5 ms·
I won't speak about upper-division courses, but in the introductory computing courses, I'm dealing with students who still don't know the fundamentals but want
by acbart 3y ago
I won't speak about upper-division courses, but in the introductory computing courses, I'm dealing with students who still don't know the fundamentals but want to use the LLMs to "augment" their skills. But it's like trying to rely on a calculator before you learn how to do addition by hand... and the calculator sometimes misfires. They don't know enough to debug the stuff coming out, because they still don't yet have the fundamental problem-solving skills or understand the core programming techniques. In the hands of an expert (or even someone with moderate knowledge), I think these tools can be great. But there needs to be a period of development WITHOUT these tools too. "If you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it."
- hyperthesis 3y agoSimilar to basic arithmetic? Perhaps the experience of symbolic calculators (like mathematica) is informing, since surely, for many years now, students have been able to have it do their homework for them. How do teachers handle that?
- fny 3y agoThey give an exam where Mathematica is not allowed. The ones that didn’t do the homework are in trouble.
- hyperthesis 3y agoHuh, straightforward. So it just becomes the old problem of getting students to do their homework without cheating. \aside Some exams allow calculators and textbooks, and are really hard. Consider: what would an exam assess, where LLMs were allowed?
- Foobar8568 3y ago25years ago, in the era post TI92, HP48, we would sometimes get table assessment without calculators in HS. University would just ban them for maths.
- Sai_ 3y ago> But it's like trying to rely on a calculator before you learn how to do addition by hand I use salt to season my food but I have no idea how salt is mined. I have used log tables books in the past to do math work. Back when I first used these lookup books, I had a shaky understanding of logarithms.
- Osmose 3y agoThese are not at all comparable? This would be more like seasoning with salt in predefined amounts and not knowing how to season to taste, which will fall apart the moment you deviate from the recipe or change up the seasoning mix at all. ChatGPT might tell you how much salt to use but you'll be screwed when it tells you to use 5 tablespoons for a small steak and you don't have the fundamentals to question it or figure out where it went wrong.
- beardedwizard 3y agoSalt never accidentally turns itself into cyanide. This argument is moot so long as llms hallucinate. llms are not a source of reliable knowledge as a result. they are knowledge augmented in knowledge cases. So really you are arguing students should read the knowledge base, the "augment" is just a thin conversational summarizing veneer.
- m_mueller 3y agoThe main question IMO is this: > when I first used these lookup books, I had a shaky understanding of logarithms. this implies that now you do have an understanding of logarithms. how did you acquire this understanding? The fear that many here share is that LLMs will make too many people get by without learning anything substantial from the ground up. Take away their LLM access and they're completely useless - at least that's what people are afraid of. Myself I'm on the fence - it was always the case that a certain type of people seek to understand how thinks actually work, and others who just want to apply recipies. These trends will likely make the recipy-appliers at first more powerful. I'm afraid though that soon enough they will be driven out by further automation coming on top.