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How University Students Use Claude

(www.anthropic.com)
395 points pseudolus | 3 comments | 09 Apr 25 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.694s | source
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SamBam ◴[09 Apr 25 16:14 UTC] No.43633756[source]▶
I feel like Anthropic has an incentive to minimize how much students use LLMs to write their papers for them.

In the article, I guess this would be buried in

> Students also frequently used Claude to provide technical explanations or solutions for academic assignments (33.5%)—working with AI to debug and fix errors in coding assignments, implement programming algorithms and data structures, and explain or solve mathematical problems.

"Write my essay" would be considered a "solution for academic assignment," but by only referring to it obliquely in that paragraph they don't really tell us the prevalence of it.

(I also wonder if students are smart, and may keep outright usage of LLMs to complete assignments on a separate, non-university account, not trusting that Anthropic will keep their conversations private from the university if asked.)

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1. vunderba ◴[09 Apr 25 16:32 UTC] No.43634024[source]▶
Exactly. There's a big difference between a student having a back-and-forth dialogue with Claude around "the extent to which feudalism was one of the causes of the French Revolution.", versus another student using their smartphone to take a snapshot of the actual homework assignment, pasting it into Claude and calling it a day.
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2. PeterStuer ◴[09 Apr 25 16:44 UTC] No.43634222[source]▶
From what I could observe, the latter is endemic amongst high school students. And don't kid yourself. For many it is just a step up from copy/pasting the first Google result.

They never could be arsed to learn how to input their assignments into Wolfram Alpha. It was always the ux/ui effort that held them back.

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3. chii ◴[10 Apr 25 10:17 UTC] No.43642468[source]▶
THe question is would those students have done any better or worse if there hadn't been LLM for them to "copy" off?

In other words, is the school certificaftion meant to distinguish those who genuinely learnt, or was it merely meant to signal (and thus, those who used to copy pre-llm are going to do the same, and thus reach the same level of certification regardless of whether they learnt or not)?