If you can bear with me while i attempt a synthesis here, I think this one line captures basically the entire dynamic, but the author seems to seriously underweight its explanatory value.
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this
It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.
As a student currently, I'll also throw in this perspective. The colleges themselves make it feel transactional and not about learning even if I'm interested in doing so.
For example, I'm taking a physics course right now (electricity and magnetism). The concepts are difficult for me and I was hoping that the homework would help. So, I go to do the homework, but the homework is online. With the online homework I get five chances to get the problem correct, but there is zero partial credit, zero feedback, and every time I get the answer wrong, it negatively impacts my grade.
I have no chance to make mistakes and learn. At least with homework that was handed out back in the day, there was at least the possibility of partial credit being handed out. So my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.
Additionally, since students have been cheating, I think it gives professors a skewed perspective on how much time is actually needed to get work done, so the deadlines get moved up. This means I get even more pressure put on me when I'm just trying to learn and be a good student.
In the 90s we had the "Plato" system for chemistry. It was a question/answer terminal in the library. Our Chemistry TA advised us to use it to study for exams as it had a lot of sample questions. It was really good because if you got it wrong, it actually gave you a detailed explanation of how to solve it. It was so helpful to have that. When I used the system, I made a bunch of mistakes but ended up learning from them, and it really helped for the exams.
1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994.
Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.
For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.
I graduated (admittedly many-many years ago) from a good but not top-notch university. I remember a somehow similar situation: obviously learning was considered a good thing, but both the students and the professors realized that it's the diploma what brings most students there, not a pursuit of pure knowledge.
So I quickly realized that, unlike, say, elementary school, a university is not a push system, it's a pull system. If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source. There's still plenty, but nobody is going to force-feed it to you. I read quite a lot beside the required books. I practiced quite a lot beside the lab practice (fortunately wielding a soldering iron or writing programs was a marketable skill; still is, but used to be, too). I asked my professors questions that were not entirely in the books; often that was during a few minutes after a lecture / classes / labs, so I got from them ideas and pointers to new directions to learn by myself.
Was it helpful in my career? Certainly yes, I started doing contract jobs three years before graduation, and then joined a bunch of interesting companies where that knowledge was somehow useful, mostly as a foundation of more specific skills.
I was certainly not alone; I knew (and often was friends with) a bunch of other students who craved knowledge and skills, and we helped each other shake these out of the university, past the transactional bounds. It wasn't all that hard, but it required a conscious effort.
Very certainly a large number of other students did more coasting than knowledge-mining. They got their diplomas, got some white-collar jobs that did not require such deep knowledge of engineering, I suppose, or started unrelated businesses.
I started college at the CC level (having no HS diploma) to get into a State school. And from a series of poor choices and ignorance on my part needed to take a several years gap before returning to finish up.
I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.
CC students have always felt more motivated in my opinion. But good Lord the quality of the education at the State level is abysmal. I am not saying there aren't quality professors and classes. There are.
There is however an alarming high number of poorly designed classes, nearly broken technology, poorly edited and badly written assignments, and questionable instruction.
I have to compare the quality and price with what I experienced in CC and it just makes me sad and depressed.
This is really unfortunate, and I think your instructor should read it.
It sounds like your instructor has confused homework with quizzes, and the cheating issue demands some rethinking of the course pace and assessment system.
In physics and related fields, I have found fully worked problems to be very valuable. If your textbook includes some of these, I recommend reviewing them and working similar practice problems if possible. I wonder if things like supplementary texts, khan academy, or tutorials on youtube might help as well.
As you note, systems like ChatGPT could be helpful for explaining or working through problems, but obviously you won't learn anything if you rely on them for doing your own problem sets.
Interesting. When I was an undegraduate we had textbooks which were at least 25% problems and solutions, allowing for near endless self practice.
I am currently holding my copy of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffiths in my hands; somehow it is rarely more than a metre from where I work!
Are such textbooks still popular and used (i.e. mandatory to purchase) in courses like this?
The best homework system i ever experienced was high school calculus.
4 points per assignment. Pass the assignment to a peer for grading. If they wrote down the problem and attempted it: 3 points. One more point if the logic and steps were followable, even if wrong.
The answers were in the back of the book. The homework grade should reflect attempts and practice, not mastery as that is what exams are for.
You are right, what degraded is not simply the students attention and motivation, it is the whole institution. They keep pushing ineffective approaches all over. You are right to blame LMSes, they are absolute disasters, poorly designed and ineffective at anything except save time for professors (and let's be real here, they also do social media and unrelated to their work activities so they are trading their teaching opportunities for leisure). Those LMSes are probably as detrimental as PowerPoint has been for communicating to an audience.
It is as if everyone is trying to avoid doing what they are here to do. They replace thought, exchanges and discovery with miserable tools just so they can go waste their time on something else.
> my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.
Have you considered trying to do the problems yourself, away from the computer, then checking your work with ChatGPT or the like?
I'm lucky enough to teach in a school that has small classes; I get to be very accessible to the students. There is some auto-grading, but most homework I grade by hand and give partial credit.
But if my classes were 300 people, I couldn't do that.
I also have relaxed deadlines so students can take more time if they need it, and request it in advance.
The object is to learn stuff. That's where I'm aiming.
From your numerous comments on this topic, it seems that you are remarkably self-aware (for a college student) about your own learning process. That is kind of amazing. I hope you really know just how broken the system that you're describing is and that it is absolutely worth fighting to figure out how to really learn something hard.
Also know that there's a yin and yang here. You're in a broken system--but the system used to be broken in other ways. Your point about there being too many resources strikes me as fascinating and true--and yet we have efforts like Three Blue One Brown taking teaching to a whole new level. People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.
i’m assuming this is a system that changes the numbers in the question each time? often there is a separate “practice” button where you can practice and (maybe) get feedback, figure out the process, and then do the questions?
even if not, try putting the textbook and the question into an AI (I use the paid version of gemini, the $20/ month is the best money you’ll ever spend at college), then as it to explain how to answer the question. Then ask it to generate a similar question, and then give you feedback to you as you try to answer it. Then try and answer it step by step, repeat as many times as you like until you understand and keep getting the right answer, then answer the actual homework question.Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss!
I agree to some extent. A wild one to me is how schools will limit the number of classes you can take and/or pressure you to graduate on time even if it means choosing a major before you're really ready. That seems like a surefire way to kill any interest in exploring knowledge and replace it with a focus on mechanical box-checking.
I agree. I took linear algebra through an online course. I can't imagine a worse way to learn the topic. I happily cheated on tests to pass the class.
Mind you, I already apply linear algebra daily—I simply refuse to waste my time computing basic operations on matrices by hand when that's why we have computers and partial credit isn't available.
We don't really have to look for an explanation. The author says it, pure and clear.
"It’s the phones, stupid"
That's it. Every other variable, including the transactional nature of acquiring a middle class job, has stayed the same. People are just getting dumber [1], and the phones are causing this drop.
I am as tech forward as the next person. I think AI deserves the time to figure out what it is. But the phones have basically shown us where all their negatives and positives are. Time to regulate, get the phones out of the schools. If you're in one of these states [2] get behind the active legislation, if not, start it!
Nah. Humanities professors keep claiming it's phones because that's visible to them when they lecture but read what they're saying carefully and the actual cause is obvious: students don't take it seriously because the professors don't.
The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price.
It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.
The transactional nature hasn’t always been the same, though. It hasn’t always been that way, or at least the nature of the transaction has changed. Decades ago, surveys showed the predominant reason people went to college was “to develop a philosophy for life”. Now the main reason is “to get a good job.”
I wonder how many people here (outside of college) spend lots of times on their phones (or their other types of screens)
It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention.
Yeah... There are exponentially more legacy applicants to colleges today than there were 30 years ago. By definition.
You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points?
But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.
You're not wrong, many students approach college as a vocational training facility. I'd say they do want to learn, but the focus is on "learning to get a job".
