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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

#91

Post by elictronic »

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.

This has been my wife’s experience as a college math professor. Instead of code it’s extremely formal problems with way more steps than the student normally performs using notation never taught in class.

It’s not that students didn’t cheat before, LLMs have just lowered the bar so far many can’t complete a live test in a class that requires effort.

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

#92

Post by FuckButtons »

sndgndgndgndy wrote: post #78
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #71

>In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA. As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor deval…

Unpopular opinion: turning public universities into an academic hunger games is diametrically opposed to their purpose for existing, which is to create an educated populace. Intentionally lowering the quality of instruction, as well as deliberately trying to trip students up on exams, is not improving educational outcomes for anyone. People who complain about "grade inflation" have completely lost sight of why public…

Some of the exams in Berkeley were brutal, but they never felt like trick questions, they did on occasion require a level of mastery of the material which was extreme, but it never felt like someone was just trying to make the questions obtuse for the sake of it.

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

#93

Post by anon291 »

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 feel the opposite. My brainstorming has increased rapidly. I can now just throw ideas at an LLM to rapidly validate.

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

#94

Post by nntlol »

I dont think ai is good enough for it coding or any other work once i told ai a problem and he generated an entire solution which i used and it was broken. You should never use ai like it treat is like a helper write a function for code and then ask if everything is correct and if something can improve read documentations understand how its working under the code if everything is correct then only deploy or build.

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

#95

Post by xadhominemx »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #55
adi_kurian wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of said PhDs gain anything positive from LLM usage? Or does it only lead to declining thinking skills in your view?

They're incredibly more productive. LLMs are amplifiers, so where they'd have branched and tried out N things, they can easily try 5N pathways of RnD. LLMs are extending the frontiers of science fast -- math -> phy -> chem -> bio in that order.

To me it is crazy that you are being downvoted. My experience in academia was that an incredible amount of time was devoted to data cleansing analysis, coding, etc., which were completely non-core to the actual underlying academic pursuit.

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

#96

Post by ernst_klim »

vineyardmike wrote: post #87
threatripper wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that this is an adjustment period that society has to go through. The way we are using electronic devices today, in some years it will probably be looked at like smoking cigarettes. And I'd argue that a lot of the "decline" is due to a shift of skills away from things that mattered more in the past toward other things that are not measured/perceived by the older generation.

Eh, I think it's less like a cigarette and more like the car. We're not going back. Americans are famously less healthy the more car dependent they are, and now people walk/run as an explicit task to be healthy. People will start going to a "thinking" gym, or engaging in additional manual mental activities for sport, like we do with chess today.

Or when the Internet came and made memory kinda obsolete. Why remember facts if you can simply index them and then lookup on demand.

But now we delegate thinking itself, so I wonder what is left.

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

#97

Post by yobbo »

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?

Testing was the annoying flood barrier. AI is the rainstorm that shows why it was necessary.

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

#98

Post by camelmel »

Finbel wrote: post #63
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that you doubt that. I think you actually believe they're speaking truthfully and in good faith.

I doubt it. I'm stupid and I use LLMs a lot but I can still meditate for 30 minutes. But apparently some of the smartest people in the world have lost the skill? But the commenter haven't, because why, they're 15 years older and thus immune to the same LLM-effects? Plus, the issue with people having trouble sitting still for 30 minutes precede LLMs with decades.

I didn't say I'm immune to those effects, I'm including myself in this as well. (also, I'm not older than my colleagues).

Most people definitely can't meditate for 30 minutes, so if you can do this, it's very impressive. Regardless, being able to think about poorly-defined problems and build completely new mental models from nothing is genuinely a really hard and uncomfortable task. If you don't use the skill you'll lose it.

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

#99

Post by matsemann »

Finbel wrote: post #63
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that you doubt that. I think you actually believe they're speaking truthfully and in good faith.

I doubt it. I'm stupid and I use LLMs a lot but I can still meditate for 30 minutes. But apparently some of the smartest people in the world have lost the skill? But the commenter haven't, because why, they're 15 years older and thus immune to the same LLM-effects? Plus, the issue with people having trouble sitting still for 30 minutes precede LLMs with decades.

Why is it so hard to believe? The young adults now have grown up with short form media and instant gratification / dopamine hits from apps. It's vastly different than people of the same age just a few years ago.

Not saying everyone else is immune, but those a few years older have also had a period without it.

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

#100

Post by thin_carapace »

wtp1saac wrote: post #21
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #5

I read something interesting yesterday on the subject of AI in education (though, it has consequences to broader society too): The goal of education is to impart knowledge in the student, preferably correct knowledge. The goal of an LLM is to produce an output that is convincingly human. It's not even that they're opposed, as much as they're ships for whom Polaris is in a completely different direction. "Hallucinatio…

Respectfully, I disagree. I think there's absolutely a case for AI being encouraged in younger people, and there's room for these tools. I've been leaning on LLMs for side learning in side projects, and it has concretely helped me with conceptual questions about math and Vulkan as I've been trying to learn some graphics basics with side projects. I would grant: I was not the most studious kid, I could definitely stan…

why would I as a child ever develop the imagination needed to actively engage with AI tools in the manner you describe? those AI tools take care of the imagining for me.
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