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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

#721

Post by fc417fc802 »

sfink wrote: post #500
ap99 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who even makes the decision to drop having a standard bar to verify students? And what possible benefit would that have?

The decision wasn't specifically to drop a standard bar. It was to drop the existing bars because they have become heavily gamed and are far more reliable indicators of your family's resources than your ability or likelihood of success. That was the equity argument. Unfortunately, the lost signal wasn't replaced with anything. (I don't know what could replace it. It's an incredibly hard problem. )

Easily gamed? Sure, education is pay to win on some level but we're talking basic prerequisites here. If the objection is that disadvantaged would-be students are being filtered out then start an outreach program to help them prep or something.

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

#722

Post by ryandrake »

svachalek wrote: post #668
lukan wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Finally, someone calling this one out. Are there legit english-learners or unskilled communicators out there who sparingly use LLMs to tweak 1-10% their prose here and there? Yes. Does that mean that the vast majority of slop-senders just using it for this "polishing"? No way.

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

#723

Post by wffurr »

10000truths wrote: post #693
wffurr wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The results are nice and I use them. I haven't seen your presentations, so I can't speak to them. But I do know at work there's a lot more illustrations in docs and presentations and such, and they almost all have an AI art "tell". I find them grating and distracting from the actual content. Very rarely do they add anything useful to the doc other than the knowledge that the owner burned some GPU time and tokens f…

That's because of people who treat AI like a magical "give me a finished product" button. Someone whipping up PowerPoint slides tends to care more about saving time than maintaining quality - the (usually watermarked) stock photos of yore weren't exactly the zenith of artistic presentation either. Like any other tool, the quality of output is proportional to the quality of input. You'll get much better results if you…

>> the (usually watermarked) stock photos

I didn't care for those either but they didn't have the signature AI art "look" and they're usually real things that an actual artist or photographer made for or sold to the stock imagery company, which curated their collection.

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

#724

Post by zuzululu »

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…

and this is why standardized testing exists so they can apply those off hour work and discipline to demonstrating their aptitude for being comfortable with boredom long enough to function in academic and workplace environments that require it.

rather than perceiving AI as a danger you should be looking at how he can leverage it to accelerate and enhance his learning but the political environment focus on removing standardized testing to hide data of those that traditionally fail is the true danger.

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

#725

Post by 9x39 »

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.

Not the parent, but I have a teammate who stunned me when, after a long back and forth texting that seemed out of character for them (I can be a fast & long texter, admittedly), sent me a long message that ended:

"If you want, I'll write you a response to 9x39 that follows up on ..."

Bro. Come on. Anyway, weirder things have happened. A chatbot that works like what people do on social media comments would be just be offensive.

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

#726

Post by jventura »

archagon wrote: post #701
jventura wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> and really, what could I do if I were? I’m not sure what you mean. Have a no-AI policy and fail those who ignore it. If students lie, discipline them appropriately for cheating.

How could I realistically enforce it? These are projects students do at home..

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

#727

Post by zuzululu »

kashunstva wrote: post #569

It’s not just students; this affliction is cropping up among established academics. My wife is editor-in-chief of a journal and in some months has rejected 100% of the letters to the editor including 6 that came in from a single author because all scored 1.0 certainty of complete LLM fabrication. The author in question is no student. It’s a little more difficult to fabricate an entire original paper this way, I suppo…

To be fair that industry has always had fabrication and dishonesty as ongoing issue long before AI.

Also I really question what this litmus test would check for and how accurate it is. Just the other day I read an article that frontier AI models outperform law students and that professors could not distinguish it from a human written ones and actually flagged human written ones as AI.

I do view this as overall positive progress in that the ridiculous barrier to entry and wasteful formality is being eroded and as will the professions that benefited from that moat will open it up to the general masses.

I personally believe we should be celebrating the universal access to knowledge and printed words

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

#728

Post by archagon »

jventura wrote: post #726
archagon wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and really, what could I do if I were? I’m not sure what you mean. Have a no-AI policy and fail those who ignore it. If students lie, discipline them appropriately for cheating.

How could I realistically enforce it? These are projects students do at home..

Same as other instances of cheating? A lot of students copy from each other and don't get caught. If anything, LLM-isms seem a lot more obvious, especially if the students are trying to avoid thinking or doing work.

Anyway, I'm not a CS professor, so I'm just venting.

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

#729

Post by joshAg »

lordnacho wrote: post #690
joshAg wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

They mean using the AI to do the import things and the higher structure for them, not removing tedium. It's like using a calculator for math school/home-work designed to teach multiplication, which requires no transcription or putting into context. The tool isn't removing tedium. It's removing the very thing they're supposed to be learning.

And my question is, in the context of learning something, how in the world is having the AI do the thing you're supposed to be learning enticing unless you don't actually care about learning the thing

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

#730

Post by sublinear »

com2kid wrote: post #703
sublinear wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree. That's similar to past arguments for banning books and the internet. Plagiarism isn't new, and those things enabled it too.

We don't let kindergartners use calculators before they learn how to add numbers. We shouldn't let LLMs write papers before kids learn how to write for themselves.

Why not though? I'm pretty sure many (especially this crowd) have childhood memories of playing with calculators before really knowing how to add.

A ton of natural questions arose like how it differs from tallying or concatenation, what the decimal point means, what negative means, ways to get to zero, ways to overflow the display, what even is overflow, what the other buttons do, etc.

The limitations are very obvious very quickly and their frustrations only further motivate the student to learn it properly.

I think beyond all else, what you're really proving is that this is more political ideology than a genuine concern.

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