If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.
These skills, and the understanding of how to use them, are the real goal -the material is just there to keep your interest.
Yes, obviously, if you are going into chemistry then learn chemistry and so on. But round out your course with other things. Oceanography can give you insight to computer science, literature can promote better communication.
Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.
But if you are at college now, or perhaps going soon, try and see beyond the next assignment. Try and see the process which underlies it.
Most of all college is there to teach you to think. So stop doing for just a moment and start thinking.
Once you see behind the curtain you can't unsee it. And ironically even if I tell you it's there, I can't make you look. Experience doesn't work like that.
I really love this. I'll try and bear this in mind over the next few years.
I'm a mature-aged student going for their second degree (CS the first time, science this time). I am loving the subject but it's hard at the beginning because the amount of new stuff I have to absorb is overwhelming. At the times when I have a bit of a breather -- either when I'm "getting it" or during mid-semester break -- I find the subject (biology) wonderful.
Agreed. I always felt my computer engineering degree taught me how to approach a problem and logically solve it, weigh the pros and cons, etc. As well as introducing me to the hardware side of things - I already knew by high school that I could learn any programming language given enough time (already had Basic, C, SQL, a couple of DSLs and knew at least in part, 3 different human languages). I wanted to force myself to get a similar "baseline" for hardware.
Of course, it has impacted all parts of my life - I think differently than I did before studying engineering, and I sometimes try to apply this problem solving in non-technical parts of life with.. mixed results.
> Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.
Like... I guess it depends what precisely you mean by "workers" but in my mind at least, if we're thinking similarly, that would be white-collar office workers. And what you describe in the previous quoted section is, IMHO, a perfectly reasonable breakdown of what college is preparing them to do. But then the subsequent line feels like a criticism of the output of that.
Yep. I gave a similar speech on the first day of every English 101 class I ever taught. (Though, damn, I wish I'd had as concise a formulation as your list of skills. Nicely done.) In my case I largely hoped to head off the resentment that STEM majors frequently expressed about how come they were required to take something so irrelevant to their eventual careers as writing. It sometimes worked.
Wait, but the point of the piece is that although college has always been transactional, behavior has changed.
If so, why would transactional-ism be the cause?
Read on:
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.
And then, crucially:
> Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.
"Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids.
When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.
Because the universities themselves have been constantly lowering standards. It was always a transaction but there was a price. That price is locked in a race to the bottom because administrations and professors don't care about standards.
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit.
Only so long as the college doesn't devalue the credential.
If I interview a few people with a CS degree from College A and I find they don't know the basics of programming - then the credential loses value; why would I bother interviewing people from such a college?
So colleges have to balance the needs of their stakeholders - employers/ graduates want the credential to be a sign of education; and current students who want good grades and less work.
The "implied terms of the transaction" have always been that current students have to learn enough that they're not devaluing the credential.
I have interviewed prospective employees who come in with no academic credentials all the way through to those who have completed degree programs at one of the top 50 universities. Regardless of university, students are individuals and shouldn’t be given more or less credit because of the name of the school they attended.
Full. Stop.
That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one.
As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it.
Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.
I agree that the trend is not sustainable, but that's not the students' responsibility — they're just responding to incentives.
Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.
Yeah, and the nature of the transaction evolves over time in a way that makes aging professors uncomfortable.
I get the sense the author just doesn’t have the same rapport with students they likely once did. Students stop coming to class and don’t go to office hours and they don’t know why.
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.
I went to college 20 years ago and lots of professors distributed slides and lecture notes to students. I assume it’s even more common now. Yes, I wouldn’t ask a speaker to let me read their private notes, but that’s not how PowerPoint slides shown in class are generally perceived.
Agreed. A course that did not distribute slides / lecture notes 35 years ago when I studied (well known engineering school in Canada) was considered annoying / the prof trying to force students to attend.
That is a purely rational take, but people are seldom rational. My pet theory is that inertia is a huge reason why people choose college. Majority of people who go to college do it as a continuation of 10-12 years of continuous schooling (or partying). As they climb educational or social hierarchies they are constantly reminded that college is a next step. Thus going to college feels far more familiar and less scary than joining the workforce. Thus, going to college is a default choice for many.
After the gut decision is made it can be wrapped into whatever rational argument.
The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.
That's part of it, but the author acknowledges that college has been transactional for quite a while. What has exacerbated the issue was COVID and the rise of extremely potent, addictive social media. I wouldn't be surprised if we look back on social media as the digital equivalent of children drinking and smoking weed, i.e. something that causes permanent damage to one's brain.
The transaction has changed a great deal though. GPA used to be more heavily weighted and professors used to be more essential for references. You might bring your transcript to an interview. Now, it seems to be all about projects. Coursework has dwindled in relevance.
> A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit.
It’s worth pointing out that this is a perception that has been cultivated. Position the degree as first and foremost a job credential, cut state support, and force students and their parents to directly bear the cost for this supposedly individualized benefit through higher tuition. “The customer is always right” and no learning need occur.
I can't respond to any specifics of the documentary, but it looks to me like the universities themselves are the biggest cultivators of this perception, with the goal of increased enrollment.
If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.
I see state funded education as making the problem worse. The market just reacts to what is available, and funding everyone to go to college, whether or not its useful or resourceful to do so means companies have a large enough pool of applicants to make it a requirement.
I could see even, that employers themselves would take up the cost to train if they lacked qualified applicants. Imagine for example there wasn't a billion CS students. All the company still need programmers, so what are they going to do?
IMO, instead of funding universities, simply give people a stipend to be used for some sort of educational purpose.
> My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.
They (the prof class) created this situation. They could have upheld their standards and seen the number of students go down but they preferred to fill their classrooms at the expense of quality.
This is like a manager who is complaining that no one can code while offering McDonalds hourly rates.
Professor here. We did not create it, we responded to administration prioritizing profit over performance and prestige. They passed the decision down to us instructors by threatening our employment if we failed too many students. Since tenure is heavily dependent on student outcomes, giving a student a lower grade than what they think they deserved will almost certainly result in negative feedback, which threatens your tenure. For non-tenured faculty it could result in a contract non-renewal.
I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role."
In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome?
At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts.
As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.
Did you finish reading? The author said later on that holding the bar high wasn't an option since it would risk his job. The blame should be on the universities, not on the professors who don't have much power to fix the problem.
I don’t agree personally. I went to school about 10 ago to a private University (nearly full ride because universities used to care about PSAT performance for no clear reason). My school was heavy on co-ops meaning it was more job outcome focused than most.
In my opinion it was mostly a rite of passage thing. It was the first time I was granted independence including personal responsibility, a brand new social network, sex, etc.
It was just adulthood with training wheels. I’m not going to argue that sounds like an ideal social structure but it was very useful to me. The raw alternative of jumping into the workforce probably would have led to bad outcomes even if it all worked out economically.
The stepping stone to employment felt like it was just sort of assumed like finishing high school. I felt nothing getting either diploma.
I might feel some serious existential dread if the market I was entering resembled the one now though.
>The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero.
I was one of those 'rounds to zero' students, in the physical sciences, long ago. I wanted to learn how to verify a hypothesis by looking at the evidence. And after 4 years, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of significant lab exposure. What we did get was cookbook labs, mostly on the very basic stuff. What we also got after that was theory, theory and more theory. Usually from unenthused teachers, going through the motions. From my perspective, it was mostly a waste of time.
Years later I learned what Feynman meant when he said "Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." Maybe if I'd heard that, I've have dropped out after two years instead of hoping I'd get to the part where someone cared.
I think most teachers are not naive wrt the transactional perception of education in their students. However, what keeps a passionate teacher going is the belief that, if they do their job well, at least some significant subset of students will take genuine interest in the material. I don't think it's naive to hope for that, I've seen this happen a lot when I was a student.
