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It's creating devastating effects in higher education here. I'm a bit older but did a masters after working a few years and I've now decided to quit because mos
by nisa 2y ago
It's creating devastating effects in higher education here. I'm a bit older but did a masters after working a few years and I've now decided to quit because most - if not all - students just upload the sheets to an llm and copy the output. Group projects used to be really intense and interesting here - now my partners in the group-projects ask me to explain their code to them. It's not an ivy-league university here but it used to be that I had a lot of fun working hard with other students to work on the projects and we learned a lot doing this - this is completely gone. It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself.
I'm suffering from quite a bit of ADHD symptoms - for the past 20 years - I already got an diagnosis and I can survive even if it's a shitty thing to have - but it feels like now everyone around me shares the same fate and people seem to forgot how to work or study or worse - never learned it. I've used to be an outlier, sharing my fate with 2 or 3 other people in the class back when doing the bachelors - we failed in spectacular ways in some areas while outshining everyone else in other areas but it was a honest struggle. I'm okay with that - I'm not made to be a researcher or writing a PhD in computer science or math. But I can work in my area of expertise - however what is happening with all these graduates?
Is this the fault of AI? Not really but society isn't really prepared for what is happening now. People correcting the exercises tell me it's impossible to proof LLM usage and 90% of the results are just ChatGPT - funnily enough this was a machine learning 101 class.
Another thing I've noticed that often when looking at LLMs prompts from other students and their application of the results that they kind of don't help them to really learn and improve yourself - you are stuck on your level of knowledge and so are your prompts and the quality of questions you ask and the way you handle the answers which results in very weird effects. So you are talking with your group member to load some binary serialized arrays for a computer vision projects and use numpy to do some calculations. Next meeting you have some code that does something but it's using another dataset and completely different code, runs 100x slower and solves a slightly different problem. All you get is a shrug. I'm better off watching Youtube or working than staying in university. It's not the fault of the teachers but I've came back because of human interaction and because I don't want to learn alone. This is almost gone here.
All of this - even if it sucks - would be somehow okay but the thing I'm scared of the most lately is the blatant dishonesty and lying I've been seeing in other students about their usage of AI - it's creating a kind of person that only pretends to be able to understand what it's doing but fails reliable to actually understand what LLMs tell them. I'm not made to deal with this and I'm getting angry. Tell me you've used an llm and you are not sure about the results, we can talk about it, work through it and improve upon it. Then it's actually a great thing to have LLMs - but I'm not seeing it.
This will be interesting - not in the good way.
- arcbyte 2y ago> It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself. This is a funny post because this was my experience 20 years ago in college. Nothing new from LLMs here. My big takeaway from my experience in different universities (I attended several different ones) is that the content in all the universities is largely the same - the main difference is that you are picking the caliber of your classmates. My classmates in one technical, well-regarded university were MILES beyond the classmates in a local second-tier state university in terms of intelligence, passion, and drive; and those classmates were more attentive and intelligent than the ones in a third-rate community college.
- nisa 2y agoFair point. Very different people from very different background here in the masters in comparison to the bachelors. Also 15 years between both experiences. Maybe I'm just getting old and start to yell at imaginary clouds. Thanks for the heads-up! Still sucks for everyone involved there that is motivated through.
- rtsil 2y agoThat's what happens when the entire education system is optimized for grades instead of the use and acquisition of knowledge. In this case, LLMs are just laying bare our failings as a society.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]