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Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

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Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#501

Post by [deleted] »

Hasz wrote: post #457
camelmel wrote: post #35

I have some sympathy for these kids. If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests. Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without…

Counterpoint, I think this is true for some archetypes of people, but certainly not everyone. I personally use it like the socratic method. I am an intermediate user, I spend a ton of time with LLMs at work and personally, both prompting and letting some crappy agents try to automate boring work. I primarily use Gemini and ChatGPT models, along with some Chinese smaller weight models (eg qwen) locally. If you treat t…

[deleted]

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#502

Post by cloche »

eueje wrote: post #268
Archer6621 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. People don't do it though, because keeping skills sharp and using them takes effort, and we have a predisposition to be as efficient as possible with how we spend our effort; if there's an easier way to do it in our awareness, we will naturally gravitate towards that. LLMs are often a universal crutch or swiss-army-knife that significantly take away workload for many abstract tasks, so all kinds of atrophy in a…

“ However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it” No.. this depends on how much muscle you have. The appropriate comparison is mass and density of knowledge/understanding vs muscle. There’s not a chance in hell you will retain mass and dense muscle without pushing the body hard. Just in the same way you will not retain very deep understanding of things unles…

To maintain the muscle you have, you only need about 1/3rd of your normal workouts. It can be retained with 1-2 workouts per week. I imagine the same would be for something you've learned. If you've already put in the effort to learn it, reviewing it ~1x per week is probably enough. During the accumulation phase though - whether it be muscle or learning a new skill - once a week is definitely not enough.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#503

Post by duskdozer »

sumtechguy wrote: post #362
camelmel wrote: post #35

I have some sympathy for these kids. If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests. Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without…

> Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well I noticed this before LLMs became a thing. It was by accident. We had a team of programmers. All decent at what they do. The management said 'hey you want to learn another language we are going to be using it for these upcoming projects'. So we set up…

I could see myself dropping out even if I was interested in learning. I'd suspect that the time spent would end up with me needing to stay late to make up for it or being penalized in some other way.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#504

Post by jordanb »

camelmel wrote: post #35

I have some sympathy for these kids. If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests. Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without…

I used Google Translate to not learn French in collage. Fortunately for me it was bad enough I had to carefully review all its outputs, but that still didn't help and I managed to pass two semesters without ever developing even basic language skills.

Something radical needs to be done. When I was in high school there were still a lot of "no calculator" restrictions in my math classes that I chaffed at because I hated doing longform arithmetic and felt like it got in the way of learning. So I can certainly understand how students would chafe at some kind of paper-only education system but I also don't see how you can learn anything when you have a high-quality homework machine just sitting there.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#505

Post by mywittyname »

noduerme wrote: post #177
conductr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been severely diminished within only 5-10 years. Just simple arithmetic and percentages that I could rapidly do in my head became dependent on calculators/spreadsheets. For all other trivia type knowledge, my brain has offloaded it to the internet RAM in my pocket…

Yeah, I'm 45 and I'm like you - no social media, relatively under connected, and still feel swamped constantly by emails and calls and especially texts. They eat up half my productive time every day, and most of them are things I'm looped in on that I don't even need to respond to. Okay so let's say that's the new cognitive burden. The new escape hatch is "AI". Now you don't need to read your mail or write responses!…

> And now your friends and coworkers will send you AI generated mail anyway

This hits close. I realized one of my friends was using AI to message me and I took it kind of hard. It's weird to be worth the effort for them to set up a chat bot to talk to me but not worth the 2-3mins a week to actually read/respond to my messages.

Right now, I just basically ghosted him, but I have teh feeling this is the start of an emerging issue.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#506

Post by sbayg »

camelmel wrote: post #35

I have some sympathy for these kids. If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests. Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without…

How many took the COVID vax? /s

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#507

Post by andrepd »

AI gives us some bad things but it's really outweighed by the good things. One one hand we have very rapid deterioration of our children's mental capacities yes, but on the other hand we have also made the internet into an unnavigable mound of slop produced by, and for consumption of, bots.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#508

Post by seanmcdirmid »

BeetleB wrote: post #450
boringg wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also, this professor doesn't grade on curves? Could be very specific to this teacher. I don't know." Someone has to hold standards up -- they seem to be falling down across the board in education.

Actually, when I read they usually graded on a curve, I lost all interest. I don't respect teachers that grade on curves. You should be graded by how well you know the material - not how well your peers don't know it. I'm always grateful both my undergrad and grad professors didn't curve on a grade. In my first company, I had 4 different jobs. It was a common adage: Go into a low performing team that does simple work…

For failing grades sure, there must be some sort of minimum competence. For sorting out >= B/3.0 grades, a curb can work since you are getting evaluated against your peers to see he is standing out vs just doing acceptable.

If you wanted to grade purely off a curve, you would be stuck with old test problems that were thoroughly vetted and calibrated, an impossible task for smaller classes where the material changes rapidly.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#509

Post by duskdozer »

surbas wrote: post #412

IMHO this is clear case of correlation vs causation… This generation of kids were fucked so hard by Covid and all the remote “schooling” and closing of public life. AI rise happens to be happening when the kids who were just entering teens at Covid time are now going to school.

The more likely culprit would be repeated COVID infections themselves, known even in mild cases to cause damage to many body systems, including the neurological, rather than a month or two of remote learning. I'm not surprised at the widespread denial over this, honestly. It's bitter.

Re: Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

#510

Post by faidit »

everforward wrote: post #445
conductr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been severely diminished within only 5-10 years. Just simple arithmetic and percentages that I could rapidly do in my head became dependent on calculators/spreadsheets. For all other trivia type knowledge, my brain has offloaded it to the internet RAM in my pocket…

I think some people are okay with communication that’s less involved. Like meme-y BSing where everyone involved knows everyone else is putting like 12% of their thinking power into sending a response. I don’t really enjoy that, so I find having that many threads stressful and annoying. I just take a hard line and will unilaterally downgrade communications (while politely letting the other party know). I have all my f…

We have to normalize being on silent all the time and making people wait hours for a response. Return to the primordial monkey of 1800s-era high-latency comms.

At first, some people will be offended. "Why didn't you let me ping and buzz you and interrupt you all day? You didn't respond immediately each time :'((". Some people with unrealistic expectations may even stop talking to you entirely.

But eventually (years maybe) they will get overwhelmed too. No one can handle this madness indefinitely. I've seen giga-texters get broken down and turn into lazy texters like me, or at least learn to tolerate my long response intervals and recognize it as a coping mechanism rather than rudeness.

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