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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

#211

Post by latexr »

ewangzzz wrote: post #125

Even as a software engineer myself, I'm feeling a bit of cognitive decline having AI doing some/most of the thinking for me The solution? I'm not sure but possibly use AI as more of a collaborate partner to discuss with rather than letting it give you the answers

> I'm feeling a bit of cognitive decline having AI doing some/most of the thinking for me

> The solution? I'm not sure

This initially felt like you were setting up a joke. If you feel like something is harmful to you, stop doing it. Find alternatives (they are there, it’s everything else; commercial LLMs are still fairly recent). Thinking “maybe I don’t have to let it go, I can still use it if I do it this other way” sounds like an addict justifying themselves.

I say all this without a hint of judgment. I genuinely hope you are able to tackle the harm you’re feeling.

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

#212

Post by Sharlin »

joe_the_user wrote: post #122
Retr0id wrote: post #116

It's interesting that it's specifically math-within-CS being discussed here. I can imagine a lot of students "just want to learn programming" (or similar), and see the math as a tedious distraction. As a naturally curious person, nothing will stop me from learning about the topics that interest me. But school also taught me a lot of things that didn't interest me, and a lot of those things turned out to be useful any…

Back in the university, I took both math and CS courses and a significant percentage of students seemed interested in neither math nor programming but rather in the jobs they would get afterwards. I didn't notice the same thing with math majors.

Well, that’s because for math majors any monetary incentive is nonexistent (modulo some rather specific careers). Just about nobody majors in math for any reason other than math itself.

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

#213

Post by watchful_moose »

HanayamaTriplet wrote: post #42
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…

If the removal of standardized testing in 2021 was the real reason, then why is there a sudden spike of failure rates happening right now?

I'm guessing the kids who didn't do the standardized tests at/shortly after 2021 were already prepared for it.

The kids who saw the removal of standardized testing 3 years out from going to college never bothered.

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

#214

Post by hypfer »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #135
justinnk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting analogy. I believe regarding addictiveness they may be compared. > a shift of skills away from things that mattered more in the past toward other things that are not measured/perceived by the older generation. Do you have any ideas what these things might be? As someone in his twenties, I’m sometimes saddened by observing that some of the skills I acquired over a long time (e.g., writing, coding) may beco…

Thinking is the skill that becomes obsolete.

Nah.

What you said there is just an extension of the elimination of friction that the silicon valley has been pursuing for the last 15+ years.

But that is just.. well. Their business model. Not a force of nature.

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

#215

Post by hypfer »

Retr0id wrote: post #116

It's interesting that it's specifically math-within-CS being discussed here. I can imagine a lot of students "just want to learn programming" (or similar), and see the math as a tedious distraction. As a naturally curious person, nothing will stop me from learning about the topics that interest me. But school also taught me a lot of things that didn't interest me, and a lot of those things turned out to be useful any…

Personally, I do believe that math as a discipline has this huge issue of being mostly incomprehensible garbage.

Not because the actual truth encoded in it would be this complex, but because the encoding scheme just sucks.

I see it as a packaging problem that has so far not been painful enough to trigger any meaningful change.

With this LLM-driven collapse, that might finally change.

Idk I'm hopeful.

Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring only found in small chunks of the population to truly click.

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

#216

Post by mdurana »

PeterStuer wrote: post #205

A famous MIT professor did a sabatical at our AI lab. He said it was "a joy to teach here, as you can rely on students being proficient in basic math as opposed to the US where you have to teach those explicitly or lose the class completely". That was in the 1980s. My first math exam as a CS undergraduate, 123 out of 129 students failed. The math department professors refused to dumb down their classes for CS student…

Can I ask, just out of curiosity, where the AI lab was?

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

#217

Post by basisword »

It’s only going to get worse. The second things like Claude Cowork get opened up to non-technical teams you start to see the influx of emails and Slack message written with LLM’s for absolutely no productivity gain (in fact probably a loss given how unnecessarily wordy the messages are). Too many people want to give up any and all responsibility.

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

#218

Post by acaloiar »

matwood wrote: post #198
acaloiar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 too…

> It didn't just suddenly materialize.

A sudden materialization is what's depicted by the data.

> It's been steadily getting worse.

I don't believe this is accurate. Failing grades are what the observation entails, and the data clearly depict an abrupt change; not a gradual one.

In the section titled "Failing grades in 3 CS classes skyrocket in spring 2026 ", there's a clear jump in failing grades for all cited courses between 2025 and 2026. Failing grades for every course jump by multiples of the previous year.

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

#219

Post by fransje26 »

qsort wrote: post #74
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'm dumb as a rock and I don't have a PhD, but since ~1 year ago I started forcing myself to do small bits of coding and math manually. I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se, but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.

> but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.

Not getting that quick dopamine hit the LLMs give you..

Some say you can re-train your system to get back the dopamine hits you used to get from other things, like the enjoyment of the "old fashioned" manual coding and math. Getting there is hard work. And YMMV.

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

#220

Post by yodsanklai »

AI should be a formidable booster for learning if used properly.

I know that some students it to prepare for competitive tests, sometimes with very good results.

I've also been using it a lot recently to brush up on my math and physics knowledge from my graduate years. It has helped me clarify and understand a lot of concepts better.

That being said, there is no shortcut, and to be good at anything, one has to put in the work and the hours. However, information has never been as available as it is today.

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