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395 points pseudolus | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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dtnewman ◴[] 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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vunderba ◴[] No.43634053[source]
I've been calling this out since the rise of ChatGPT:

"The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the LLM to provide an answer, rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own. By reaching for it to solve any problem at nearly an instinctual level you are completely failing to cultivate an intrinsically valuable skill - that of critical reasoning."

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1. prawn ◴[] No.43642927[source]
I've had multiple situations where AI has helped me get to the solution because it has been unable to get there itself. But that I wouldn't have realised that solution otherwise. In one case, looking for a plot, it delivered many woeful options but one sparked an alternative thought that got me on track. In other cases trying to debug code, having it talk through the logic/flow and exhaust other fixes, I have managed to solve the problem despite not being experienced at all with that language.

The dangers I've found personally are more around how it eases busywork, so I'm more inclined to be distracted doing that as though it delivers actual progress.