How University Students Use Claude • Hacker News Board

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#51

Post by PeterStuer » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:44 PM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #26

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…

Exactly. There's a big difference between a student having a back-and-forth dialogue with Claude around "the extent to which feudalism was one of the causes of the French Revolution." , versus another student using their smartphone to take a snapshot of the actual homework assignment, pasting it into Claude and calling it a day.

From what I could observe, the latter is endemic amongst high school students. And don't kid yourself. For many it is just a step up from copy/pasting the first Google result.

They never could be arsed to learn how to input their assignments into Wolfram Alpha. It was always the ux/ui effort that held them back.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#52

Post by dingnuts » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:44 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #35

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…

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

> That's more or less accepted today.

Bullshit! You cannot do second order reasoning with a set of facts or concepts that you have to look up first.

Google Search made intuition and deep understanding and encyclopedic knowledge MORE important, not less.

People will think you are a wizard if you read documentation and bother to remember it, because they're still busy asking Google or ChatGPT while you're happily coding without pausing

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#53

Post by walthamstow » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

nyeah wrote: post #41

bko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

Spell check isn't really adequate. You get a page full of correctly spelled words, but they're the wrong words.

Try being British, often they're not correctly spelt words at all.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#54

Post by taftster » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

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…

I don't think asking "what's wrong with my code" hurts the learning process. In fact, I would argue it helps it. I don't think you learn when you have reached your frustration point and you just want the dang assignment completed. But before reaching that point, if you had a tutor or assistant that you could ask, "hey, I'm just not seeing my mistake, do you have ideas" goes a long way to foster learning. ChatGPT, used in this way, can be extremely valuable and can definitely unlock learning in new ways which we probably even haven't seen yet.

That being said, I agree with you, if you just ask ChatGPT to write a b-tree implementation from scratch, then you have not learned anything. So like all things in academia, AI can be used to foster education or cheat around it. There's been examples of these "cheats" far before ChatGPT or Google existed.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#55

Post by Vvector » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

noitpmeder wrote: post #44

bko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

This is an insane take. The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart. The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it. I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.

Do you have the skills and knowledge to survive like a pioneer from 200 years ago?

Technology is rapidly changing humanity. Maybe for the worse.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#56

Post by fudged71 » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

an interesting area potentially missed (though acknowledged as out of scope) is how students might use LLMs for tasks related to early adulthood development. Successfully navigating post-secondary education involves more than academics; it requires developing crucial life skills like resilience, independence, social integration, and well-being management, all of which are foundational to academic persistence and success. Understanding if and how students leverage AI for these non-academic, developmental challenges could offer a more holistic picture of AI's role in student life and its indirect impact on their educational journey

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#57

Post by kibwen » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #35

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…

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions.

Like, Socrates may have been against writing because he thought it made your memory weak, but at least I, an individual, am perfectly capable of manufacturing my own writing implements with a modest amount of manual labor and abundantly-available resources (carving into wood, burning wood into charcoal to write on stone, etc.). But I ain't perfectly capable of doing the same to manufacture an integrated circuit, let alone a digital calculator, let alone a GPU, let alone an LLM. Anyone who delegates their thought to a corporation is permanently hitching their fundamental ability to think to this wagon.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#58

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #35

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…

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

I don't think memorizing poetry fits your picture. Nobody ever memorized poetry so that they could answer questions about it.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#59

Post by bko » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

noitpmeder wrote: post #44

bko wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibl…

This is an insane take. The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart. The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it. I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.

Maybe 40 years ago there were programmers that would not work with anyone that use IDEs or automated memory management. When presented with a programming task that requires these things and you're WITHOUT your IDE or whatever, they will fall apart.

Look, I agree with you, I'm just trying to articulate to someone why they should learn X if they believe an LLM could help them and "an LLM won't always be around" isn't a good argument, because lets be honest, it likely will. This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#60

Post by Maskawanian » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

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…

Agreed, the only thing that is certain is that they are cheating themselves.

While it can be useful to use LLMs as a tutor if you're stuck. The moment that you use it to provide a solution, you stop learning and the tool becomes a required stepping stone.