10 ms·

Can GPT pass my programming courses?

43 points by greghn 3y ago

faitswulff 3y ago
I think the most interesting use of LLMs I’ve heard of in education is to use them as adversaries for real students, e.g. find factual errors in GPT output in a journalism class, or finding edge cases in GPT code.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Are chess engines being used to train students individually?
  - faitswulff 3y ago
    Magnus Carlsen has talked about playing against AlphaZero, so at least at high levels yes.
r3trohack3r 3y ago
That ChatGPT can pass exams, do your homework, and write your essays is a great thing. Education has been fundamentally broken pretty much my entire life. The cracks have been showing through at an increasing rate since the internet went mainstream. If I had to pick between the current gulag and a self-paced world where nearly every child has access to the library of Alexandria with a personal AI tutor, I’d chose the later in a heartbeat. I have a very strong feeling that the current system isn’t going to survive the AI + Internet 1-2 punch. I believe that what replaces it will be significantly better and waste less of my descendants’ childhoods.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  The pessimist in me doesn’t expect those in power to change education for the better or react accordingly, but the optimist in me really hopes you’re right
  - r3trohack3r 3y ago
    There is no one in power other than you when it comes to your education. Credentials, yes, but education no. Go on Wikipedia, Khan Academy, MDN, etc and open ChatGPT right now.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      There are so many exceptions to this I'll just say that I disagree.
    - asynchronous 3y ago
      I’m talking those who make decisions about what to do with my tax dollars, and no, we do not have much control over those people
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    It's always a generational problem for progress in anything isn't it? When people are entrenched in certain ways it's nigh impossible to change anything, especially when there's no gain for them personally. Real changes happen only when the current incumbents gradually die off. This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. It's become glaringly apparent in the last century with progress vastly outpacing generational swaps. Old geezers in charge, trying to control a world they don't fundamentally understand anymore.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. I don't think mortality was selected for - but rather, that it's longevity that never was. The default state of any organism - or any temporarily self-sustaining / self-perpetuating chemical reaction or temporarily-stable dynamical system - is that something will eventually kick it out of the stable region, and the reaction breaks down, the system muffles itself or shakes itself apart, the organism decays and dies. The way the evolutionary process works, natural selection will strongly promote organisms that survive to the point of reproduction. Past that point, the influence weakens significantly. It's more work that affects reproduction weakly, if at all. Humans are one of those few special cases, where it's strongly beneficial to keep the older individuals around, due to the positive impact of accumulated experience and thinking on survival rates of the group. I think in our case natural selection would actually favor longevity, or at least extending the part of the lifespan where we are capable of thinking clearly. Alas, from evolution's point of view, the entire history of humanity - from first tales and invention of writing, all the way to spaceflight and the Internet and GPT-4 - happened faster than in a blink of an eye. We're iterating and improving couple orders of magnitude faster than natural selection - we've decoupled ourselves from natural evolution, and we're stuck with the shitty hardware we have, that's optimized for barely above reproductive age. IMO, the right answer isn't to throw up our hands and say "oh, science/politics advances one funeral at a time" or "evolution clearly thought longevity sucks" - but rather recognizing that we're on our own with this, evolution doesn't matter to us, and maybe we should come up with a better solution.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  I keep hearing that education is broken, but I never see specifics. Could you present some?
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    For thousands of generations we effectively learned through individual, tailored mentorship and trial-and-error. A hundred or two generations ago mass instruction was adopted for scions of certain of the powerful, or for everyone in organizations such as militaries. It's only in the last couple of hundred years that this mass instruction generalized to almost the entire populace of countries. Mass instruction effectively treats students as the average of their cohort, without really getting to know each particular student. This is the fundamental break. It treats students more as blank states to be filled, than as collaborators in their own development. As a specific anecdote, when I was in 4th/5th grade I didn't work ahead in math much because the assignments were to do every even problem on a page (one page, the potato page, as it had pictures of potatoes on it, had over 100 problems, I still remember it), which was tedious as heck. Because I didn't work ahead I was mainstreamed in math in 6th grade, and felt absolute horror at repeating yet again what I had already tediously repeated so many times.
    - hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
      What an ordeal!
      - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        Assuming you're being sarcastic about my anecdote, I was in gifted classes in elementary and middle school (there were no gifted classes in high school for anyone in my district). 1330 SATs as a 14 year old (edit to add: 14 years, 10 months, to be precise). I ended up in poor fit colleges and didn't finish an A.S. until almost 30, and a B.S. until 35. My abilities were wasted in jobs such as newspaper delivery until the A.S., and even wasted in the A.S.-level job as I had very little power to be anything other than someone else's hands in that job. Miraca Gross, in her literature on the exceptionally gifted, has a person with a 4 S.D. IQ who dropped out of high school and ended up in a store management track.
