How University Students Use Claude

This has been observation about the internet. Growing up in a small town without access to advanced classes, having access to Wikipedia felt like the greatest equalizer in the world. 20 years post internet, seeing the most common outcome be that people learn less as a result of unlimited access to information would be depressing if it did not result in my own personal gain.

I would say a big difference of the Internet around 2000 and the internet now is that most people shared information in good faith back then, which is not the case anymore. Maybe back then people were just as uncritical of information, but now we really see the impact of people being not critical.

> having access to Wikipedia felt like the greatest equalizer in the world. 20 years post internet, seeing the most common outcome be that people learn less

when wikipedia was initially made, many schools/teachers explicitly denied wikipedia as a source for citing in essays. And obviously, plenty of kids just plagerized wikipedia articles for their essay topics (and was easily discovered at the time).

With the advent of LLM, this sort of pseudo-learning is going to be more and more common. The unsupervised tests (like online tests, or take home assignments) cannot prevent cheating. The end result is that students would pass, but without _actually_ learning the material at all.

I personally think that perhaps the issue is not with the students, but with the student's requirement for certification post-school. Those who are genuinely interested would be able to leverage LLM to the maximum for their benefit, not just to cheat a test.