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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

#531

Post by lokar »

mywittyname wrote: post #519
frollogaston wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berkeley chancellor told students to vote for 2020 California Proposition 16, which would've repeated 1996 Proposition 209 that banned race-based admission in public universities. Prop 16 failed. Subsequently, Cal started ignoring SAT/ACT scores. I have to think this was their alternative way of taking fewer Asian students, who average highest on that. Soon after I got an email from the same chancellor praising the c…

They could have easily made test scores a pass/fail per program and not weight higher scores for admission purposes. It achieves the goal of ensuring students have requisite knowledge for the program while not favoring students who are able to ace the test. Or, even better - just expand programs so they can accept more students who pass the test. This would probably improve diversity without artificially restricting…

To expand the UC system to accommodate everyone who could do the work would require repealing Prop 13, much harder.

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

#532

Post by andrewflnr »

hypfer wrote: post #215
Retr0id wrote: post #116

It's interesting that it's specifically math-within-CS being discussed here. I can imagine a lot of students "just want to learn programming" (or similar), and see the math as a tedious distraction. As a naturally curious person, nothing will stop me from learning about the topics that interest me. But school also taught me a lot of things that didn't interest me, and a lot of those things turned out to be useful any…

Personally, I do believe that math as a discipline has this huge issue of being mostly incomprehensible garbage. Not because the actual truth encoded in it would be this complex, but because the encoding scheme just sucks. I see it as a packaging problem that has so far not been painful enough to trigger any meaningful change. With this LLM-driven collapse, that might finally change. Idk I'm hopeful. Math is literall…

> Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring

Ok, I'm all for overhauling math notation and teaching but this doesn't follow. Most animals can't do Math, even if they can do arithmetic. Clearly living in the universe doesn't guarantee you can learn how it works. There's no reason to believe we slightly smarter animals are universally entitled to understand it either.

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

#533

Post by rafram »

Retr0id wrote: post #116

It's interesting that it's specifically math-within-CS being discussed here. I can imagine a lot of students "just want to learn programming" (or similar), and see the math as a tedious distraction. As a naturally curious person, nothing will stop me from learning about the topics that interest me. But school also taught me a lot of things that didn't interest me, and a lot of those things turned out to be useful any…

There's some discussion of math skills in the article, but the headline courses with huge jumps in failing grades (CS10 and 61A) are pretty math-light. The former is "CS for poets," the latter is the first CS class for majors - lots of work on scopes, recursion, basic data structures, and, at the end, a simple Scheme implementation.

Understanding math well might help a bit, but they're the least mathy classes in the core Berkeley CS curriculum IMO.

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

#534

Post by davrosthedalek »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #285
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…

> 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. I agree - I would have been toast. I wonder if the teachers/colleges need to change the way they teach and assess. Let the students use the AI tools they like (perhaps guide them how they can use them professionally), but test regularly and early on the skills/knowledge they'r…

Absolutely university has to change. But it's not a simple change. I say this as a professor for Physics:

My colleagues say "We must fully embrace AI as a tool". I agree. But how do you teach it? It's a moving target, and you can't even give homework like: "Research with an LLM of your choice, and submit the transcript" because they can do that, or they can just copy the task into an LLM and have the LLM do it. It becomes meta quite quickly.

And independent what and how we teach, we have to change how we assess a students learning result:

The first thing we have to change is that homework needs to be completely ungraded. Reviewed and corrected, yes, but not part of the grade. That's the only way to make sure that people who don't want to cheat have to cheat anyway to compete with those that do.

Second, all exams have to be in person. Online, cheating is so trivial it's not even funny (many students are so stupid about it that we have a pretty clear idea what's going on). In person, we have maybe 2-3 years until we have to make sure its proctored and people's glasses are checked. I think in less than 10 years, local mobile AI will be good enough so even a Faraday cage will not help.

Maybe we have to go to oral tests only.

Of course, none of this scales. Some of our intro courses have a thousand students.

Any ideas are much appreciated.

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

#536

Post by LEDThereBeLight »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #107
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…

LLMS didn’t invent cheating just made it easier. When you cheat you’re the one who cheats yourself because the point of an education is to learn, not complete the assignments and get high marks on tests alone. No one benefits and no one other than you is materially hurt by cheating, but you are absolutely the one who is hurt. There’s no way to learn than to force the brain into adaptation which it is resistant to do…

To say that students don’t benefit from getting good grades using LLMs is incredibly naive. Learning is only about the third or fourth most important “benefit” for students, after getting a degree, getting good grades, and making connections.

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

#537

Post by Decabytes »

In Grad school I remember learning Python 2, and there was one particular night where an assignment of mine just wasn’t working and no searches were helping me. I was frustrated to the point of tears, and when I solved it, it wasn’t with some triumphant yell. I just remember being so tired, closing my laptop and going to sleep.

I’m sure I wouldn’t be the programmer I am without that experience, but I am Not sure I would have willingly put myself through that if LLMs existed at that point

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

#538

Post by jackgavigan »

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've avoided using AI* for precisely this reason. I don't want my brain to get lazy and rot.

(* I can count on one hand the number of time I've used an AI tool.)

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

#539

Post by lokar »

jventura wrote: post #263
kuschku wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other two groups also used LLM but in a high-level and architectural way. Sounds more like the score is 3/3 (100%) Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project? If not, why is using LLM generated code different?

> Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project? Yes, if they are "responsible" for the code delivered, where responsible means they understand the code, the architecture, the decisions made, etc. In this case, the students had to invent multiple strategies to solve a specific problem. The "successful" groups did a mix of generated and hand-crafted code (don't know perc…

I'd say most of my CS classes (in the 90s) had us write out code by hand, on paper, during in-class exams.

It was fine.

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

#540

Post by lokar »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #71

>In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA. As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor deval…

I read the subreddit for the UC I went to. When acceptance letters went out this year there were (as you expect) a ton of questions from accepted students. About 1/3 to 1/2 included questions about how bad "grad deflation" was, asking for comparisons to other campuses.
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