- thatcat 3y ago
  Do ai tutors exist? Any recommendations?
  - r3trohack3r 3y ago
    Khan Academy is working on one that looks promising - it’s in a private beta.
    - d0mine 3y ago
      You might mean this: How AI could save (not destroy) education Sal Khan • TED2023 https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education/ https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_des...
  - andai 3y ago
    ChatGPT
- juujian 3y ago
  Curious to hear why you feel that education has been broken throughout your life. I totally believe you, it's your own experience after all! Just feel that I was very lucky and had a good education at several great institutions with good mentors, so curious to hear what could have gone wrong.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    I'm not the GP, but treating students as tabula rasa is a big part of the problem. Another is treating students as the average of their cohort. > with good mentors Most people don't get mentors until the latter part of undergraduate, at best. They don't even get people asking pertinent questions as to what they (the students) want to do, or are interested in, and what problems or issues they are having. Asking these questions is not an easy process, as the asker doesn't know about the student in order to ask pertinent questions, and the student often lacks the life knowledge to give the most pertinent answers. But even a bad processes would be preferable to nothing. I know now what guidance I should have sought. But other students aren't me. It's a sad fact that it's pretty much only those who successfully navigated the system who are in a position to give informed advice and mentorship to students today. Our teachers are the successes. Those who failed are, at best, object lessons who we never hear from. Some pedagogues try to research successes versus failures to generate lessons on how to instruct and credential better. And I wish them well.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    I personally had a miserable experience too. I can focus for about 10-20 minutes in a typical class setting before my brain drifts off, which made most of education feel like a waste of time. That kind of daydreaming also pisses off certain teachers to a point they make it their goal to make one's life hell. Part of the reason I finished school at all is that making a student fail causes more paperwork than most teachers care to do, which makes it quite easy to get barely passing grades. Of course this backfires in various ways like constantly declining standards for grades. Teachers in their last years before retirement are either so unmotivated they might as well stay at home (one of my teachers literally arrived 30 minutes late every time, another one simply didn't teach, ever, and was just present), others are just miserable people and decide none of their students ever deserves a better grade than a C. Very motivating. Of course it's not a great system for teachers either and a lot of them work really hard.
- ryan93 3y ago
  Humans made unimaginable progress in the last 150ish years. Many of those who contribute were raised on farms or taught in third world countries. What magic system are you envisioning that could do better than what got us to the moon?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Solutions that involve tossing everyone into the deep end of the pool and letting them sink or swim on their own would probably work for some people assuming it exists as part of a system where there are no educational credentials (though presumably companies would then come up with their own credentialing systems). But I expect a lot of people would drop out of the system in the absence of structure.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      > But I expect a lot of people would drop out of the system in the absence of structure. Especially once they've been socialized through years of instruction to not be self-motivated learners. I've read about child development that most children actively want to be engaged with adult work (such as chores), but harried adults can become impatient with the best efforts of the children. This can lead to the children no longer being interested in helping, and when the tasks eventually become chores assigned to the kids they dislike doing them, and don't have the willpower to stick with doing them. I think this process would generalize to general education.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I doubt anyone seriously disputes that individual (or small group) tutors combined with whatever form of socialization is probably optimal. But that's pretty impractical economically for the population as a whole. I had some of that in grad school and it was pretty great but I'm pretty sure not really scalable.
        anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        This seems like a response to another of my comments, not this one. Things can be done with individualized or mentored instruction within the current system without using too many additional resources.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  I'd like to speak in favor of the gulag. Sure, you get access to the library of Alexandria, but every book you need is wedged between copies of "The Big Book of distractions" and the "Encyclopedia of young girls with barely any clothes on". Some of those books play loud music, too, not to mention the books written by hacks and disguised as the book you actually want. You'd have to have the tenacity of a monk to get anything done. It is possible for a person to be self-disciplined and learn by themselves. It is also possible, and even likely, to get lost in an ocean of distractions and/or depressed due to the lack of human interaction. As a physical person living in a physical space I wouldn't discount the positive influence of bringing your body somewhere with a purpose.