What OOP is lamenting is that that's no longer possible.
I think plenty of students are there because they want to learn a subject, singular. Everything else is just the unrelated overhead they're stuck with for their white collar job permit.
Does that mean it would be better if the majority of people went to trade schools and left the universities for the minority who want an education for it's own sake?
The reason why I wanted to study CS in university was because I was curious, not because of possible job offers you get if you have a degree. When I applied I thought that this was the primary motivator for others as well. Turns out I was very wrong, although I did meet a few students who were studying mainly for their curiosity.
Sure, but not all degrees are equal. Institutions have reputations based on how smart / effective their graduates tend to be. So by making it harder for the careless ones to graduate, a university can enhance the value of the degree for those that do. Even with the transactional attitude, it would behoove students to want to be pushed.
Yet institutions don't do this so your reasoning is faulty. Particularly at the "value of the degree" line. There are few, if any, degrees that provide value and even fewer that provide employable skills.
Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.
That is true, but I don't think the students are the ones responsible for the second and third order effects of maintaining academic rigor. They're just playing the game they're given.
It's telling this sentence has the student as one to blame, when it's a structural issue and the weight of the blame rests more heavily on the shoulders of the universities.
> The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero.
Further - even if someone wants to learn these subjects, most don't see the value in paying for a college course to learn them. Close to no one, after receiving a college degree in a subject, says "I want to learn more about X, I'm going to go ahead and pay $4,000 to take a class in it at the nearby college."
Plenty of people learn things after they graduate. Just about everyone does so in a better manner than a college course. Colleges are only viable because they dangle degrees over students' heads, and then they complain that students are only coming for the degrees.
I can’t find the exact citation at the moment, but I believe that American students were described as viewing the education process as transactional in a wider sense by Max Weber in 1905 (Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism I think?)
And now the white-collar jobs are being replaced by vibe AI app-making. It seems most of college now isn't for most people. Maybe the kids can save their money and just make vibe apps.
> What has changed exactly? Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class.
My brother and I graduated from university a little over 4 years ago and we were both top students (he studied music and I studied applied math). There were classes where he and I (without exaggeration) skipped more than 90% of the lectures.
I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.
I think this is a good point. I found the following sentences of the article shocking:
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.
It makes you wonder whether the lecturer actually values the time of the students. Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
Personally I always ask for lecture/presentation slides - it's common practice in computing and related fields. Technical conferences (be they industry-focused like Nvidia GTC or more research-focused like Usenix ATC) routinely provide presentation slides and recordings. Both are extremely valuable.
I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)
Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.
A professor's lecture notes would never be good notes for a student to learn from. They are simply reminders to the professor to talk about certain topics that they know the ins and outs of.
Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.
I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.
> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.
The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.
In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.
The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.
Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.
Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.
I loved it when lecturers made the PowerPoint slides available before the lecture, as it meant I could read the slides ahead of time and thus keep up in the lecture. It made it easier to take meaningful notes.
I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.
It is not interactive because the professor has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter and thoughts, ideas and suggestions of the students are an order of magnitude less of less value than that of the professors.
Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.
Agreed, when I was at uni a few years ago, having the lecture slides was a handy reference EVEN when I wrote my own notes during lectures.
One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.
Yeah I don't get that statement at all. How can a professor not just post their slides on their website? What exactly is so special about their slides?
I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes.
in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.
> This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes.
But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.
> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time.
Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else.
I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).
100% agreed. When I was in Uni, I had a few lectures where going to the class was actually a waste of time for me (especially when I had to work on other time-consuming assignments) since I knew about the topic already. I passed those classes with high grades solely by going over the lecture slides.
One thing that's changed in the past decade is that college professors are now competing against youtube. There are really bad lecturers in college (and also really good ones!). But now, when you encounter a bad one, that's okay--you can watch lectures online.
Not just YouTube. MIT has an open course system that is available to anyone, for free, from actually employed MIT professors, lecturing real courses [1]. I went to a state university that basically copied Pearson slides and books into a course with minimal adjustments.
Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.
And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
I'm guessing you and your brother are both well above average, in which case I'd agree that you could get more out of studying on your own (if the material was even challenging to begin with).
The students referred to in the article don't have the wherewithal to study effectively on their own; the lectures are their only hope for learning, assuming they were to take advantage of them. Also, many classes are not simply lectures, but an opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. By not coming to class, one robs themselves of that opportunity.
In my experience it’s one or the other: attend all the lecturers and nullify the need to study more than that attendance and some specific exam revision if they drop hints or don’t attend but do the readings. I think a lot of being a successful student is cutting through all the duplicative work that gets thrown your way.
> I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.
Jeez I wish they would have uploaded all the material online, not everyone does that (perhaps thinking if they do it lots of people won't show up). And even if they do it , it is often sparse slides with half the material passed in person - so very missing.
It's enough to not understand the first 10 minutes of the lecture and then you're completely lost for another frustrating 35 minutes ( or more, some lectures are double). It's enough not to fully remember the last lecture and you don't follow what the professor is talking about now.
It's not a fun experience and happened to me a lot - the material is hard, my intelligence is good but nothing stellar so it's super easy to become lost.
The truth is it's probably better for the average person to study at their own pace with an LLM or something like that, I had a real rough time following computer science lectures. I can ask the LLM to stop, to re explain, to re explain in a different way etc etc. If I'm tired I can stretch a bit.
I think its the really bright kids or those with superior concentration and preparation skills that got something out of those lectures, the rest of us hated it.
I had a linear algebra teacher who would not speak to us. Literally conducted most classes in complete silence. His English wasn't great but manageable - that wasn't the issue. He would just walk into class without acknowledging us and proceed to solve out the previous homework problems. Then he'd introduce a few other problems (written on the whiteboard, nothing verbal) and keep writing. This was presumably similar to our next assignment, which he handed out at the end of class before leaving. Often zero words spoken for the 50 minute class. All of the solutions were available without going to class. So I didn't.
If the university isn't going to invest anything in lecturing, why should I attend the lectures?
I empathize with this. I went to one of those “top tier” universities and had a handful of classes where I regretted being one of the few (fewer than 10) goody good students who attended lecture, and subsequently fell asleep anyway. Over time, I realized that universities like these primarily prioritize faculty who can attract grant dollars over those who are excellent teachers.
But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.
>But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.
From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.
> when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.
Unfortunately, some colleges doesn't value efficiency nearly as much as they do their self respect. Because of which we now have strict attendance requirements (75%) for every course.
Fully agree as a "top student" from probably a school similar to where author is a professor.
I would add that reading this piece and the attitude the author has towards students, I doubt I would want to attend their class (or possibly even take it in the first place, professors have reputations).
I'm confused. At the universities I attended, or later worked at, lectures were absolutely, definitely, optional. That's how it should be. Universities provide a framework for students to learn. The university then tests what the student has learned in order to give them a diploma. How the student learned that is surely not important.
(Things are of course different when there are practical considerations to the teaching, such as labwork, which of comes with a degree of associated testing anyway.)
Yeah a lot of what this essay called out seems bad to me, but I always felt like professors thought their lectures were more important to the learning process than they were. Most of my courses had more workshop like class periods where grad students and/or upperclassmen would be there to answer questions, and those were universally more valuable uses of time than the lectures. Office hours with the professors, and of course textbooks, were also great. But lectures? Pretty skippable, honestly!
I regret this showing of disrespect, but I'm a little proud of the fact that I got an A in inorganic chemistry by reading the book when I felt like reading it and otherwise doing homework on my laptop all semester during lectures.
You're top students and don't understand that a sample of two is a poor way to reason about social and human problems at scale? Across large population of individuals with different traits?
Totally disagree. Lecture is an opportunity to directly ask your professor to clarify the material or perhaps extend to an adjacent area. It is also an opportunity to learn from your classmates who may pose insightful questions or comments.
