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Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

• snarky-comments 5mo ago
  I had dwindling math skills way before AI made it cool.
• loneboat 5mo ago
  What a terribly ambiguous title. "Failing grades soar after xyz" makes it sound like xyz has helped what were previously terrible, failing grades become good ones.
  • christophilus 5mo ago
    Failing news headlines soar after AI takes over reporters jobs.
    • rogerrogerr 5mo ago
      *quietly takes over reporters’ jobs
      • devdp430 5mo ago
        Precise.
    • tomjakubowski 5mo ago
      generally an editor writes the headline, not the reporter
  • userbinator 5mo ago
    I suspect the ambiguity might be part of making it "clickbaity", as it naturally causes you to wonder which meaning it's about and become more interested in reading.
  • quietbritishjim 5mo ago
    No matter how many times I read it, I can't interpret it the way you're suggesting. "x soars after y" always reads as "x increases a lot because of y". I don't really get what you're saying. Are you maybe saying that "soars" might mean "get better", so "failing grades soar" might mean there are actually less failing grades? That's not how I've ever understood that word.
    • stavros 5mo ago
      "Falling" means that something goes towards the earth. "Soaring" means the opposite. "Grades soar" means that grades went up "Falling grades means that grades are going down". "Falling grades soar" is just meaningless writing.
      • jcranmer 5mo ago
        The title is "failing grades soar" (one 'l', not two), not "falling grades soar."
    • loneboat 5mo ago
      Imagine an elementary school teacher told you that many of her students had failing grades, so she had implemented a new reading curriculum. If she told you that afterwards the failing grades had "soared", it could easily be read either way: - The (previously failing) grades had increased, so the program must be working very well. - The percent of grades that count as failing had increased, so the program must actually be terrible.
      • littlexsparkee 5mo ago
        It's not the best phrasing but it's still quite clearly the latter
        • loneboat 5mo ago
          Yeah, it was quite clear once I started reading the article. It just threw me for a loop as I read the title - Usually if I hear of grades "soaring" that's a _good_ thing.
• onetokeoverthe 5mo ago
  [dead]
• ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
  I read something interesting yesterday on the subject of AI in education (though, it has consequences to broader society too): The goal of education is to impart knowledge in the student, preferably correct knowledge. The goal of an LLM is to produce an output that is convincingly human. It's not even that they're opposed, as much as they're ships for whom Polaris is in a completely different direction. "Hallucinations" as they're called, or more plainly stated when the machine makes some shit up, are perfectly understandable in this context, as are the struggles of every single AI firm to get rid of them. Namely: the machine is functioning exactly as it is designed to, so how can you possibly fix it? It's working. The goal of an LLM is to produce text that passes for human, and apart from the obvious LLM tells, it largely does. Like say what you will about their lack of intelligence, the writing is solid. It's grammatically correct, spelling is dead on, what have you. It reminds me of the famous phrase from Chomsky: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. A sentence which is perfectly grammatically valid but is also completely devoid of meaning. An LLM would write that sentence, and it would be working correctly. All of that to say: for all the things they CAN do and CAN be used for, I think we have to draw a hard line at education. I just don't think AI has a place in it. Of course that presumes that the goal of education is to, well, educate people, and especially here in the States but also abroad, we have been putting other interests, especially capital, far ahead of that for decades. I expect no different here. And before someone comes in to go "WELL HOW DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GONNA STOP IT LUDDITE IT'S THE FUTUUUUUURE" yes, I'm sure as long as these exist and are available to people tech literate enough to access and use them, whatever that means into the far flung future, they will be a factor. Just like cheating, just like plagiarism, just like everything else that will get you kicked out of school. And the answer is the same: it will be stopped by institutions, imperfectly, and it will also happen anyway and with the same consequence: those responsible will mostly be harming themselves for short-term gains.
  • MengerSponge 5mo ago
    Some people need Jesus, but y'all need Kant ;) "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance." https://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html https://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html
• alephnerd 5mo ago
  "According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026" Alternatively, more students are taking CS10 and CS61A irrespective of aptitude. Anyone can code, but not everyone can become an employable SWE. Anyone who has first or second hand experience with Cal or any other university knows how impacted CS majors have become, and how everyone is attempting to become a CS major because it's the easiest path to multiple high paying white collar careers. And in all honesty, it's not like CS@Cal never had weedout classes (I remember CS70, CS61B, and Math54 had reputations of being the L&S weedout classes).
  • threatofrain 5mo ago
    The question comes sooner than the students being tested on the job market. Another possibility is that dropping standardized testing was a net bad idea.
    • alephnerd 5mo ago
      This is orthogonal to standardized testing. At UC Berkeley L&S, students are undeclared by default, and everyone is incentivized to take the intro CS classes (CS10, CS61A) irrespective of aptitude because worst case they can declare a CS minor or use the classes for other adjacent degrees (eg. Applied Math, Data Science). Additionally, while Cal doesn't require standardized tests, most students who applied and attended already took the SAT, ACT, and APs becuase they cross-applied to other universities as well. This is reflected in UC Berkeley's HS Weighted GPA being in the 4.31-4.65 range [0], which means most students will have taken at least 6 AP classes. Hell, I attended an Ivy and even then Cal was a target program for me, as well as my peers. If I didn't get into my Ivy I would have ended up at Cal and ended up in the same position. [0] - https://admissions.berkeley.edu/apply-to-berkeley/student-profile/ https://admissions.berkeley.edu/apply-to-berkeley/student-pr...
      • nullisland00 5mo ago
        CS is now in the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society instead of the College of Letters & Science
• williamstein 5mo ago
  > Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the center for student conduct,” Garcia said. According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were caught cheating on take-home exams in spring 2026.
  • aidenn0 5mo ago
    Anybody know how many students take CS 10 in a typical spring semester?
    • snarky-comments 5mo ago
      Or how many are normally caught cheating? Did they use AI to detect AI using cheaters?
      • jmalicki 5mo ago
        And if cheating was triggered using AI detectors, was it real? AI detectors are pretty mid in practice - they tend to have a lot of false positives for "B" students who are okay, but can still be struggled to be more coherent than AIs are. There are some specific triggers that AIs are way more likely to do than students, but a lot of AI detectors will trigger on this "almost there, but you're still struggling" level of essay writing that might get a B, B-. I could expect the same might be true for CS students even though I haven't seen how AI detectors work for CS/math homework.
        • acbart 5mo ago
          You'd be amazed at how many students we know are obviously cheating because the logs reveal that they copy pasted a long, complete answer within seconds of opening a problem for the first time, full of sophisticated code constructs that we didn't teach them, and lot's of nicely formatted comments. Sometimes they even copy/paste the entire GPT output and then format it down.
• readthenotes1 5mo ago
  “I’m a strong, strong opponent of what Harvard is doing to say that only a fraction of students can earn A’s,” Garcia said. “I think you should have clear standards for what an A means, and then give tons of opportunity for people … to get to that A bar without lowering the standard. So everybody who’s curving is hiding that effect. It’s completely hiding that effect, and it’s pretending as if nothing’s wrong, and something is definitely wrong.” To do this, you have to be a professor who has a strong idea of what subject mastery looks like. Not available to most. But ... It is exactly the right idea IMO
  • alephnerd 5mo ago
    I'm confused by Garcia's statement as well because CS@Cal traditionally uses a bell curve which is even stricter than Harvard's changes, because Harvard doesn't have the same stringent GPA requirements to declare a concentration unlike declaring an impacted major at L&S Cal. Anyone with a pulse can declare a CS concentration at Harvard and muddle by (you actually need to try in order to get a C/C-). Of course, GPAs are calculated differently at Harvard compared to other universities, as a B- is treated at a 2.67 but most other programs treat that as a C+.
  • MengerSponge 5mo ago
    In a broad sense, this distinction between Harvard and Cal is the distinction between an old money Ivy and a flagship state school. One exists to propagate a social hierarchy, and the other aims to allow all entrants to succeed. Ironically, the techniques of the latter yield the results of the first, but everybody gets to keep a pure heart.
  • j45 5mo ago
    Grades only matter as much as being able to transfer just to the real world. People can use AI to outsource their learning, but if they use ai to outsource their understanding they just set themselves up to fail even more. From what I’ve seen, how students are using ai (not that they are using ai) is making them less prepared for the real world, which unfortunately is changing faster than ever at the same time to create double impact.
• com2kid 5mo ago
  At this point I would support a ban on generative AI by anyone under 18, or even perhaps 21 years of age. A bunch of science fiction stories had "first connection to cyberspace" as a coming of age event, maybe those authors were on to something.
