How University Students Use Claude

This is now reality -- fighting to change the students is a losing battle. Besides in terms of normalizing grade distributions this is not that complicated to solve.

Target the cheaters with pop quizzes. Prof can randomly choose 3 questions from assignments. If students cant get enough marks on 2/3 of them they are dealt a huge penalty. Students that actually work through the problems will have no problems with scoring enough marks on 2/3 of the questions. Students that lean irresponsibly on LLMs will lose their marks.

Maybe we'll revert to Soviet bilet-style oral exams...

Why not just grade solely based on live performance? (quizzes and tests)

Homework would still be assigned as a learning tool, but has no impact on your grade.

Because students wouldn't do the homework and would fail the quizzes. Students need to be pressured into learning and grades for doing the practice are a way. Don't pretend many students are self-motivated enough to follow the lecturer's instructions when there's no grade in it and insisting that "trust me, you won't learn if you don't do it".

> would fail the quizzes.

not those who did actually do the work, and learnt.

The change ought to be that students are allowed to be failed, and this should be a form of punishment for those who "cheat".

I've heard that's how studying is done in Oxford/Cambridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system

Certainly with maths you’re marked almost totally on written exams, but even if that weren’t true you’re also required to go over example sheets (hard homework questions that don’t form part of the final mark) with a tutor in two-student sessions so it’d be completely obvious if you were relying on AI.

I've mostly had non-graded homework in my studies because cheating was always easy. In highschool they might have told your parents if you don't do homework. In university you do what you want. It's never been an issue overall.

Or, well, LLM wouldn't do the homework anymore --- which was the sought-after outcome.

The pop quizzes being part of the grade was the entire point of the comment you replied to. I guess you misread?

Funnily enough, the best use of AI in education is to serve as exactly this kind of tutor. This is the future of education.

I really like oral exams on top of regular exams. The teacher can ask questions and dive into specific areas - it'll be obvious who is just using LLMs to answer the questions vs those who use LLMs to tutor them.

The tutorial system is just for teaching, not grading. It does keep students honest with themselves about their progress when they’re personally put on the spot once a week in front of one or two of their peers.

The promise of the expansion of this kind of tutorial teaching to everyone via AI is great. The problem is keeping students honest with themselves.

That's also how it's done in almost all French engineering schools. You get open book tests with a small amount of relatively difficult questions and you have 3-4 hours to complete.

In some of the CS tests, coding by hand sucks a bit but to be honest, they're ok with pseudo code as long as you show you understand the concepts.

My high school English teacher's book reports were like this. One by one, you come up, hand over your book, and the teacher randomly picks a couple of passages and reads them aloud and asks what had just happened prior and what happens after. Then a couple opinion questions and boom, pass or fail. Fantastic to not write a paper on it; paper writing was a more dedicated topic.

When I was a student, I spent my first 2 years in a so-called prépa intégré of a French engineering school. 20% of students failed and were shown the door during those two years (some failed, some figured that it just wasn't for them). That's fine, that means you keep the ones who actually do the work. At a certain point, you have to start treating students like adult, either they succeed or they don't but it's their personal responsibility.

The European mind cannot comprehend take-home exams.

I don’t recall take home exams being at all common undergrad in the US. Open book or one page formula sheets more so.

But they do that already in Danish universities, and I have to admit, those are very effective.

That's exactly how scientific courses were in my experience at a university in the US. Curriculum was centered around a textbook. You were expected to do all end of chapter problems and ask questions if you had difficulty. It wasn't graded. No one checked. You just failed the exam if you didn't.

Aren't students already allowed to fail?

As a comment upthread said, let them cheat on the take home as much as they want to, they're still going to fail the exam.

There is no European mind when it comes to education, hell, there is barely a national mind for those countries with federated education systems (e.g. Germany).

Well, from what I understand, the answer is kinda "no".

Depends on the country and educational system I suppose, but I do believe professors in many places get in trouble for failing too many students. It's right there in the phrasing.

If most students pass and some fail, that's fine. Revenue comes in, graduates are produced, the university is happy.

If most students fail, revenue goes down, less students might sign up, less graduate, the university is unhappy.

It's a tragedy of the commons situation, because some professors will be happy to pass the majority of students regardless of merit. Then the professors that don't become the problem, there's something wrong with them.

Likewise, if most universities are easy and some are really hard, they might not attract students. The US has this whole prestige thing going on, that I haven't seen all that much in other countries.

So if the students overall get dumber because they grow up over relying on tools, the correction mechanism is not that they have to work harder once the exam approaches. It's that the exam gets easier.