TFA omits this trend (seemingly since wide spread availability of the internet) to being solitary - the view that nothing of value can come from interactions with peers or superiors other than wasted time. [this is different from missing classes because of laziness which is implied].
I meant "pass" as in the sense of "Olé, here's an A+, so off with you to the rest of your life".
But, seriously, how's that lack of engagement working out in "the rest of your life"? Meetings? Why bother? Seems like a lecture. Reply to Slack or Email? Does that sound like something you ought to do? Or a judgement call, based on your intuition of their value?
There is a lot of talk about how LLMs will disrupt software development and office work and whatnot, but there is one thing that they are massively disrupting right now, and that is education. I've witnessed this with a group of CS master students recently, and they have let their programming skills atrophy to barely imaginable levels. LLMs have the twin effect of raising the bar for what even a barely viable junior developer has to live up to, while simultaneously lowering their actual skills. There is a generation of completely unemployable "graduates" in the pipeline.
The article mentions that most students are only in it for the diploma anyway, but somehow most people are yet to realize that those diplomas will soon be toilet paper, precisely because they no longer require any actual effort to obtain.
I am currently a CS student in germany and our python lecturer told us at the first lesson that "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways and we will not be writing any code after we graduate. He then encouraged us to use AI on all assignments he gives us. He even allows us to cheat at the final exam by using LLMs.
I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.
I asked around with my fellow students what they thought about them and not one minded that they were essentially enrolled in a "how to proompt" class. When I asked one student that it was all nice and well that you pass the module but isn't the ideal outcome that you actually know the language by the end? He laughed and said "Yeah sure, do you think the same about maths"?
Please raise this with the university, be it 'Fachschaft' or the ombudsman for academic integrity. This is not representative for CS education here as far as I know. Other teachers or faculty want to know.
Besides that, these are ridiculous claims from the teacher. LLMs are powerful but in the end they are still a tool with random output, which needs to be carefully evaluated. Especially Python is my personal view much more subtle than people assume on first contact. Especially the whole numpy universe is like a separate language and quite complicated for a beginner if you want to write fast and efficient code.
I've had courses where LLMs where allowed for projects but we had to provide prompts.
> I am currently a CS student in germany and our python lecturer told us at the first lesson that "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways and we will not be writing any code after we graduate. He then encouraged us to use AI on all assignments he gives us. He even allows us to cheat at the final exam by using LLMs.
> I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.
Knowing the education system in Germany rather well, I ask myself in which (kind of) educational establishment this happened, since I'd consider this to be rather unusual for at least universities (Universitäten) and Fachhochschulen (some other system of tertiary education that has no analogue in most countries).
You do not have to put up with this. Your lecturer is significantly undermining your education (which you pay for!).
You should bring this up with the department chair of your study. The purpose of your CS degree is to build a strong theoretical foundation, replacing programming with prompting directly goes against this.
Don't believe them. I was also going to university in Germany and had to work so much to compensate for bad lecturers. Until now I can say I needed 100% of what I learned in university. Even the most esoteric stuff came back to bite me. For LLMs, they are close to useless if you can't review the stuff. Maybe at some point in the future they are better and can reason about their code, but as in fusion, self-driving, etc., you never know when this is. And there will always be people who have to develop this.
> but isn't the ideal outcome that you actually know the language by the end?
Given that it is billed as a Python course that is reasonable.
But, to be fair, the intent of the course is almost certainly to provide background in the tools so that you can observe CS concepts learned later. Which is kind of like astronomy majors learning how to use a telescope so that they can observe its concepts. If Google image search provided the same imagery just as well as a telescope, the frustration in being compelled to teach rudimentary telescope operation is understandable. It is not like the sciences are studied for the tools.
> "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways
Wow! I think this is an extreme comment to make. I get it.. but WOW! It really makes you wonder about the future of universities. If the answer is to let AI do our work.. even to cheat in final exams... what is the point of universities? Not only are we talking about Software Engineers dying.. but so if his lecturer job!
Anyway..
I am developer for over 20 years.
I have kids -- both are not even teenagers... but there are times I think to myself "is it worth them learning XYZ" because of AI?
By the time my eldest get his first job.. we are talking (atleast) around year 2032. We have to accept that AI is going to do some pretty cool things. HOWEVER, I still "believe" that AI will work alongside software developers. We still need to communicate with it - to do that, you need to understand how to communicate with it.
Point is, if any of my kids express interest in computer programming in the next year or so, I will HAPPILY encourage them to invest time in it. What I have to accept is that they will use AI.. a lot.. to build something in their chosen language.
I can see this being a typical question for new coders:-
"Can you create a flappy bird game in python"
Sure.. AI might spit something out in a matter of minutes and it might even work, but are they really learning? I think I would encourage my kids to ban using AI for (around) 4 days a week.
At the end of the day it is very difficult to know our future. Sometimes I have to think about my future.. not just my kids. I mean, would my job as a software engineer be over? If so, when? What would I do?
Overall It doesn't not bother me because I do think my role will transition with AI but for the younger generation, it can be a grey area understanding where they fit in all this.
I try to be optimistic that the next 100 years will be a very exiciting time for the human race (if we do not destroy ourselves beforehand)
To counter your lecturer, I am reminded of a John Carmack quote:
"Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul"
Not even low-level -- any programming. If you really like to code, you are going to learn it whether in School, College, or University. To me, the best times I learned was outside of official education, shutting myself away in my bedroom. "Official education" is nothing more that doing what you are told for a peice of paper. What is its worth these days?
Whether AI exists or not - those that like coding will invest the time to code. This is what will seperate average to good programmers or developers. What seperates a good programmer to a great programmer will be their lack or AI generated code... to DIY!
Thats my view... but this is a large topic and I am only scratching the surface.
Well, he has a point about Maths :) But, the difference is that basic Maths skills are enough to live a decent life for someone who doesn't do Maths for a career. Basic programming usually isn't enough to pass job interviews and one needs to know the language for a career, atleast for now. I'm actually learning a lot of basic Maths concepts now that I have a kid I need to teach sometimes and have some money I need to invest and understand about rate of return, compounding etc.
I have seen folks who are relatively new to programming work like this.
Rather than simple laziness, it was often because they felt intimidated by their lack of knowledge and wanted to be more productive.
However, the result of a ChatGPT based workflow is that reasoning often is the very last resort. Ask the LLM for a solution, paste it in, get an error, paste that in, get a new solution, get another error, ask for a fix again, etc. etc.
Before someone chimes in to say this is like Stack Overflow: no it isn't. Real people expect you to put some work and effort into first describing your problem, then solving it. You would rarely find someone willing to go through such an exercise with you, and they probably wouldn't hallucinate broken code to you while doing it.
15 minutes of this and it turns out to be something silly that ChatGPT would never catch - e.g. you have installed a very old version of the Python module for some internal company reason. But because the reasoning muscle isn't being built up, and the context isn't being built up, they can't figure it out.
They didn't see the bit on the docs page that says "this function was added in version 1.5" because they didn't write the function call, and didn't open the documentation, and perhaps wouldn't even consider opening the documentation because that's what ChatGPT is for. In fact, they might not have even consciously chosen that library because again.. that's what ChatGPT is for.
> Ask the LLM for a solution, paste it in, get an error, paste that in, get a new solution, get another error, ask for a fix again, etc. etc.
That's exactly what I've seen as well. The students don't even read the code, let alone try to reason through how it works. They just develop hand-eye coordination for copy-pasting.
> Rather than simple laziness, it was often because they felt intimidated by their lack of knowledge and wanted to be more productive.
Part of it really is laziness, but what you say is also true. Unfortunately, this is the nature of learning. Reading or listening is by itself a weak stimulus for building neural pathways. You need to actively recall and apply, and struggle with problems until they yield. It is so much easier to look up a solution somewhere. And now you don't even to look anything up anymore -- just ask.
Just a funny, or depressing, aside - and then a point about LLMs.