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    This is the big thing all the introverted self-learners miss about college. They reduce it to a number of CS classes they’d like to take, see the material on YouTube, then conclude that the college experience can be reduced to viewing some YouTube videos. Lost in all of this is the notion that learning is a coop game, not single player; it’s more fun with friends! That’s the whole point!
    - faitswulff 3y ago
      Not only is it more fun, those friends will be able to refer you to jobs later on.
    - r3trohack3r 3y ago
      As an introverted self-learner, I can say I do not miss this. From LinkedIn, to IRC, to GitHub, to the hallway track at conferences the people part of our craft is more important than writing software. At the risk of over-asserting your stance, I’d say you’re accusing introverted self-learners of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, when you are mistaking the bathwater for the baby. The social aspect of the craft doesn’t require taking on 5-6 figures of debt (or being lucky enough to have a social structure from the previous generation that can foot that bill upfront). Most venues for education don’t even provide that great of a social network compared to the internet (elite universities withstanding). Not to mention most of this only applies to collegiate level study and not pre-k through 12th grade, which IMO is more broken then collegiate education. As an introverted self-learner, I’d rather meet my social network while practicing my craft and take out a 5 figure loan to live on my own for 4 years and “figure it out” before moving into a big kid job. That doesn’t require our current education system.
techwiz137 3y ago
I often ask ChatGPT4 questions related to ECU programming and cars. And once it outputs what I believe is correct math, only to get it wrong in another instance. How come I always find these flaws?
- andai 3y ago
  Math and language use different parts of the brain. (We cloned the language part.) OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Plus users will (finally) get Plugins in a week, so you'll be able to integrate WolframAlpha.
  - techwiz137 3y ago
    Actually what I ask it, is for instance how to calculate the horsepower required to reach a speed of 250km/h. Or even ask it what a formula might be that incorporates an Air Fuel Ratio using the Mass Air Flow Sensor. Or even a speed density algorithm. Things like this for which I know no formulas. Or how a injection time in milliseconds is converted to milligrams of fuel.
  - was_a_dev 3y ago
    At the moment I have preferred to have ChatGPT output code and run that code For example, I asked ChatGPT to solve a function, in which is suggested to use Newton's method and provided some Python to do so Copy and paste into repl.it and add some quick assertions on known solutions. This is all stuff I learnt early in my undergrad (and quickly forgot). Integrating a Python interpreter into ChatGPT would be awesome
axpy906 3y ago
Anyone made a chrome plugin yet for LC/Hackerrank yet? Asking for a friend.
- SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
  https://github.com/leetcode-mafia/cheetah https://github.com/leetcode-mafia/cheetah (Firefox, not Chrome)
ResearchCode 3y ago
If your courses are in the training set. You can also Google the solutions.
ttiurani 3y ago
This reminds me of a gem I picked up in my pedagogical studies: the aim of effective learning is for the student to ask from the teacher to explain something they don't understand. That both guarantees relevance and is highly likely to leave a lasting impression. However, in most classrooms it's the teacher doing the asking. "Why are you asking me if you already know the answer?" is a completely valid response. A teacher should try to avoid that and instead ask e.g. "what are you having trouble with?" With regard to ChatGPT passing tests, IMO the root problem is the overemphasis on tests with these kinds of redundant questions (and constant grading) that have always had limited correlation with learning.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  The problem with this is that students don’t know what they don’t know, so how are they supposed to ask the relevant questions?
  - ttiurani 3y ago
    The teacher of course brings the material to the student, typically by presenting it by making statements. If the emvironment is right and the teacher has good pedagogical skills, that should spur questions from the students.
    - ModernMech 3y ago
      > typically by presenting it by making statements. Yes, but these statements are often posed as questions though. > A teacher should try to avoid that and instead ask e.g. "what are you having trouble with?" The student who is sufficiently lost answers “I’m having trouble with everything!” It takes some guided questions first to figure out exactly where the problem is.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Don't forget the elephant in the classroom: other students. Regardless of how badly lost some student may be, a question like "do you understand what I just said?" directed at the class in general, will almost always solicit zero responses other than everyone nodding and making approving noises. This is driven by social sense of the students, involving many contributing reasons, such as "I don't want my classmates to think I'm stupid", "I don't want my classmates to think I'm brown-nosing", and "my classmates will kill me if I make this lesson last any longer than necessary". In my experience, this kind of thinking holds well into university years - it takes some years of adulthood for people to unlearn this pattern, and take responsibility for their own education.
dschuetz 3y ago
Of course it could, but it would fail at exams, because AI cannot write programs with pen and paper :3
two_in_one 3y ago
You can use one of GPTs to write essays, programs, solve math problems. But all you will learn is how to write a prompt. And this knowledge will be outdated in one year or less. Do you want it? Professional use, on the other hand, saves time, at least in some cases.
- andai 3y ago
  Outdated why?
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    new GPT-*, will behave differently. It will do different things by default. So, old prompts will have to be fine tuned.
