5 ms·

How ChatGPT spoiled my semester (2024)

80 points by edent 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Unirely01 1y ago
[dead]
skeaker 1y ago
Not sure this was the fault of ChatGPT as much as it was the fault of disinterested students bullshitting a class for credits. I've seen similar bad work in group projects when I was a student well before ChatGPT was a thing.
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  Chatgpt introduces a new vector of being a bad collaborator. Previously you could write a lot of text that was wrong, but claim that you at least tried. Now, we need to get used to putting it in the same category that a peer did not contribute anything and that they contributed ai slop. This is one of the reasons why juniors will vanish - there is no room for "I tried my best". Edit: clarity
- augment_me 1y ago
  I am a PhD student who teaches part-time in some courses, and a difference I have personally ran into is that disinterested students still had agency over what they had written. When you present something, or hand something in that you have written, you still display the information that you know at that time. This makes feedback helpful because you can latch it onto SOMETHING. When I get obvious LLM-handins, who am I correcting? What point does it have? I can say anything, and the student will not be able to integrate it, because they have no agency or connection to "their" work. Its a massive waste of everyone's time, I have another 5 student in line who actually have engaged with their work, and who will be able to integrate feedback, and their time is being taken by someone who will not be able to understand or use the feedback. This is the big difference. For a bad student, failing and making errors is a way to progress and integrate feedback, for an LLM-student, its pointless.
  - what-the-grump 1y ago
    I think only time will tell? Let me flip this on it's head. LLMs allow me to tackle stuff I have no business tackling because the support from the LLM for the task far exceeds google / stack overflow / [insert data source for industry or task]. Does the concept sink in? Yes and no, I am moving too fast most of the time to retain the solution. When the task is complex enough and LLM gets it wrong, oh boy is it educational, not only do I have to figure out why the LLM is wrong, I have to now correct my understanding and learn to reason against it. I was a very bad student, most of the classes didn't make sense to me, bored me out of my mind, I failed a lot. Do I ever feel that way when talking to Chatgpt about a task I have no idea how to solve? No, and guess what we figure it out together. Another data point, my english writing has improved by using chatgpt to refactor / reformat, more examples, mostly correct english structure. Over time stuff sinks in even if you are not writing it, you are still reading it, and editing. Lets take code for a minute, is it easier to edit someone else's code or your own? So everyone that has to dive deep into troubleshooting chatgpt's code is somehow dumb/lazy? I don't think so, they are at least as smart as the code. What would happen if we made a curriculum around using chatgpt, how far would I get in chem 1 if I spent 90 minutes with chatgpt prompts prepared by a professor and a machine that never gets tired of explaining / rephrasing until I get it?
    - augment_me 1y ago
      I get your point and I agree with it, I don't think this flips anything. What you are describing is an engaged, motivated student who is using the tools for learning when the traditional system did not suit them. I am actually the same, had shit grades, and found traditional lectures pointless. What I am describing in what I and many colleagues have run into are students who are not engaged or motivated with their work because there is a path of much less resistance, and are using the LLMs to pass learning moments with minimal effort. When you choose to edit the code of the LLM instead of feeding it all back to it with the added prompt "it does not work, fix it", you have already made a choice in learning. edit; I do agree on the curriculum change, however, there is a time-window now before there has been a consensus on the new ways of learning and political action from the universities where the learning is to a much higher degree in the hands of students than the universities. And this power can lead both ways to a higher extent than before when the university was in control of this.
isanjayjoshi 1y ago
[dead]
bradley13 1y ago
ChatGPT didn't ruin anything. Lazy students did. I'm a prof, and my experience so far is that - where AI is concerned - there are two kinds of students: (1) those who use AI to support their learning, and (2) those who use AI to do their assignments, thus avoiding learning altogether. In some classes this has flipped the bell curve on its head: lots of students at either end, and no one in the middle
- throwaway290 1y ago
  No, now there is more people who are not learning. Previously students had to learn. Group 2 was very small because you had to be very lucky to get your assignments done for you without learning at least something yourself. And if you half assed your assignment it would be noticeable by the lecturer. Now it is a no brainer for many people to be in group 2
- ViscountPenguin 1y ago
  Quantity is a quality all its own, it's significantly easier to be lazy with LLMs than with oldschool cheating methods, this changes the equilibrium point at which people will cheat. So if you're a student, you're now even more likely to be dragging along deadweight than you were a decade ago.
  - mattgreenrocks 1y ago
    Yes, I think many aren’t realizing this. It is much easier to be lazy, much faster to get something plausible, and not culturally looked down upon. It is also easier to say, “I’ll ask ChatGPT to help me with my main points,” and fall into having it write the essay for you. Changing the defaults (as they were) changes the system, given enough time. Perhaps the worst aspect of LLMs is they can support us in our “productivity,” when we’re actually trying to avoid the hard work of thinking. This sort of technology-assisted self-delusion feels very similar to social media: “I’m not hiding from life and people, I’m talking to them on Twitter!”