Real coding can, unfortunately, be as bad as that or worse. Here is one very famous HN comment from 2018, and I know what he is talking about because participating in this madness was my first job after university, dispelling a lot of my illusions:
I went into that job (of porting Oracle to another Unix platform for an Oracle platform partner) full of enthusiasm and gave up finding any meaning or enjoyment after the first few weeks, or trying to understand or improve anything. If AI could do at least some of that job it would actually a big plus.
(it's the working-on-Oracle-code comment if you didn't already guess it)
I think there's a good chance code becomes more like biology. You can understand the details, but there are sooo many of them, and there are way too many connections directly and indirectly across layers. You have to find higher level methods because it's too much for a direct comprehension.
I saw a main code contributor in a startup I worked at work kind of like that. Not all his fault, forced to move too quickly and the code was so ill defined, not even the big boss knowing what they wanted and only talking in meta terms and always coming up with new sometimes contradicting ideas. The code was very hard to comprehend and debug, especially since much of it was distributed algorithms. So his approach was running it with demo data, observing higher level outcomes, and tweaking this or that component until it kind of worked. It never worked reliably, it was demo-quality software at best. But he managed to implement all the new ideas from management at least.
I found that style interesting and could not dismiss it outright, even though I really really did not want to have to debug that thing in production. But I saw something different from what I was used to, focus on a higher level, working when you just can't have the same depth of understanding of what you are doing as one would traditionally like. Given my Oracle experience, I saw how this would be a useful style IRL for many big long-running projects, like that Oracle code, that you had no chance of comprehending or improving without "rm -rf" and a restart which you could not do.
I think education needs to also show these more "biology-level complexity" and more statistical higher level approaches. Much of our software is getting too complex for the traditional low-level methods.
I see LLMs as just part of such a toolkit for the future. On the one hand, there is supplying code for "traditional" smaller projects, where you still have hope to be in control and have at least the seniors fully understand the system. On the other hand, LLMs could help with too-complex systems, not with making them understandable, that is impossible for those messy systems, but with being able to still productively work with them, add new features and debug issues. Code such as in the Oracle case. A new tool for even higher levels of messiness and complexity in our systems, which we won't be able to engineer away due to real life constraints.
I've used AI as a crutch for a time, and felt my skills get worse. Now I've set it up to never have it give me entire solutions, just examples and tips on how to get it done.
I've struggled with Shader Programming for a while, tried to learn it from different sources and failed a lot. It felt like something unreachable for me, I don't really know why really. But with the help of an AI that's fine-tuned for mentoring, I really understood some of the concepts. It outlined what I should do and asked socratic questions that made me think. I've gotten way better at it and actually have a pretty solid understanding of the concepts now (well, I think).
But sometimes at work I do give in and get it to write an entire script for me, out of laziness and maybe boredom. Their significant advances as of late with "extended thinking" and the likes made them much more likely to one-shot the writing of a slightly complex script... Which in turn made it harder to not just say "hey, that sounds like boring work, let's have the AI do the biggest part of it and I'll patch up the rest".
It is one thing to get code explained to you (which can also be good) but another to engage in finding a solution, explore the problem space, fail a couple of times and learn from your mistakes also, and of course the embodied process itself of writing the code. Learning is an active process; having stuff explained to you is not bad but it does not lead to the same depth of understanding. Granted, not all subjects and cases benefit the same from deeper understanding and it is impossible to get into depth with everything. So this is a trade-off in each case to decide how much one may want to go in, and it is great that we also now have this option to not go in the same depth. But imo one should be mindful about it, and make conscious decisions on how they use LLMs in case where they may think that understanding a subject more is also important.
There are still ways that LLMs can be used in that case, eg having them review your code, suggest alternatives to your code, eg more idiomatic ways to do sth, when you delve into sth new etc, and treat their output critically of course, but actually writing one's code is important for some kinds of understanding.
This can be very useful when you are learning programming.
You don't always have a tutor available and you shouldn't only rely on tutors.
It might be useful when you start learning a new programming language/framework, but you should learn on how to articulate a problem and search for solutions, e.g. going through stackoverflow posts and identify if the post applies and solves your problem.
After a while (took way too long for me) you realize that the best way to solve problems is by looking up the documentation/manpage of a project/programming language/whatever and really try to understand the problem at its core.
I wonder how much even this approach would help. I would liken it to studying past exam papers with the solutions on hand. My experience is you actually have to solve the problems yourself to actually properly absorb the concepts, rather than just copy them into your short term memory for a short while.
I agree - the truly curious will be rewarded while those who couldn’t care less will mindlessly copy and paste. Maybe that will give the rest of us job security?
It's just Google (web search) v2, if you are able to input the right terms and interpret the results critically you'll be accelerated. If not, you're just another mark.
I wasn't unemployable as a graduate, I found a job after all. But I was near enough useless and started from the ground up.
I've always felt my real education in software engineering started at work.
20 odd years later I lead a large engineering team and see the same with a lot of graduates we hire. There's a few exceptions but most are as clueless as I was at that age.
A diploma from the type of school the author describes is already pretty worthless, imo.
I don't get why schools can't just get strict in response to these issues. No electronics in class, period. Accessibility problems can be fixed by having each impaired student get a volunteer scribe for the class.
You're in school to learn, and electronics hinder in-person education more than they help, especially as ChatGPT style AI is available on them.
The real damage is in the brains and attention spans, traditional school just can't compete with the massive dopamine overstimulus of System A thinking students get every day for an average of 6-8h outside school, by simply requiring focused System B reasoning on tiresome and (comparatively) dull tasks while enforcing dopamine withdrawal.
I think payola diplomas will probably continue to be valuable, since they represent non-falsifiable economic power/sacrifice. Even if schools just literally sold diplomas for 100k, they would still be useful for business to filter out people who are too poor to matter (i.e. they have such divergent interests from shareholders/management that it would be more trouble that its worth to try and socialize them to a particular professional role).
This is a bit less cut-and-dried, but IMO cryptocurrency has normalized this kind of view where simply wasting resources is itself a way to generate, or at least represent, value.
Well, I see an e-bike analogy around the corner. People dont want to invest the energy anmore, now that they can buy expensive batteries to help with the pedaling. That is pretty much the human nature.
They were, but that vision was killed as soon as the phrase you quote was spoken.
LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Anyone can just go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai to access a tool that will understand their problem, no matter how clumsily formulated, and solve it, or teach them how to solve it, or otherwise address it in a useful fashion. That's pure and quite general force multiplier.
But don't you worry, plenty of corporations and countless startups are hard at work to, like with all computing before, strip down the bicycle and offer you Uber and theme park rides for your mind.
We have robots do physical chores for us: washing machine, robo-vac etc, so why can't we have robots that do mental chores for us? For most of us, our jobs aren't a pleasure, but a chore necessary to earn money to pay rent. How many factory workers do you think enjoy bolting the same car parts to a car over and over again till retirement?
So if I can outsource the mundane, annoying and repetitive parts of SW development (like typing the coding) to a machine, so that I can focus on the parts I enjoy (debugging, requirements gathering, customer interaction, architecture etc), what's wrong with that?
If the end product is good and fulfills the customers needs who cares if a large part of it was written by a machine and not by a human?
I also wish we can go back to the days we were coding in assembly in stead of say JavaScript, but that's not gonna happen professionally for 99% of jobs, you either use JS to ship quickly or get run over by the companies who use JS while you write assembly. ML assisted coding will be the next step.
Which is understandable. All societies are constrained by lack of experts / intelligence. Think about how relatively inaccessible healthcare is, even in rich countries.
I had a data structures professor (over a year ago now) that actively encouraged a class of sophomores - most of whom were fresh out of "intro to Java" - to have Copilot (GPT-4 at the time I believe) help churn out assignment code on the university's dime.