  • hanzeweiasa 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  • dyauspitr 5mo ago
    It’s like the greatest teacher. Plus it’s not toxic like social media. Banning it would be a shame.
    • samrus 5mo ago
      Its not teaching. These people cant pass a the class. They never went through the friction needed to learn
      • cpncrunch 5mo ago
        It depends how you use it. You can either get it to explain a concept, or do your homework for you. Its a bit like the decision students have to make as to whether to review their material before exams or go out partying. Overall it just seems like a huge waste of money to piss away the huge tuition cost your parents probably paid.
      • blululu 5mo ago
        You can use an llm to get out of doing homework but you can also use it to ask every question you would ever wanted in a 1-1 tutoring session. The problem is kids will use it to cheat on their homework. If we can’t deal with that problem then a ban is necessary. But these things can be phenomenal teachers if you use them properly.
        • beej71 5mo ago
• thraway3837 5mo ago
  Sorry, but I don't think AI is entirely to blame here. When I graduated from a CS program at a top-10 school, I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone. Like in the movie Good Will Hunting, you could have learned nearly all of it and more by borrowing those books for free from the library. Or, just opening a complex OSS project and learning to contribute. And quite honestly. It shows in the CS grad population too. A lot of us are condescending toward anything that doesn't make sense to us. But, I digress. The best engineers I've worked with are all non traditional backgrounds, non degree or degree holders from non elite schools. They think differently, they tinker, they are incredibly nice and patient, and do it for the love of connecting humans to technology. Look up the names mentioned in the article. Garcia, Ranade, Nelson. All of them are involved with highly theoretical mathematics and scientific computing. Just because you're good at 1 thing does not mean you are qualified to teach. And none of these professors are trained or taught or graded or performance managed on how they teach. For most of them, its just required that they spend 10% of their time in the classroom lecturing. Let's be honest about another thing. 99% of EECS graduates, even from elite schools, are wrangling objects and their relationships to a graph. Simply put, we're all just a bunch of glorified JSON massage therapists. It just so happens that we get paid well for it, and we hold that over people. The same happens in the classroom. I think in order to facilitate a healthy, educational environment for young adults, we as adults must encourage, motivate and make that environment fun and practical. We force feed binary trees and the compiler AST's, but we need to make it fun. It's like the commonly accepted saying: Schools kill creativity :(.
  • littlexsparkee 5mo ago
    > According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F’s did not exceed 10% for either class. I don't think instruction would've changed drastically in the last year though.
  • kajecounterhack 5mo ago
    > I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone +10000. The goddamn slides. If I were a student now going to engineering school, I'd basically take the slides and throw them into NotebookLM and get way better lectures. Then I'd ask claude or GPT all my hard questions. Hell, I'd get the PDF version of my textbooks and do the same. The number of lectures actually worthy of your time was so low.
• camelmel 5mo ago
  I have some sympathy for these kids. If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests. Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without an LLM present doing 90% of the work. Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own, which is a required skill for producing original thought. For adults the cognitive decline won't be as measurable since there's no exams, and overall output volume will still be fine due to LLM help. But I do believe it's already happening absolutely everywhere around us. Honestly, I wanted to be in denial about it before but it's too obvious to ignore now.
  • GoblinSlayer 5mo ago
    At this rate humans will become avatars remotely controlled by LLMs. Ironic conclusion of the consciousness debate.
    • cultofmetatron 5mo ago
      obligatory https://smbc-wiki.com/index.php/2014-12-17 https://smbc-wiki.com/index.php/2014-12-17
    • repelsteeltje 5mo ago
      Distopian, what an insightful frame
    • genxy 5mo ago
      We are already remote sensors and manipulators for the corporate and economic structures we operate under. You can't see it, but we are ants in a superorganism.
    • sph 5mo ago
      More evidence of the philosophical concept of 'technology is a life form.' Humans would be the perfect host, at least for the time being. They are certainly a willing host.
• vladgur 5mo ago
  In unrelated news "More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and mathematics applicants, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students." https://archive.ph/18spS https://archive.ph/18spS
  • frollogaston 5mo ago
    Hard to find the actual letter: https://ucstudentsuccess.org https://ucstudentsuccess.org
  • ap99 5mo ago
    Who even makes the decision to drop having a standard bar to verify students? And what possible benefit would that have?
    • throwatdem12311 5mo ago
      Why else does anyone in California get rid of anything? Because it’s racist.
      • contagiousflow 5mo ago
        See: when they banned guns because of the black panthers.
      • logicalmind 5mo ago
        You should probably take a look at the demographics of the top scores of the standardized tests like the SAT. You're not going to find the race you think at the top.
        • throwatdem12311 5mo ago
          Do you think I wouldn’t know? Pray tell which race do you think I’m going to expect to find? Because let me tell you, the demographics are pretty much exactly what I expected. And my response to that is…so what? If anything you’re telling on yourself with your statement.
• somenameforme 5mo ago
  The likely 'real' reason is hidden in one paragraph within the article and has nothing to do with the implication of the eye-catching title: "Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. The petition and its accompanying open letter detail similar concerns with students’ mathematical preparation." Around COVID times many top universities experimented with removing test requirements from admissions, under an argument largely related to equity. It's been a failure everywhere, with many, if not most, universities already reversing it. As Yale put it, "Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT." [1] That link is for an archive because that page has been removed. That's because they briefly experimented with a new 'test flexible' strategy where they allowed students to submit test scores or not, but then scrapped that altogether and went back to simply requiring test scores. [1] - https://archive.is/8zxfo https://archive.is/8zxfo
  • HanayamaTriplet 5mo ago
    If the removal of standardized testing in 2021 was the real reason, then why is there a sudden spike of failure rates happening right now?
    • userbinator 5mo ago
      It takes time for students to work their way through the system.
      • kingkawn 5mo ago
        Wouldn’t this change be evidenced right away after the elimination of the test as criteria if the test was responsible
• stanleydupreez 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• steve_taylor 5mo ago
  AI has a way of exposing people. In this example, students who are there to get a degree from a prestigious institution, rather than to learn, are prone to take perceived shortcuts and proceed to come unstuck when their AI isn't there to do their work for them, such as in an exam.
  • vachina 5mo ago
    These people would’ve failed with or without AI.
    • elictronic 5mo ago
      You are wrong. Some would have failed before, but not in the larger numbers. Before when they couldn’t complete an assignment they would try different things, seek a professor, or seek out friends to help explain. You could find answer keys to many assignments online, but that doesn’t feel like learning and wouldn’t even always answer your actual misunderstanding. It wasn’t perfectly tailored to your issue all the time. Now the barrier to an answer is zero. They are basically watching a YouTube video on how to X, seeing step by step instructions feeling like they are doing it, and the moment they swing a real hammer they are whacking themselves in the crotch. It might get better after a few years, but this stuff is just now hitting mainstream for the masses. ChatGPT has only been in mainstream use for about 3 years.
    • chii 5mo ago
      With AI, they fail later (during the exams), where as without using AI previously, they'd fail early and either course-correct, or drop out early (and suffer less of the consequences). Not sure what the solution is - there's no possibility of stopping students using AI to complete their homework/assignments etc. But let me flip the question - do they need to be stopped? Why not let them fail at the exam? As long as the exam acts as a filter, their usage of AI to "cheat" their learning is inconsequential to anyone but themselves.
  • nneonneo 5mo ago
    It's too damn tempting to not use. You have a magical machine that, on command, will spit out the answer to your question in 10 seconds, whereas you'd need to spend hours to do the assignment the Good Old Fashioned Way. Even students who aren't just there for the prestigious degree are falling victim to this. When you're up against a deadline - and unless you're very good at time management you're frequently up against a deadline - it's going to be an irresistible lever to pull. In times past, cheating would mean copying an answer off the Internet or off a friend, both of which are easy to detect. More sophisticated cheaters might spend an hour rewriting the solution to make it less obvious they cheated, but at some point the cost of cheating (time + risk of getting caught) starts exceeding the cost of just doing the assignment. AI changes this - you get a customized answer that doesn't show up in a database with no extra work. The thing is, students fail to realize just what using AI robs them of. Struggling with the assignment is the entire point. You don't learn if the assignments are too easy; you need to have some challenge to push your brain to understand the material more deeply and to build those pathways to apply the knowledge in novel ways. You become more efficient and effective over time as that knowledge settles in and you get more proficient - one of the reasons why time-bounded exams still make sense (being fast is also a proxy measure for understanding).