devjab 3y ago
For the past 6 or 7 years I've had a side gig as an external examiner for CS students, and I've gotten GPT to pass most of the programming questions they ask the students in the programming exam. It's things like building a double linked list, sorting a binary tree and so on, and it's very good at it. On the flip side, I've yet to get it to do anything useful for me in my real job that isn't writing documentation. It's likely because it has a lot of data on how to pass CS courses, but not so much data on how to get entity Framework, Asp Versioning and Odata to work together. Probably because very few people have been crazy enough to attempt the latter. I think it will be very interesting to see what the teachers, and institutions, do about it though. It's not like students couldn't find these things on the internet before GPT, but it's so much easier now. Over all I personally think that a nice shake-up of the way we educate people might turn out to be a good thing though. That is of course easy for me to say, as someone who doesn't actually have to do any of the shaking-up.
- xwdv 3y ago
  The solution is trivial. Have students write the algorithms in pseudocode in class by hand, on paper.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    No, thanks. The coding exams I've been in were either handwritten, or in a text field which loses focus every time you pess Tab. Both were a miserable experience and absolutely pointless. How about this: test actual understanding instead of desperately making trivial tasks needlessly challenging.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      I think the point was that some students might substitute ChatGPT understanding for their own.
    - gpm 3y ago
      I had exams in university that involved writing short pieces of (usually pseudo code, one exam asked us to write C) code on paper. Pre-gpt or anything like that. Done just because all our exams were on paper to simplify logistics. It was fine. It tested actual understanding of the problems at hand. No one should be asking someone to write long pieces of code by hand, but a dozen lines of code to implement a simple algorithm is fine.
alex_lav 3y ago
I tried a handful of my partner's philosophy course's questions on ChatGPT. Of 10 questions, it got 4 right. I have no idea what to make of this.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Maybe it uses a different epistemology?
ModernMech 3y ago
As an educator, the way I’m responding to this is that the bar has been raised. Whatever ChatGPT can do is considered a C. If your responses are at ChatGPT level or above, you pass and can move on. If you can’t meet the bar set by ChatGPT, you will need to get to that level before moving on.
- falcor84 3y ago
  So does that mean that you officially allow students to utilize ChatGPT for their work?
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    Where appropriate, yea. It’s the same as any other resource, like a calculator. If the assignment isn’t about calculating numbers, fine, use a calculator. But if the whole point is to make sure you can do long division, then no calculator allowed.
    - was_a_dev 3y ago
      I think this is the "healthiest" way. Students learning how to use LLMs means they will also learn about the limitations and pitfalls that comes with it
espadrine 3y ago
The second to last problem has a correct reasoning but an incorrect answer. 50×0.008-10×(1-0.008) = -9.52, instead of -0.2. One flaw of transformer models is that, while they are able to provide good approximations of additions and small multiplications, they are unable to handle more complex formulae and functions, yet will provide an answer. They should really be fine-tuned to use an external calculator, which hopefully plugins will normalize.
- falcor84 3y ago
  In a first course on proofs in university, I received the following advice: start from the givens and try to get as close as you can to the proposition, as well as start from the proposition and work backwards, trying to get as close to where you got earlier, and then hope that the two parts either meet in the middle, or are close enough to fool the examiner. This seems to work well enough for LLM's too.
natch 3y ago
It seems to me that if you are an educator testing your students with questions in English, you owe it to them to at least make sure the questions are accurately posed and free of typos. This means if you are not a native speaker, you should get a native speaker conversant in your topic area to check your writing. “also omitting numbers whose hundredth digit is 2 or 3” I know this kind of post is frowned on, so downvote away if that’s your thing, but I think the point could also be relevant to GPT’s performance here, although it generally seems to handle typos pretty well.
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y ago
I have an extremely simple programming question that I always ask in interviews. It’s FizzBuzz-like in terms of complexity: write a function that manipulates numbers to achieve a certain result. ChatGPT fails it, as does Bard.
navjack27 3y ago
Since I see a lot of people in the comments just talking about ChatGPT or just the generic term GPT I think I should remind everybody that Bing Chat and Bing Compose is based off of GPT-4.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nemoniac 3y ago
Don't know if it has much of an effect on the answers but the prompts refer to the "hundredth digit" where they should read the "hundreds digit". The "hundreds digit" being the third from the right, whereas the "hundredth digit" would be one hundred digits from (presumably) the left, as in "the hundredth digit of pi". This is English as I would use it. YMMV. Having written the above and with my hand hoverig over the "send" button, I wondered what GPT would think so I asked it: 'What is the difference between "the hundreds digit" and "the hundredth digit"?' It answered: '"The hundreds digit" refers to the digit in the hundreds place of a number, while "the hundredth digit" refers to the second digit after the decimal point in a number.' An interesting interpretation that hadn't occurred to me!

