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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

#661

Post by davrosthedalek »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #628
davrosthedalek wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

>Of course, none of this scales. Some of our intro courses have a thousand students. Any ideas are much appreciated. Oral exams graded by LLMs? Scale with the improving models. Based on GPQA Diamond results they're mostly at PhD level for subject trivia anyway.

The problem here is that it will work for now, but how do you make sure the LLM talks to the student, and not a different LLM? I guess vision models FTW?

In the end, will be build a GAN loop?

Why am I now reminded of corewars?

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

#662

Post by hirvi74 »

fransje26 wrote: post #219
qsort wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm dumb as a rock and I don't have a PhD, but since ~1 year ago I started forcing myself to do small bits of coding and math manually. I'm not noticing a "cognitive decline" per se, but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy.

> but I do see I'm a lot "lazier", even stuff that used to be routine when I started coding now feel heavy. Not getting that quick dopamine hit the LLMs give you.. Some say you can re-train your system to get back the dopamine hits you used to get from other things, like the enjoyment of the "old fashioned" manual coding and math. Getting there is hard work. And YMMV.

I just do things manually and ask LLMs to check my work. That seems to be working great for me.

I had the most Russian of Russian bosses when I was in college. My first day on the job he so eloquently stated, "I am not your mother. Do not come to me with problems. Come to me with solutions. I want to know what you tried and what did not work."

His advice has served me well in many areas of life too. I try my best to treat LLMs no differently for domains I care about (not one-off little questions here and there).

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

#663

Post by proee »

The traditional sit down in a lecture hall, listen to professor speak, then come in for a pen and paper test, is outdated for this era of technology. What's the point of physically bringing +300 students into a room for a passive listening experience?

The future of education is rapid back and forth between the student and the teacher. You could image a future where a student sits down all day with an AI system that trains the student, and it won't let them pass until it's confident you know the material. This will happen at different rates for different people, but this is expected.

An ideal education would be getting those skills discs uploaded to you in the Matrix, but unfortunately it will take a bit longer to master them as we don't have full brain-system interfaces (yet).

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

#664

Post by xdavidliu »

timmytokyo wrote: post #647
epgui wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think my actual cognitive skills have declined by using AI I'm not speaking about you but... I know most people would not have much awareness of their cognitive decline. I know this because that awareness gap is there with or without LLMs, across all age groups and cultures.

Especially since attention -- which the parent commenter says has been diminished by LLMs -- is a key part of cognition.

adding to the irony is the fact that the mechanism used by the NN architecture in LLMs is also called attention

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

#665

Post by techblueberry »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #629

I feel like a lot of the lament expressed in the comments is grounded in loss aversion. We really don't like losing things —regardless of the objective (or subjective) value of that loss. We know this intellectually, but we still feel it emotionally. I'm feeling effects of using LLMs day in and day out, but I am not yet convinced that it's overwhelmingly negative, the way much of HN seems to lean. I derive a lot of j…

> I derive a lot of joy from shipping outstanding code for my clients and fixing problems they're experiencing. My joy has only increased as I can now ship better code, faster, with fewer bugs. No, I don't intimately understand the code the way I used to, but I understand it enough to accomplish the end goal.

If you’re doing this than great! More power to you. But I think you underestimate the discipline it can take to focus on a task when “coding is free”. I don’t worry that I’ll just lose my old skills. I worry that in losing my old skills I’ll lose the new skills as well. Driving is great! But I still run for exercise and occasionally to get places too. I’d be a worse driver if I was out of shape do to the loss of energy and mental clarity.

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

#666

Post by ARandumGuy »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #653
danso wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says they looked at CS 10 and 61A, which IIRC are the intro classes at Berkeley. Why do you think that amounts to “cherry picking” versus being a reasonable starting point for analysis (esp if those classes, as they are for one of the quoted professors, aren’t graded on a curve)?

Because CS10, being an intro class, has its highest enrollment in Fall, not in Spring. In the most recent CS10 cohort (the one in which 35% of grades were an F) only 34 students were graded. If you're going to look at intro classes, why not look at the Fall semesters, which have much higher enrollment? # grades % F grades Fall 2019 268 0.37% Fall 2020 259 8.49% Fall 2021 342 3.22% Fall 2022 218 13.30% Fall 2023 194 7…

Additionally, if someone is taking an intro class in the Spring, that's probably because they already failed it in the previous semester. While that doesn't guarantee that they'll fail again, it does make it more likely.

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

#667

Post by rahimnathwani »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #666
rahimnathwani wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because CS10, being an intro class, has its highest enrollment in Fall, not in Spring. In the most recent CS10 cohort (the one in which 35% of grades were an F) only 34 students were graded. If you're going to look at intro classes, why not look at the Fall semesters, which have much higher enrollment? # grades % F grades Fall 2019 268 0.37% Fall 2020 259 8.49% Fall 2021 342 3.22% Fall 2022 218 13.30% Fall 2023 194 7…

Additionally, if someone is taking an intro class in the Spring, that's probably because they already failed it in the previous semester. While that doesn't guarantee that they'll fail again, it does make it more likely.

Sure, but 12 people got an F in CS10 in Spring 2026, which is higher than any prior spring. The second-highest number of Spring F grades was 9, in Spring 2022, when four times as many students were graded (133 vs 34).

Separately, there's a clear downward trend in the number of grades being awarded in the fall semester. Perhaps students have the option to take the course pass/fail?

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

#668

Post by svachalek »

lukan wrote: post #658
mywittyname wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eme…

Are you sure he is sending automated messages, or used LLM to polish up some writing? Would be a difference to me, but .. still weird.

I'm unconvinced of this "polishing" everyone seems to claim. Whenever someone dumps a load of slop on you, that's always the answer, oh this is totally my own work, but I used AI to "polish" it. Then why is it so clearly crap? What kind of "polishing" makes text bloated and empty?

No, they were too lazy to write and let the machine do it.

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

#669

Post by amiga386 »

HanayamaTriplet wrote: post #42
somenameforme wrote: post #39

The likely 'real' reason is hidden in one paragraph within the article and has nothing to do with the implication of the eye-catching title: "Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. The petition and its accompanying open letter detail similar concerns with students…

If the removal of standardized testing in 2021 was the real reason, then why is there a sudden spike of failure rates happening right now?

https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...

Please see the graph "Growth of the Math 2 Population by Major (2019-2024)". UCSD's Math 2 class is remedial high-school level maths. It has grown from under 100 students in 2016-2020, to more and more people each year starting from 2021.

UCSD tested the people who took this class, and 25% of them could not answer the question "Fill in the box: 7 + 2 = [_] + 6" (with only pencil and paper allowed, no calculators or other electronics)

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

#670

Post by hirvi74 »

confidantlake wrote: post #635
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study. Doing the homework and the tests are just the "goalposts" to check for yourself whether you made progress on this. So, as long as you are not under time pressure (which you in…

The main reason to go is you need that piece of paper.

I needed the structure more than anything. Nothing I learned in university was some secretive knowledge. Anyone could buy the same textbooks and learn the same materials.

However, I am not one of those people. I lack(ed) the self-discipline required to learn anything with moderate to long feedback loops, thus it was far wiser for me to outsource all the necessary planning and assessment to a structured program.

Student loan debt is a blight on society, but I'd be lying if I said the looming repayment was not a great motivator to attend classes and do well in school. Some things just hit differently when there is skin in the game.

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