Being somewhat ahead and an avowed LLM hater, I mostly forgot about this and plowed through the assignments unassisted... until the first midterm (on paper, in person) hit. The mean was something like a 40.
I eventually spoke to some classmates that weren't in my immediate group, and predictably heard several variations on "I let Copilot become a crutch."
Ugh. Fortunately there was ample opportunity to turn grades around, but I'm sure some people are still feeling that bad advice in their GPAs.
I've completed a Master's course in CS and some students came from other technical studies, like applied mathematics and physics. Of course after only 2 years they did not learn any particular programming language well, but they learned other skills related to CS, performed experiments in very narrow fields.
This is a fun article because while it discusses a real issue, it has just enough outdated views to distract people from the main point and focus on those.
Having recently finished studies and still being in contact with teaching assistants today, the problem is big. Attendance going down, participation going down, courses and curriculum simplified. I already noticed a big shift after Covid and I'm glad I missed the ChatGPT era.
Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding. In our efforts to standardise everything and come to objective exams, we've rewarded a culture that just intends to pass with the least amount of effort. Next to that are the burdens of being a student; if I didn't have to work most nights of the week, I'm sure I'd have put more effort into studying.
Lectures were often boring and questions would be answered by referring to pages in a textbook. Maybe with recorded media, we should revisit the use of lectures.
All in all, I don't see how academia can keep the standards high in current society. We'll see how it goes.
Perhaps it has to do with the reason people go to university, and the pressures they're under.
I remember being a poor student burning through my savings. I had no patience for humanities and anything that didn't directly help me get gainful employment.
Years later, I love those things, mostly because I am free to pursue them at my own pace, without worrying about maintaining a high GPA, courting companies that offer internships, building up my portfolio, and learning the things that are actually related to my job. That's on top of working my way through school, trying to make friends in a new city, and pursuing happiness.
I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.
Agreed. Having time and a mental health status where one can relax and peacefully read a whole book is a luxury. Having a job where you can apply any knowledge from your studies is a luxury too. Having space in your life to care about knowledge and learning for its own sake is a luxury
I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about.
Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me
> I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.
This was definitely the case for me.
However, it always left me with the idea of “then why did I study?”. To get a job, of course, but in retrospect a better path might’ve been to work and then study at a later phase in life.
Good points, but the other part of this is that back in "our time" (we may not be the same age - I was in University 1999-2005, but regardless) there was...basically no other choice.
If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.
Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.
Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.
You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.
I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.
> Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding
It doesn't matter. There is literally no assignment you can give students that they won't cheat on. In an intro college astronomy class, "Look at these pictures of planets, what do think is interesting about them?" or "Walk around your house and look at the different types of light bulbs, what kinds do you have?" Both of these will include 20% ChatGPT responses.
For a take-home exam or assignment, I’m sure this is the case.
The hardest course I took at uni had a final oral exam and weekly homework assignment. Your final grade would be the average of all the homework assignments, but the final oral exam decided if you passed (with previous mentioned grade) or failed.
I thought that was a great way to do it, you can cheat your way through the course but in the end you’ll fail the oral exam. However, it was more subjective.
As someone who teaches in humanities many students are really bad at reading and writing, use ai way too much and it hurts them, and rarely pay attention in class.
I’ve sat in other classes which were indeed boring but I don’t think this is the common denominator. Undergrads are just high schoolers with a different title.
The students from our schools foreign branch that come here for a semester or so are leagues beyond local students.
>it has just enough outdated views to distract people
Haha, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's great this guy wrote a textbook, but perhaps he should have authored a series of documentaries.
Perhaps reading dense texts isn't actually the best way to make an impression on a students mind, but that's just all we had up until about 20 years ago.
I think Khan Academy is really great because of the video content.
Call me old fashioned, but I don't think it'd be that bad for schools to be almost completely analog. Obviously not for classes like CS, but do math class es or English classes really need computers? The whole "digital learning" push feels like it hasn't resulted in significantly better learning than with a book, pen, and paper.
Totally agree. Unless the use of the computer is integral to the material at hand (learning to program, learning to solve problems numerically, modeling) it is superfluous. Tons of dough spent on making it "modern" just for the sake of it.
Why is this obvious? Unless you’re talking CS = Programming a specific language, I think it’d be better for the K-12 version of CS to be completely analog save for maybe a “lab” for students in later years of high school.
It really feels the same as weed/nicotine/alcohol/sex/other vices. If history has taught us anything, outright banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit. We need to explain (and frequently reinforce) these negative effects of modern phone use so kids can grow up understanding them. Right now, it seems like a lot of people really only start to understand the impacts of this kind of phone use long after they're addicted. Hopefully informing them before that happens would help.
Of course, this kind of thing is easy to do wrong. Programs like D.A.R.E. and THRIVE tried going the way of fear tactics which seems to really not work well. We need to have an open and honest discussion about "yes, this is fun. But it DOES have a bad side" instead.
The last sticking point there is that it assumes people will be rational and come to the conclusion of using with moderation. Hopefully people can be rational... Otherwise I think there's no hope for us in solving the brainrot epidemic.
From my own experience and that of fellow parents that I talked to, explanations will be dismissed outright by the all-knowing teenagers, and any attempt to have a rational conversation on the topic will fail. Just like any addict, kids will deny that they are addicted. I had to act once the smartphone addiction reached a disaster level. What worked the best for me was "no you cannot bring your phone to school or use it before the homework is done, that's my decision and I don't have to provide you with any explanation." Did this generate some resentment and a few tantrums? You bet, but I got the result I wanted, peace of mind and homework done on time.
I disagree with you.
> outright banning them only makes them into forbidden fruit
I think it should be fine to outright ban them in certain contexts, like classroom learning; just as they are outright banned (usually) in theaters or playhouses or places of worship.
And to cite your example, even in the most liberal jurisdictions I think it's not acceptable for students to take drugs in the classroom. Phones are basically the same thing.
There was no mention of an outright ban, merely restrictions on use. Much as we have restrictions on where and when one can indulge in weed, nicotine, alcohol, and so forth.
We did this with our kids, now college freshman and high school junior, and it was absolutely worth it. In middle school we established "screen break" from Friday night to Saturday afternoon. It was challenging at first but they came to love it. We've had many conversations and read many books on those breaks (and still do). Advice to new parents: keep them off screens as long as possible, and then build in and enforce breaks that become a part of your family routine. Chances are they will end up noticeably different from other kids.
It seems some are. My kid is in 4th grade in a city public school (US) and the district just this year banned all phones, tablets, and smart watches during the school day. We’ll see how it goes.
For what goal? Just for them to get instantly addicted once the ban is lifted? For them to lack any communications with their friends and to be excluded from their social circles discussing the newest tiktoks or whatever?
As the parent of a young kid: how do you do this? Does this just mean not giving them a smartphone until they’re teenagers? Not letting them take it to school. My oldest kid isn’t even four yet, but I’m already wondering about how to limit his eventual phone usage and also not make him a social pariah.
It should be enforced by the schools: put the phones in a tub in home group and hand them back out at the end of the day. If there’s an emergency call the office or the office calls you. Use exercise books for note taking, etc.
The "social pariah" thing is FUD. It's just people repeating what other people claim to be afraid of, and then becoming afraid of it themselves. Kids can be shitty--if they want to exclude someone or bully them, they're going to do it whether or not the victim has a cell phone. Conversely, if people will only be friends with you if you have a cell phone, then I have some bad news for you: They're probably not genuine friends.
No. It's not the smartphones that are the problem. Smartphones are a wonderful invention, capable of connecting anyone anywhere.
It's the apps, which overcharge everyone's (not just kids!) brains, by algorithmically "mAxImiZinG eNgaGeMent"
It's time to ban them all. Okay that's a bit much. Ban all algorithmic feeds, all apps must adhere to strictly chronological feed of the strictly subscribed authors.
