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395 points pseudolus | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.213s | source
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moojacob ◴[] No.43634527[source]
How can I, as a student, avoid hindering my learning with language models?

I use Claude, a lot. I’ll upload the slides and ask questions. I’ve talked to Claude for hours trying to break down a problem. I think I’m learning more. But what I think might not be what’s happening.

In one of my machine learning classes, cheating is a huge issue. People are using LMs to answer multiple choice questions on quizzes that are on the computer. The professors somehow found out students would close their laptops without submitting, go out into the hallway, and use a LM on their phone to answer the questions. I’ve been doing worse in the class and chalked it up to it being grad level, but now I think it’s the cheating.

I would never do cheat like that, but when I’m stuck and use Claude for a hint on the HW am I loosing neurons? The other day I used Claude to check my work on a graded HW question (breaking down a binary packet) and it caught an error. I did it on my own before and developed some intuition but would I have learned more if I submitted that and felt the pain of losing points?

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1. knowaveragejoe ◴[] No.43635023[source]
It's a hard question to answer and one I've been mindful of in using LLMs as tutoring aids for my own learning purposes. Like everything else around LLM usage, it probably comes down to careful prompting... I really don't want the answer right away. I want to propose my own thoughts and carefully break them down with the LLM. Claude is pretty good at this.

"productive struggle" is essential, I think, and it's hard to tease that out of models that are designed to be as immediately helpful as possible.