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How University Students Use Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#471

Post by pc86 »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #460
enjo wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

my partner teaches high school math and regularly gets answers with calculus symbols (none of the students have taken any calculus). these students aren't putting a single iota of thought into the answers they're getting back from these tools.

To me this is the bigger problem. Using LLMs is going to happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. So it's important to make people understand how to use them, and to find ways to test that students still understand the underlying concepts.

I'm in a 100%-online grad school but they proctor major exams through local testing centers, and every class is at least 50% based on one or more major exams. It's a good way to let people use LLMs, because they're available, and trying to stop it is a fool's errand, while requiring people to understand the underlying concepts in order to pass.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#472

Post by pc86 »

guappa wrote: post #466
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.

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.

Well graduation rate is a pretty terrible way to grade education, especially country to country. You could have 100% graduation rate today by just passing everyone - that's basically what we have in primary education and there was an article here just last week about how most college students are functionally illiterate.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#473

Post by dysoco »

ryandrake wrote: post #82
dyauspitr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure you can assume close to 100% of students are using LLMs to do their homework.

And if you're that one person out of 100,000 who is not using LLMs to do their homework, you are at a significant disadvantage on the grading curve.

My university solves this quite easily.

There is no graded homework, the coursework is there only as a guide and practice for the exams.

So you can absolutely use LLMs to help you with the exercises or to help understand something, however if you blindly get answers you will only be fooling yourself as you won't be able to pass the exams.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#474

Post by pc86 »

pja wrote: post #386
HPsquared wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, the best use of AI in education is to serve as exactly this kind of tutor. This is the future of education.

The promise of the expansion of this kind of tutorial teaching to everyone via AI is great. The problem is keeping students honest with themselves.

At the end of the day you can't force people to learn if they don't want to.

As a society we need to be okay with failing people who deserve to fail and not drag people across the finish line at the expense of diluting the degrees of everyone else who actually put in effort.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#475

Post by jillesvangurp »

chii wrote: post #424
jillesvangurp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Of course, you'd expect students to use similar prompts to make sure they are prepared for discussing those questions with the teacher. what's the point of the teacher then? Courses could entirely be taught via LLM in this case! A student's willingness to learn is orthogonal to the availability of cheating devices. If a student is willing, they will know when to leverage the LLM for tutoring, and when to practise w…

> what's the point of the teacher then?

Coaching the student on their learning journey, kicking their ass when they are failing, providing independent testing/certification of their skills, answering questions they have, giving lectures, etc.

But you are right, you don't have to wait for a teacher to tell you stuff if you want to self educate yourself. The flip side is that a lot of people lack the discipline to teach themselves anything. Which is why going to school & universities is a good idea for many.

And I would expect good students that are naturally curious to be using LLM based tools a lot to satisfy their curiosity. And I would hope good teachers would encourage that instead of just trying to fit students into some straight jacket based on whatever the bare minimum standards say they should know, which of course is what a lot of teaching boils down to.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#476

Post by shinycode »

9rx wrote: post #462
shinycode wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

So like arguably when people were not using calculators they made calculations by hand and there was a room full of people that did calculations. That’s gone now thanks to calculators. But it the analogy goes to an order of magnitude higher, now fewer people can « do » the job of many so less hiring maybe but not just on « do calculations by hand » but almost all fields where the use of software is required.

  Where will all those new students find a job if :
  - they did not learn much because LLM did work for them 
  - there is no new jobs required because we are more productive ?

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#477

Post by sally_glance »

acbart wrote: post #215
sally_glance wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a structural issue. Universities right now are trying to justify their existence - universities of the past used to be sites of innovation. Using ChatGPT doesn't dumb down your students. Not knowing how it works and where to use it does. Don't do silly textbook challenges for exams anymore - reestablish a culture of scientific innovation!

Incorrect. Fundamentals must be taught in order to provide the context for the more challenging open-ended activities. Memorization is the base of knowledge, a starting point. Cheating (whether through an LLM or hiring someone or whatever) skips the journey. You can't just take them through the exciting routes, sometimes they have to go through the boring tedious repetitive stuff because that's how human brains learn…

I guess I should have phrased it differently - what I meant was just stop testing the tedious stuff, make it clear to students that learning the fundamentals is expected. Then examine them on hard exploratory problems which require the fundamentals.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#478

Post by pc86 »

NiloCK wrote: post #457
lelanthran wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't students already allowed to fail? As a comment upthread said, let them cheat on the take home as much as they want to, they're still going to fail the exam.

> Aren't students already allowed to fail? It's technically allowed on an individual basis, but the economics don't work for any institution to attempt to raise its bar. If institutions X and Y grant credential Z, and X starts failing a third of its students, who would apply to go there?

For the most part degrees from roughly comparable schools in the same subject are fungible. However, graduating cheaters who should have flunked out of school their freshman year is a one-way ticket to having a reputation that your degree is worthless. You're now comparable to a lower tier of schools and suddenly Y's degree is worth a lot more than yours. The best way (not to only way) to combat this is to actively cull the bottom of your classes. Most schools already do this by kicking out people with low enough GPAs, academic probation, etc. My undergrad would expel you if you had a GPA below 1.8 after your first semester, and you were on academic probation if your GPA was > 1.8 and This assumes, of course, an institution is actively trying to raise the academic bar of its student population. Most schools are emphatically not trying to do this and are focused more on just increasing enrollment, getting more tax dollars, and hiring more administrators.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#479

Post by MisterTea »

If you are doing remote learning and using AI to cheat your way through school you have obliterated any chance of fair competition. Cheaters can hide at home feeding homework and exams into AI, get a diploma that certifies all the cheating, then they go on to do the same at work where they feed work problems into an AI. Get paid to copy paste.

But I have a feeling that if it's that easy to cheat through life then its just as easy to eliminate that job being performed by a human and negate the need to worry about cheating. So I have a feeling it will work for only a very short amount of time.

Another feeling I have is mandatory in-person exams involving a locked down terminal presenting the user with a problem to solve. Might be a whole service industry waiting to be born - verify the human on the other end is real and competent. Of course, anything is corruptible. Weird future of rapidly diminishing trust.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#480

Post by sally_glance »

nixpulvis wrote: post #217
sally_glance wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a structural issue. Universities right now are trying to justify their existence - universities of the past used to be sites of innovation. Using ChatGPT doesn't dumb down your students. Not knowing how it works and where to use it does. Don't do silly textbook challenges for exams anymore - reestablish a culture of scientific innovation!

You claim using AI tools doesn't dumb you down, but it very well could and is. Take the calculator for example, I'm overly dependent on it. I'm slower to perform arithmetic than I would have been without it. But knowing how to use one allows me to do more complex math more quickly. So I'm "dumber" in one way and "smarter" in others. AI could be the same... except our education system doesn't seem ready for it. We sti…

I agree that you should learn the fundamentals before taking shortcuts. I just don't view it as the universities' job to repeatedly remind their students of this, that's elementary/high school style. In universitiy, just give them hard problems requiring fundamental knowledge and cross-checking capabilities but don't restrict their tools.
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