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How University Students Use Claude

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395 points pseudolus | 1 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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dyauspitr ◴[09 Apr 25 16:51 UTC] No.43634343[source]▶
I’m pretty sure you can assume close to 100% of students are using LLMs to do their homework.
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ryandrake ◴[09 Apr 25 16:59 UTC] No.43634452[source]▶
And if you're that one person out of 100,000 who is not using LLMs to do their homework, you are at a significant disadvantage on the grading curve.
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1. Eavolution ◴[10 Apr 25 09:14 UTC] No.43642164[source]▶
Currently in university and my experience is that it heavily depends on the module. For a lot your statement's probably accurate, however for others it really isn't. For example we have a microprocessors module which is programming for an rp2040 in c, but also manually setting up interrupt handlers etc in assembly. All of the LLM's are completely useless for it, they tell you that the rp2040 works in ways it just doesn't and are actively unhelpful with the misinformation. The only students who can do well in that module are the ones that understand the material well and go to the datasheet and documentation instead of an LLM.