• nirui 5mo ago
  Pity. I recently started a fun activity to rebrush my math my where I tries to solve problems while asking Gemini Live mode for confirmation and suggestions, sometimes step by step. It kinda was fun, like a very patient professor stand right besides you. It was the one of the best math learning experience I've ever had, and you don't even need to send bribe/gift to Gemini to keep you in it's favor. On the other hand, if you ask a LLM to completely finish the work without thinking it through by yourself, then it sounded like cheating, to yourself.
• saltyoldman 5mo ago
  A reckoning is coming for school. Learning the rote stuff is no longer essential. Now they need to learn, how to teach "how to think". How to invent, how to be creative. Art++, Woodshop++, Math--
• ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
  Hmm, meanwhile somewhere else on campus this study: Artificial Intelligence and Grade Inflation https://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/artificial-intelligence-and-grade-inflation-cshe-higher-education-working-paper-series https://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/artificial-intelligen...
• 0xDEAFBEAD 5mo ago
  >In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA. As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor devalued if Cal went the direction of e.g. Yale and started handing out 79% A's and A-minuses: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/professors-face-grading-dilemma-too-many-a-s-little-taste-for-limits https://yaledailynews.com/articles/professors-face-grading-d...
  • sndgndgndgndy 5mo ago
    Unpopular opinion: turning public universities into an academic hunger games is diametrically opposed to their purpose for existing, which is to create an educated populace. Intentionally lowering the quality of instruction, as well as deliberately trying to trip students up on exams, is not improving educational outcomes for anyone. People who complain about "grade inflation" have completely lost sight of why public education exists in the first place.
    • intended 5mo ago
      This is valid, and I would add that these academic hunger games are a result of College Degrees being needed to get what remains of well paying jobs. Maybe we can use AI to create new exams that grade people on professional capability, and then gate entry into other professional degrees? Hmm, Where would the teachers come from, and how good would the education actually be?
    • FuckButtons 5mo ago
      Some of the exams in Berkeley were brutal, but they never felt like trick questions, they did on occasion require a level of mastery of the material which was extreme, but it never felt like someone was just trying to make the questions obtuse for the sake of it.
    • typs 5mo ago
      Obviously a balance would be best, but as someone who went to a very grade-inflated school, I do believe that grade inflation gets in the way of education substantially. When you can get through classes with very little effort and understanding and know you will get a sufficient grade, many people will simply not learn the material deeply.
• eudamoniac 5mo ago
  We're going to find that LLM usage has even worse effects on the mind than the horrific effects we're just starting to be certain of from social media. I'm just not going to use either. See you lads on the other side.
• BrenBarn 5mo ago
  Well, at least the faculty are actually giving out the Fs and not just lowering the bar, so kudos to them for that.
• contubernio 5mo ago
  Professors suddenly realized everyone was cheating and started paying attention, but the cheating isn't new ... A lot of faculty are happy when their students get good grades because they interpret it as I'm such a good teacher instead of I should pay more attention to how they cheat. AI woke some of them up to reality.
• nntlol 5mo ago
  I dont think ai is good enough for it coding or any other work once i told ai a problem and he generated an entire solution which i used and it was broken. You should never use ai like it treat is like a helper write a function for code and then ask if everything is correct and if something can improve read documentations understand how its working under the code if everything is correct then only deploy or build.
• TheServitor 5mo ago
  The kids don't care about the integrity of the systems or their educations because they can see that all the benefits of a traditional education and career are predicated on a future that probably won't exist. It's a rational response to entrenched elites that prevent realization of the very social contracts they push on the youth (hard work will equal success, home ownership is a fundamental, etc). Combined with the looming specter of climate doom, and watching the adults do nothing about it, treating preparation for a conventional career as a scam to be counter-scammed makes a certain sense.
• Retr0id 5mo ago
  It's interesting that it's specifically math-within-CS being discussed here. I can imagine a lot of students "just want to learn programming" (or similar), and see the math as a tedious distraction. As a naturally curious person, nothing will stop me from learning about the topics that interest me. But school also taught me a lot of things that didn't interest me, and a lot of those things turned out to be useful anyway. I think if I had access to AI from a younger age, I'd have used it to skip learning the things I didn't care about, which would not have done me any favours.
  • joe_the_user 5mo ago
    Back in the university, I took both math and CS courses and a significant percentage of students seemed interested in neither math nor programming but rather in the jobs they would get afterwards. I didn't notice the same thing with math majors.
    • Sharlin 5mo ago
      Well, that’s because for math majors any monetary incentive is nonexistent (modulo some rather specific careers). Just about nobody majors in math for any reason other than math itself.
  • hypfer 5mo ago
    Personally, I do believe that math as a discipline has this huge issue of being mostly incomprehensible garbage. Not because the actual truth encoded in it would be this complex, but because the encoding scheme just sucks. I see it as a packaging problem that has so far not been painful enough to trigger any meaningful change. With this LLM-driven collapse, that might finally change. Idk I'm hopeful. Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring only found in small chunks of the population to truly click.
    • andrewflnr 5mo ago
      > Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring Ok, I'm all for overhauling math notation and teaching but this doesn't follow. Most animals can't do Math, even if they can do arithmetic. Clearly living in the universe doesn't guarantee you can learn how it works. There's no reason to believe we slightly smarter animals are universally entitled to understand it either.
• enoeht 5mo ago
  Average school system has been lacking for a very long time, overhauling it to focus on kids current interests, while sneaking in the other stuff, might now be possible and cheaper to realize with our new tech.
• ivolimmen 5mo ago
  It's not just 'a person' or 'a student', we as a collective become more dumb. Very simple example to highlight this: Most developers use(d?) stackoverflow. Everything related to software development is stored there. The LLM's trained on it. Now a huge set of developers now longer go to stackoverflow to get answers. Or add to the collective. Stackoverflow is losing money (ad revenue). If / when stackoverflow goes away we will lose a huge amount of collective information on software development. We, as a group, will take a huge step back.
  • mnau 5mo ago
    So is dead and has been for some time. 1500 questions per month. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661 https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661
    • Jensson 5mo ago
      Dropped 99% in three years... Some think that would happen to Google, but it didn't so far.
• ewangzzz 5mo ago
  Even as a software engineer myself, I'm feeling a bit of cognitive decline having AI doing some/most of the thinking for me The solution? I'm not sure but possibly use AI as more of a collaborate partner to discuss with rather than letting it give you the answers
  • latexr 5mo ago
    > I'm feeling a bit of cognitive decline having AI doing some/most of the thinking for me > The solution? I'm not sure This initially felt like you were setting up a joke. If you feel like something is harmful to you, stop doing it. Find alternatives (they are there, it’s everything else; commercial LLMs are still fairly recent). Thinking “maybe I don’t have to let it go, I can still use it if I do it this other way” sounds like an addict justifying themselves. I say all this without a hint of judgment. I genuinely hope you are able to tackle the harm you’re feeling.
  • Jtarii 5mo ago
    >The solution? I'm not sure The solution is extremely obvious, just stop using it on 2 days out of the week or something like that. You need to go to the gym, but for your brain. If what you are building is too complex for you to meaningfully contribute to in the absence of LLM assistance then that should tell you something important.
• hspeiser 5mo ago
  Pretty ironic that these kids are failing a non major requirement called "the beauty and joy of computer science"
• erelong 5mo ago
  Probably not a bad thing, the coursework is antiquated and meeting students with new advanced tools and the awareness of AI's impact on things in the coming future I imagine there is some apathy and laziness here but idk how unjustified it is "Noooooo you need to manually code on paper in assembly" Alright, well maybe the CS grads need to, but why expect that of everyone else
• fedeb95 5mo ago
  Students need to be taught how to use AI apps efficently to learn. Their goal is not to solve problems, but to learn how to solve them. Let alone, they instead use AI apps to solve problems for them. AI apps are very powerful for teaching. You just need to tell them to do that, and not to directly solve your problem.
• frollogaston 5mo ago
  Dude, cheating in CS10 of all classes?
  • Zarathruster 5mo ago
    Yeah pretty hard to imagine Claude making sense of BYOB
• iLoveOncall 5mo ago
  All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs is atrophying their skills in real-time. I have yet to meet a single person for whom it's not the case. But I essentially completely stopped using them for software engineering (why isn't really relevant, but it's not because od this skill atrophy). So as the skills of everyone else is diminishing, mine is proportionally raising. It has never been easier to get better than others. You don't need to put in more effort, just the same effort as you always have, and others will do the job of losing their skills for your own benefit.