43 points by greghn 3y ago

I think the most interesting use of LLMs I’ve heard of in education is to use them as adversaries for real students, e.g. find factual errors in GPT output in a journalism class, or finding edge cases in GPT code.

EGreg 3y ago
Are chess engines being used to train students individually?
- faitswulff 3y ago
  Magnus Carlsen has talked about playing against AlphaZero, so at least at high levels yes.

r3trohack3r 3y ago

That ChatGPT can pass exams, do your homework, and write your essays is a great thing. Education has been fundamentally broken pretty much my entire life. The cracks have been showing through at an increasing rate since the internet went mainstream. If I had to pick between the current gulag and a self-paced world where nearly every child has access to the library of Alexandria with a personal AI tutor, I’d chose the later in a heartbeat. I have a very strong feeling that the current system isn’t going to survive the AI + Internet 1-2 punch. I believe that what replaces it will be significantly better and waste less of my descendants’ childhoods.

asynchronous 3y ago
The pessimist in me doesn’t expect those in power to change education for the better or react accordingly, but the optimist in me really hopes you’re right
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  There is no one in power other than you when it comes to your education. Credentials, yes, but education no. Go on Wikipedia, Khan Academy, MDN, etc and open ChatGPT right now.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    There are so many exceptions to this I'll just say that I disagree.
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    I’m talking those who make decisions about what to do with my tax dollars, and no, we do not have much control over those people
- moffkalast 3y ago
  It's always a generational problem for progress in anything isn't it? When people are entrenched in certain ways it's nigh impossible to change anything, especially when there's no gain for them personally. Real changes happen only when the current incumbents gradually die off. This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. It's become glaringly apparent in the last century with progress vastly outpacing generational swaps. Old geezers in charge, trying to control a world they don't fundamentally understand anymore.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. I don't think mortality was selected for - but rather, that it's longevity that never was. The default state of any organism - or any temporarily self-sustaining / self-perpetuating chemical reaction or temporarily-stable dynamical system - is that something will eventually kick it out of the stable region, and the reaction breaks down, the system muffles itself or shakes itself apart, the organism decays and dies. The way the evolutionary process works, natural selection will strongly promote organisms that survive to the point of reproduction. Past that point, the influence weakens significantly. It's more work that affects reproduction weakly, if at all. Humans are one of those few special cases, where it's strongly beneficial to keep the older individuals around, due to the positive impact of accumulated experience and thinking on survival rates of the group. I think in our case natural selection would actually favor longevity, or at least extending the part of the lifespan where we are capable of thinking clearly. Alas, from evolution's point of view, the entire history of humanity - from first tales and invention of writing, all the way to spaceflight and the Internet and GPT-4 - happened faster than in a blink of an eye. We're iterating and improving couple orders of magnitude faster than natural selection - we've decoupled ourselves from natural evolution, and we're stuck with the shitty hardware we have, that's optimized for barely above reproductive age. IMO, the right answer isn't to throw up our hands and say "oh, science/politics advances one funeral at a time" or "evolution clearly thought longevity sucks" - but rather recognizing that we're on our own with this, evolution doesn't matter to us, and maybe we should come up with a better solution.
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
I keep hearing that education is broken, but I never see specifics. Could you present some?
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  For thousands of generations we effectively learned through individual, tailored mentorship and trial-and-error. A hundred or two generations ago mass instruction was adopted for scions of certain of the powerful, or for everyone in organizations such as militaries. It's only in the last couple of hundred years that this mass instruction generalized to almost the entire populace of countries. Mass instruction effectively treats students as the average of their cohort, without really getting to know each particular student. This is the fundamental break. It treats students more as blank states to be filled, than as collaborators in their own development. As a specific anecdote, when I was in 4th/5th grade I didn't work ahead in math much because the assignments were to do every even problem on a page (one page, the potato page, as it had pictures of potatoes on it, had over 100 problems, I still remember it), which was tedious as heck. Because I didn't work ahead I was mainstreamed in math in 6th grade, and felt absolute horror at repeating yet again what I had already tediously repeated so many times.
  - hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    What an ordeal!
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      Assuming you're being sarcastic about my anecdote, I was in gifted classes in elementary and middle school (there were no gifted classes in high school for anyone in my district). 1330 SATs as a 14 year old (edit to add: 14 years, 10 months, to be precise). I ended up in poor fit colleges and didn't finish an A.S. until almost 30, and a B.S. until 35. My abilities were wasted in jobs such as newspaper delivery until the A.S., and even wasted in the A.S.-level job as I had very little power to be anything other than someone else's hands in that job. Miraca Gross, in her literature on the exceptionally gifted, has a person with a 4 S.D. IQ who dropped out of high school and ended up in a store management track.
thatcat 3y ago
Do ai tutors exist? Any recommendations?
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  Khan Academy is working on one that looks promising - it’s in a private beta.
  - d0mine 3y ago
    You might mean this: How AI could save (not destroy) education Sal Khan • TED2023 https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education/ https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_des...
- andai 3y ago
  ChatGPT
juujian 3y ago
