321–330 of 828 posts
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You are confusing faculty with records. The ability to navigate by sense of direction. The ability to memorize numbers. The ability to think clearly by yourself. Watcha gonna do if big tech takes away your access to the outsourced brain, dear?
Build one myself and make a ton of money. Or wait for the next guy/company to do it.
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…
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Or when the Internet came and made memory kinda obsolete. Why remember facts if you can simply index them and then lookup on demand. But now we delegate thinking itself, so I wonder what is left.
This is an age-old argument actually, the same one was raised when the printing press was invented and reading became a more generally available skill.
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 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.
>In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA. As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor deval…
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…
No one is intentionally lowering the quality of instruction or trying to trip students up. They are trying to get them to pass the same bar that generations of students before them passed fine...
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> 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.
The only thing I can see them doing is removing technology altogether. People did just fine 100 years ago.
Want to learn to code? Use a Commodore 64. The company was purchased and rebooted the C64: https://commodore.net/
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…
Maybe the problem is that doing assignments contributes to your grades? The answer from wolfram alpha wasn't so much to get the homework done, but to understand how I would be screwed in the exam.
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 can still read code and write it, I just need to look back at docs a lot more, when I used to just know things. I also have to sit and try to recall how to do things and what abstractions are involved more. I also have more "writer's block" when starting with a fresh program/document if trying not to get AI to seed it with a baseline implementation, where I have to sit for a while thinking about what I really want to build.
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I always absolutely hated when a teacher did a reverse classroom and I had to “learn” at home and then practice in the classroom. I think the solution is more engaging lessons and less outside work. I know why homework exists, but homework is a chore that most people want to get done as fast as possible. If kids got to learn something interesting in school and then have their free time after school, there would be le…
When left to their own devices, 99% of children are not interested enough in math, history, literature, languages, or almost any other school subject to engage with it willingly. Only teaching "interesting" things that kids are "interested" in is both impossible (too many varied kids per class for that to work 100% of the time) and even if possible, would leave kids with zero practical knowledge, because learning mos…
College is a different dynamic from a middle/high school classroom, but I don’t remember 95% of the material from my college engineering classes anyway, it’s the problem solving and information finding that I’ve retained and have helped me do the things I do. I remember the stuff from the classes that taught me the material in an engaging way though.
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…
You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study. Doing the homework and the tests are just the "goalposts" to check for yourself whether you made progress on this.
So, as long as you are not under time pressure (which you in some degree courses unluckily are), there is simply no need to "speed up" any homework assignments.
If, on the other hand, LLMs help you with making much faster progress in understanding the subject that you study (which is only loosely correlated to homework and tests), I guess it's fine to use them. Just always keep in mind that very often the pain of attempting to understand the topic on your own often makes you smarter - something that you will miss when you take an "LLM shortcut".