41–50 of 318 posts
The way they actually use is to get ChatGPT to generate ALL their homework and submit that. And sometimes take home exams too. And the weird thing is that some professors are perfectly cool with it.
I am starting to question whether the cost of going to a place of higher learning is worth it.
In the age of google + AI + instant access to info, knowing how to ask the question is more important than knowing the answer.
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Wouldn't it be unfair towards the students who want to learn without LLMs?
Why does that matter? LLMs are going to be increasingly important tools, so it's valuable for educators to help students understand how to use them well. If you choose to exclude modern tools in your teaching to avoid disadvantaging those who don't want to use them, you disadvantage all the students who do want to use them. To put it another way, modern high school level math classes disadvantage students who want to…
LLMs have their place and maybe even somewhere in schools but the more you automate the hard parts of tasks, the less people value the struggle of actually learning something.
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I've noticed that people who rely on calculators have great difficulty recognizing when their answers are off by a factor of 10. I know a hiring manager who asks his (engineering) candidates what is 20% of 20,000? It's amazing how many engineers are completely unable to do this without a calculator. He said they often cry. Of course, they're all "no hire". How did they get a degree, one wonders?
This is a sort of mental math trick that isn’t incredibly useful in day to day engineering. Now if they say 16,000 or something then maybe there’s an argument against them, but being able to calculate a tip on the fly isn’t really something worth selecting for imo
I was talking to a teacher today that works with me at length about the impact of AI LLM models are having now when considering student's attitude towards learning. When I was young, I refused to learn geography because we had map applications. I could just look it up. I did the same for anything I could, offload the cognitive overhead to something better -- I think this is something we all do consciously or not. Tha…
In Germany the subject is called "Erdkunde" which would translate to geology. And this term is, I assume, more appropriate as it isn't just about what is where but also about geological history and science and how volcanoes work and how to read maps and such.
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I've noticed that people who rely on calculators have great difficulty recognizing when their answers are off by a factor of 10. I know a hiring manager who asks his (engineering) candidates what is 20% of 20,000? It's amazing how many engineers are completely unable to do this without a calculator. He said they often cry. Of course, they're all "no hire". How did they get a degree, one wonders?
This is a sort of mental math trick that isn’t incredibly useful in day to day engineering. Now if they say 16,000 or something then maybe there’s an argument against them, but being able to calculate a tip on the fly isn’t really something worth selecting for imo
And yes, it's incredibly useful in enabling recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error. When you've got zero feel for numbers, you're going to make bad engineering decisions. You'll also get screwed by car dealers every time, and contractors. You won't know how far you can go with the gas in your tank.
It goes on and on.
Calculators are great for getting an exact final answer. But you'd better already know approximately what the answer should be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed that people who rely on calculators have great difficulty recognizing when their answers are off by a factor of 10. I know a hiring manager who asks his (engineering) candidates what is 20% of 20,000? It's amazing how many engineers are completely unable to do this without a calculator. He said they often cry. Of course, they're all "no hire". How did they get a degree, one wonders?
I've been bashing my head against Speed Mathematics Simplified because I want to be able to do tip math without pulling out my phone.