  • JonChesterfield 5mo ago
    This only holds if society manages to hang together, which in the age of military strategy written by AI is looking borderline.
  • littlexsparkee 5mo ago
    That thought came to me early but it feels like a pyrrhic victory - if society is dumbed down, increasingly unstable what kind of win is that? is the excellence you've maintained even valued at that point? standards even within tech, both technical and moral, have withered. this is a function of its popularity and openness but still
• matrixages 5mo ago
  [dead]
• Otterly99 5mo ago
  Maths skills have been slowly falling even before the advent of LLMs. I have a story but this is anecdotical so take it with a grain of salt. I was in my 3rd bachelor's year studying physics (France) and overheard a conversation between two of my teachers. They were discussing how they should modify the 1st year program to now include math, because he had been noticing how more and more students were failing the more math-heavy subjects like body and newtonian mechanics. He said that they should now teach (or re-teach) calculus to 1st year students, which was not taught when I entered college (it was assumed that you learned it in high school and we would only cover linear algebra in 1st year). I can imagine things are only getting worse with students that can now get under the illusion that they know math because they have a tool that can do it for them. Which raises the question: should programs adapt to this, like we adapted to having calculators?
  • Sharlin 5mo ago
    Not teaching analysis to 1st year physics students seems to me rather crazy, TBH. Yes, people (are supposed to) learn basic calculus in high school, but university-level math just hits different. And at least around here stuff like actually applying analysis in physics and having to integrate and solve DEs (rather than assuming constant acceleration, for instance), is definitely not covered in high school.
• ListeningPie 5mo ago
  The exams need to change. Now that we have LLMs the value a human can bring to a task has changed and it’s that new value that has to be tested. It’s like testing your drawing ability in a photography class. The difference is that now nearly have subject and testing method we have has become obsolete. Drawings courses still exist as will traditional courses, but the main stream has changed and exams and schools need to adapt.
  • gspr 5mo ago
    Terrible comparison. You don't need to be good at drawing to be good at photography. You do need to be good at math to do e.g. physics (or math itself!), nomatter the tools at your disposal.
• ricardobayes 5mo ago
  This tracks, I have read that this generation is the first one since the 1800s that performs worse academically than the previous ones. Experts blamed screens and anything digital in the classroom.
• fastidiousangle 5mo ago
  what if it's not llms and instead the removal of standardized testing in the state of california?
• fastidiousangle 5mo ago
  what if this is not due to AI use and instead due to the demolishing of standardized testing and "new Math" in the state of california?
  • defrost 5mo ago
    New Math finally causes havoc 61+ years after introduction? Oh my. * Tom Lehrer: New Math (1965) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4
• samuelzxu 5mo ago
  AI + Education is really interesting but also pretty tough to get right. Working on something that is hopefully going in the right direction: https://knowable.ca https://knowable.ca
• arikrahman 5mo ago
  The main thing I use as a fallback is to keep thoughts connected in a Zettelkasten. This interacts well with AI assisted information gathering, while firing synapses whenever a connection can be made. I use Tiago Forte's method of organizing as needed within a loose org mode confederation of atomic notes.
• c16 5mo ago
  My experience (n=1) is that while I'm definitely lazier on certain tasks, AI has opened up some much more complex tasks. There are many tasks which I still carry out which I don't trust AI with. Maybe it's a result of the codebase I work with being fairly complicated and math heavy, but I'd say the overall outcome for me has been: lazier application on the easy tasks, mind opening on the harder tasks.
• 3vo-ai 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• PeterStuer 5mo ago
  A famous MIT professor did a sabatical at our AI lab. He said it was "a joy to teach here, as you can rely on students being proficient in basic math as opposed to the US where you have to teach those explicitly or lose the class completely". That was in the 1980s. My first math exam as a CS undergraduate, 123 out of 129 students failed. The math department professors refused to dumb down their classes for CS students. Math was core to the CS curicullum in those days. It would fade away over the next few decades to almost nothing. The main reason being the CS department wanted to popularize its uptake, and remove barriers that kept students from passing. There was also a major dose of interdepartemenral rivalry and academic politiking involved.
  • mdurana 5mo ago
    Can I ask, just out of curiosity, where the AI lab was?
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • PeterStuer 5mo ago
      Brussels.
  • Sharlin 5mo ago
    To be honest, there’s approximately zero reasons to teach major-grade math to just about anyone but math majors. None of the applied math disciplines need go that deep, and what they do need depends on the field (physics is all about analysis, CS is about algebra and discrete math, and so on).
    • torben-friis 5mo ago
      In terms of material learned maybe, in terms of shaping logical thinking and tackling hard problems there is a huge benefit.
• basisword 5mo ago
  It’s only going to get worse. The second things like Claude Cowork get opened up to non-technical teams you start to see the influx of emails and Slack message written with LLM’s for absolutely no productivity gain (in fact probably a loss given how unnecessarily wordy the messages are). Too many people want to give up any and all responsibility.
• yodsanklai 5mo ago
  AI should be a formidable booster for learning if used properly. I know that some students it to prepare for competitive tests, sometimes with very good results. I've also been using it a lot recently to brush up on my math and physics knowledge from my graduate years. It has helped me clarify and understand a lot of concepts better. That being said, there is no shortcut, and to be good at anything, one has to put in the work and the hours. However, information has never been as available as it is today.
  • yubblegum 5mo ago
    > AI should be a formidable booster for learning if used properly. A premature technology, known to be potentially harmful in its current state of development and established guidelines as to its effective use, is pushed by powerful and wealthy elite down the throat of society. These same forces (and their unwitting helpers in the unmoneyed public) also wish to deflect with useless argumentation over "AI good" "AI bad". The debate that we should have had: Is this tech actually mature enough for pervasive use in society. Instead we get these entirely useless back and forths with anecdotal "works for me!" and "sucks for me!".
    • yodsanklai 5mo ago
      > is pushed by powerful and wealthy elite down the throat of society. Adoption has been exponential. We don't need to be AI to be pushed down the throat. People use it because it works and it's useful to them. > The debate that we should have had: Is this tech actually mature enough for pervasive use in society. It's too late for this debate because this tech is already pervasively used, and there's no coming back. It's part of our lives. What we need to do is understand the risks and adapt, probably regulate, educate. So we can get the best of this tech, and mitigate its risks.
      • yubblegum 5mo ago
        It is no "too late" about AI right now. The only people who stand to 'suffer' in anyway from putting on the breaks and doing a comprehensive review of +/-s are the moneyed classes who have bet the house on this tech. We know this tech as it is now is harming society. We also know that most of the people who are principally pushing it will be fairly immune to (or certainly are in a position to mitigate) its detrimental effects.
• DiogenesKynikos 5mo ago
  AI is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's like having a free private tutor who is always available. It's a great learning tool. On the other hand, students can use it to do all their homework for them, and skip learning altogether.
• MeteorMarc 5mo ago
  Could it be that CS attracts a different population of students in the current genAI era?
  • BobbyTables2 5mo ago
    My biased view is CS attracts a large “wannabe” group that wants high salaries without learning any hard math or putting forward a lot of serious effort. Even a lot of CS research journal papers feel more like role play — the same way startups try to pretend to be real companies with executive headshots, flashy offices, and all the other nonsense. (Instead of analytically modeling something to prove an idea, they’ll build a simple simulation and focus on its “Architecture”) Engineering departments effectively weed out such in the first ground of engineering courses. Looks to me CS has no equivalent.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• jventura 5mo ago
  CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang" - ask for clarifications until they follow unintended paths that lead nowhere. To fellow professors, when you're suspicious my suggestion is to appeal to their honesty (like "let's be honest, how much of this code is yours, and how much is ChatGPT's?") and offer some empathy and understanding (like understanding they may had multiple deadlines in the same week, etc.). Nevertheless, don't miss the chance to give them the lesson on how is the correct way of doing things. The way to catch these students is to find the same signs of yesteryear copying from other students (which in essence is what copying from an LLM is, although the number has increased because they found us professors unprepared for the volume). The other two groups also used LLM but in a high-level and architectural way. They were clearly responsible for the code (even if they didn't wrote it 100% manually) and could explain their reasoning and strategies used to solve the problems. Me and my colleagues still have a lot of projects to review, and I asked them to keep the score of the number of projects like these, but so far, the score is 1 in 3 (33%).
