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How University Students Use Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#261

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> self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.

And what happened to them, I wonder?

Well, they reproduced so we could exist now. Definition of ancestors.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#262
post #95

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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…

The education model at high school and undergrad uni has not changed in decades, I hope AI leads to a fundamental change. Homework being made easy by AI is a symptom of the real issues. Being taught by uni students who learned the curriculum last year, lecturers who only lecture due to obligation and haven't changed a slide in years. Lecturers who refuse to upload lecture recordings or slides. Just a few glaring issu…

And yet all the people who created all the advances in AI have extremely traditional, extremely good, fancy educations, and did absolutely bonkers amount of homework. The thing you are talking about is very aspirational.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#263

> 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…

> “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it!"

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#264

I'm a professor at an R1 university teaching mostly graduate-level courses with substantive Python programming components. On the one hand, I've caught some students red handed (ChatGPT generated their exact solution and they were utterly unable to explain the advanced Python that was in their solution) and had to award them 0s for assignments, which was heartbreaking. On the other, I was pleasantly surprised to find…

> had to award them 0s for assignments, which was heartbreaking

You should feel nothing. They knew they were cheating. They didn't give a crap about you.

Frankly, I would love to have people failing assignments they can't explain even if they did NOT use "AI" to cheat on them. We don't need more meaningless degrees. Make the grades and the degrees mean something, somehow.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#265
post #57

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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. I do know how to write a web site.”

Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is.

Sure, you might be able to get a job slinging AI code to produce CRUD apps or whatever. But since that’s the easy thing, you’re going to have a hard time standing out from the pack. Yet we will still need people who understand the concepts at a deeper level, to fix the AI messes or to build the complex systems AI can’t, or the systems that are too critical to rely on AI, or the ones that are too regulated. Being able to do those thing, or to just better understand what the AI is doing to get better more effective results, that will be more valuable than just blindly leaning on AI, and it will remain valuable for a while yet.

Maybe some day the AI can do everything, including ASICs and growing crops, but it’s got a long way to go still.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#266
post #172

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It may be possible for you (I am assuming you are > 20, mature adult). But the context is around teens in the prime of their learning. It is too hard to keep ChatGPT/Claude away from them. Social media is too addictive. Those TikTok/Reels/Shorts are addictive and never ending. We are doomed imho. If education (schools) were to adopt a teaching-AI (one that will given them the solution, but at least ask a bunch of que…

>We are doomed imho. I encourage you to take action to prove to yourself that real change is possible. What you can do in your own life to enact change is hard to say, given I know nothing about your situation. But say you are a parent, you have control over how often your children use their phones, whether they are on social media, whether they are using ChatGPT to get around doing their homework. How we raise the n…

So your plan is to encourage people to "get off the Internet" by posting on the Internet, and to stave off automation by encouraging workers to gang up on their employers and make themselves a collective critical point of failure.

Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world...

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#267

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There is no industry that I have worked in that fights against creating or joining unions tooth, claw, and nail quite like software engineers.

I think more and more workers are warming up to unions. As wages in software continue to be oppressed, I think we'll see an increase in unionization efforts for software engineers.

"Gee, it seems that people in my profession are in danger of being replaced by AI. I wonder if there's anything I can do to help speed up that process..."

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#268

I think there's ways for teachers to embrace AI in teaching. Let AI generate a short novel. The student is tasked to read it and criticize what's wrong with it. This requires focus and advanced reading comprehension. Show 4 AI-generated code solutions. Let the student explain which one is best and why. Show 10 AI-generated images and let art students analyze flaws. And so on.

You are neglecting to explain why your assignments themselves cannot be done with AI.

Also, this kind of fatuous response leaves out the skill building required - how do students acquire the skill of criticism or analysis? They're doing all of the easier work with ChatGPT until suddenly it doesn't work and they're standing on ... nothing ... unable to do anything.

That's the insidious effect of LLMs in education: as I read here recently "simultaneously raising the bar for the skill required at the entry level and lowering the amount of learning that occurs in the preparation phase (e.g., college)".

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#269
post #247

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I sort of view that list as table stakes for a well rounded capable person.. Well barring the invasion bit. Then again, being familiar with guns and or other forms of self defense is valuable. I think most farmers would be somewhat capable on most of that list. Equations for farm production. Programming tractor equipment. Setting bones. Giving and taking orders. Building houses and barns. Building a single story buil…

> pre-planned plans Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't a properly self-reliant human be able to come up with the plans too?

Learning from others doesn’t mean you are not learning.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#270

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That's a quote that sounds great until, say, that self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect at best turns out to have some intractible design flaw and at worst collapses and kills people. It's also a quote from a character who's literally immortal and so has all the time in the world to learn things, which really undermines the premise.

> self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.

I'm not saying that our ancestors were wrong. Hell, I live in a house that was originally built under similar conditions.

That being said, buildings collapse a lot less frequently these days. House fires happen at a lower rate. Insulation was either nonexistent or present in much lower quantities.

I guess the point I'm making is that the lesson here shouldn't be "we used to make our houses, why don't we go back to that?" It also shouldn't be "we should leave every task to a specialist."

Know how to maintain and fix the things around your house that are broken. You don't need a plumber to replace the flush valve on your toilet. But maybe don't try to replace a load-bearing joist in your house unless you know what you're doing? The people building their own homes weren't engineers, but they had a lot more carpentry experience than (I assume) you and I.

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