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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

#271

Post by bsenftner »

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…

When LLMs and ChatGPT first came out, it struck me as obvious and dangerous to a deep thinker or a knowledge worker the answering capacity. So, from my initial use I did not ask them questions, I have always "done my own work" and then asked the LLMs to criticize that work. This has been an exponential ladder of learning, and my cognitive growth is personally noticeable. I'm not hesitating to scribble out calculus and work it out, as I need for my work, where in the past I'd have found some other way because I felt uncomfortable with my tip-of-my-tongue calc skills. Don't ask AI, do your own work and ask for criticism, and them improve your own work yourself. This creates a learning ladder that you will climb.

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

#272

Post by GoblinSlayer »

ListeningPie wrote: post #166
f311a wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

taste and judgment, which you can only obtain by having a strong CS base and coding manually for years. I disagree, the definers of taste; art and food critics, movie and book reviewers, don’t need to have learned the craft by doing. Taste is a separate skill.

I'd say taste is a consequence of lifestyle, which is learned by doing. And art critics often have bad lifestyle, which is visible in their bad taste. When art is virtual life, it would define a lifestyle, which is adopted by doing, in its turn producing taste.

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

#273

Post by eueje »

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.

“ I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se, but I do see I'm a lot "lazier"”

These are correlated - it just hasn’t happened in a large enough amount for you to have clearly noticed it yet.

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

#274

Post by jeremyjh »

prawn wrote: post #256
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 wonder if AI or something else changing (developing anxiety, etc) has made the pay-off of the degree less certain. If you're confident that your years of effort will pay off, it's probably easier to see it through. If you're worried that AI will wreck your industry before you hit the workforce, maybe the equation changes and you're more inclined to gamble with shortcuts?

Yes, and this is going to hurt everyone. If everyone knows that you can skate through a college degree without doing any work, it is not going to have much value as a credential.

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

#275

Post by jvanderbot »

> 35.3% of CS 10

.. had failing grades.

I guess LLMs will in fact kill the junior CS graduate, but before the graduation, not necessarily after.

> The electrical engineering and computer sciences department’s grading guidelines state that 7% of students in lower division courses, including CS 10 and CS 61A, should receive D’s and F’s.

Well I sure hope they dont just make it easier to hit this (objectionable) standard.

> Garcia believes that instructors “should not be curving” but should instead make thresholds for each letter grade publicly available and give students many chances to reach them. He added that he loves the idea of “having no limit” to the number of A’s he gives students.

This is a tough problem: Are grades sorting functions (top students get A's so retries are not helpful), inflexible thresholds (A's show mastery at a given level so retries are valid), or are A's certifications (a sufficiently good result such that they could do it - e.g., inflated but not curved, retries less likely but still ok).

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

#276

Post by eueje »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #272
ListeningPie wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

taste and judgment, which you can only obtain by having a strong CS base and coding manually for years. I disagree, the definers of taste; art and food critics, movie and book reviewers, don’t need to have learned the craft by doing. Taste is a separate skill.

I'd say taste is a consequence of lifestyle, which is learned by doing. And art critics often have bad lifestyle, which is visible in their bad taste. When art is virtual life, it would define a lifestyle, which is adopted by doing, in its turn producing taste.

Agreed.

Taste implicitly requires discipline of what one chooses to expose themself to and what not to.

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

#277

Post by layer8 »

camelmel wrote: post #104
adi_kurian wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of said PhDs gain anything positive from LLM usage? Or does it only lead to declining thinking skills in your view?

Yes, I can churn out a lot more stuff as can most of my peers. Experiments etc are all way faster to run with coding agents. But I think the overall creativity and originality is a lot lower. I think this is what many people are facing, if you don't use LLMs your short term productivity is worse.

There’s the saying that we overestimate what we can achieve in the short term, but underestimate what we can achieve in the long term. Optimizing for the short term is therefore counterproductive if it impairs us for the long term.

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

#278

Post by j-bos »

frollogaston wrote: post #138
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…

Berkeley chancellor told students to vote for 2020 California Proposition 16, which would've repeated 1996 Proposition 209 that banned race-based admission in public universities. Prop 16 failed. Subsequently, Cal started ignoring SAT/ACT scores. I have to think this was their alternative way of taking fewer Asian students, who average highest on that. Soon after I got an email from the same chancellor praising the c…

Reminds me of this asian professor getting blocked for promotion, allegedly, on the basis of race, but in a roundabout way. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/professor-sues-texas-unive...

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

#279

Post by jvanderbot »

> “I’m a strong, strong opponent of what Harvard is doing to say that only a fraction of students can earn A’s,” Garcia said. “I think you should have clear standards for what an A means, and then give tons of opportunity for people … to get to that A bar without lowering the standard. So everybody who’s curving is hiding that effect. It’s completely hiding that effect, and it’s pretending as if nothing’s wrong, and something is definitely wrong.”

Grade curves are how you test your curriculum for good challenge - are you challenging people such that an A isn't a too-low threshold. When you force people into a curve, you haven't defined a threshold of mastery, you've defined a sorting function: A means "better than this year's peers". It is absolutely bananas to me that a tech/math oriented school would be doing any sort of curving.

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

#280

Post by eueje »

vineyardmike wrote: post #87
threatripper wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that this is an adjustment period that society has to go through. The way we are using electronic devices today, in some years it will probably be looked at like smoking cigarettes. And I'd argue that a lot of the "decline" is due to 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.

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.

You do realise most people aren’t in shape right?

The idea that most people have the discipline to keep themselves mentally in check is false. We already know this! Millions and billions of people who spend hrs a day consuming media on platforms such as instagram.

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