  • kuschku 5mo ago
    > The other two groups also used LLM but in a high-level and architectural way. Sounds more like the score is 3/3 (100%) Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project? If not, why is using LLM generated code different?
    • yubblegum 5mo ago
      He explains why in his comment. Read it again, carefully. Or ask an LLM for an "explainer"..
    • jventura 5mo ago
      > Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project? Yes, if they are "responsible" for the code delivered, where responsible means they understand the code, the architecture, the decisions made, etc. In this case, the students had to invent multiple strategies to solve a specific problem. The "successful" groups did a mix of generated and hand-crafted code (don't know percentages), implemented different strategies and knew their plus and minuses, could change the code in a timely manner to accommodate some of my requests, etc. The "unsuccessful" group couldn't do any of that. I'm not anti-AI (and really, what could I do if I were?) since I use it myself, I'm just anti-slop, especially from my students. But in reality I've been slowly transitioning from group projects (for a subset of the grade) to "practical tests", where they must implement a significant subset of a larger project in a 2h class. Still experimenting though.
• yubblegum 5mo ago
  The obvious cognitive deterimental effects of using map apps, when we all realized we lose directional sense and our previous ability to navigate without the smartdevices, was society's canary in a coal mine and a headsup of what was coming. WAL-E and Idiocracy. The future.
  • ap99 5mo ago
    This goes with calculator to do basic math, contacts apps to store phone numbers instead of remembering them, and watches to tell time imo. Sure we could use our brain power with old techniques to do these, but why? I don't want to do any of these. I'd rather use that brain power for other problems. Same with maps. I don't want to have to store a bunch of location or routing data in my head. I think what you're pointing towards is going from having problems to solve to not having any problems to solve. That's definitely a danger, but right now is still early in the AI era so obviously it'll feel like we went from solving problems to letting the new tool solve them for us. There are still many problems to solve.
    • yubblegum 5mo ago
      You are confusing faculty with records. The ability to navigate by sense of direction. The ability to memorize numbers. The ability to think clearly by yourself. Watcha gonna do if big tech takes away your access to the outsourced brain, dear?
      • ap99 5mo ago
        Build one myself and make a ton of money. Or wait for the next guy/company to do it.
        • 31337Logic 5mo ago
          Think about what you just said. Oh wait, you can't.
    • chewbaxxa 5mo ago
• jonator 5mo ago
  It seems like now’s the time to rethink how we do education. In my personal post academic life, I’ve found LLMs to be an incredible teacher. Almost like the best professor in the world at my fingertips. I use it to generate quizzes on demand to test for my own knowledge gaps. However, if I use it to speedrun over concepts I should be learning, I may achieve my end goal but I wouldn’t actually learn many of the details. I think it requires an approach where you have to continuously audit your own understanding as you work with the concepts. You must slow down until you’ve confirmed this. Only once you know the concepts deeply and have retained them in your own memory can you then go all in with the LLM.
• makach 5mo ago
  It's critical that we adapt to a strategy where AI supports our learning instead of the having it the other way around.
• jvanderbot 5mo ago
  > 35.3% of CS 10 .. had failing grades. I guess LLMs will in fact kill the junior CS graduate, but before the graduation, not necessarily after. > The electrical engineering and computer sciences department’s grading guidelines state that 7% of students in lower division courses, including CS 10 and CS 61A, should receive D’s and F’s. Well I sure hope they dont just make it easier to hit this (objectionable) standard. > Garcia believes that instructors “should not be curving” but should instead make thresholds for each letter grade publicly available and give students many chances to reach them. He added that he loves the idea of “having no limit” to the number of A’s he gives students. This is a tough problem: Are grades sorting functions (top students get A's so retries are not helpful), inflexible thresholds (A's show mastery at a given level so retries are valid), or are A's certifications (a sufficiently good result such that they could do it - e.g., inflated but not curved, retries less likely but still ok).
• jvanderbot 5mo ago
  > “I’m a strong, strong opponent of what Harvard is doing to say that only a fraction of students can earn A’s,” Garcia said. “I think you should have clear standards for what an A means, and then give tons of opportunity for people … to get to that A bar without lowering the standard. So everybody who’s curving is hiding that effect. It’s completely hiding that effect, and it’s pretending as if nothing’s wrong, and something is definitely wrong.” Grade curves are how you test your curriculum for good challenge - are you challenging people such that an A isn't a too-low threshold. When you force people into a curve, you haven't defined a threshold of mastery, you've defined a sorting function: A means "better than this year's peers". It is absolutely bananas to me that a tech/math oriented school would be doing any sort of curving.
  • le-mark 5mo ago
    But when there is no standard and students are subject to tests created by and graded by egotistical narcissists, a curve can be the only way anyone passes the course at all. It simply wouldn’t be acceptable for 5 of 50 students to pass because professor egghead can’t write coherent question on a test. I had classes where I didn’t make over a 50% on any test and still got an A because half the class dropped and the other half hung on for the curve like I did. I think curves are more a result of poor teachers than anything.
    • jvanderbot 5mo ago
      > I think curves are more a result of poor teachers than anything Precisely right - that's what I said, too. You fit a curve to see if your coursework/exams fit the students. But you don't fit a curve to ensure that "precisely 10% of the class gets A, 20% gets B" etc etc. If you dont like the grades your students are receiving, you either fix the coursework or the students.
  • SOTGO 5mo ago
    I think curving has its place. One of my math professors explained that in his opinion an effective test should differentiate performance as much as possible. The top students should score very well and the bottom students should score very poorly. If all the scores are clustered near the top (>80% for example) then it's hard to tell who really mastered the material and who just muddled through. Then, once you've sorted the students you can apply an appropriate curve. He did not have pre-defined thresholds, for each exam he would evaluate when he felt like the quality of work changed from an A to an A-, A- to B+ etc. The curves were very fair; he wasn't trying to force some number of As Bs or Fs, but it did increase my stress levels not knowing in advance how well I needed to do on each exam
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• frankest 5mo ago
  1. The article itself seems like an LLM summary of a conversation. 2. No US educational institution should ever grade on a curve. Your job is not to compare students but to educate them. Grade curves hide the performance of the educators and process of education in actually improving the skills of students. 3. Both AI and the cognitive and emotional overload from social media taking away brain space may be to blame. Idea: let students report screen time statistics at the beginning of each semester and weekly or at the end. See if and how it correlates with academics.
  • criddell 5mo ago
    There's often little discussion around incentives. Students cheat because grades are used as a major selection factor in university admissions. Maybe that should change. Set a reasonable bar for grades or SAT scores and then use other criteria beyond that gate.
• deadbabe 5mo ago
  It’s not that they can’t think deeply, these are smart people. It’s that there is no reward for doing so and in fact there is punishment. The punishment is that for all the thinking you do, someone else will arrive at the same result as you in less time, or maybe even a better result. You don’t get rewarded for the effort of thinking, only for the end result. Naturally, even if you are an intelligent individual, you can still be conditioned in this way to take the easy way out, unless you purposely like to suffer. But suffering is only worth it if you know in the end you come out ahead. But now, you do not come out ahead. People will be using AI in the workforce for the rest of your life anyway, might as well just join the trend. It’s like if everyone started taking a magical steroid and growth hormone to build muscle and look great instead of actually working out in a gym and possibly getting worse results anyway.
  • nkrisc 5mo ago
    But you are rewarded for the effort: you're rewarded with knowledge. Whether or not you value that reward depends on the individual.
    • plewd 5mo ago
      That's a fair point, and it gets into intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Problem is that nearly all students are conditioned to care about external motivators (GPA, parental expectations, etc..) instead of "the joy of learning".
    • deadbabe 5mo ago
      What you value personally does not have as much impact on your life as the things people will value about you. In corporate, people value you for the amount of money you can make them.
      • nkrisc 5mo ago
        On the contrary, I think what you value has the greatest impact on your life, it can be the difference between being happy or completely miserable. Some people spend their lives valuing the wrong things and being unhappy, so much so that it’s a common trope in books and movies.
• gcanyon 5mo ago
  “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” Reminds me of a year where a teacher of mine (high school) gave everyone in class an A. He got called on it, and fought back. He literally called out the weakest kids in the class and had them do the work in front of the admins complaining and said, "tell me that's not A work, I ["fucking" strongly implied] dare you." His grades stuck.
• gcanyon 5mo ago
  It's incredibly difficult at this point to "skate where the puck is going" as Gretzky is said to have done. No one knows what knowledge work will look like in five years. People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point. That said, assessments of poor critical thinking skills jump out at me more than the rest. That sort of thing seems likely to matter until machines can replace us completely.
