> AI systems are no longer just specialized research tools: they’re everyday academic companions.
Oh, please, from the bottom of my heart as a teacher: go fuck yourselves.
How University Students Use Claude
341–350 of 601 posts
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
>50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright." And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete? We live in a highly specialized society t…
Your opinion is wild. Hmm, millions of humans are spending a bulk of their lives plugging away at numbers on a screen. We can replace this with an AI and free them up to do literally anything else. No, let's not do that. Keep being slow ineffective calculators and lay on your death bed feeling FULFILLED!
You're skipping over a critical step, which is that our society allocated resources based on the labor value that an individual provides. If we free up everyone to do anything, they're not providing labor any more, so they get no resources. In other words, society needs to change in big ways, and I don't know how or if it will do that.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#343The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense. The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking. You'll soon no…
Students will work in a world where they have to use AI to do their jobs. This is not going to be optional. Learning to use AIs effectively is an important skill and should be part of their education.
And it's an opportunity for educators to raise the ambition level quite a bit. It indeed obsoletes some of the tests they've been using to evaluate students. But they too now have the AI tools to do a better job and come up with more effective tests.
Think of all that time freed up having to actually read all those submitted papers. I can tell you from experience (I taught a few classes as a post doc way back): not fun. Minimum you can just instantly fail the ones that are obviously poorly written, are full of grammatical errors, and feature lots of flawed reasoning. Most decent LLMs do a decent job of doing that. Is using an LLM for that cheating if a teacher does it? I think that should just be expected at this point. And if it is OK for the teacher, it should be OK for the student.
If you expect LLMs to be used, it raises the bar for the acceptable quality level of submitted papers. They should be readable, well structured, well researched, etc. There really is no excuse for those papers not being like that. The student needs to be able to tell the difference. That actually takes skill to ask for the right things. And you can grill them on knowledge of their own work. A little 10 minute conversation maybe. Which should be about the amount of time a teacher would have otherwise spent on evaluating the paper manually and is definitely more fun (I used to do that; give people an opportunity to defend their work).
And if you really want to test writing skills, put students in a room with pen and paper. That's how we did things in the eighties and nineties. Most people did not have PCs and printers then. Poor teachers had to actually sit down and try to decipher my handwriting. Which even when that skill had not atrophied for a few decades, wasn't great.
LLMs will force change in education one way or another. Most of that change will be good. People trying to cheat is a constant. We just need to force them to be smarter about it. Which at a meta level isn't that bad of a skill to learn when you are educating people.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#344My take: While AI tools can help with learning, the vast majority of students use it to avoid learning
Most of us here took their education before AI. Students trying to avoid having to do work is a constant and as old as the notion of schools is. Changing/improving the tools just means teachers have to escalate the counter measures. For example by raising the ambition level in terms of quality and amount of work expected.
And teachers should use AIs too. Evaluating papers is not that hard for an LLM.
"Your a teacher. Given this assignment (paste /attach the file and the student's paper), does this paper meet the criteria. Identify flaws and grammatical errors. Compose a list of ten questions to grill the student on based on their own work and their understanding of the background material."
A prompt like that sounds like it would do the job. Of course, you'd expect students to use similar prompts to make sure they are prepared for discussing those questions with the teacher.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#345I'm an undergrad at a T10 college. Walking through our library, I often notice about 30% of students have ChatGPT or Claude open on their screens. In my circle, I can't name a single person who doesn't heavily use these tools for assignments. What's fascinating, though, is that the most cracked CS students I know deliberately avoid using these tools for programming work. They understand the value in the struggle of s…
Another obvious downside of the idiosyncratically American system that forces university students to take irrelevant classes to make up for the total lack of rigorous academic high school education.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#346If a student is passing your classes while using AI, I'm sorry your class is a joke. Every class I sophomore on was open everything (except internet) and it still had a >50% failure rate.
> Every class I sophomore on
What does this mean?
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just grade solely based on live performance? (quizzes and tests) Homework would still be assigned as a learning tool, but has no impact on your grade.
I've heard that's how studying is done in Oxford/Cambridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system
Certainly with maths you’re marked almost totally on written exams, but even if that weren’t true you’re also required to go over example sheets (hard homework questions that don’t form part of the final mark) with a tutor in two-student sessions so it’d be completely obvious if you were relying on AI.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#348No one seems to be talking about the fact that we need to change the definition of cheating. People's careers are going to be filled with AI. College needs to prepare them for that reality, not to get jobs that are now extinct. If they are never going to have to program without AI, what's the point in teaching them to do it? It's like expecting them to do arithmetic by hand. No one does. For every class, teachers nee…
I believe we need to practice critical thinking through actual effort. Doing arithmetic by hand and working through problems ourselves builds intuition in ways that shortcuts can't. I'm grateful I grew up without LLMs, as the struggle to organize and express my thoughts on paper developed mental muscles I still rely on today. Some perspiration is necessary for genuine learning—the difficulty is actually part of the value.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#349> 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…
> it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that". My wife is an accounting professor. For many years her battle was with students using Chegg and the like. They would submit roughly correct answers but because she would rotate the underlying numbers they would always be wrong in a provably cheating way. This made up 5-8% of her students. Now she…
I guess this students don't pass, do they? I don't think that's a particularly hard concern. It will take a bit more, but will learn the lesson (or drop out).
I'm more worried about those who will learn to solve the problems with the help of an LLM, but can't do anything without one. Those will go under the radar, unnoticed, and the problem is, how bad is it, actually? I would say that a lot, but then I realize I'm pretty useless driver without a GPS (once I get out of my hometown). That's the hard question, IMO.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just grade solely based on live performance? (quizzes and tests) Homework would still be assigned as a learning tool, but has no impact on your grade.
Because students wouldn't do the homework and would fail the quizzes. Students need to be pressured into learning and grades for doing the practice are a way. Don't pretend many students are self-motivated enough to follow the lecturer's instructions when there's no grade in it and insisting that "trust me, you won't learn if you don't do it".
I've mostly had non-graded homework in my studies because cheating was always easy. In highschool they might have told your parents if you don't do homework. In university you do what you want. It's never been an issue overall.