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How University Students Use Claude

(www.anthropic.com)
395 points pseudolus | 2 comments | 09 Apr 25 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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dtnewman ◴[09 Apr 25 16:23 UTC] No.43633873[source]▶
> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used.

I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem.

Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous issue. For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".

I think the issue is that it's so tempting to lean on AI. I remember long nights struggling to implement complex data structures in CS classes. I'd work on something for an hour before I'd have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts. With AI, I can simply copy/paste my code and say "hey, what's wrong with this code?" and it'll often spot it (nevermind the fact that I can just ask ChatGPT "create a b-tree in C" and it'll do it). That's amazing in a sense, but also hurts the learning process.

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sally_glance ◴[09 Apr 25 23:09 UTC] No.43638980[source]▶
I think this is a structural issue. Universities right now are trying to justify their existence - universities of the past used to be sites of innovation.

Using ChatGPT doesn't dumb down your students. Not knowing how it works and where to use it does. Don't do silly textbook challenges for exams anymore - reestablish a culture of scientific innovation!

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1. acbart ◴[09 Apr 25 23:13 UTC] No.43639000[source]▶
Incorrect. Fundamentals must be taught in order to provide the context for the more challenging open-ended activities. Memorization is the base of knowledge, a starting point. Cheating (whether through an LLM or hiring someone or whatever) skips the journey. You can't just take them through the exciting routes, sometimes they have to go through the boring tedious repetitive stuff because that's how human brains learn. Learning is, literally, a stressful process on the brain. Students try to avoid it, but that's not good for them. At least in the introductory core classes.
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2. sally_glance ◴[10 Apr 25 13:41 UTC] No.43643671[source]▶
I guess I should have phrased it differently - what I meant was just stop testing the tedious stuff, make it clear to students that learning the fundamentals is expected. Then examine them on hard exploratory problems which require the fundamentals.