  • latentsea 5mo ago
    > That sort of thing seems likely to matter until machines can replace us completely. This seems like the crux of the issue. Like people are banking on that day coming even if they don't know exactly when.
  • techblueberry 5mo ago
    > People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point. Sometimes I don’t wonder if this wouldn’t still be a good way to educate people. Part of the problem is education has to sort of optimize to try to educate like passive people. If you’re a curious and pragmatic person, you can understand how to use what you learned in a liberal arts degree to be better at almost any job. As I look forward to the second half of my career. Certainly I use AI in healthy doses. But people talk about the division between practice and performance, and most of my practice is old school. Reading books. Writing my thoughts down. Memorizing quotes and passages. I think more important than what you learn is the way you use it to train and evolve your brain, with the caveat that - I know this is more useful to me because I have a marketable skill. This is the balance universities have to stick, there are tons of people with liberal arts degrees in middling jobs. But at least half if not more of education should be on building practical skills in the three r’s.(maybe the third r should be ‘rgumentation instead of ‘rithmatic, but I digress) It’s interesting - people decry memorization in education, and I’m not entirely naive as to why - if you were to show up to the first day of work and say “I don’t know any of what you just said but I can recite log tables! It might be your last day - and yet one of the most underrated skills, especially late in your career is the ability to ingest and operate in large quantities of information.
• moron4hire 5mo ago
  I don't like the framing of calling it academic dishonesty. If it were one or two students doing it, sure. But there is no reason to believe that 2026 Berkeley freshmen are fundamentally more dishonest than 2025 Berkeley students. When so many are doing it, it suggests a sea change in the understanding of what is honest or dishonest in that particular community. That sort of thing should be treated more like a "disease": something that should be treated, than a "crime": something that will be punished.
• kopirgan 5mo ago
  Long long back, when I was a kid even ball pens were banned because they screwed up handwriting. Just the same things in different ways.
  • plewd 5mo ago
    Is that really a fair comparison though? Were there any stats showing that ball pens directly impacted metrics like grades? I understand that it's harder to see things without the benefit of hindsight, but we must agree that AI's impact on students (or society, to be even more vague) has a much larger scope.
    • kopirgan 5mo ago
      I'm frankly not sure in both cases, just commenting on how over the ages things change but remain the same. If the broader concern about AI blunting thoughts, introduce laziness etc is true, so are things like calculators, although I agree on much smaller scale. I do share some of the concerns, though I don't have kids of school going age.
• figassis 5mo ago
  It's a strange thing that as humans, we sleepwalk into every crisis, never agreeing on anything, and then when we're there, we also never agree on the causes. When we ge too the point where we can no longer "engineer" or "science" anything we will spend the next decade arguing that the issue was not really AI, or that if it was, it was inevitable and no one (or everyone) was to blame. Rinse, repeat. Yet we're here, today, looking at the bleak future, and taking yet another step forward. Do we assume society just self regulates. I think it does, but the cost of letting it self regulate is really really high, with lots of suffering. Is it that we find this acceptable when there is a chance we won't be the first to feel the pain?
  • e40 5mo ago
    Yes, climate change debate went the same way.
  • taegee 5mo ago
    https://i.imgur.com/fk1aI.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/fk1aI.jpeg :)
  • thinkingtoilet 5mo ago
    We don't all sleep walk into these. Many people shout from the roof tops but the masses are easily manipulated.
  • skybrian 5mo ago
    People have been warning about AI coming for decades. For better or worse, it's embedded in popular culture, in science fiction books and movies. But that's different from figuring out practically what to do. It's cultural evolution and it's how markets work, too. You were expecting central planning?
• phtrivier 5mo ago
  I wonder if this is reflected in other big exams or elite colleges elsewhere. Are the gaokao, X/Centrale, oxford etc... Results showing the same trend ?
• ItsBob 5mo ago
  They worry me. A lot. My son is 15 and I use Google Family Link to control what he does on his phone: it's pretty open for the most part (I receive notifications of installs) but Gemini is a hard-ban. We've spoken at length of the dangers. He says his pals use LLMs frequently and I suspect that's the reason for their test scores: some of them are in the 20% - 40% range for tests whereas my son is 80%+ because he studies past-papers and answers questions in his revision. I worry for the future coz you can be sure that the AI providers don't care if a schoolchild is using their LLM to answer the homework questions.
  • thierrydamiba 5mo ago
    Did your son behave in a way for that to be installed or did you do it by default?
  • eunos 5mo ago
    > Gemini is a hard-ban. Sounds like you would hard-ban your son from using Internet if it was only introduced 5 years ago
    • bcrosby95 5mo ago
      Or a calculator. Oh wait, I hard ban my 8 and 11 year old kids from using a calculator. I wonder why.
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      • CamperBob2 5mo ago
        That... is not a good idea. Inexpensive calculators were relatively new when I was that age, and I learned so much just playing with them.
        • LtWorf 5mo ago
          What exactly did you learn?
• le-mark 5mo ago
  Perhaps the future will belong to those who learn to use llms to enhance their capabilities. Neil Stephenson Diamond Age was an interesting take on this very same topic [1]. So the Claude web app has this “learn” option that turns the session into a Socratic dialog of sorts. One could easily imagine enforcing this on an age based or parental controls set up. Maybe it can be prompted around but at the very least the concept could be a path forward. As others have said there is a way to use llms to increase learning, but autodidacts will always autodidact. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
  • Jtarii 5mo ago
    It will just be similar to physical fitness. Some people go to the gym, the vast majority do not. Humans are wired to take the path of least resistance.
• shevy-java 5mo ago
  Folks, we have more and more data now. Skynet is making mankind dumber - dailycal.org just added yet-another piece to all evidence here. It is a simple but effective strategy; Kyle Reese will stand no chance because prior to that, the other humans were already dumbed down into submission. Skynet version 15.0 will make no more mistakes here.
• deaton 5mo ago
  As someone who graduated college in 2025, and so saw college both before and after the AI era, it is really frightening how quickly people became dependent on AI. Hell, I myself found myself asking AI questions that I would've researched deeper before. To some extent not expending that time is nice, but I do think its eroding critical thinking skills (my own included), and its getting worse. There are people I know now who basically let AI control their life. It glazes the user, it's almost always available, and to someone who doesn't know better, and it is extremely good at looking like it knows what its talking about, even when its completely wrong (but its right often enough to have some baseline level of trust). If that's not a recipe for addiction I don't know what is.
• surbas 5mo ago
  IMHO this is clear case of correlation vs causation… This generation of kids were fucked so hard by Covid and all the remote “schooling” and closing of public life. AI rise happens to be happening when the kids who were just entering teens at Covid time are now going to school.
  • duskdozer 5mo ago
    The more likely culprit would be repeated COVID infections themselves, known even in mild cases to cause damage to many body systems, including the neurological, rather than a month or two of remote learning. I'm not surprised at the widespread denial over this, honestly. It's bitter.
    • Bnjoroge 5mo ago
      Lmao
• rybosworld 5mo ago
  If you watch old videos of tradesmen using basic hand tools like hammers, you'll find examples of skill/dexterity with the tool that I think don't exist today at all except maybe in communities like the Amish. I think it's true that we collectively lose something akin to beauty every time technology advances. But usually some new set of skills that have beauty emerge. If LLMs end up being the pneumatic nail gun for the human mind, I personally think that's a fine thing for us to accept. If they end up being more like some dark factory that autonomously does everything - then I think ultimately the thing that makes us human (our minds) will slowly decay and be lost, and that seems very sad. That's a version of the future we should try to prevent, I think.
  • boringg 5mo ago
    I mean the argument that is being put forward is that it isn't a pneumatic nail gun for the human mind - it atrophies are mathematical capability and quality of understanding.
    • rybosworld 5mo ago
      Right - but you could imagine a similar sentiment anytime a skill was replaced by a new technology. I think the jury is still out on whether LLMs actually lead to complete atrophy of skills that don't eventually get replaced with brand new skills.
      • boringg 5mo ago
        Anecdotally people have been noticing atrophy quite a bit. Again its anecdotal because we can't possibly have a study that works in real time because the technology is rolling out insanely quickly. And all the older technologies that have rolled out haven't competed against our cognitive abilities at speed and scale. I don't think of cognitive ability as a skill per se - more of a critical core function of humanity. I say this as someone who uses it extensively not some luddite but is also very aware of the risks which I assume are worse for people who have limited understanding on the matter.
