Some students become better because of LLMs, some become worse.
It's like some people learn knowledge by TikTok, some just waste time on it.
How University Students Use Claude
441–450 of 601 posts
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#442No 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…
That's brilliant! I mean, arithmetic is the same way, right? Nobody should do the arithmetic by hand, as you say. Kindergarten teachers really ought to just hand their kids calculators, tell them they should push these buttons like this, and write down the answers. No need to teach them how to do routine arithmetics like 3+4 when a calculator can do it for them.
And don't everyone have smartphones? So why not just use OCR to read things. No need to learn to read. Just use speech recognition and OCR.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT is laughably terrible at double entry accounting. A few weeks ago I was trying to use it to figure out a reasonable way to structure accounts for a project given the different business requirements I had. It kept disappearing money when giving examples. Pointing it out didn’t help either, it just apologized and went on to make the same mistake in a different way.
Using a system based on randomness for a process that must occur deterministically is probably the wrong solution. I'm running into similar issues trying to use LLMs for logic and reasoning. They can do it (surprisingly well, once you disable the friendliness that prevents it), but you get a different random subset of correct answers every time. I don't know if setting temperature to 0 would help. You'd get the same…
> They can do it (surprisingly well, once you disable the friendliness that prevents it) ...
Interesting! :D Do you mind sharing the prompt(s) that you use to do that?
Thanks!!
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#444I'm looking forward to the next installment on this subject from Anthropic, namely "How University Teachers Use Claude". How many teachers are offloading their teaching duties onto LLMs? Are they reading essays and annotating them by hand? If everything is submitted electronically, why not just dump 30 or 50 papers into a LLM queue for analysis, suggested comments for improvement, etc. while the instructor gets back…
Alternatively, let's throw out our outmoded ideas and all get excited for an AI-based future in which professors let AI grade the essays student generate with AI.
Just think of the time everybody will save! Instead of wasting effort learning or teaching, we'll be free to spend our time doing... uh... something! Generative AI will clearly be a real 10x or even 100x multiplier! We'll spiral into cultural and intellectual oblivion so much faster than we ever thought possible!
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#445I'm a professor at an R1 university teaching mostly graduate-level courses with substantive Python programming components. On the one hand, I've caught some students red handed (ChatGPT generated their exact solution and they were utterly unable to explain the advanced Python that was in their solution) and had to award them 0s for assignments, which was heartbreaking. On the other, I was pleasantly surprised to find…
> had to award them 0s for assignments, which was heartbreaking You should feel nothing. They knew they were cheating. They didn't give a crap about you. Frankly, I would love to have people failing assignments they can't explain even if they did NOT use "AI" to cheat on them. We don't need more meaningless degrees. Make the grades and the degrees mean something, somehow.
> > had to award them 0s for assignments, which was heartbreaking
> You should feel nothing. They knew they were cheating. They didn't give a crap about you.
Most of us (a) don't feel our students owe us anything personally and (b) want our students to succeed. So it's upsetting to see students pluck the low-hanging, easily picked fruit of cheating via LLMs. If cheating were harder, some of these students wouldn't cheat. Some certainly would. Others would do poorly.
But regardless, failing a student and citing students for plagiarism feel bad, even though basically all of us would agree on the importance and value of upholding standards and enforcing principles of honesty and integrity.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
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.
Almost none of the cheaters appear to be solving problems with LLMs. All my faculty friends are getting large portions of their class clearly turning in "just copied directly from ChatGPT" responses.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be interested in counter-examples?
Given the original, ludicrous, claim was: > Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization. Then we don't really need plural examples, right? Anyway - language, wheel, fire, tool-making, social constructs like reciprocity principle - I think gave us some progress as a species and a society.
All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists.
Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.
The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.
Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#448> 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…
I've been calling this out since the rise of ChatGPT: "The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the LLM to provide an answer, rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own. By reaching for it to solve any problem at nearly an instinctual level you are completely failing to cultivate an intrinsically valuable skill - that of cri…
I've had multiple situations where AI has helped me get to the solution because it has been unable to get there itself. But that I wouldn't have realised that solution otherwise. In one case, looking for a plot, it delivered many woeful options but one sparked an alternative thought that got me on track. In other cases trying to debug code, having it talk through the logic/flow and exhaust other fixes, I have managed to solve the problem despite not being experienced at all with that language.
The dangers I've found personally are more around how it eases busywork, so I'm more inclined to be distracted doing that as though it delivers actual progress.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#449Earlier 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 ?…
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Re: How University Students Use Claude
#450Earlier 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
Yes, my undergrad degree grade was determined solely by my performance on 8 three-hour exams at the end of the final year.