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How University Students Use Claude

(www.anthropic.com)
395 points pseudolus | 4 comments | 09 Apr 25 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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srveale ◴[09 Apr 25 17:09 UTC] No.43634566[source]▶
IMO it's so easy to ChatGPT your homework that the whole education model needs to flip on its head. Some teachers already do something like this, it's called the "Flipped classroom" approach.

Basically, a student's marks depend mostly (only?) on what they can do in a setting where AI is verifiably unavailable. It means less class time for instruction, but students have a tutor in their pocket anyway.

I've also talked with a bunch of teachers and a couple admins about this. They agree it's a huge problem. By the same token, they are using AI to create their lesson plans and assignments! Not fully of course, they edit the output using their expertise. But it's funny to imagine AI completing an AI assignment with the humans just along for the ride.

The point is, if you actually want to know what a student is capable of, you need to watch them doing it. Assigning homework has lost all meaning.

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1. sixpackpg ◴[10 Apr 25 00:08 UTC] No.43639328[source]▶
The education model at high school and undergrad uni has not changed in decades, I hope AI leads to a fundamental change. Homework being made easy by AI is a symptom of the real issues. Being taught by uni students who learned the curriculum last year, lecturers who only lecture due to obligation and haven't changed a slide in years. Lecturers who refuse to upload lecture recordings or slides. Just a few glaring issues, the sad part these are rather superficial easy to fix cases of poor teaching.

I feel AI has just revealed how poor the teaching is, though I don't expect any meaningful response to be made by teaching establishments. If anything AI will lead to bigger differences in student learning. Those who learn core concepts and to critically think will be become more valuable and the people who just AI everything will become near worthless.

Unis will release some handbook policy changes to the press and will continue to pump out the bell curve of students and get paid.

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2. doctorpangloss ◴[10 Apr 25 01:55 UTC] No.43639895[source]▶
And yet all the people who created all the advances in AI have extremely traditional, extremely good, fancy educations, and did absolutely bonkers amount of homework. The thing you are talking about is very aspirational.
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3. sixpackpg ◴[10 Apr 25 02:24 UTC] No.43640042[source]▶
There's some sad irony to that, making homework easier for future generations but those generations being worse off as a result on average. The lack of AI assistance was a forcing function to greater depth.

Outliers will still work hard and become even more valuable, AI won't affect them negatively. I feel non outliers will be affected negatively on average in ability to learn/think.

With no confirming data, I feel those who got that fancy education would do so in any other institution. Just those fancy institutions draw in and filter for intelligent types, not teach them to be intelligent as it's practically a pre-requisite.

4. Workaccount2 ◴[10 Apr 25 15:49 UTC] No.43645115[source]▶
I don't see a future that doesn't involve some form of AR glasses and individual tuned learning. Forget teachers, you will just don your learning glasses and have an AI that walks you through assignments and learning everyday.

That is if learning-to-become-a-contributing-member-of-society doesn't become obsolete anyway.