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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

#731

Post by mepiethree »

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The traditional sit down in a lecture hall, listen to professor speak, then come in for a pen and paper test, is outdated for this era of technology.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…

That sounds super awesome, but I think college students are always going to find a way to shirk work. For example, in your proposal, plenty of college students would just get another AI to talk to the test administration AI (think Cluely)

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

#732

Post by kajecounterhack »

beej71 wrote: post #46
kajecounterhack wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone +10000. The goddamn slides. If I were a student now going to engineering school, I'd basically take the slides and throw them into NotebookLM and get way better lectures. Then I'd ask claude or GPT all my…

I try to lecture as little as possible. No slides. Quick highlights discussion of the reading, maybe a coding demo, and then students work on coding challenges in class, in groups if they want. I circulate and help out. I'm lucky to have small class sizes at this university. I couldn't pull it off in a class of 300.

Wow Beej it's you!! I loved your guide to network programming in undergrad <3 you're probably not part of the problem here, lol.

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

#733

Post by donkey_brains »

eunos wrote: post #524
Jtarii wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty clear that LLMs are going to be extremely corrosive to culture in general.

No more corrosive than introduction of internet

Oh, so only extremely corrosive, cool

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

#734

Post by jplusequalt »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #561

My daughter was struggling with her Math class back in January. I used Claude to build a tool that allowed me to generate very focused worksheets. The worksheets had problems designed to drill the concepts she was struggling with. It worked, and it would have been MUCH harder to do this the traditional way. The tool generates PDFs including an answer key and solution sets that solved the problems using a variety of t…

>That's powerful. It comes back to how are you using the tool. Are you using it to make things better or to take shortcuts?

Where are the incentives at a societal level to prioritize quality over efficiency? Of course if everyone did things the "correct" way we'd have no issues. But societies incentives are messy and contradictory, so taking shortcuts ends up being the more appealing choice in the moment for lots of people.

This is as much a societal issue as it a technological one.

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

#736

Post by WalterBright »

sph wrote: post #231
WalterBright wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. But I like to add artwork to my presentations. My artistic skills have not advanced beyond 2nd grade. So I'll make a line sketch, and give to AI to "fix" it. The results are nice and I use them. I have no interest in learning how to do art well myself, so using AI for it is appropriate. But I still write my code myself.

> But I still write my code myself. Not for long, if you so easily have caved in to using AI elsewhere. People are lazy. If you see that the 'results are nice', it's game over for your programming/thinking. Waiting for the day the advice will be to "enjoy AI assistance in moderation"

We'll see. I kinda suspect that vibe coding would take the joy out of it.

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

#737

Post by rahimnathwani »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #696
rahimnathwani wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

12 Fs across 34 students is not statistically significant. Comparing the spring 2022 vs spring 2026 rates only works if the composition of the groups is similar (e.g. same % of students that previously failed the course), which seems dubious given the dramatically different sample sizes. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem worth investigating. If I was a dean I'd certainly have some questions if I found out that…

Agreed.

That's why I raised the low N.

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

#738

Post by rahimnathwani »

calepayson wrote: post #708
rahimnathwani wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all groups outsourced their thinking to an LLM. Will they have learned anything they can apply to different types of projects in future?

In your opinion where is the line on where LLMs are useful/harmful to learning? In my school projects I've found them super useful for working with libraries. In the past it felt like the theory I learned was pretty low impact. 80% of my time was spent learning the quirks of a library. Now it feels like I can take theory and iterate over a ton of different solutions without having to worry about learning whatever lib…

If you don't want to improve your ability to work with new libraries, then that's your decision.

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

#739

Post by WalterBright »

wffurr wrote: post #723
10000truths wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure my "D-Man" cartoons are not in some stock image collection. Ironically, I've received complaints that my hand-drawn and laboriously edited cartoons were derided as "unprofessional".

Having an on-topic cartoon goes well with the slides, rather than some random stock photo.

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

#740

Post by donkey_brains »

dieselgate wrote: post #588

One of my favorite jokes ever is from a dear friend who happens to be a graduate of the Berkeley CS program: "Programmers don't need to know how to do math, they only need to know how to add 1 to something."

Well, sometimes we have to subtract 1 from something, too.
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