Curious to hear why you feel that education has been broken throughout your life. I totally believe you, it's your own experience after all! Just feel that I was very lucky and had a good education at several great institutions with good mentors, so curious to hear what could have gone wrong.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I'm not the GP, but treating students as tabula rasa is a big part of the problem. Another is treating students as the average of their cohort. > with good mentors Most people don't get mentors until the latter part of undergraduate, at best. They don't even get people asking pertinent questions as to what they (the students) want to do, or are interested in, and what problems or issues they are having. Asking these questions is not an easy process, as the asker doesn't know about the student in order to ask pertinent questions, and the student often lacks the life knowledge to give the most pertinent answers. But even a bad processes would be preferable to nothing. I know now what guidance I should have sought. But other students aren't me. It's a sad fact that it's pretty much only those who successfully navigated the system who are in a position to give informed advice and mentorship to students today. Our teachers are the successes. Those who failed are, at best, object lessons who we never hear from. Some pedagogues try to research successes versus failures to generate lessons on how to instruct and credential better. And I wish them well.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  I personally had a miserable experience too. I can focus for about 10-20 minutes in a typical class setting before my brain drifts off, which made most of education feel like a waste of time. That kind of daydreaming also pisses off certain teachers to a point they make it their goal to make one's life hell. Part of the reason I finished school at all is that making a student fail causes more paperwork than most teachers care to do, which makes it quite easy to get barely passing grades. Of course this backfires in various ways like constantly declining standards for grades. Teachers in their last years before retirement are either so unmotivated they might as well stay at home (one of my teachers literally arrived 30 minutes late every time, another one simply didn't teach, ever, and was just present), others are just miserable people and decide none of their students ever deserves a better grade than a C. Very motivating. Of course it's not a great system for teachers either and a lot of them work really hard.
ryan93 3y ago
Humans made unimaginable progress in the last 150ish years. Many of those who contribute were raised on farms or taught in third world countries. What magic system are you envisioning that could do better than what got us to the moon?
- ghaff 3y ago
  Solutions that involve tossing everyone into the deep end of the pool and letting them sink or swim on their own would probably work for some people assuming it exists as part of a system where there are no educational credentials (though presumably companies would then come up with their own credentialing systems). But I expect a lot of people would drop out of the system in the absence of structure.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > But I expect a lot of people would drop out of the system in the absence of structure. Especially once they've been socialized through years of instruction to not be self-motivated learners. I've read about child development that most children actively want to be engaged with adult work (such as chores), but harried adults can become impatient with the best efforts of the children. This can lead to the children no longer being interested in helping, and when the tasks eventually become chores assigned to the kids they dislike doing them, and don't have the willpower to stick with doing them. I think this process would generalize to general education.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I doubt anyone seriously disputes that individual (or small group) tutors combined with whatever form of socialization is probably optimal. But that's pretty impractical economically for the population as a whole. I had some of that in grad school and it was pretty great but I'm pretty sure not really scalable.
      - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        This seems like a response to another of my comments, not this one. Things can be done with individualized or mentored instruction within the current system without using too many additional resources.
probably_wrong 3y ago
I'd like to speak in favor of the gulag. Sure, you get access to the library of Alexandria, but every book you need is wedged between copies of "The Big Book of distractions" and the "Encyclopedia of young girls with barely any clothes on". Some of those books play loud music, too, not to mention the books written by hacks and disguised as the book you actually want. You'd have to have the tenacity of a monk to get anything done. It is possible for a person to be self-disciplined and learn by themselves. It is also possible, and even likely, to get lost in an ocean of distractions and/or depressed due to the lack of human interaction. As a physical person living in a physical space I wouldn't discount the positive influence of bringing your body somewhere with a purpose.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  This is the big thing all the introverted self-learners miss about college. They reduce it to a number of CS classes they’d like to take, see the material on YouTube, then conclude that the college experience can be reduced to viewing some YouTube videos. Lost in all of this is the notion that learning is a coop game, not single player; it’s more fun with friends! That’s the whole point!
  - faitswulff 3y ago
    Not only is it more fun, those friends will be able to refer you to jobs later on.
  - r3trohack3r 3y ago
    As an introverted self-learner, I can say I do not miss this. From LinkedIn, to IRC, to GitHub, to the hallway track at conferences the people part of our craft is more important than writing software. At the risk of over-asserting your stance, I’d say you’re accusing introverted self-learners of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, when you are mistaking the bathwater for the baby. The social aspect of the craft doesn’t require taking on 5-6 figures of debt (or being lucky enough to have a social structure from the previous generation that can foot that bill upfront). Most venues for education don’t even provide that great of a social network compared to the internet (elite universities withstanding). Not to mention most of this only applies to collegiate level study and not pre-k through 12th grade, which IMO is more broken then collegiate education. As an introverted self-learner, I’d rather meet my social network while practicing my craft and take out a 5 figure loan to live on my own for 4 years and “figure it out” before moving into a big kid job. That doesn’t require our current education system.

