Are there any students here who started uni just before LLM's took off and are now finishing their degrees? Have you noticed much change in how your classes are taught?
Instead of paper exams asking students "find the bug" or "implement a short function", they get a takehome exam where they have to write tests, integrate their project into a CI pipeline, use version control, and implement a dropbox-like system in Rust, which we expect to have a good deal of functionality and accompanying documentation.
I tell them go ahead and use whatever they want. It's easier than policing their tools. If they can put it together, and it works, and they can explain it back to me, then I'm satisfied. Even if they use ChatGPT it'll take a great deal of work and knowledge to get running.
If ChatGPT suddenly is able to put a project like that together, then I'll ask for even more.
I know a hiring manager who asks his (engineering) candidates what is 20% of 20,000? It's amazing how many engineers are completely unable to do this without a calculator. He said they often cry. Of course, they're all "no hire".
How did they get a degree, one wonders?
To put it another way, modern high school level math classes disadvantage students who want to learn without using a calculator, but it would be quite odd to suggest that we should exclude calculators from math curricula as a result.
On the other hand, 54% of US adults read and write at a 6th grade level or below. They will get absolutely left in the dust by all this.
But more won’t be able to be _learned_ in less time
That wouldn't be odd at all. Calculators have no place in a math class. You're there to learn how to do math, not how to get a calculator to do math for you.
LLMs have their place and maybe even somewhere in schools but the more you automate the hard parts of tasks, the less people value the struggle of actually learning something.
And yes, it's incredibly useful in enabling recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error. When you've got zero feel for numbers, you're going to make bad engineering decisions. You'll also get screwed by car dealers every time, and contractors. You won't know how far you can go with the gas in your tank.
It goes on and on.
Calculators are great for getting an exact final answer. But you'd better already know approximately what the answer should be.
Students today will be practitioners tomorrow, and those that know how to work with AI will be more effective than those who do not.
Is having a paid subscription with a company that potentially tracks and records every keystroke a requirement for future courses?
Using AI is a skill too. People who use it every day quickly realize how poor they are at using it vs the very skilled when they compare themselves. Ever compared your own quality AI art vs the top rated stuff on Civit.AI? Pretty sure your stuff will be garbage, and the community will agree.
I see LLMs as almost sufficiently advanced compilers. You could say the same thing about gcc or even standard libraries. "Why back in my day we wrote our own hash maps while walking uphill both ways! Kids these days just import a lib and they don't learn anything!"
They are still learning, just at a higher level of abstraction.
When every student can write code that compiles, then you can ask them to write good code. Fast code. Robust code. Measure it, characterize it, compare it.
For example you claim that addition flashcards and times tables are invaluable, but you don't specify a base, in base 2 you have 4 addition flashcards, in base 100 you have 10,000, clearly understanding addition isn't related to the base, but flashcards increase as base increases, thus there is a relation, implying of course that understanding addition isn't related to the number of addition flashcards you understand. Oh but of course they aren't invaluable in understanding addition, they are invaluable in understanding concepts that use addition, cause ... why exactly? You saved 1 second finishing the problem that you may have understood before you completed that addition step? You didn't have to "context switch" by using a calculator? Students who don't know the sum often give unused name and go back at the end of the problem and solve it later. This behavior is of course discouraged since students can't understand variables until much later if ever and not knowing something you were taught represents the failure of the student and thus the teacher, school, government and society.
Infinitely better is learning from someone who speaks the language. A 30 minute solo tutoring session once a week for a month, in a no distraction environment (aside from a snack), even just working through homework, is more than enough for most students to go from Fs to As for multiple years.
Ironically, those who can work with their hands may be better positioned than "lightly" college educated persons; LLMs can't fix a car, build a house, or clear a clogged pipe.
What makes you think that? I feel like I’m able to learn faster with LLMS than I was before.
Humans are much better at pattern matching than computation, so the safest solution is probably to just double check if you've typed in the right numbers.
To quickly calc 10% just multiply the number by 0.1 which you can do by moving the decimal point one place 20,000.00 => 2,000.000 then it is easy to double that number.
to get 4,000.
17% for example is 1.7 x 10%
in this case 1.7 x 2,000 = 3,400
You mostly have common equivalences like this in your memory and you can be faster than computing the actual thing with arithmetic. Or have good approximations.
It might be counterintuitive, but the cheaper (and therefore successful) solution will always be more technological integration, not less.
In this case, better speech recognition, so the user doesn't have to type the numbers anymore, and an LLM middleman that's aware of the real-world context of the question, so the user can be asked if he's sure about the number before it gets passed to the calculator.
Today we stand on the shoulders of giants to create things previous generations could not, but we still have to climb up to their shoulders in order to see where to go. Without that perspective, people spend a lot of cycles doing things that have already been done, making mistakes that have already been made. There's value in gaining that knowledge yourself through trial and error but it takes much longer than a 4 year program if that's the way you want to learn.
My role is that of a ladder. People are free to do whatever they want, create whatever they want once they get to the top.
And anyway, we graduate students who go on to create new things every year. So proof is in the puddin.