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The AI zombification of universities

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Re: The AI zombification of universities

#141

Post by j45 »

Lerc wrote: post #51

If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost. AI is an easy, but possibly high risk approach to gaining the certification without work, but the tried and tested approach is doing the bare minimum, cramming, then forgetting everything after graduation. If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem…

More and more colleges are saying they will cancel your degrees if they retroactively detect AI cheating. This will be hysterical.

AI isn't the issue as much how AI is used. Passive use of any tech, including social media, and now AI is lazy and has poor outcomes.

Aligning AI use with the goals of all sides, and not just one side getting paid, or just one side graduating could look different.

Most people attend higher education to access opportunity to improve their lives, overwhelmingly for a career and earning.

The idea of higher education teaching "learning how to think" is perhaps a relic of the origin of some universities which didn't historically do STEM, and focused on things like liberal arts, which in turn often had the support of coming from a privileged background, or financial safety net.

STEM money and funding though, attached a lot of traditional post secondaries to do that as well.

It's perfectly acceptable to expect higher education of any kind to have you ready to grow and earn more in better suited opportunities. Not enough educational institutaions don't publish their % of students who graduate in the area that they started in, and also the % of graduates who find their next step, career wise, etc, in 6-12 months of education.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#142

Post by nradov »

MattGaiser wrote: post #102
Lerc wrote: post #51

If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost. AI is an easy, but possibly high risk approach to gaining the certification without work, but the tried and tested approach is doing the bare minimum, cramming, then forgetting everything after graduation. If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem…

This particular battle for learning was lost a long time ago. If university stopped providing an earnings boost from attending, 90% of students would quit tomorrow. It doesn’t help that a lot of desirable fields are comically out of date at the academic instructional level anyway. Would you honestly tell an aspiring software engineer that your typical computer science degree will teach them much about wielding comput…

Anyone who thinks that a Computer Science degree is supposed to prepare them for a job as a Software Engineer has completely missed the point. It's like getting a Physics degree for a job as a Mechanical Engineer. There is some overlap but a huge difference in focus on theoretical versus practical topics.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#143

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

The universities can survive a wave of student ai laziness- blue books and pass fail homework. cfg. I can’t see how they survive a wave of professor ai laziness. Paying $200,000 for $40 of tokens is such a brutal way to be scammed and the resentment will get refreshed by loan payments every month for decades

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#144

Post by whatshisface »

sheept wrote: post #120
Lerc wrote: post #51

If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost. AI is an easy, but possibly high risk approach to gaining the certification without work, but the tried and tested approach is doing the bare minimum, cramming, then forgetting everything after graduation. If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem…

For US undergrad, with all the resources available online, going to university just for education doesn't justify the high tuition. Research is mostly limited to graduate school anyways.

This is one of those things that seems true in theory but doesn't have examples of success. There are people who self-study advanced mechanics at home, but they're child prodigies and enjoy (typically) going to universities as a way of meeting others who share some interests.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#145

Post by nradov »

materielle wrote: post #137
taude wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i always found it funny when people complaied about white board coding tests. Back in school, I had to write C code in those little blue books. :) EDIT: I meant writing in blue books before this era of copying words out of the claude app on your phone

As recently as 2015 when I attended a middling CS program, we had in-person timed exams where we had to write down DSA implementations on a blank sheet of paper in Java. We were deducted points for trivial syntax mistakes. If these stories I keep hearing are true, then university programs have really taken a nose dive recently. This isn’t a “back in my day” thing, but within the past 5 years. The pace of the purporte…

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Surely you don't think that the details of a particular programming language's syntax are an appropriate criteria for grading an exam? That seems crazy.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#146

Post by nradov »

asdff wrote: post #78
corywadd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest the one exception to this would be courses explicitly designed to teach how to use AI, and how not to. But in that case, it's less "use AI to cheat on this course" and "AI is the tool this course is about." Otherwise your suggestion makes sense.

Then it becomes, teach what? "To use AI", yes, and, then, to do what? Use it how? To make some software? Why? You are already taking software engineering classes to learn to make software. To write something? Why? You are already taking classes that ask you write things yourself. An AI class, to me at least, is akin to taking a class about how to pay someone to write your essay for you. And if we are talking about th…

Regardless of VC subsidies, the cost of compute always trends down over time. Whether you like it or not, LLMs will be a pervasive part of everyone's life forever (or at least until a better replacement comes along).

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#147

Post by WaltPurvis »

djeastm wrote: post #16
chasd00 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a proctoring problem though, no phones during a test is typical to say the least.

And yet a Top 10 school like University of Chicago has apparently not been able to fix that problem. That's telling in and of itself.

One professor in one class has not fixed the problem. You can't generalize that to the whole university. Even for that one professor/class, it's not the case that the problem can't be fixed (it could be, quite easily), it's that the professor evidently cares so little about doing their job as an educator that they simply should no longer have a job in a university.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#148

Post by overgard »

rspeele wrote: post #84
overgard wrote: post #64

I can't help but wonder if the fundamental problem is just that we spent decades pretending that a university degree was some sort of useful job training in the first place. As a professional software developer, I think my computer science degree is not actually all that important. Sure there are some relevant concepts, but they're ones you'd pick up on the job anyway. I don't regret getting my degree (back in 2009),…

Even though the degree really didn't teach you what you'd do on the job, it was a signal to employers that 1. you were capable of learning stuff when needed, 2. you didn't give up on doing hard things, and 3. they wouldn't have to explain to you what a loop or a class is. With rampant AI cheating it's no longer a guarantee of any of those.

I don't know, I went to a pretty well regarded CS program but some of the people I graduated with are definitely not people I'd want to work with. They might have hypothetically known what a loop is but I wouldn't expect them to put one to good use.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#149

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

zdragnar wrote: post #106
smartmic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A culture rooted in φιλοσοφία (greek, philosophia in Latin). So yes, I meant that literally. There were times, already 2500 years ago, where people wanted to study to become wiser.

It's great when you're a wealthy noble and have time to do luxury things. For almost all of history, higher education has been a luxury good for the rich, including the Greek city states. There have been a few exceptions, most notably European countries with tax funded schools, but even those are primarily pumping out degrees used for chasing jobs.

The point of modernity was to broaden access and opportunity for everyone, not just the rich.

What we got instead was a regression to aristocracy, where critical social resources of all kinds were enclosed and captured by capital and financialisation.

The result is a lot of very broken systems, education being just one.

Universities became primarily about administration of property and income, and the educational element has become a form of marketing to attract money (and bodies) so the rest could function.

And now we're on the edge of the next stage, which isn't "What is education for?" but "What are humans for?"

We used to know. Or at least we used to believe we knew.

Now we don't any more.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#150

Post by overgard »

gobdovan wrote: post #132
the_af wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Computer Science in particular: it's not supposed to be job training. CS is an education closer to math or science (in fact, at my university it belongs to the department of hard sciences and math). If you like that (and I sure did!) it'll be worth your time. If you're just looking for job training, you're looking in the wrong place. My university CS program didn't even teach programming in any of the major class…

What program was this? It sounds much closer to what I wish my CS degree had been. In my CS program, the courses I actually enjoyed were the math-heavy, but always optional, like computability/decidability/complexity, cryptography, etc. The mandatory "practical" courses were often much worse. For example, I studied relational algebra on my own, plus a few chapters from Kleppmann's Data-Intensive Applications book, an…

Industry-lite is a good way to describe it. I remember having a 300 level class which was supposed to be about real world application architecture but it was essentially just about making UML diagrams (because the professor happened to be on the board of whoever was in charge of UML.) Nobody serious (even at the time!) uses UML.
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