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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

#191

Post by smallstepforman »

f311a wrote: post #158
adamcharnock wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering if there would be a benefit to inverting how we teach subjects now. Previously we would teach from the bottom, and build up. Semi-colon goes here, curly brace goes there, and then build up to architecture, systems, etc. But this doesn't seem to make sense when someone comes to a topic with an LLM in-hand. They need to know high-level techniques, architecture, best practice, etc. As they pursue the…

You can ask LLMs about high-level techniques, and their answers will usually be good enough. What you can't get from LLMs is the taste and judgment, which you can only obtain by having a strong CS base and coding manually for years. High-level techniques were never a problem. You could Google tens of articles on this topic. They are useless too, it's like learning how to drive a racing bicycle from reading a book. Su…

The other day I just wanted to loop through characters in a std::string to copy data to a new string with a few escape characters (sending to peripheral device). Simple enough task for AI. I got a coroutine monstrocity back, with copies to std::array and a range based iterator, since I specified C++23. If I specified C++11, I would have received a: char p = src.data(); while (p) { … p++; }

I had the experience to keep calling out AI to simplify and downgrade the solution to something primitive, which ended up smaller, faster, easier to maintain. Juniors with real world experience would not bother, they’ll take the first working AI result.

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

#193

Post by PapstJL4U »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #107
camelmel wrote: post #35

I 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…

LLMS didn’t invent cheating just made it easier. When you cheat you’re the one who cheats yourself because the point of an education is to learn, not complete the assignments and get high marks on tests alone. No one benefits and no one other than you is materially hurt by cheating, but you are absolutely the one who is hurt. There’s no way to learn than to force the brain into adaptation which it is resistant to do…

>The smart student uses the LLM as a proctor or provide challenges and feedback on attempts rather than an easy button.

Yeah, this is how we used wolframalpha for Math as students. Whatever we had to do, we did it ourself as a group of three. Afterwards we checked with Wolframaplha to see if we were correct. If there were any difference between us, we went line by line to find where the error appeared.

It was helpful, because we did it ourself, but because the work was graded, we had the security, that it is not a total failure.

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

#194

Post by weavie »

dotancohen wrote: post #141
vineyardmike wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I think it's less like a cigarette and more like the car. We're not going back. Americans are famously less healthy the more car dependent they are, and now people walk/run as an explicit task to be healthy. People will start going to a "thinking" gym, or engaging in additional manual mental activities for sport, like we do with chess today.

Funny that you mention that. A month ago I started the Duolingo chess course, and just yesterday I noticed that my brain is clearer, more capable of deep thought than it has been in years. It's like stepping out of a fog. I also started CPAP recently, so it's hard to attribute the change to either, but I feel certain that the chess helped.

> I also started CPAP recently

A proper nights sleep is massive! I'd put 99% down to this..

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

#195

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

typs wrote: post #123
sndgndgndgndy wrote: post #78

Earlier 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…

Obviously a balance would be best, but as someone who went to a very grade-inflated school, I do believe that grade inflation gets in the way of education substantially. When you can get through classes with very little effort and understanding and know you will get a sufficient grade, many people will simply not learn the material deeply.

The material outcome is what should be the goal. Tests are a relatively brute way to try and determine how well the student understands the material, but conversations about grade inflation and "back in my day getting a grade was hard", and professors purposefully putting difficult questions (not in content but in presentation of the question) all betray the inherent goal being pursued.

Its all Goodhart's law problem, but we are missing the forest for the trees talking about grades and tests when what we want is people to be educated, and critical thinkers and competent in their area and due to a comprehensive way to evaluate that we end up talking about grade inflation or how Yale vs Berkeley gives letters at the end of a semester

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

#196

Post by mylastattempt »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #111
mylastattempt wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human is designed to interact with small groups, to understand several smaller groups, and perhaps to imagine a big group of smaller groups. In a literal sense, let's say 100 people per group. At that level the human can actually know and interact with them still. In a city of 100.000 it's still managable to feel you are related and involved to this group-of-groups. In a city of a million, you'll revert to only y…

I think there’s a major part of this conversation being omitted, though I am not saying you did it intentionally: “the attention economy.” We have gone from advertising to a system of creating addicts for profit

Definately agree, that was included in the "or for worse" in this sentence I wrote. As for creating the addicts, nobody had a masterplan. It's all the pieces spiraling together,

>> The world will just keep rushing forward. Some have a slight hand in the direction it goes for better (never) or for worse, but spiral it will.

The systems are too large and self-propulsing for anyone to really control. Consider the rainforest. How many millions of variables interact, nobody is in charge, everything influences everything in a billion different ways. You might say, well we can cut it down, so kind we can control it. Allright, let's continue to spiral. You might build a city there after a few years. Still in charge right. But it get's too hot because there's no vegitation, so you have to change again. And then we find that people keep getting strangely sick, and scientists find some special mushroom that survived and apparantly thrives on the mix of cut trees and diesel fumes and their spores in the air are poisonous. I made that up, but you get the idea hopefully.

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

#197

Post by 36733883 »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #164
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…

I'm not American so maybe I am missing some context. But how did admissions work without test scores?

[flagged]

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

#198

Post by matwood »

acaloiar wrote: post #187
matwood wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes time to work through the system and it has been steadily getting worse. It was already discussed on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309233

I'm having a difficult time imagining how an admissions event in 2021 materializes in the spring semester of 2026 in a class largely taken by first-year students. Could you explain?

It didn't just suddenly materialize.

From the current article

In addition to overreliance on AI, Garcia also pointed out that many students are underprepared mathematically, a concern echoed by campus associate teaching professor Gireeja Ranade.

From the article discussed the other week:

Over three years — from fall 2021 to fall 2023 — the letter said, at least 20% of Berkeley first-semester calculus students who took a diagnostic exam showed deficits. “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” faculty wrote.

It's been steadily getting worse. The current article only looks at F's which conveniently hides if there has been a slope down. Additionally, kids entering HS in 2021/2022 would just now be hitting college.

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

#199

Post by princegift98 »

noduerme wrote: post #177
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…

Yeah, I'm 45 and I'm like you - no social media, relatively under connected, and still feel swamped constantly by emails and calls and especially texts. They eat up half my productive time every day, and most of them are things I'm looped in on that I don't even need to respond to. Okay so let's say that's the new cognitive burden. The new escape hatch is "AI". Now you don't need to read your mail or write responses!…

[flagged]

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

#200

Post by krilcebre »

jerfjlejr wrote: post #174
camelmel wrote: post #35

I 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 think it varies tremendously from one role to the next. I'm a senior software engineer and LLMs, the way I'm using them, improve almost everything I do. I use them to write most of my code now, but first I spent twenty years writing code before LLMs came into existence and second writing code is like 5% of my job. Most of my job is research, investigation, and architecture. I treat LLMs just like a junior engineer.…

You cannot tell me that letting anyone do something for you does not affect the skills that you outsourced, unless you are some sort of a superhuman.

As an example, I have been drawing portraits for quite a few years now, and whenever I go on a hiatus and come back after a few months, I can notice my skill not being anywhere close to where it was before I stopped using it.

Sure, after 2 or 3 portraits they mostly come back because of the previous experience, but skill rust is a real thing, and if you think your coding skills are the same because you used to code 20 years but haven't coded for some time, you are probably just lying to yourself.

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