techwiz137 3y ago

I often ask ChatGPT4 questions related to ECU programming and cars. And once it outputs what I believe is correct math, only to get it wrong in another instance. How come I always find these flaws?

andai 3y ago
Math and language use different parts of the brain. (We cloned the language part.) OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Plus users will (finally) get Plugins in a week, so you'll be able to integrate WolframAlpha.
- techwiz137 3y ago
  Actually what I ask it, is for instance how to calculate the horsepower required to reach a speed of 250km/h. Or even ask it what a formula might be that incorporates an Air Fuel Ratio using the Mass Air Flow Sensor. Or even a speed density algorithm. Things like this for which I know no formulas. Or how a injection time in milliseconds is converted to milligrams of fuel.
- was_a_dev 3y ago
  At the moment I have preferred to have ChatGPT output code and run that code For example, I asked ChatGPT to solve a function, in which is suggested to use Newton's method and provided some Python to do so Copy and paste into repl.it and add some quick assertions on known solutions. This is all stuff I learnt early in my undergrad (and quickly forgot). Integrating a Python interpreter into ChatGPT would be awesome

axpy906 3y ago

Anyone made a chrome plugin yet for LC/Hackerrank yet? Asking for a friend.

SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
https://github.com/leetcode-mafia/cheetah https://github.com/leetcode-mafia/cheetah (Firefox, not Chrome)

ResearchCode 3y ago

If your courses are in the training set. You can also Google the solutions.

ttiurani 3y ago

This reminds me of a gem I picked up in my pedagogical studies: the aim of effective learning is for the student to ask from the teacher to explain something they don't understand. That both guarantees relevance and is highly likely to leave a lasting impression. However, in most classrooms it's the teacher doing the asking. "Why are you asking me if you already know the answer?" is a completely valid response. A teacher should try to avoid that and instead ask e.g. "what are you having trouble with?" With regard to ChatGPT passing tests, IMO the root problem is the overemphasis on tests with these kinds of redundant questions (and constant grading) that have always had limited correlation with learning.

ModernMech 3y ago
The problem with this is that students don’t know what they don’t know, so how are they supposed to ask the relevant questions?
- ttiurani 3y ago
  The teacher of course brings the material to the student, typically by presenting it by making statements. If the emvironment is right and the teacher has good pedagogical skills, that should spur questions from the students.
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    > typically by presenting it by making statements. Yes, but these statements are often posed as questions though. > A teacher should try to avoid that and instead ask e.g. "what are you having trouble with?" The student who is sufficiently lost answers “I’m having trouble with everything!” It takes some guided questions first to figure out exactly where the problem is.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Don't forget the elephant in the classroom: other students. Regardless of how badly lost some student may be, a question like "do you understand what I just said?" directed at the class in general, will almost always solicit zero responses other than everyone nodding and making approving noises. This is driven by social sense of the students, involving many contributing reasons, such as "I don't want my classmates to think I'm stupid", "I don't want my classmates to think I'm brown-nosing", and "my classmates will kill me if I make this lesson last any longer than necessary". In my experience, this kind of thinking holds well into university years - it takes some years of adulthood for people to unlearn this pattern, and take responsibility for their own education.

dschuetz 3y ago

Of course it could, but it would fail at exams, because AI cannot write programs with pen and paper :3

two_in_one 3y ago

You can use one of GPTs to write essays, programs, solve math problems. But all you will learn is how to write a prompt. And this knowledge will be outdated in one year or less. Do you want it? Professional use, on the other hand, saves time, at least in some cases.

andai 3y ago
Outdated why?
- two_in_one 3y ago
  new GPT-*, will behave differently. It will do different things by default. So, old prompts will have to be fine tuned.

