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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

#791

Post by aidenn0 »

acbart wrote: post #67
jmalicki wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if cheating was triggered using AI detectors, was it real? AI detectors are pretty mid in practice - they tend to have a lot of false positives for "B" students who are okay, but can still be struggled to be more coherent than AIs are. There are some specific triggers that AIs are way more likely to do than students, but a lot of AI detectors will trigger on this "almost there, but you're still struggling" level…

You'd be amazed at how many students we know are obviously cheating because the logs reveal that they copy pasted a long, complete answer within seconds of opening a problem for the first time, full of sophisticated code constructs that we didn't teach them, and lot's of nicely formatted comments. Sometimes they even copy/paste the entire GPT output and then format it down.

Public schools around me have done more than just turn a blind-eye to cheating. During COVID, one of our kids cheated in every subject, we showed the proof to the school and only one of the teachers had any consequence at all, and that was to give her a failing grade for the test we could prove she cheated on (quizzes and HW were ignored).

It was trivial to show she had plagiarized every single essay she wrote (just put any unusual sounding sentence in google with double quotes around it), and her English teacher said roughly: "Yeah, lots of kids are doing that these days, nothing we can do about it"

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

#793

Post by dysoco »

lokar wrote: post #539
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…

I'd say most of my CS classes (in the 90s) had us write out code by hand, on paper, during in-class exams. It was fine.

Usually you get both kind of assignments, short exercises in paper without any help whatsoever and more open, larger take-home assignments where you can usually use external help.

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

#794

Post by WorldMaker »

zchrykng wrote: post #779
WorldMaker wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's an emergency I want it in text first because I read faster than I listen to voicemails, and can do so in more spaces/contexts/environments (say, at a loud concert or eating in a restaurant), and I trust a person to write the message better than the voicemail system will transcribe a call. Certain emergency keywords sent in a text will especially alert me faster than a call would. (I have call notifications as…

Why are we talking about voicemails in the context of emergencies? If it was an emergency, I'm calling every number I have for someone until they pickup or enough time has passed that I write them off as a flake and find the next person on the list who might be able to help with whatever it is.

I think that's what I'm complaining about, too, but again from a just slightly different perspective. In an emergency I also don't want to take time to "call every number I have for someone". I don't want to worry about safe calling hours or people that prescreen every call/make every call go to voicemail (including myself). I'd much prefer to send a much faster, single text message and they either get it or they don't, and often there's a quick read receipt if they do get it.

Phone calls have so much ceremony and ritual and take so much time to play phone tag, and every single part of that, especially the phone tag, has gotten so much worse because of spammers. Phone calls just don't feel reliable anymore. It's easier to assume you are more likely to hit someone's voicemail than reach them many hours of the day. It's easier to assume people don't even check their voicemail in some cases, because they expect a text message if it was important.

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

#795

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #789
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also "lost" (or rather, never had) the ability to manually manage memory, and I have no idea what my machine code actually does once my program compiles. Yet, I'd say my career so far has been very successful and personally enriching for me. So what am I losing? I still use my intellect day in and day out, so it can't be that I'm not using my intellect at all . I don't find this argument persuasive.

That attributes your success to the wrong cause. Your career (and mine) has been successful and personally enriching because of the colossal demand for software developers over the past 25 years guaranteeing employment to anyone who could write fizzbuzz. But demand for developers can now be filled by AI that does know how to manually manage memory and a whole lot more. Those deep technical skills may well be the only…

> But demand for developers can now be filled by AI

Oh? Is that so? I've yet to see any evidence of this.

I've seen big companies laying off developers with dubious claims about them being replaced by AI. None of them can prove their claims. Their software hasn't gotten noticeably better.

Jevons paradox appears to be in full swing. No sign yet of software slowing down. In fact, my company has continued to grow in demand over the past 2 years due to the fact that we can build better software faster. By any way I could attempt to measure my "value", it is increasing.

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

#796

Post by overgard »

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.

One thing I'll point out is the attention thing might be more of a lack of motivation on my part. It used to be banging out features quickly gave me a nice dopamine rush and the satisfaction of having built something I'm proud of. With LLMs, I don't really have that feeling because even if I guided it to that endpoint I feel less invested and somewhat less interested.

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

#797

Post by CamperBob2 »

LtWorf wrote: post #718
CamperBob2 wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That... is not a good idea. Inexpensive calculators were relatively new when I was that age, and I learned so much just playing with them.

What exactly did you learn?

(I also learned that a lot of people on Hacker News have absolutely no business on a site called 'Hacker News.')

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

#798

Post by gamblor956 »

jordanb wrote: post #504
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 used Google Translate to not learn French in collage. Fortunately for me it was bad enough I had to carefully review all its outputs, but that still didn't help and I managed to pass two semesters without ever developing even basic language skills. Something radical needs to be done. When I was in high school there were still a lot of "no calculator" restrictions in my math classes that I chaffed at because I hated…

In California Google Translate would not have been (and still is not) sufficient to pass a high-school foreign language class, let alone a college level class.

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

#799

Post by nkrisc »

deadbabe wrote: post #787
nkrisc wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you are rewarded for the effort: you're rewarded with knowledge. Whether or not you value that reward depends on the individual.

What you value personally does not have as much impact on your life as the things people will value about you. In corporate, people value you for the amount of money you can make them.

On the contrary, I think what you value has the greatest impact on your life, it can be the difference between being happy or completely miserable. Some people spend their lives valuing the wrong things and being unhappy, so much so that it’s a common trope in books and movies.

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

#800

Post by gamblor956 »

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?

The removal of standardized testing is not the reason for a sudden spike in failures this past year.

The standardized testing changes resulted in a decrease in mathematical preparedness across the board, but outside of CS/EECS it's not very significant in other STEM majors since most students to other math-heavy majors self-select on the basis of being good in math (and took AP math classes in high school).

The big change is that LLMs became widely available 3 years ago, and practicably usable within the last 2 years. FTA, all of the failing students had enrolled in the precursor math sections that allowed for AI use on homeworks and tests; none from the other sections.

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