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How University Students Use Claude

(www.anthropic.com)
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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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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samuel ◴[10 Apr 25 07:05 UTC] No.43641433[source]▶
I guess this students don't pass, do they? I don't think that's a particularly hard concern. It will take a bit more, but will learn the lesson (or drop out).

I'm more worried about those who will learn to solve the problems with the help of an LLM, but can't do anything without one. Those will go under the radar, unnoticed, and the problem is, how bad is it, actually? I would say that a lot, but then I realize I'm pretty useless driver without a GPS (once I get out of my hometown). That's the hard question, IMO.

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Stubbs ◴[10 Apr 25 07:30 UTC] No.43641559[source]▶
As someone already said, parents used to be concerned that kids wouldn't be able to solve maths problems without a calculator, and it's the same problem, but there's a difference between solving problems _with_ LLMs, and having LLMs solve it _for you_.

I don't see the former as that much of a problem.

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shinycode ◴[10 Apr 25 08:31 UTC] No.43641924[source]▶
Well the extent is much broader from a calculator vs an LLM. Why should I hire you if an agent can do it ? LLM is every job is a calculator and can be replaced. Spotify CEO stated on X that before asking for more headcount they have to justify not being able to do the job with an agent. So all the students who let the LLM do their assignment and learn basically nothing, what’s their value for a company to be hired ? The company will and is just using the agent as well …
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9rx ◴[10 Apr 25 12:49 UTC] No.43643254[source]▶
> Why should I hire you if an agent can do it ?

An agent can't do it. It can help you like a calculator can help you, but it can't do it alone. So that means you've become the programmer. If you want to be the programmer, you always could have been. If that is what you want to be, why would you consider hiring anyone else to do it in the first place?

> Spotify CEO stated on X that before asking for more headcount they have to justify not being able to do the job with an agent.

It was Shopifiy, but that's just a roundabout way to say that there is a hiring freeze due to low sales (no doubt because of tariff nonsense seizing up the market). An agent, like a calculator, can only increase the productivity of a programmer. As always, you still need more programmers to perform more work than a single programmer can handle. So all they are saying is that "we can't afford to do more".

> The company will and is just using the agent as well …

In which case wouldn't they want to hire those who are experts in using agents? If they, like Shopify, have become too poor to hire people – well, you're screwed either way, aren't you? So that is moot.

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shinycode ◴[10 Apr 25 13:34 UTC] No.43643610{3}[source]▶
So like arguably when people were not using calculators they made calculations by hand and there was a room full of people that did calculations. That’s gone now thanks to calculators. But it the analogy goes to an order of magnitude higher, now fewer people can « do » the job of many so less hiring maybe but not just on « do calculations by hand » but almost all fields where the use of software is required.

  Where will all those new students find a job if :
  - they did not learn much because LLM did work for them 
  - there is no new jobs required because we are more productive ?
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1. 9rx ◴[10 Apr 25 14:01 UTC] No.43643861{4}[source]▶
> now fewer people can « do » the job of many

Never in the history of humans have we been content with stagnation. The people who used to do manual calculations soon joined the ranks of people using calculators and we lapped up everything they could create.

This time around is no exception. We still have an infinite number of goals we can envision a desire for. If you could afford an infinite number of people you would still hire them. But Shopify especially is not in the greatest place right now. They've just come off the COVID wind-down and now tariffs are beating down their market further. They have to be very careful with their resources for the time being.

> - they did not learn much because LLM did work for them

If companies are using LLMs as suggested earlier, they will find jobs operating LLMs. They're well poised for it, being the utmost experts in using them.

> - there is no new jobs required because we are more productive ?

More productivity means more jobs are required. But we are entering an age where productivity is bound to be on the decline. A recession was likely inevitable anyway and the political sphere is making it all but a certainty. That is going to make finding a job hard. But for what scant few jobs remain, won't they be using LLMs?