• rob_c 5mo ago
  Those who can use it better, those who can't out who cheat are (for now) let down by obviously cheap and slightly crappy models. The worry is in ~5yr time when the generic models catch up to this level (basic undergrad mind) that we need to worry about how to thin the herd. We could always go back to the tried and tested student staff engagement but most unis tried to turn themselves into sausage factories in thirst for the almighty dollar so the student/staff ratios are all off
• focusgroup0 5mo ago
  Quit blaming AI. The UC system banned standardized testing during the race communism mass hysteria of the early 2020s. Predictably, performance of the student body is down across the board.
• luc_ 5mo ago
  How we learn has gotta change...
• nemo44x 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Bnjoroge 5mo ago
    Or your lazy excuse is an even more convenient thing to blame
    • zuzululu 5mo ago
      I don't think his comment was lazy, there has been a documented concerted effort to get rid of math and standardized tests because real world data conflicts with their political reality. Doing so ultimately diminishes those that have earned their place to stand as exceptional performers through hard work and grit and its replacing meritocracy with a form of apathy disguised as political empathy. Contrary to what one side of the political spectrum wants to push as truth, we are all not equals in terms of ability. Different cultures and demographics excel at different things and not always the same things. This shouldn't be chalked up as racism or something to be hidden at all.
      • Bnjoroge 5mo ago
        an even lazier comment
• Avshalom 5mo ago
  Cognitive Multiplier, eh?
• TuringNYC 5mo ago
  How do we know this is due to AI usage? Perhaps it is because the students missed key in-person learning at the tail end of high school due to the pandemic lock-downs? I cant imagine learning calculus / linear algebra on my own in high school.
  • feoren 5mo ago
    Absolutely: missing in-person learning due to COVID. Less attention span due to growing up in a distracting environment. A lower bar to entry due to removal of standardized testing and indirectly from No Child Left Behind. Changes in parent or student attitudes. It could be any number of things, and it's lazy to just say "with AI usage" as something that has increased at the same time.
  • Terr_ 5mo ago
    > I cant imagine learning calculus / linear algebra on my own in high school. I don't think they necessarily expect students to have that from high school, because the class mentioned, EECS 127, lists three college classes as prerequisites: * Math 53 - Multivariable Calculus * Math 54 - Linear Algebra & Differential Equations * CS 70 - Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory
• jdauriemma 5mo ago
  I'm curious about LLM adoption by faculty. Is it possible that lesson plans and/or slides are being vibe-produced by professors/TAs, potentially reducing quality of instruction?
• timdavid2026 5mo ago
  This is concerning. AI tools are powerful but foundational skills still matter. The balance is tricky for CS students.
• jknoepfler 5mo ago
  One thing that bothers me about these conversations: failure is an important signal that what we're doing isn't working as well as we thought it would, not a sign of the apocalypse. Kids need to understand how to adjust and grow from failure more than they need to always be on the happy-path of straight A's and easy money. How we respond to failure is how we teach response to failure. Hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and finger-pointing aren't valuable life skills. Personally it's easy for me to be contemptuous - I opted into an accelerated math program that banned calculators when I was in Junior High. It helped me cultivate an very crisp intuitive/conceptual understanding of basic mathematical concepts that's carried through to today. I think we should do more of that kind of education, but it's expensive and requires amazing educators and a tolerance for student struggle. Get the machines out, absolutely. But respond to failure compassionately, as part of a natural learning process.
• andrepd 5mo ago
  AI gives us some bad things but it's really outweighed by the good things. One one hand we have very rapid deterioration of our children's mental capacities yes, but on the other hand we have also made the internet into an unnavigable mound of slop produced by, and for consumption of, bots.
• vector_spaces 5mo ago
  I agree that AI is likely a driving force here, but it is also likely not the only driving force. COVID likely played a devastating role, along with curriculum changes in high school, reactionary cultural shifts towards anti-intellectualism, and broader declines in literacy that have been in progress for a while now. It would be interesting to see data for the past 5-10 years or so.
• lokar 5mo ago
  While this is worse in degree, it’s not new. I TA’d in the early 2000s and the first day students were warned that we used automatic analysis to find programming assignments that were similar to previous submissions. And renaming things, moving them around etc would not help. We caught and failed cheaters every term.
• nphardon 5mo ago
  This also reflects the failings of the teachers to teach in a way that is conducive to learning given the current cultural landscape.
• Decabytes 5mo ago
  In Grad school I remember learning Python 2, and there was one particular night where an assignment of mine just wasn’t working and no searches were helping me. I was frustrated to the point of tears, and when I solved it, it wasn’t with some triumphant yell. I just remember being so tired, closing my laptop and going to sleep. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the programmer I am without that experience, but I am Not sure I would have willingly put myself through that if LLMs existed at that point
• buredoranna 5mo ago
  This is a student problem, not an ai problem... if the student chooses to not learn, to just use ai for answers, that's on them. And their failing grades reflect the choices they've made. ai is the single most powerful learning tool ever invented... but only if you choose to use it for learning.
• bmurphy1976 5mo ago
  My daughter was struggling with her Math class back in January. I used Claude to build a tool that allowed me to generate very focused worksheets. The worksheets had problems designed to drill the concepts she was struggling with. It worked, and it would have been MUCH harder to do this the traditional way. The tool generates PDFs including an answer key and solution sets that solved the problems using a variety of techniques so I could check her work more easily and we could iterate quickly. That's powerful. It comes back to how are you using the tool. Are you using it to make things better or to take shortcuts?
  • jplusequalt 5mo ago
    >That's powerful. It comes back to how are you using the tool. Are you using it to make things better or to take shortcuts? Where are the incentives at a societal level to prioritize quality over efficiency? Of course if everyone did things the "correct" way we'd have no issues. But societies incentives are messy and contradictory, so taking shortcuts ends up being the more appealing choice in the moment for lots of people. This is as much a societal issue as it a technological one.
• kashunstva 5mo ago
  It’s not just students; this affliction is cropping up among established academics. My wife is editor-in-chief of a journal and in some months has rejected 100% of the letters to the editor including 6 that came in from a single author because all scored 1.0 certainty of complete LLM fabrication. The author in question is no student. It’s a little more difficult to fabricate an entire original paper this way, I suppose. It will have taken us less than 1000 years to go from scarcity of the printed word to the over-abundance, and finally to the uselessness of it.
  • zuzululu 5mo ago
    To be fair that industry has always had fabrication and dishonesty as ongoing issue long before AI. Also I really question what this litmus test would check for and how accurate it is. Just the other day I read an article that frontier AI models outperform law students and that professors could not distinguish it from a human written ones and actually flagged human written ones as AI. I do view this as overall positive progress in that the ridiculous barrier to entry and wasteful formality is being eroded and as will the professions that benefited from that moat will open it up to the general masses. I personally believe we should be celebrating the universal access to knowledge and printed words
• krunger 5mo ago
  [dead]
• noworriesnate 5mo ago
  One thing I’ve used in interviews is to write some code that looks like it was written by an overly enthusiastic engineer who just discovered some new concept (e.g. “trees are the ultimate data structures”) then have the candidate review the code. I wonder if this could work for education: orient the entire class around who can give the AI the best corrections.
• whimblepop 5mo ago
  Writing better exams, even if they're more expensive to grade, and removing homework from grading as far as possible addresses this problem well wherever it's applicable. Senior-level math courses at many universities are already like this: homework is ungraded, or counts for little, and it's possible for students to "cheat" on the homework by copying another student instead of struggling through the exercises. But the students who do that don't learn much, if at all, and predictably fail the exams. Professors warn students at the beginning of the class and tell them how this will work, something like: > You can always ask me for feedback on your homework and I will mark up every part of it, but you won't receive a grade for homework. However, if you don't do the homework and take your time with it, you will fail the class. My office hours are in the syllabus and you're strongly encouraged to use them. There will be an early exam to give you a chance to know whether you are likely to fail this class before you lose your chance to drop it. Correctness is harder to adjudicate in some humanities disciplines but the format of these exams is actually not super different from essay tests (when a math professor grades a proof, they're inspecting specialized prose for validity, coherence, persuasion in a way that also reveals knowledge). When you don't rely on homework for determining whether or not a student passes the class, you make cheating on the homework into the student's problem instead of the professor's or the university's. Students have the right incentives to solve problems for which they are the ones responsible, and they figure it out after one failed (or ideally, dropped) class at worst.