Yes, my undergrad degree grade was determined solely by my performance on 8 three-hour exams at the end of the final year.

> Aren't students already allowed to fail?

It's technically allowed on an individual basis, but the economics don't work for any institution to attempt to raise its bar.

If institutions X and Y grant credential Z, and X starts failing a third of its students, who would apply to go there?

That's how it is in Italy. And that's why Italy is behind every other country in education. Because it hasn't yet made graduating as easy as it is in other places.

In italy there's an oral in most exams. In math exams you're asked proofs of theorems (that were part of the course).

If they fail they learn that they have to study.

That looks bad in the international statistics and so on, there's a lot of pressure to just pass everyone.

In Italy university keeps getting easier because their funding is tied to not failing students.

Well graduation rate is a pretty terrible way to grade education, especially country to country. You could have 100% graduation rate today by just passing everyone - that's basically what we have in primary education and there was an article here just last week about how most college students are functionally illiterate.

At the end of the day you can't force people to learn if they don't want to.

As a society we need to be okay with failing people who deserve to fail and not drag people across the finish line at the expense of diluting the degrees of everyone else who actually put in effort.

For the most part degrees from roughly comparable schools in the same subject are fungible. However, graduating cheaters who should have flunked out of school their freshman year is a one-way ticket to having a reputation that your degree is worthless. You're now comparable to a lower tier of schools and suddenly Y's degree is worth a lot more than yours. The best way (not to only way) to combat this is to actively cull the bottom of your classes. Most schools already do this by kicking out people with low enough GPAs, academic probation, etc. My undergrad would expel you if you had a GPA below 1.8 after your first semester, and you were on academic probation if your GPA was > 1.8 and <=2.5.

This assumes, of course, an institution is actively trying to raise the academic bar of its student population. Most schools are emphatically not trying to do this and are focused more on just increasing enrollment, getting more tax dollars, and hiring more administrators.

The biggest contrast for me between Oxbridge and another red brick was the Oxbridge tutors aren't shy of saying "You've not done the homework, go away and stop wasting my time", whereas the red brick approach was to pick you up and carry you over the finishing line (at least until the hour was up).

in France I got a bunch of equivalent take-home tests, between high school and graduate level, mostly in math and science. The teacher would give us exercice equivalent to what we'd get in our exams and we'd have one week to complete it (sometimes in pairs) and it'd be graded as part of that semester

Many mathematics professors don't require homework to be turned in for grading. For example, the calculus courses at many US universities. Grades are solely determined by quizzes in the discussion section and by exams. Failure rates are above 30%, but that's accepted.

This model won't work for subjects that rely on students writing reports. But yes, universities frequently accept that failure rates for some courses will be high, especially for engineering and the sciences.

My favorite math professor said "your homework is as many of the odd-numbered problems as you feel like you need to do to understand the material" and set a five minute quiz at the start of each lecture which counted as the homework grade. I can't speak for the other students, but I did more homework in his classes than any of the other math classes I took.

Well take home exams are not very useful nowadays with AI. And yeah, other commenters are right when he says there's no European mind when it comes to education, each country does its own thing.

Of course, the reasons they do quizes is to optimize the process (need less tutors/examiners), and to remove bias (any tutor holds biases one way or the other).

I only partially agree with "you can't force people". I think that all people are just like children, but bigger. You can force a kid to not eat to much sugar, even when they want to.

Same with education, for example you can financially force people to learn, say, computer science instead of liberal arts. Even when they don't like it. It's harder, less efficient, but possible.

In sweden until high school it's literally impossible to fail. There's no grades and no way of failing anyone.

Then they suddenly become kinda stricter in high school, where your results decide if you can go to university and which.

But I've been to one of the top technical universities and compared to Italy it was very easy. It was obvious the goal was to try and have everyone pass. Still people managed to fail or drop out anyway, although not in the dramatic numbers I saw in Italy for math exams.

I'm not sure why we care about the degree. Employers care about the degree, but they aren't paying for my education.

The students who want to learn, will learn. For the students who just want the paper so they can apply for jobs, we ought to give them their diploma on the first day of class, so they can stop wasting everybody's time.

I think that’s a good idea too and effectively that is the same outcome when the quizzes shape the distribution.

Then employers will stop caring about the degree...

Employers want the degree because it's supposed to verify that you have a certain set of knowledge and/or skills, or at the very least, you're capable of thought to the extent required to get that degree. That's the only reason they want it.

Student being unable to unwilling to learn that knowledge or acquire those skills should mean they don't get that degree, they don't get those jobs, and they go work in fast food or a warehouse.

"Just give them the degree" is quite literally the worst possible solution to the problem.