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 1y ago
  For category 1, they can too fall into temptation of just not trying hard enough solving the homework/assignment. This is interesting era I think.
michaelchicory 1y ago
This sucks, though it’s formative. An experience that I value highly from my time studying was working on a group project in a team with misaligned goals: it teaches you how much it matters to find good people to work with in the real world!
nlitsme 1y ago
I think your 'group' is not communicating very well. Just telling a groupmate 'Now I will take over your work' is not very supportive. When people start editing each others work out of the blue, there seems to be no healthy discussion at all.
self_awareness 1y ago
If it wasn't ChatGPT, those students are more than likely to be the kind that buys solutions so that they still don't have to work. Some people somehow think that having more while working less is an act of resourcefulness. To some extent it maybe is, because we shouldn't work for work's sake, but making "working less" a life goal doesn't seem right to me.
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  The difference in 20$ and 200$ + significantly more effort. I don't think these students necessarily would have bought.
  - rekenaut 1y ago
    The difference is much greater than this. It’s $20/month for a machine that can provide instant answers to any prompt in any topic hundreds of times a month vs $200/assignment that may take days to received and you have to edit yourself if you want a change made. I think it’s quite clear that most students who are using AI now to generate assignments would not have bought.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  Before LLMs they copy pasted straight from Google or Wolfram Alpha.
- rrgok 1y ago
  Why "working less" should not be a life goal? I got a undergraduate degree because I can earn more, but I don't need more money. I need more free time. With increased salary I can work less.
jatins 1y ago
I am seeing this in job as well where there is increasingly a trend of submitting code that authors haven't thoroughly reviewed themselves and can't reason through
- wfhrto 1y ago
  Why should that be a problem? Code no longer needs to be understood. If there are any problems, code can be trivially regenerated with updated descriptive prompts.
  - sfn42 1y ago
    Is this sarcasm or are you really that naive?
  - jeffhuys 1y ago
    Oh the future is going to be BRIGHT for hackers!
tossandthrow 1y ago
This > Some of the sections were written to answer a subtly different question than the one we were supposed to answer. The writing wasn’t even answering the correct question. Is my absolute biggest issue with LLMs - and it is really week written. It is like two concepts are really close in latent space, and the LLM projects the question to the wrong representation.
sudohalt 1y ago
The vast majority of people go to school to be "employable" (or because it's what your "supposed to do"), not to learn. The only thing that matters is your grade, therefore people will optimize for that. With grades being the only thing that matters and time pressure (you must graduate by this time) it's no surprise that students offload their work to ChatGPT. They don't care about learning they care about what is actually valued: their grade and graduating. If those things didn't matter people wouldn't use ChatGPT because their incentive would be to learn. You see this with older people who go back to college or take community college classes, they aren't cheating because there is no incentive to cheat.
- lysecret 1y ago
  I honestly think the times where you became employable simply with decent grades and a degree are over.
- T4iga 1y ago
  Except since getting my degree no one but my ego has ever cared for the grades i received (which weren't good btw). This is my European perspective. I don’t know how it is in the US.
  - sudohalt 1y ago
    Ya this is mostly true, grades rarely matter after you graduate. But you must maintain a "passing grade" and matters if you are pursing grad school or certain majors, and sometimes matter right after graduation or for internships.
- BrtByte 1y ago
  When the system rewards grades over understanding, it's completely rational for students to optimize for grades
nuthje 1y ago
Might be worthwile to have an actual conversation with your peers instead of just deleting and running over it. Maybe they thought your level of work was lower than that produced by GPT? Maybe they thought it useful to have filler draft instead of starting from a blank sheet? Maybe they have a sick parent at home and needed to fill it in just to move on? Complaining externally and not communicating is just a very tiny step up from what your classmates are doing. Also having your entire semester spoiled by some incidents induced by random passersby? Come on, university is for growing up, start.
PeterStuer 1y ago
Ah. The hell of group projects. In my days, if it were a group assignment you would still end up doing all the work yourself 80% of the time as the group just couldn't be arsed to produce anything and rather play a game of chicken. Worse yet. In 10% of the cases you'ld get some clueless but very opinionated student wanting to be 'manager' and 'editor in chief', contributing nothing but bossing everyone around. And yes, in 10% of the cases, you would have another student actually smart and helpfull. So is it better to have LLM slop rather than nothing at all? Probably not, but it is not like those people would have turned in good contributions otherwise.
BrtByte 1y ago
Honestly, this is where group-based grading starts to feel broken