If we can all agree that cannabis is bad for the still-developing mind, and can generally get on board with the idea that kids should be kept as far away from it as possible, because it's addicting, because it causes long-term alterations to brain development, because it diminishes motivation and hijacks executive functioning networks, why is it so hard for society to consider treating smartphones, social media, and highly-immersive video games like MMORPG's, with essentially all of the same effects, the same way?
I am part of the generation that grew up with MMORPG's from early childhood (I was about 9 years old when I made my first RuneScape account), but approaching 30, I don't game at all anymore for the exact same reasons I don't touch cannabis anymore. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, it's all the same thing for teenagers. At a neurological level, these platforms are as highly addicting and neural-network-altering as actual psychoactive pharmaceuticals, legal or otherwise.
Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.
No, that doesn't address the incentives that cause all those things: maximizing engagement to maximize ad impressions for money. You have to choke the money supply off at the source or the big corporations will just find other engagement mechanisms to hook users to get at more profits.
Instead, tax ad impressions per day per user on a sliding scale that makes it quickly unprofitable to display more than a handful of ads and use the money to fund media literacy classes in schools. Restrict the number and types of advertising that can be shown to children and adolescents, like forbidding animated ads.
I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV. Cutting back to chronological feeds might improve some things but I don't think that's the root of the issue.
I would suggest the primary difference between then and now is accessibility. As a kid, my screen time was limited not just by my parents indulgence but the social pressure from using a shared device. Smart phones let you carry your personal distraction with you.
I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.
You sound like one of the author's students. Just restricting juvenile phone use to dumb phones is obviously the more feasible solution than banning or manipulating entire platforms.
Why not educate the users about the dangers misuse and abuse lead to the attention span, instead of banning things?
I vaguely recall too students back in the era where our biggest distraction was MSN messenger and our university forums. They kept both off until late at night.
We're letting people experience the downsides of the attention economy when it's almost (if not entirely) too late to avoid the negatives.
I've no clue why people have downvoted this; you're right as rain. A phone is nothing short of a digital slot machine and shouldn't be put in front of adults or children. These algorithms are designed for profit, not humanity. They have far greater control over us than they should.
This is a really good take. My mother did this until high school and some of my favorite classes forced this. Lectures were so much more engaging with no computer distracting me.
> It’s also clear that kids whose parents restrict phone use seem to have superpowers compared to those that don’t.
Love this phrase. What might happen is that the next generation, upon seeing this opportunity, will do the opposite of their elders and highly value focus, and more readily dismiss quick gains.
Smartphones are easy to blame, but they aren't the core of the problem. They're not just a thing used in the US, but across the world and we don't see the same problems in say, European school systems. The actual issue is multifaceted:
1) Parents in the US are overworked, underpaid and (increasingly) unable to participate in the lives of their children. It should come as zero surprise then that phones are used as a way to get kids out of their hair. If you don't fix this problem then banning phones entirely won't matter, because parents will yell, scream and quite literally assault your schools for taking away phones from their kids.
2) Our K-12 educational system is broken. Kids are graduating with lower literacy rates than ever. College is functioning less as higher education and more like remedial programs, having to teach basic topics that should've been covered as part of the core curriculum.
3) Teachers are also underpaid, overworked and having to deal with the deficiencies in parenting as well as the advent of AI making cheating significantly easier and harder to detect.
These three factors all compound to create a whole generation that we're effectively failing. And given the attacks/teardown of college as an institution, I fear we're going to have our own version of the 'lost generation' until people get angry enough to fix it or our business capabilities collapse.
Parenting and upbringing could be an important and overlooked reason for this lost generation.
I can only speak anecdotally. Way before smartphones were invented, I had enforced limits on computer time to 1-2 hours a day via time tracking software. All this did was breed resentment between me and my parents that led to conflict and punishment. As soon as I got to college I was back to being on my computer all night nearly every day, relieved that I didn't have to put up with them anymore.
The technology restriction wasn't the beginning and end of my mentality all through college. The true cause was how I was raised and my relationship with my parents. They were the only real bullies I've ever had.
People will always attack apps, algorithms and corporations since they're easy to feel powerless about. But if a developing person is given good enough reason to doomscroll so that they able to forget the pain that was imbued in them from an early age, then 1) the outcome in the article results, 2) a major underlying factor in the analysis of why we're failing young people will be missed, and people will assume it's solely the fault of addictive "algorithms" and capitalism, and 3) it's unlikely that people are going to open up about stressors as personal as childhood trauma (a cause) as opposed to behavioral addictions like doomscrolling (a symptom), so the focus will be on attacking and regulating the symptoms, and this cycle of trauma will only exacerbate and repeat itself.
A certain level of trauma can steal decades away from developing persons and set them up for failure, with or without smartphones, and smartphones only make their problems worse. Not to mention, past a certain age people start to blame you for your own failings, even though many of them have roots in actions taken against you that were not your fault, and this only contributes to feelings of misery and hopelessness. Knowing this firsthand, it's no wonder so many people find little else interesting than doomscrolling all day - myself included.
You can regulate apps and restrict smartphones, but I have no idea how to fix bad parenting/emotional trauma at scale. What goes on in families is private by its nature, emotional abuse is legitimized if you never lay a hand on the child and some arbitrary standard of defiance is crossed, and intergenerational trauma can have completely arbitrary causes going back decades, which end up transmitted as meaningless stressors to a victim trapped in an endless search of anything at all to hold close to them...
In a European public university ~10 years ago, I did a class in discrete mathematics in my first year as a student and it was hard. The professor was going fast, not following any book or notes but writing everything on the blackboard. During that hour I needed to pay constant attention to the lesson, take notes, going home to find explanations in books or online about what I didn't understand. At the exam, there was a quick pre-test to filter out some of the students. I think there were maybe around 150 students if not more, that tried and only 30 that went to the final exam. I was one of them and passed it with a good mark. It was my first exam in my first year, and I still remember it to be enjoyable because I appreciated the hard work required.
Two years later, I heard that some students didn't pass the exam and wrote a letter to the faculty director, demanding an easy way. The professor was replaced with another one and they passed the class.
Even in reputable public universities, professors have to adjust their teaching to make sure enough students are satisfied with their facutly choice so they can continue receiving government funding.
It depends on the model, some universities are easy to get in but have weed-out classes, some are hard to get in but comparatively easy to finish, and some are both hard to get in and hard to finish.
Discrete maths back in my days was one of those almost universal weed-out classes which got rid of people with limited abstract thinking ability who weren't willing or able to get over that with hard work. Very heavy correlation between how well you did in that class and core CS subjects.
In my EU country, lots of first year students are kind of lost and are picking their major more or less at random (or very unprepared). Very low passing rates in first year are very common. It gets better in 3rd year and after.
Unfortunately, my uni was free admission, so the first year helps filter out unprepared students.
I might suffer from a bias, but what I did was study to pass the test. I don't expect everyone to pass every exam as I don't expect everyone to get a degree. Universities need to be hard if they want to keep their reputation and not be outlived by online courses on YouTube. A degree, more than a certificate that the student attended some classes, should prove that a person is capable of thinking, studying and doing hard work.
> In a European public university ~10 years ago, I did a class in discrete mathematics in my first year as a student and it was hard. The professor was going fast, not following any book or notes but writing everything on the blackboard. During that hour I needed to pay constant attention to the lesson, take notes, going home to find explanations in books or online about what I didn't understand.
This has always been my pet peeve. My classes were mostly like this. I like to think and dig into topics and instead of doing that, there was regurgitation without any pause. Whoever could write fast and have breathing space to think won. I wish they had given out the notes upfront, use a portion of the class to go through the overall thing and then use the rest for getting into the tougher parts/Q&A.
Certainly there is no time to read widely or sit around thinking or chatting with people who challenge our views .. no time to hang around campus and engage in conversation.
