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How University Students Use Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#461

Post by albumen »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #266
jplusequalt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We are doomed imho. I encourage you to take action to prove to yourself that real change is possible. What you can do in your own life to enact change is hard to say, given I know nothing about your situation. But say you are a parent, you have control over how often your children use their phones, whether they are on social media, whether they are using ChatGPT to get around doing their homework. How we raise the n…

So your plan is to encourage people to "get off the Internet" by posting on the Internet, and to stave off automation by encouraging workers to gang up on their employers and make themselves a collective critical point of failure. Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world...

Apparently you'd love to change the world; a good start would be accurately reading and recounting others' arguments.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#462

Post by 9rx »

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 ?

An agent can't do it. It can help you like a calculator can help you, but it can't do it alone. So that means you've become the programmer. If you want to be the programmer, you always could have been. If that is what you want to be, why would you consider hiring anyone else to do it in the first place?

> 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.

It was Shopifiy, but that's just a roundabout way to say that there is a hiring freeze due to low sales (no doubt because of tariff nonsense seizing up the market). An agent, like a calculator, can only increase the productivity of a programmer. As always, you still need more programmers to perform more work than a single programmer can handle. So all they are saying is that "we can't afford to do more".

> The company will and is just using the agent as well …

In which case wouldn't they want to hire those who are experts in using agents? If they, like Shopify, have become too poor to hire people – well, you're screwed either way, aren't you? So that is moot.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#463

Post by wordofx »

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 not a wide spread “problem”. It’s just education lagging behind technology.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#464

Post by globnomulous »

fourseventy wrote: post #22
bluefirebrand wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We certainly improve productivity I think this is really still up for debate We produce more output certainly but if it's overall lower quality than previous output is that really "improved productivity"? There has to be a tipping point somewhere, where faster output of low quality work is actually decreasing productivity due to the efforts now required to keep the tower of garbage from toppling

It's not up for debate. Ask any programmer if LLMs improve productivity and the answer is 100% yes.

> It's not up for debate. Ask any programmer if LLMs improve productivity and the answer is 100% yes.

Programmer here. The answer is 100% no. The programmers who think they're saving time are racking up debts they'll pay later.

The debts will come due when they find they've learned nothing about a problem space and failed to become experts in it despite having "written" and despite owning the feature dealing with it.

Or they'll come due as their failure to hone their skills in technical problem solving catches up to them.

Or they'll come due when they have to fix a bug that the LLM produced and either they'll have no idea how or they'll manage to fix it but then they'll have to explain, to a manager or customer, that they committed code to the codebase that they didn't understand.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#465

Post by akimbostrawman »

Jedd wrote: post #459
akimbostrawman wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists. I'm not sure how you get from pre-agricultural humans developing fire, to dentists building cars. I don't doubt that after fire was 'understood', there was specialisation to some degree, probably , around management of fire, what burns well, how best to cook, etc. But any claim that fire was the result of specialisat…

The discovery of fire itself was not progress, but how to use it very much is. They most likely didn't have a "discover fire" specialization in the modern sense but I doubt the one first to create a fire starter was afterwards deligated to only collect berries. The discovery and creation of something obviously often comes before the specialization or it would otherwise be impossible to discover and create anything.

>FWIW I don't have a microwave oven.

That was just an example. You still know how to use them hence basic knowledge. Seem like this discussion boils down to semantics

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#466

Post by guappa »

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.

That's how it is in Italy. And that's why Italy is behind every other country in education. Because it hasn't yet made graduating as easy as it is in other places.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#467

Post by guappa »

vmilner wrote: post #347
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

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.

In italy there's an oral in most exams. In math exams you're asked proofs of theorems (that were part of the course).

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#468

Post by guappa »

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".

If they fail they learn that they have to study.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#469

Post by pc86 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #446
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.

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.

It's an issue in grad school as well. You'll have an online discussion where someone submits 4 paragraphs of not-quite-eloquent prose with that AI "stink" on it. You can't be sure but it definitely makes your spidey sense tingle a bit.

Then they're on a video call and their vocabulary is wildly different, or they're very clearly a recent immigrant and struggle with basic sentence structure such that there is absolutely zero change their discussion forum persona is actually who they are.

This has happened at least once in every class, and invariably the best classes in terms of discussion and learning from other students are the ones where the people using AI to generate their answers are failed or drop the course.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#470

Post by guappa »

sersi wrote: post #392
foxglacier wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That looks bad in the international statistics and so on, there's a lot of pressure to just pass everyone.

In Italy university keeps getting easier because their funding is tied to not failing students.

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