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How University Students Use Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#491

Post by vonneumannstan »

goatlover wrote: post #212
vonneumannstan wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 100% certain people said the same thing about arithmetic and calculators and now mental arithmetic skill is nothing more than a curiosity.

That's simply not true. I use mental arithmetic skill every day. It's irritating or funny when you come across someone who struggles with it, depending on the situation.

Obviously basic levels are needed but the ability to say multiply 4 digit numbers in your head is totally superfluous. Theres a parallel to software engineering there.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#492

Post by oytis »

lordnacho wrote: post #458
chii wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like expecting them to do arithmetic by hand. No one does. But those who traditionally learnt arithmetics have had this training, which _enables_ higher order thinking. Being reliant on AI to do this means they would not have had that same level of training. It could prevent them from being able to synthesize new patterns or recognize them (and so if the AI also cannot do the same, you get stagnation).

I suspect schools spend a lot less time on arithmetic than they used to, however. You used to _actually_ need to do the arithmetic, now you just need to understand when a calculator is not giving you what you expected. (Not that this is being taught either, lol) You can get to the higher order thinking sooner than if you spent years grinding multiplication tables.

> you just need to understand when a calculator is not giving you what you expected

How do you do that if you can't do arithmetic by hand though? At most, when working with integers, you can count digits to check if the order of magnitude is correct.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#493

Post by linkregister »

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".

Many mathematics professors don't require homework to be turned in for grading. For example, the calculus courses at many US universities. Grades are solely determined by quizzes in the discussion section and by exams. Failure rates are above 30%, but that's accepted.

This model won't work for subjects that rely on students writing reports. But yes, universities frequently accept that failure rates for some courses will be high, especially for engineering and the sciences.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#494

Post by currymj »

0xffff2 wrote: post #126
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…

>For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that". Does that actually work? I'm long past having easy access to college programming assignments, but based on my limited interaction with ChatGPT I would be absolutely shocked if it produced output that was even coherent, much less working code given such an approach.

since late 2024/early 2025 it now is the case, especially with a reasoning model like Sonnet 3.7, DeepSeek-r1, o3, Gemini 2.5, etc., and especially if you upload the textbook, slides, etc alongside the homework to be cheated on.

most normal-difficulty undergraduate assignments are now doable reliably by AI with little to no human oversight. this includes both programming and mathematical problem sets.

for harder problem sets that require some insight, or very unstructured larger-scale programming projects, it wouldn't work so reliably.

but easier homework assignments serve a valid purpose to check understanding, and now they are no longer viable.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#495

Post by c22 »

danielbln wrote: post #432
c22 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specialization is over-rated. I've done everything in your list except make an ASIC because learning how to do those things was interesting and I prefer when things are done my way. I started way back in my 20s just figuring out how to write websites. I'm not sure where the camel's back would have broken. It has, of course, been convenient to be able to "bootstrap" my self-reliance in these and other fields by consum…

Jack of all trades, master of none. I also somehow doubt that you've built a car from scratch, including designing the engine, carving it out of a block of metal and so on. And if we're talking modern car, good luck fabbing the integrated circuits in your backyard or whatever. Even your particular generalist fantasy will (and most likely has) hit the hard constraints of specialization real quick. There is no single h…

It was an electric car, but it's true that I bought the motor (and the esc, batteries, etc...) That said, I have wound several motors in my day.

I'm not saying some degree of specialization isn't desirable in the world, just that it's overrated.

Do we need a modern computer?

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#497

Post by xhkkffbf »

samuel wrote: post #349
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…

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…

All tech becomes a crutch. People can't wash their clothes without a machine. People can't cook without a microwave. Tech is both a gift and a curse.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#498

Post by xpe »

ignoramous wrote: post #453
SamBam wrote: post #9

I feel like Anthropic has an incentive to minimize how much students use LLMs to write their papers for them. In the article, I guess this would be buried in > Students also frequently used Claude to provide technical explanations or solutions for academic assignments (33.5%)—working with AI to debug and fix errors in coding assignments, implement programming algorithms and data structures, and explain or solve mathe…

> feel like Anthropic has an incentive to minimize how much students use LLMs to write their papers for them You're right. Quite incredibly, they also do the opposite, in that they hype-up / inflate the capability of their LLMs. For instance, they've categorised "summarisation" as "high-order thinking" ("Create", per Bloom's Taxonomy). It patently isn't. Comical they'd not only think so, but also publicly blog about…

> Bloom's taxonomy is a framework for categorizing educational goals, developed by a committee of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. ... In 2001, this taxonomy was revised, renaming and reordering the levels as Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. This domain focuses on intellectual skills and the development of critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. - Wikipedia

This context is important: this taxonomy did not emerge from artificial intelligence nor cognitive science. So its levels are unlikely to map to how ML/AI people assess the difficulty of various categories of tasks.

Generative models are, by design, fast (and often pretty good) at generation (creation), but this isn't the same standard that Bloom had in mind with his "creation" category. Bloom's taxonomy might be better described as a hierarchy: proper creation draws upon all the layers below it: understanding, application, analysis, and evaluation.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#499

Post by neves »

noisy_boy wrote: post #433
moojacob wrote: post #86

How can I, as a student, avoid hindering my learning with language models? I use Claude, a lot. I’ll upload the slides and ask questions. I’ve talked to Claude for hours trying to break down a problem. I think I’m learning more. But what I think might not be what’s happening. In one of my machine learning classes, cheating is a huge issue. People are using LMs to answer multiple choice questions on quizzes that are o…

I don't think the pain of losing points is a good learning incentive, powerful sure but not effective. You would learn more if you tell Claude to not give outright answers but generate more problems where you are weak for you to solve. That reduction in errors as you go along will be the positive reinforcement that will work long term.

I don't know. I remember much more my failures than my successes. There are errors in important tests that I remember for life the correct answer.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#500

Post by CamperBob2 »

albumen wrote: post #461
CamperBob2 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, that's important. What'd I get wrong?
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