devjab 3y ago

For the past 6 or 7 years I've had a side gig as an external examiner for CS students, and I've gotten GPT to pass most of the programming questions they ask the students in the programming exam. It's things like building a double linked list, sorting a binary tree and so on, and it's very good at it. On the flip side, I've yet to get it to do anything useful for me in my real job that isn't writing documentation. It's likely because it has a lot of data on how to pass CS courses, but not so much data on how to get entity Framework, Asp Versioning and Odata to work together. Probably because very few people have been crazy enough to attempt the latter. I think it will be very interesting to see what the teachers, and institutions, do about it though. It's not like students couldn't find these things on the internet before GPT, but it's so much easier now. Over all I personally think that a nice shake-up of the way we educate people might turn out to be a good thing though. That is of course easy for me to say, as someone who doesn't actually have to do any of the shaking-up.

xwdv 3y ago
The solution is trivial. Have students write the algorithms in pseudocode in class by hand, on paper.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  No, thanks. The coding exams I've been in were either handwritten, or in a text field which loses focus every time you pess Tab. Both were a miserable experience and absolutely pointless. How about this: test actual understanding instead of desperately making trivial tasks needlessly challenging.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    I think the point was that some students might substitute ChatGPT understanding for their own.
  - gpm 3y ago
    I had exams in university that involved writing short pieces of (usually pseudo code, one exam asked us to write C) code on paper. Pre-gpt or anything like that. Done just because all our exams were on paper to simplify logistics. It was fine. It tested actual understanding of the problems at hand. No one should be asking someone to write long pieces of code by hand, but a dozen lines of code to implement a simple algorithm is fine.

alex_lav 3y ago

I tried a handful of my partner's philosophy course's questions on ChatGPT. Of 10 questions, it got 4 right. I have no idea what to make of this.

mensetmanusman 3y ago
Maybe it uses a different epistemology?

ModernMech 3y ago

As an educator, the way I’m responding to this is that the bar has been raised. Whatever ChatGPT can do is considered a C. If your responses are at ChatGPT level or above, you pass and can move on. If you can’t meet the bar set by ChatGPT, you will need to get to that level before moving on.

falcor84 3y ago
So does that mean that you officially allow students to utilize ChatGPT for their work?
- ModernMech 3y ago
  Where appropriate, yea. It’s the same as any other resource, like a calculator. If the assignment isn’t about calculating numbers, fine, use a calculator. But if the whole point is to make sure you can do long division, then no calculator allowed.
  - was_a_dev 3y ago
    I think this is the "healthiest" way. Students learning how to use LLMs means they will also learn about the limitations and pitfalls that comes with it

espadrine 3y ago

The second to last problem has a correct reasoning but an incorrect answer. 50×0.008-10×(1-0.008) = -9.52, instead of -0.2. One flaw of transformer models is that, while they are able to provide good approximations of additions and small multiplications, they are unable to handle more complex formulae and functions, yet will provide an answer. They should really be fine-tuned to use an external calculator, which hopefully plugins will normalize.

falcor84 3y ago
In a first course on proofs in university, I received the following advice: start from the givens and try to get as close as you can to the proposition, as well as start from the proposition and work backwards, trying to get as close to where you got earlier, and then hope that the two parts either meet in the middle, or are close enough to fool the examiner. This seems to work well enough for LLM's too.

natch 3y ago

It seems to me that if you are an educator testing your students with questions in English, you owe it to them to at least make sure the questions are accurately posed and free of typos. This means if you are not a native speaker, you should get a native speaker conversant in your topic area to check your writing. “also omitting numbers whose hundredth digit is 2 or 3” I know this kind of post is frowned on, so downvote away if that’s your thing, but I think the point could also be relevant to GPT’s performance here, although it generally seems to handle typos pretty well.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y ago

I have an extremely simple programming question that I always ask in interviews. It’s FizzBuzz-like in terms of complexity: write a function that manipulates numbers to achieve a certain result. ChatGPT fails it, as does Bard.

navjack27 3y ago

Since I see a lot of people in the comments just talking about ChatGPT or just the generic term GPT I think I should remind everybody that Bing Chat and Bing Compose is based off of GPT-4.

deleted 3y ago

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nemoniac 3y ago

Don't know if it has much of an effect on the answers but the prompts refer to the "hundredth digit" where they should read the "hundreds digit". The "hundreds digit" being the third from the right, whereas the "hundredth digit" would be one hundred digits from (presumably) the left, as in "the hundredth digit of pi". This is English as I would use it. YMMV. Having written the above and with my hand hoverig over the "send" button, I wondered what GPT would think so I asked it: 'What is the difference between "the hundreds digit" and "the hundredth digit"?' It answered: '"The hundreds digit" refers to the digit in the hundreds place of a number, while "the hundredth digit" refers to the second digit after the decimal point in a number.' An interesting interpretation that hadn't occurred to me!