80 points by edent 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Unirely01 1y ago

[dead]

skeaker 1y ago

Not sure this was the fault of ChatGPT as much as it was the fault of disinterested students bullshitting a class for credits. I've seen similar bad work in group projects when I was a student well before ChatGPT was a thing.

tossandthrow 1y ago
Chatgpt introduces a new vector of being a bad collaborator. Previously you could write a lot of text that was wrong, but claim that you at least tried. Now, we need to get used to putting it in the same category that a peer did not contribute anything and that they contributed ai slop. This is one of the reasons why juniors will vanish - there is no room for "I tried my best". Edit: clarity
augment_me 1y ago
I am a PhD student who teaches part-time in some courses, and a difference I have personally ran into is that disinterested students still had agency over what they had written. When you present something, or hand something in that you have written, you still display the information that you know at that time. This makes feedback helpful because you can latch it onto SOMETHING. When I get obvious LLM-handins, who am I correcting? What point does it have? I can say anything, and the student will not be able to integrate it, because they have no agency or connection to "their" work. Its a massive waste of everyone's time, I have another 5 student in line who actually have engaged with their work, and who will be able to integrate feedback, and their time is being taken by someone who will not be able to understand or use the feedback. This is the big difference. For a bad student, failing and making errors is a way to progress and integrate feedback, for an LLM-student, its pointless.
- what-the-grump 1y ago
  I think only time will tell? Let me flip this on it's head. LLMs allow me to tackle stuff I have no business tackling because the support from the LLM for the task far exceeds google / stack overflow / [insert data source for industry or task]. Does the concept sink in? Yes and no, I am moving too fast most of the time to retain the solution. When the task is complex enough and LLM gets it wrong, oh boy is it educational, not only do I have to figure out why the LLM is wrong, I have to now correct my understanding and learn to reason against it. I was a very bad student, most of the classes didn't make sense to me, bored me out of my mind, I failed a lot. Do I ever feel that way when talking to Chatgpt about a task I have no idea how to solve? No, and guess what we figure it out together. Another data point, my english writing has improved by using chatgpt to refactor / reformat, more examples, mostly correct english structure. Over time stuff sinks in even if you are not writing it, you are still reading it, and editing. Lets take code for a minute, is it easier to edit someone else's code or your own? So everyone that has to dive deep into troubleshooting chatgpt's code is somehow dumb/lazy? I don't think so, they are at least as smart as the code. What would happen if we made a curriculum around using chatgpt, how far would I get in chem 1 if I spent 90 minutes with chatgpt prompts prepared by a professor and a machine that never gets tired of explaining / rephrasing until I get it?
  - augment_me 1y ago
    I get your point and I agree with it, I don't think this flips anything. What you are describing is an engaged, motivated student who is using the tools for learning when the traditional system did not suit them. I am actually the same, had shit grades, and found traditional lectures pointless. What I am describing in what I and many colleagues have run into are students who are not engaged or motivated with their work because there is a path of much less resistance, and are using the LLMs to pass learning moments with minimal effort. When you choose to edit the code of the LLM instead of feeding it all back to it with the added prompt "it does not work, fix it", you have already made a choice in learning. edit; I do agree on the curriculum change, however, there is a time-window now before there has been a consensus on the new ways of learning and political action from the universities where the learning is to a much higher degree in the hands of students than the universities. And this power can lead both ways to a higher extent than before when the university was in control of this.

isanjayjoshi 1y ago

[dead]

bradley13 1y ago

ChatGPT didn't ruin anything. Lazy students did. I'm a prof, and my experience so far is that - where AI is concerned - there are two kinds of students: (1) those who use AI to support their learning, and (2) those who use AI to do their assignments, thus avoiding learning altogether. In some classes this has flipped the bell curve on its head: lots of students at either end, and no one in the middle

throwaway290 1y ago
No, now there is more people who are not learning. Previously students had to learn. Group 2 was very small because you had to be very lucky to get your assignments done for you without learning at least something yourself. And if you half assed your assignment it would be noticeable by the lecturer. Now it is a no brainer for many people to be in group 2
ViscountPenguin 1y ago
Quantity is a quality all its own, it's significantly easier to be lazy with LLMs than with oldschool cheating methods, this changes the equilibrium point at which people will cheat. So if you're a student, you're now even more likely to be dragging along deadweight than you were a decade ago.
- mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  Yes, I think many aren’t realizing this. It is much easier to be lazy, much faster to get something plausible, and not culturally looked down upon. It is also easier to say, “I’ll ask ChatGPT to help me with my main points,” and fall into having it write the essay for you. Changing the defaults (as they were) changes the system, given enough time. Perhaps the worst aspect of LLMs is they can support us in our “productivity,” when we’re actually trying to avoid the hard work of thinking. This sort of technology-assisted self-delusion feels very similar to social media: “I’m not hiding from life and people, I’m talking to them on Twitter!”
BOOSTERHIDROGEN 1y ago
For category 1, they can too fall into temptation of just not trying hard enough solving the homework/assignment. This is interesting era I think.