• dieselgate 5mo ago
  One of my favorite jokes ever is from a dear friend who happens to be a graduate of the Berkeley CS program: "Programmers don't need to know how to do math, they only need to know how to add 1 to something."
  • donkey_brains 5mo ago
    Well, sometimes we have to subtract 1 from something, too.
• nadermx 5mo ago
  Well here we have a product market fit issue. See the market was lead to believe that if you got a degree you got a job. So learning was never the actual goal. Originally, at least in premis, it was to learn and advance the arts and sciences. So what we need now is a college for llm's to advance the arts and sciences.
• dmitrygr 5mo ago
  As promised in many science fiction novels, humanity will split into two species: Those who can think and those who cannot. Keep your kids away from LLMs and they will have an advantage over those whose parents didn’t.
• kolesnikov-arch 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• adamtaylor_13 5mo ago
  I feel like a lot of the lament expressed in the comments is grounded in loss aversion. We really don't like losing things—regardless of the objective (or subjective) value of that loss. We know this intellectually, but we still feel it emotionally. I'm feeling effects of using LLMs day in and day out, but I am not yet convinced that it's overwhelmingly negative, the way much of HN seems to lean. I derive a lot of joy from shipping outstanding code for my clients and fixing problems they're experiencing. My joy has only increased as I can now ship better code, faster, with fewer bugs. No, I don't intimately understand the code the way I used to, but I understand it enough to accomplish the end goal. The premise of this article takes a presumed position that the grades we were posting before really mattered a whole lot. I'm not convinced that's true.
  • emsign 5mo ago
    Sure sure whatever suits you. But I personally have a very strong aversion to losing my intelligence.
    • adamtaylor_13 5mo ago
      The presumption that we're losing "intelligence" is unproven and widely debated. I'd prefer "capability" over raw intellect any day, and my capability is definitely greater than it was a year ago.
      • ThrowawayR2 5mo ago
        There's nothing to debate about "use it or lose it"; the reduction in numeracy after the adoption of pocket calculators is well established. And "capability" is the measure of the mere assembly line worker. "Raw intellect" is the measure of the inventors and creators.
        • desterothx 5mo ago
          And yet the average intelligence continued to rise through the reduction in numeracy. What job do you have where your performance is graded by your "raw intellect" instead of capability? A student?
• flynnsinclair07 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• ken47 5mo ago
  Isn’t this related? Hundreds of UC faculty call to reinstate SAT, ACT requirements for STEM applicants: https://dailybruin.com/2026/05/27/hundreds-of-uc-faculty-call-to-reinstate-sat-act-requirements-for-stem-applicants https://dailybruin.com/2026/05/27/hundreds-of-uc-faculty-cal...
• rahimnathwani 5mo ago
  The grade data come from https://berkeleytime.com/grades https://berkeleytime.com/grades I was worried they may have cherrypicked courses that support their chosen narrative. So I plotted the % of F grades (red line) for all CS courses still offered, and sorted the chart in descending order of the # grades given out (light blue vertical bars) in the most recent semester when the course was offered. My worry was borne out. See the first few charts. No big increase in F % in the past few semesters. https://x.com/rahimnathwani/status/2062431813143019525?s=61 https://x.com/rahimnathwani/status/2062431813143019525?s=61
  • danso 5mo ago
    The article says they looked at CS 10 and 61A, which IIRC are the intro classes at Berkeley. Why do you think that amounts to “cherry picking” versus being a reasonable starting point for analysis (esp if those classes, as they are for one of the quoted professors, aren’t graded on a curve)?
    • rahimnathwani 5mo ago
      Because CS10, being an intro class, has its highest enrollment in Fall, not in Spring. In the most recent CS10 cohort (the one in which 35% of grades were an F) only 34 students were graded. If you're going to look at intro classes, why not look at the Fall semesters, which have much higher enrollment? # grades % F grades Fall 2019 268 0.37% Fall 2020 259 8.49% Fall 2021 342 3.22% Fall 2022 218 13.30% Fall 2023 194 7.22% Fall 2024 169 1.18% Fall 2025 146 2.74% You can see a chart of the data here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17acH9JkGE4MlYE1Aeh_iTYwsmPC2lTSvhzBOqr83EzU/edit?gid=0#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17acH9JkGE4MlYE1Aeh_i...
      • ARandumGuy 5mo ago
        Additionally, if someone is taking an intro class in the Spring, that's probably because they already failed it in the previous semester. While that doesn't guarantee that they'll fail again, it does make it more likely.
• vondur 5mo ago
  I'm sure a large part of the problem is not using the SAT's as a filter on incoming students.
• proee 5mo ago
  The traditional sit down in a lecture hall, listen to professor speak, then come in for a pen and paper test, is outdated for this era of technology. What's the point of physically bringing +300 students into a room for a passive listening experience? The future of education is rapid back and forth between the student and the teacher. You could image a future where a student sits down all day with an AI system that trains the student, and it won't let them pass until it's confident you know the material. This will happen at different rates for different people, but this is expected. An ideal education would be getting those skills discs uploaded to you in the Matrix, but unfortunately it will take a bit longer to master them as we don't have full brain-system interfaces (yet).
  • hirvi74 5mo ago
    Historical learning methods were not far off from that. Many of the greats we remember likely heavily benefited from private tutoring and mentoring, not busywork, rote memorization, and arbitrary assessments.
  • mepiethree 5mo ago
    That sounds super awesome, but I think college students are always going to find a way to shirk work. For example, in your proposal, plenty of college students would just get another AI to talk to the test administration AI (think Cluely)
• cess11 5mo ago
  Looks to me like the US education system stopped teaching problem solving and let kids pass classes in math and whatnot by querying a database instead of learning how to figure things out. The fault is with people, some database provided by some company can't carry guilt.
• mberkov 5mo ago
  [dead]
• joshhart 5mo ago
  According to the article, the major effect is they are catching and prosecuting cheaters with a secondary effect that students are over-relying on them for homework or practice, and are unprepared for exams. The article also talks about the fact that the SAT was banned. I really am curious what percentage of the effect is from no SAT vs LLMs. I guess they haven't had the SAT for a while though so it's gotta be the LLMs?
  • zuzululu 5mo ago
    I think its just a sloppy article that doesn't discern students who were going to fail and underperform anyways using AI vs those that were going to do exceptionally well anyhow. It's ridiculous that we talk about getting rid of standardized aptitude tests and entire subjects from school curriculum because certain demographics struggle with it
• NuclearPM 5mo ago
  I have learned a ton using LLMs. Teachers can vibe code pop quizzes in seconds to monitor progress - so do that.
• mistyvales 5mo ago
  Color me surprised
• AlexCoventry 5mo ago
  > nearly 30 students in CS 10 were caught cheating on take-home exams in spring 2026. You'd have to be really lazy and disrespectful, to get caught cheating on a take-home exam...
• musicale 5mo ago
  This seems like ... sort of good news that the assessments are actually working. Hopefully the students will decide to use their brains more.
• latentframe 5mo ago
  The most worrying part isn't the cheating it's that students seem to be skipping the struggle that learning requires, as one professor put it "Confusion is the sweat of learning"
• warumdarum 5mo ago
  Jammers at exams is such a mean way to throw all those imposters..
• dack 5mo ago
  sounds like the link with AI is tenuous at best given the other comments, but I'll take it as an opportunity to say a few things I believe anyway: 1. AI is really helpful for a lot of things 2. to the extent that AI can do something perfectly for us, we probably shouldn't try to force people to "learn" it the hard way 3. people who don't want to learn won't, and will suffer naturally later 4. if the material didn't need to be learned anyway, then using AI to do it for them is a win. that's how the real world works anyway. 5. if AI makes some knowledge obsolete, we should stop trying to teach it. i think the only thing for the teachers to do is to properly warn students of the consequences of using AI to skip learning ahead of time (because by the time the natural consequences hit, it's too late), and to do their best to devise tests that incentivize the right knowledge, while also showing how to use AI properly. the problem is that the education system isn't set up to change this quickly so I don't really know how they are going to properly adjust every semester
• throwawaypath 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • umeshunni 5mo ago
    no - they blame it on AI
    • throwawaypath 5mo ago
      That is the new scapegoat! My original GP flagged post: Many warned that "math is racist" and "equitable math" were going to be a disaster. Now that we know it was a disaster, will leftists admit they were wrong and revert the changes?
• arendtio 5mo ago
  The irony is that LLMs can make it much easier to learn new skills. You just have to use them in the right way, and obviously most people take the easy path and don't learn...
• rahulhazarika 5mo ago
  [flagged]