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.

I'm more interested in memory and knowledge retention in general and how AI can assist. How many times have you heard from people that they are doing rote memorization and will "data dump" test information once a course is over. These tools are less to blame than the motivators and systems that are suppose to be engaging students in real learning and the benefits of a struggle.

Another problem is there is so much in technology, I just can't remember everything after years of exposure to so many spaces. Not being able to recall information you used to know is frustrating and having AI to remind you of details is very useful. I see it as an amplifying tool, not a replacement for knowledge. I'm sure there are some prolific note taking memory tricksters out there but I'm not one of them.

I frequently forget information over time and it's nice to have a tool to remind me of how UDP, RTP, and SIP routing work when I haven't been in the comm or network space for a while.

My CS undergrad school used to let students look up documentation during coding exams. Most courses had a 3-5 hour coding challenge where you had to make substantial changes to a course project you had developed. I think this could also be the right response to LLMs. Let students use whatever they want to use, and test true skills and understanding.

FWIW, exams testing rote learning without the ability to look up things would have been much easier. It was really stressful to sit down and make major changes to your project to satisfy new unit tests, which often targeted edge cases and big O complexity to crash your code.