Interesting article, but I think it downplays the incidence of students using Claude as an alternative to building foundational skills. I could easily see conversations that they outline as "Collaborative" primarily being a user walking Claude through multi-part problems or asking it to produce justifications for answers that students add to assignments.
> I think it downplays the incidence of students using Claude as an alternative to building foundational skills
I think people will get more utility out of education programs that allow them to be productive with AI, at the expense of foundational knowledge
Universities have a different purpose and are tone deaf to why their students use universities for the last century: which is that the corporate sector decided university degrees were necessary despite 90% of the cross disciplinary learning being irrelevant.
Its not the university’s problem and they will outlive this meme of catering to the middle class’ upwards mobility at all. They existed before and will exist after.
The university may never be the place for a human to hone the skill of being augmented with AI but a trade school or bootcamp or other structured learning environment will be, for those not self started enough to sit through youtube videos and trawl discord servers
Yes, AI tools have shifted the education paradigm and cognition requirements. This is a 'threat' to universities, but I would also argue that it's an opportunity for universities to reinvent the experience of further education.
Yea, the solution here is to embrace the reality that these tools exist and will be used regardless of what the university wants, and use it as an opportunity to level up the education and experience.
The clueless educational institutions will simply try to fight it, like they tried to fight copy/pasting from Google and like they probably fought calculators.
They didn’t “fight” copy and pasting from Google - they called it what it is, plagiarism, and they expel hundreds of students for it.
Universities aren’t here to hold your hand and give you a piece of paper. They’re here to build skills. If you cheat, you don’t build the skills, so the piece of paper is now worthless.
The only reason degrees mean anything is because the institutions behind them work very hard to make sure the people earning them know what they’re doing.
If you can’t research a write an essay and you have to “copy/paste” from google, the reality is you’re probably a shit writer and a shit researcher. So if we just give those people degrees anyway, then suddenly so-called professionals are going to flounder. And that’s not good for them, or for me, or for society as a whole.
That’s the key here that people are missing. Yeah cheating is fun and yeah it’s the future. But if you hire a programmer, and they can’t program, that’s bad!
And before I hear something about “leveling up” skills. Nuh-uh, it doesn’t work that way. Skills are built on each other. Shortcuts don’t build skills, they do the opposite.
Using chat GPT to pass your Java class isn’t going to help you become a master C++ day trading programmer. Quite the opposite! How can you expect to become that when you don’t know what the fuck a data type is?
We use calculators, sure. We use Google, sure. But we teach addition first. Using the most overpowered tool for block number 1 in the 500 foot tall jenga tower is setting yourself up for failure.