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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: 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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enjo ◴[10 Apr 25 04:05 UTC] No.43640528[source]▶
> it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".

My wife is an accounting professor. For many years her battle was with students using Chegg and the like. They would submit roughly correct answers but because she would rotate the underlying numbers they would always be wrong in a provably cheating way. This made up 5-8% of her students.

Now she receives a parade of absolutely insane answers to questions from a much larger proportion of her students (she is working on some research around this but it's definitely more than 30%). When she asks students to recreate how they got to these pretty wild answers they never have any ability to articulate what happened. They are simply throwing her questions at LLMs and submitting the output. It's not great.

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DSingularity ◴[10 Apr 25 04:39 UTC] No.43640669[source]▶
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.

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cellularmitosis ◴[10 Apr 25 05:25 UTC] No.43640910[source]▶
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.

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foxglacier ◴[10 Apr 25 05:47 UTC] No.43641029[source]▶
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".
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chii ◴[10 Apr 25 05:59 UTC] No.43641094[source]▶
> 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".

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lelanthran ◴[10 Apr 25 10:08 UTC] No.43642427[source]▶
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.

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1. NiloCK ◴[10 Apr 25 12:12 UTC] No.43643042[source]▶
> 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?

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2. pc86 ◴[10 Apr 25 13:43 UTC] No.43643693[source]▶
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.