Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by aleph_minus_one » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

raesene9 wrote: post #411

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study. > This is a bit of a naive or maybe affluent take? Concerning the "naive" aspect, I wrote something at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397759 Basically, this was really my lived experience, which might have been amplified that it was a decent university in a "boring" town where learning for your studies wa…

I think perhaps the reason you are seeing quite a few commenters expressing skepticism to your comment "You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study." is that you appear to be extrapolating from one example (your own), without considering whether that's likely the wider experience of people going to university. In the UK anyway, there's an acknowledged idea that…

> "You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study." is that you appear to be extrapolating from one example (your own)

I know a lot of people who think this way, and I can assure you that the people who realized later that university is not for them deeply would have wished that someone had given them this advice when they were younger.

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

#572

Post by krunger » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

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

#573

Post by LovelyButterfly » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

jventura wrote: post #241

CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang"…

As a professor, what's you opinion regard the Socratic method with LLMs? Would that be preferable over simply "give me the answer" prompt?

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

#574

Post by Drunk_Engineer » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #6

"According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026" Alternatively, more students are taking CS10 and CS61A irrespective of aptitude. Anyone can code, but not everyone can become an employable SWE. Anyone who has first or second hand experience with Cal or any other university knows how impacted CS majors have become, and how everyone is attempting to become a…

My son took CS10 a couple years ago, and even I (Masters in EECS from UCB) struggled with some really obtuse multiple-guess questions he showed me on the homeworks. Much of the classwork is done in Snap, a weird and stupid graphical "programming" language. If 1/3 of the students are failing, that may have more to do with the professor.

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

#575

Post by techblueberry » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #549

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What a delightful fantasy world you live in. I can really certify that this was my lived experience. In the math degree course, basically everyone who was not incredibly passionate about mathematics (NB: "passionate" does not necessary imply "great academic achievements") changed their major or decided for a different kind of tertiary education. Former co-students who attended the same university and degree course…

Another factor might just be that math pretty much is the extra depth behind a bunch of STEM fields, so people studying math specifically are more likely to be interested in that depth. That said I generally think the take that it's somehow privileged to find school interesting to be sad. Over the last couple decades one could do pretty well with pretty much any STEM degree. Is the majority feeling among people study…

1. I don’t think there’s a direct correlation between curiosity and finding school interesting. I’m endlessly curious about how the world works and always reading three books at a time, and school was often dull as paint.

2. I would optimize hiring people who display the kind of curiosity described, but if my goal was to create an education system to generate educated workers to grow an economy, I wouldn’t optimize for it. I don’t think curiosity is a privilege, it’s an undervalued right.

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

#576

Post by bcrosby95 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

eunos wrote: post #523

ItsBob wrote: post #393

They worry me. A lot. My son is 15 and I use Google Family Link to control what he does on his phone: it's pretty open for the most part (I receive notifications of installs) but Gemini is a hard-ban. We've spoken at length of the dangers. He says his pals use LLMs frequently and I suspect that's the reason for their test scores: some of them are in the 20% - 40% range for tests whereas my son is 80%+ because he stud…

> Gemini is a hard-ban. Sounds like you would hard-ban your son from using Internet if it was only introduced 5 years ago

Or a calculator. Oh wait, I hard ban my 8 and 11 year old kids from using a calculator. I wonder why.

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

#577

Post by nsagent » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

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…

My two modes of using LLMs has been to try it for 1) natural language search queries where traditional search engines have failed and 2) occasionally as a sounding board using the socratic method.

Inevitably, it fails frequently at both. Any "reasoning" it is doing is merely rehashing ideas that someone else has already posited. This helps some of the times, but the vast majority of the time it just chooses a biased perspective (frequently the most common) and then regurgitates tired old talking points. This contrasts greatly to speaking with others who often have more intuitive notions that tend to be less polished and rote.

I'd love for LLMs to be better sounding boards, but so far they fail miserably far too often for my tastes. To each their own though.

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

#578

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

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…

Yeah. I have no doubt that I would have used LLMs “just this one time” to help with problem sets or papers when I got behind or wanted to do something else.

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

#579

Post by nsagent » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

girfan wrote: post #541

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 broadly agree with the premise. As a PhD student in Computer Science, I feel there are some significant upsides to my work routine. LLM access has made many new domains more "accessible" to me which I otherwise would be too hesitant in investing my time in. For example, my area of research is computer systems which involves operating systems, distributed systems and more recently systems for AI. Within these, there…

As someone with a PhD in CS focused on NLP (I started my PhD in 2018 just as Transformers were introduced), and with a strong background in distributed systems owing to the fact that I was a lead developer of an MMO before starting my PhD, I can definitively say that any surface-level understanding you get by interacting with an LLM, is just that: surface level.

If that allows you to target your deep dives better, then great. If instead your deep dive into a topic is purely through prompting an LLM, that will almost certainly end with little functional domain expertise.

The absolute best experience you can get is by trying, failing, then improving upon your past failures. Remove that friction at your peril.

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

#580

Post by jventura » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

bo1024 wrote: post #342

jventura wrote: post #241

CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang"…

What is the policy and guidance you gave the students regarding LLM use?

This is all so new, and caught us completely unprepared that there's no official university-level policies. Most of us are still navigating the waters and seeing what works and what doesn't work anymore.

I have colleagues that are teaching for more than 30 years, few years away from retirement, who suddenly have been confronted with a new way of doing things. Those are the ones that are still insisting on doing practical projects, etc. I've only been doing this for 20 years, and I'm quite lazy (worked previously as software engineer), so I've moved to those practical tests. I guess that there should probably exist a class or workshop to teach these students how to use LLMs effectively, but as I said, this technology and its implications is quite new.

Personally, what I did was to give them the "lecture" in the line of that they do not understand what the machine has generated, that is not the way a true engineer does, try to do some parallel with things like an LLM designing a bridge and civil engineers building that bridge, and a fatal flaw collapsing the all thing, etc.

In other words, we do not have a formal system in place, it's all talking and convincing them. Obviously it's a big enough problem that should deserve more investment in solutions, but we are all overwhelmed by other tasks. Maybe LLM studios should be held responsible for all these "disruptions" and provide solutions to problems they created! :)