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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

#681

Post by Zarathruster »

rafram wrote: post #533
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…

Can confirm- I took both of those classes and don't remember any math beyond big O, which only technically counts.

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

#682

Post by abustamam »

spockz wrote: post #603
abustamam wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside to this I mute ALL notifications on my phone. I still get notifications of course, but they never ping or vibrate. For important threads like calls or messages from important people/group chats, I have my watch vibrate. Otherwise, I just go through my notifications once I have downtime.

I really like that system! How do you configure that only notifications from certain parties end up on the watch? As far as I can tell I can only filter on application. On iOS I can add “favourites” which get prio for calls and messages in Messages/Mail but not in other apps.

Yeah that's the iffy part tbh. I have a oneplus phone and watch and it is per-app on the watch. So in the app I have to configure which lines of comms are important (so like Signal is how my wife and I communicate so I get watch notifications for that, and I mute other group chats). And because my WhatsApp is pretty noisy, even with muted chats, I just opt not to get notifications on my watch, which has the consequence of me not being able to get WhatsApp call notifications, which honestly isn't the worst thing in the world :)

It's not perfect, but it works for me.

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

#683

Post by abustamam »

Uncle_Brumpus wrote: post #633
faidit wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I am notoriously "bad" at texting. My phone's on silent almost 95% of the time, I don't even have a smartphone so the only way to get to me wirelessly is to call or text. I got really into sending mail last year, specifically postcards. I have a list of ~10 people I would consider "close", immediate family and good friends, and 5 or 6 more tertiary contacts. I travel fairly frequently, so I had plenty of opportunitie…

I like this. I don't know what postcard etiquette is, but when I send a postcard it's just to show that I'm thinking of someone while I'm traveling. If the recipient doesn't travel or finds other ways to express that they're thinking or me while traveling (souvenir, etc) I'd consider that social contract fulfilled.

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

#684

Post by zdragnar »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #164
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…

I'm not American so maybe I am missing some context. But how did admissions work without test scores?

> how did admissions work without test scores?

They look at "life experience" factors. Grades, of course, but also extracurricular activities such as school clubs, volunteering, activism, socioeconomic background and so forth.

The aim was to include as many varieties of these factors as possible in the student population to boost diversity without directly referencing skin color (which would be illegal).

There's a lot of antipathy towards standardized tests as things that disadvantage kids who don't test well, despite it being much cheaper and less time intensive to prepare for the test than it is to join a bunch of clubs and spend your weekends volunteering.

It turns out that removing the standardized testing requirement led to a lot of students wasting their money on courses that they weren't at all prepared to take.

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

#685

Post by zdragnar »

LiteUser wrote: post #679
pessimizer wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Around COVID times many top universities experimented with removing test requirements from admissions, under an argument largely related to equity. It's been a failure everywhere, with many, if not most, universities already reversing it. It's the universities that have failed. They've restricted admissions to a set of people who would learn no matter what the schools did, which is what makes them lazy. When confro…

Can you cite a source for the claim about "most faithful test predictor"? I'm genuinely curious. I would think high school GPA would be more predictive.

High school grades are not evenly applied, and sometimes heavily inflated. Eliminating that variable is the whole point behind taking a standardized test.

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

#686

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

emsign wrote: post #630
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…

Sure sure whatever suits you. But I personally have a very strong aversion to losing my intelligence.

The presumption that we're losing "intelligence" is unproven and widely debated. I'd prefer "capability" over raw intellect any day, and my capability is definitely greater than it was a year ago.

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

#687

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #639
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…

LLMs are great at reducing how much you work you personally have to do. This is the exact opposite of what we need kids in education to do.

This is a good point! AI can't lift the weights for you.

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

#689

Post by hirvi74 »

proee wrote: post #663

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 t…

Historical learning methods were not far off from that. Many of the greats we remember likely heavily benefited from private tutoring and mentoring, not busywork, rote memorization, and arbitrary assessments.

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

#690

Post by lordnacho »

joshAg wrote: post #680
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…

Why do you think you didn't do similar when you were a student? We've seen this exact issue with other technology before: calculators for math; typewriters and then word processors for writing assignments; audio books for literacy. In those cases we've collectively realized there's a benefit in getting the manual skill and understanding how to use it before shortcutting things with the technology, even if most of the…

It's because modern AI promises to relieve you of the tedium, leaving you to consider the important things like higher structure. It actually does deliver on this, but in contrast to older tools, it is unlimited in scope.

A calculator - let's expand this to maps, thesauruses, dictionaries, and other lookup tools - was used for a pretty narrow set of problems, and you had to transcribe the result to whatever context you needed.

An AI can be all the calculators together, and transport the output of one to the input of the next. You're meant to have the overview, but it's just so enticing to let it simply do that as well.

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