michaelchicory 1y ago

This sucks, though it’s formative. An experience that I value highly from my time studying was working on a group project in a team with misaligned goals: it teaches you how much it matters to find good people to work with in the real world!

nlitsme 1y ago

I think your 'group' is not communicating very well. Just telling a groupmate 'Now I will take over your work' is not very supportive. When people start editing each others work out of the blue, there seems to be no healthy discussion at all.

self_awareness 1y ago

If it wasn't ChatGPT, those students are more than likely to be the kind that buys solutions so that they still don't have to work. Some people somehow think that having more while working less is an act of resourcefulness. To some extent it maybe is, because we shouldn't work for work's sake, but making "working less" a life goal doesn't seem right to me.

tossandthrow 1y ago
The difference in 20$ and 200$ + significantly more effort. I don't think these students necessarily would have bought.
- rekenaut 1y ago
  The difference is much greater than this. It’s $20/month for a machine that can provide instant answers to any prompt in any topic hundreds of times a month vs $200/assignment that may take days to received and you have to edit yourself if you want a change made. I think it’s quite clear that most students who are using AI now to generate assignments would not have bought.
PeterStuer 1y ago
Before LLMs they copy pasted straight from Google or Wolfram Alpha.
rrgok 1y ago
Why "working less" should not be a life goal? I got a undergraduate degree because I can earn more, but I don't need more money. I need more free time. With increased salary I can work less.

jatins 1y ago

I am seeing this in job as well where there is increasingly a trend of submitting code that authors haven't thoroughly reviewed themselves and can't reason through

wfhrto 1y ago
Why should that be a problem? Code no longer needs to be understood. If there are any problems, code can be trivially regenerated with updated descriptive prompts.
- sfn42 1y ago
  Is this sarcasm or are you really that naive?
- jeffhuys 1y ago
  Oh the future is going to be BRIGHT for hackers!

tossandthrow 1y ago

This > Some of the sections were written to answer a subtly different question than the one we were supposed to answer. The writing wasn’t even answering the correct question. Is my absolute biggest issue with LLMs - and it is really week written. It is like two concepts are really close in latent space, and the LLM projects the question to the wrong representation.

sudohalt 1y ago

The vast majority of people go to school to be "employable" (or because it's what your "supposed to do"), not to learn. The only thing that matters is your grade, therefore people will optimize for that. With grades being the only thing that matters and time pressure (you must graduate by this time) it's no surprise that students offload their work to ChatGPT. They don't care about learning they care about what is actually valued: their grade and graduating. If those things didn't matter people wouldn't use ChatGPT because their incentive would be to learn. You see this with older people who go back to college or take community college classes, they aren't cheating because there is no incentive to cheat.

lysecret 1y ago
I honestly think the times where you became employable simply with decent grades and a degree are over.
T4iga 1y ago
Except since getting my degree no one but my ego has ever cared for the grades i received (which weren't good btw). This is my European perspective. I don’t know how it is in the US.
- sudohalt 1y ago
  Ya this is mostly true, grades rarely matter after you graduate. But you must maintain a "passing grade" and matters if you are pursing grad school or certain majors, and sometimes matter right after graduation or for internships.
BrtByte 1y ago
When the system rewards grades over understanding, it's completely rational for students to optimize for grades

nuthje 1y ago

Might be worthwile to have an actual conversation with your peers instead of just deleting and running over it. Maybe they thought your level of work was lower than that produced by GPT? Maybe they thought it useful to have filler draft instead of starting from a blank sheet? Maybe they have a sick parent at home and needed to fill it in just to move on? Complaining externally and not communicating is just a very tiny step up from what your classmates are doing. Also having your entire semester spoiled by some incidents induced by random passersby? Come on, university is for growing up, start.

PeterStuer 1y ago

Ah. The hell of group projects. In my days, if it were a group assignment you would still end up doing all the work yourself 80% of the time as the group just couldn't be arsed to produce anything and rather play a game of chicken. Worse yet. In 10% of the cases you'ld get some clueless but very opinionated student wanting to be 'manager' and 'editor in chief', contributing nothing but bossing everyone around. And yes, in 10% of the cases, you would have another student actually smart and helpfull. So is it better to have LLM slop rather than nothing at all? Probably not, but it is not like those people would have turned in good contributions otherwise.

BrtByte 1y ago

Honestly, this is where group-based grading starts to feel broken