuable. I don’t know any other form of writing that is like that.

Reading “themes” into books that your teacher is convinced are there. Looking for 3 quotes to support your thesis (which must come in the intro paragraph, but not before the “hook” which must be exciting and grab the reader’s attention!).

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#128

Post by jplusequalt »

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…

>50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright."

And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete?

We live in a highly specialized society that requires people take out large loans to learn the skills necessary for their careers. You take away their ability to provide their labor, and it now seriously threatens millions of workers from obtaining the same quality of life they once had.

I seriously oppose such a future, and if that makes me a Luddite, so be it.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#129

Post by zebomon »

janalsncm wrote: post #114
zebomon wrote: post #83

The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense. The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking. You'll soon no…

How does your product prevent a person from simply retyping something that ChatGPT wrote? I think the prevalence of these AI writing bots means schools will have to start doing things that aren’t scalable: in-class discussions, in-person writing (with pen and paper or locked down computers), way less weight given to remote assignments on Canvas or other software. Attributing authorship from text alone (or keystroke p…

It may be possible that with enough data from the two categories (copied from ChatGPT and not), your keystroke dynamics will differ. This is an open question that my co-founder and I are running experiments on currently.

So, I would say that while I wouldn't fully dispute your claim that attributing authorship from text alone is impossible, it isn't yet totally clear one way or the other (to us, at least -- would welcome any outside research).

Long-term -- and that's long-term in AI years ;) -- gaze tracking and other biometric tracking will undoubtedly be necessary. At some point in the near future, many people will be wearing agents inside earbuds that are not obvious to the people around them. That will add another layer of complexity that we're aware of. Fundamentally, it's more about creating evidence than creating proof.

We want to give writers and students the means to create something more detailed than they would get from a chatbot out-of-the-box, so that mimicking the whole act of writing becomes more complicated.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#130

Post by StefanBatory »

0xffff2 wrote: post #126
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…

>For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that". Does that actually work? I'm long past having easy access to college programming assignments, but based on my limited interaction with ChatGPT I would be absolutely shocked if it produced output that was even coherent, much less working code given such an approach.

I have some subjects, at Masters - that are solvable by one prompt. One.

Quality of CS/Software Engineering programs vary that much.

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