How University Students Use Claude

> 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.

here is an idea, curious what others think of this:

split the entire coursework into two parts:

part 1 - students are prohibited from using AI. Have the exams be on physical papers than digital ones requiring use of laptop/computer. I know this adds burden on corrections and evaluations of these answers, but I think this provides a raw answer to someone's understanding of concepts being taught in the class.

part2 - students are allowed, and even encouraged to use LLMs. And they are evaluated based on the overall quality of the answer, keeping in mind that a non zero portion of this was generated using an LLM. Here the credit should be given to the factual correctness of the answer (and if the student is capable of verifying the LLM output).

Have the final grade be some form of weighted average of a student's scores in these 2 parts.

note: This is a raw thought that just occurred to me while reading this thread, and I have not had the chance to ruminate on it.