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How University Students Use Claude

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#391

Post by sethammons »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #319
DSingularity wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is now reality -- fighting to change the students is a losing battle. Besides in terms of normalizing grade distributions this is not that complicated to solve. Target the cheaters with pop quizzes. Prof can randomly choose 3 questions from assignments. If students cant get enough marks on 2/3 of them they are dealt a huge penalty. Students that actually work through the problems will have no problems with scori…

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.

My high school English teacher's book reports were like this. One by one, you come up, hand over your book, and the teacher randomly picks a couple of passages and reads them aloud and asks what had just happened prior and what happens after. Then a couple opinion questions and boom, pass or fail. Fantastic to not write a paper on it; paper writing was a more dedicated topic.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#392

Post by sersi »

foxglacier wrote: post #323
cellularmitosis wrote: post #319

Earlier 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".

When I was a student, I spent my first 2 years in a so-called prépa intégré of a French engineering school. 20% of students failed and were shown the door during those two years (some failed, some figured that it just wasn't for them). That's fine, that means you keep the ones who actually do the work. At a certain point, you have to start treating students like adult, either they succeed or they don't but it's their personal responsibility.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#393

Post by jpc0 »

shinycode wrote: post #385
Stubbs wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone already said, parents used to be concerned that kids wouldn't be able to solve maths problems without a calculator, and it's the same problem, but there's a difference between solving problems _with_ LLMs, and having LLMs solve it _for you_. I don't see the former as that much of a problem.

Well the extent is much broader from a calculator vs an LLM. Why should I hire you if an agent can do it ? LLM is every job is a calculator and can be replaced. Spotify CEO stated on X that before asking for more headcount they have to justify not being able to do the job with an agent. So all the students who let the LLM do their assignment and learn basically nothing, what’s their value for a company to be hired ?…

> Why should I hire you if an agent can do it ?

You as the employer are liable, a human has real reasoning abilities and real fears about messing up, the likely hood of them doing something absurd like telling a customer that a product is 70% off and them not losing their job is effectively nil. What are you going to do with the LLM, fire it?

Data scientist and people deeply familiar with LLMs to the point that they could fine tune a model to your use case cost significantly more than a low skilled employee and depending on liability just running the LLM may be cheaper.

As an accounting firm ( one example from above ) far as I know in most jurisdictions the accountant doing the work is personally liable, who would be liable in the case of the LLM?

There is absolutely a market for LLM augmented workforces, I don't see any viable future even with SOTA models right now for flat out replacing a workforce with them.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#394

Post by 9rx »

oerdier wrote: post #377
9rx wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in my day they worried about kids not being able to solve problems without a calculator, because you won't always have a calculator in your pocket. ...But then.

Not being able to solve basic math problems in your mind (without a calculator) is still a problem. "Because you won't always have a calculator with you" just was the wrong argument. You'll acquire advanced knowledge and skills much, much faster (and sometimes only) if you have the base knowledge and skills readily available in your mind. If you're learning about linear algebra but you have to type in every simple mu…

> if you have the base knowledge and skills readily available in your mind.

I have the base knowledge and skill readily available to perform basic arithmetic, but I still can't do it in my mind in any practical way because I, for lack of a better description, run out of memory.

I expect most everyone eventually "runs out of memory" if the values are sufficiently large, but I hit the wall when the values are exceptionally small. And not for lack of trying – the "you won't always have a calculator" message was heard.

It wasn't skill and knowledge that was the concern, though. It was very much about execution. We were tested on execution.

> If you're learning about linear algebra but you have to type in every simple multiplication of numbers into a calculator...

I can't imagine anyone is still using a four function calculator. Certainly not in an application like learning linear algebra. Modern calculators are decidedly designed for linear algebra. They need to be given the rise of things like machine learning that are heavily dependent on such.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#395

Post by 1oooqooq »

kibwen wrote: post #57
bko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

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…

nobody ever said that. that's ai apologist history revisionism.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#396

Post by kgwgk »

sersi wrote: post #390
deepsun wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that's how studying is done in Oxford/Cambridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system

That's also how it's done in almost all French engineering schools. You get open book tests with a small amount of relatively difficult questions and you have 3-4 hours to complete. In some of the CS tests, coding by hand sucks a bit but to be honest, they're ok with pseudo code as long as you show you understand the concepts.

The European mind cannot comprehend take-home exams.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#397

Post by sethammons »

lisper wrote: post #247
elcritch wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To bake a cake from scratch, first, you must create the universe

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#398

Post by jurgenaut23 »

I think most people miss the bigger picture on the impact of AI on the learning process, especially in engineering disciplines.

Doing things that could be in principle automated by AI is still fundamentally valuable, because they bring two massive benefits:

- *Understanding what happens under the hood*: if you want to be an effective software engineer, you need to understand the whole stack. This is true of any engineering discipline really. Civil engineers take classes in fluid dynamics and material science classes although they will mostly apply pre-defined recipes on the job. You wouldn't be comfortable if the engineer who signed off on the blueprints of dam upstream of your house had no idea about the physics of concrete, hydrodynamic scour, etc.

- *Having fun*: there is nothing like the joy of discovering how things work, even though a perfectly fine abstraction that hides these details underneath. It is a huge part of the motivation for becoming an engineer. Even by assuming that Vibe Coding could develop into something that works, it would be a very tedious job.

When students use AI to do the hard work on their behalf, they miss out on those. We need to be extremely careful with this, as we might hurt a whole generation of students, both in terms of their performance and their love of technology.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#399

Post by iNic »

enjo wrote: post #297
dtnewman wrote: post #14

> 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…

The solution is making all homework optional and having an old-school end of semester exam.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#400

Post by ghaff »

kgwgk wrote: post #396
sersi wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also how it's done in almost all French engineering schools. You get open book tests with a small amount of relatively difficult questions and you have 3-4 hours to complete. In some of the CS tests, coding by hand sucks a bit but to be honest, they're ok with pseudo code as long as you show you understand the concepts.

The European mind cannot comprehend take-home exams.

I don’t recall take home exams being at all common undergrad in the US. Open book or one page formula sheets more so.
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