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.

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

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%).

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?

"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

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?

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

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-d...

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.

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.

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

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.

WAL-E and Idiocracy. The future.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

A bunch of science fiction stories had "first connection to cyberspace" as a coming of age event, maybe those authors were on to something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

You'd have to be really lazy and disrespectful, to get caught cheating on a take-home exam...

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

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.

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?

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

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.

Hundreds of UC faculty call to reinstate SAT, ACT requirements for STEM applicants: https://dailybruin.com/2026/05/27/hundreds-of-uc-faculty-cal...

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).

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.

AI apps are very powerful for teaching. You just need to tell them to do that, and not to directly solve your problem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

.. 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).

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 :(.

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

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.

Artificial Intelligence and Grade Inflation

https://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/artificial-intelligen...

The fault is with people, some database provided by some company can't carry guilt.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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