Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not American so maybe I am missing some context. But how did admissions work without test scores?
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Your comment sounds vibes-based
Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
311–320 of 828 posts
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I agree - I would have been toast. I wonder if the teachers/colleges need to change the way they teach and assess. Let the students use the AI tools they like (perhaps guide them how they can use them professionally), but test regularly and early on the skills/knowledge they'r…
>(perhaps guide them how they can use them professionally) If that's anything like how they guided me to use programming languages professionally... In my workplace I find systems and policies move too slowly to keep up with how rapidly the LLM world is changing. Colleges are even more glacial. They've barely adapted to video conferencing.
Yes, meanwhile, Claude Cowork was only released this past January. And that was amazing. But I don't know about anyone else but I've already moved on to just using Codex for just about everything (except some Kagi use). Schools work on timescales of years, AI is advancing on the timescale of weeks and months.
Until that situation stabilizes I think the only institution capable of teaching about it is the family -- parents.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#313It's not just 'a person' or 'a student', we as a collective become more dumb. Very simple example to highlight this: Most developers use(d?) stackoverflow. Everything related to software development is stored there. The LLM's trained on it. Now a huge set of developers now longer go to stackoverflow to get answers. Or add to the collective. Stackoverflow is losing money (ad revenue). If / when stackoverflow goes away…
So is dead and has been for some time. 1500 questions per month. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661
Dropped 99% in three years...
Some think that would happen to Google, but it didn't so far.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally agree about school-level homework: it was many years before my pre-frontal cortex developed enough that I could have forced myself to do the work. That said, though, one thing I don't understand about the heavy users of AI in academia and software development is that the thinking and coding is the fun part . And that's the part so many people seem to be so keen to automate away.
Isn't the fun part having the thing work how you wanted it to? Why shouldn't I be keen to automate the process away?
Depends on the person. I find that it's extremely satisfying to figure out a tricky problem on the way to that end result - to struggle with something for a bit, then finally fix it or fully wrap my head around it. So to me, it's a mixture of both. What I want is the end result, but in the past sometimes that came with thinking in the shower about an approach... Or a wild thought while going to bed that makes me jump up and grab my computer.
That doesn't happen for me anymore to the same degree.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#315I 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 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…
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Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#316It's incredibly difficult at this point to "skate where the puck is going" as Gretzky is said to have done. No one knows what knowledge work will look like in five years. People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point.
That said, assessments of poor critical thinking skills jump out at me more than the rest. That sort of thing seems likely to matter until machines can replace us completely.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally agree about school-level homework: it was many years before my pre-frontal cortex developed enough that I could have forced myself to do the work. That said, though, one thing I don't understand about the heavy users of AI in academia and software development is that the thinking and coding is the fun part . And that's the part so many people seem to be so keen to automate away.
Isn't the fun part having the thing work how you wanted it to? Why shouldn't I be keen to automate the process away?
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Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#318I 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 don’t buy it. Properly leveraging LLMs to generate stable and extendable systems is mentally exhausting (i.e. highly demanding of intelligent thought), especially given the poor quality and churn within the harness ecosystem.
Now, if you’re creating trivial, unstable, or nonextendable systems maybe this doesn’t apply. And maybe I have long overestimated the work that SWEs have done.
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#319I 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…
We also had exercises for which the solutions were given, and we didn't reach for them immediately...
Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
#320A 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?
Brussels.