Gary of Garys Economics YT channel makes the point that inequality - in and of itself - robs the middle class of wealth :
Essentially he argues that the fraction of dollars allocated to the middle class is less, and the total amount of dollars is used to apportion 'real' wealth - ie. the total number of atoms, people, energy supply, houses, land, paintings does not go up in proportion, so the same dollar amount will buy less realworld goods.
Science and Technology - universities and startups - require an abundant over-apportionment of capital to make sure that we cast a large net in order to reach those rare talents that make significant advances.
The side effect of wasted funding - students who learn/research stuff they wont use in jobs, and startups that fail to find PMF and scale fast .. is a well educated, better society in which to live.
Relatively low inequality and high progressive tax post-WWII funded the new medicine and tech we now enjoy.
It's a Western problem. In China students work very hard because they had to beat a tough competion to even be able to attend the University. And they know that finishing the University with good grades will mean a difference between a good life and a hard one. In South Korea it's the same.
So, IMO, standards should be kept very high. There is no need that all people finish the University. There are plenty of jobs that can be done without attending an University. But the problem is that even for those jobs there's a degree of competence required and some willing to work. And there are people who fail at low qualification jobs. Solution? Bring some competition. Hire only well prepared people.
I'm going to say something really out of pocket about the average American student, so forgive me.
Americans aren't used to having to compete. When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.
I think a large part of it is an entitlement issue that's pretty common in our culture. But there are also cultural undercurrents from resentful Americans who failed to get ahead in life that actively denigrate the concept of education and the educated.
>When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.
I you even know how often I've heard students complain about "having my A taken away from me". It's insane, but it's also what to expect from a society just like you described who has been told that the point of school is to get good grades.
Now, a lot of students here are discovering that minmaxing to get a high GPA in a degree like compsci lands them firmly in jobless land if they failed to use those 4 years in an environment of learning to actually learn things. Doesn't even have to be from courses, things like student groups and competitions, research opportunities, etc.
Employers don't really want people whose sole interest is to do nothing and be rewarded for it.
Maybe I’m biased because I grew up in a family where my dad at one point was a musician and my siblings and I all pursued competitive careers at one point in our lives (academia, acting, business, music, sports), but I don’t know if Americans in general are averse to competition. In fact, I’d say Americans love competition. Americans generally love sports, for example.
I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”
The only way to keep standards high is to cease using degrees solely as class indicators and stop requiring a bachelor's degree for the overwhelming majority of white collar jobs (that we all know don't need the specific knowledge from the degree or else the required degree would be more specific, and that we also know the degree doesn't indicate work ethic necessarily, go look at the people working much harder precisely because they don't have a degree, if anything the degree serves as a license to slack off like the upper class so).
Otherwise the potential downside of not graduating with at least a bachelor's degree is so devastating that the population (who don't want to be perpetually responsible for their adult children that have been made unemployable in any decent capacity for no reason other than to make certain email job people feel important) will accept nothing less than a pass rate approaching ever closer to 100%.
If you want to make education rigorous, you have to address that problem and then also try to address the K-12 education system that faces a similar but more extreme version of the same issue (because not being able to properly read and write are genuinely bad indicators for the majority of white collar jobs, and failing to graduate high school tends to indicate fundamental issues in that respect moreso than failing to graduate with a bachelor's, which usually just indicates immaturity / lack of money / boredom / a million other things that don't imply missing fundamental skills).
That difference in Asian societies as against Western ones doesn't come from "higher standards" or whatever; it comes from a much more mundane reason: not doing good in school here literally has immediate far-reaching consequences because everything is scarce and up for brutal competition.
In the West kids can randomly decide to drop entire years after high school, or even skip college altogether - because it's (apparently) easy to not be immediately destitute without a good job. In India and China children grow up witnessing how much of a divide that makes, and how thin the line seperating their fates from "respectable" to brutal poverty is. No kid growing in such an environment will take school lightly.
I wonder if, as inequality increases and the social safety net disappears in the USA, this will change. My parents told me “do what you love, as long as you work hard you’ll succeed and be fine.” I did what I loved (the arts), worked my ass off and succeeded, and wasn’t fine. Thank god I learned to code in the 20-teens, when competition was lower.
I most certainly will transmitting a different set of values to my kids. Not going to go full straight A’s psychopath because I’ve seen what that’s done to some peers, but unless I win the lottery my kids will not be being told to just “do what they love” (unless they happen to love applied math lol)
>In China students work very hard because they had to beat a tough competion to even be able to attend the University
This is an unfair comparison. The equivalent of those chinese students do work as hard in America - they just wouldn't be found at OP's school, there would be in a Tier 1 school.
Hint: in China, university admissions is based in large part on students's performance on the 高考, a national entrance exam, taken at the end of high school.
My experience with Chinese universities is they work so hard to pass the gaokao to get in then relax through university. This is common throughout all of east Asia. Maybe at top universities it’s different.
Readit News
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this
It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.
For example, I'm taking a physics course right now (electricity and magnetism). The concepts are difficult for me and I was hoping that the homework would help. So, I go to do the homework, but the homework is online. With the online homework I get five chances to get the problem correct, but there is zero partial credit, zero feedback, and every time I get the answer wrong, it negatively impacts my grade.
I have no chance to make mistakes and learn. At least with homework that was handed out back in the day, there was at least the possibility of partial credit being handed out. So my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.
Additionally, since students have been cheating, I think it gives professors a skewed perspective on how much time is actually needed to get work done, so the deadlines get moved up. This means I get even more pressure put on me when I'm just trying to learn and be a good student.
1990, "PLATO reached it's maximum enrollment, with 4,029 course seats and approximately 30 courses and other applications." Plato was decommissioned in 1994.
https://www.umass.edu/it/it-timeline
Honestly as an engineer some of schooling was learning enough just to get by. We always envied the non-engineers who had more freedom to choose classes they were fascinated by.
For me the Masters Degree gives a better chance to dive deep into a single topic.
So I quickly realized that, unlike, say, elementary school, a university is not a push system, it's a pull system. If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source. There's still plenty, but nobody is going to force-feed it to you. I read quite a lot beside the required books. I practiced quite a lot beside the lab practice (fortunately wielding a soldering iron or writing programs was a marketable skill; still is, but used to be, too). I asked my professors questions that were not entirely in the books; often that was during a few minutes after a lecture / classes / labs, so I got from them ideas and pointers to new directions to learn by myself.
Was it helpful in my career? Certainly yes, I started doing contract jobs three years before graduation, and then joined a bunch of interesting companies where that knowledge was somehow useful, mostly as a foundation of more specific skills.
I was certainly not alone; I knew (and often was friends with) a bunch of other students who craved knowledge and skills, and we helped each other shake these out of the university, past the transactional bounds. It wasn't all that hard, but it required a conscious effort.
Very certainly a large number of other students did more coasting than knowledge-mining. They got their diplomas, got some white-collar jobs that did not require such deep knowledge of engineering, I suppose, or started unrelated businesses.
I don't think in my experience students have changed all that much.
CC students have always felt more motivated in my opinion. But good Lord the quality of the education at the State level is abysmal. I am not saying there aren't quality professors and classes. There are.
There is however an alarming high number of poorly designed classes, nearly broken technology, poorly edited and badly written assignments, and questionable instruction.
I have to compare the quality and price with what I experienced in CC and it just makes me sad and depressed.
It sounds like your instructor has confused homework with quizzes, and the cheating issue demands some rethinking of the course pace and assessment system.
In physics and related fields, I have found fully worked problems to be very valuable. If your textbook includes some of these, I recommend reviewing them and working similar practice problems if possible. I wonder if things like supplementary texts, khan academy, or tutorials on youtube might help as well.
As you note, systems like ChatGPT could be helpful for explaining or working through problems, but obviously you won't learn anything if you rely on them for doing your own problem sets.
I am currently holding my copy of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffiths in my hands; somehow it is rarely more than a metre from where I work!
Are such textbooks still popular and used (i.e. mandatory to purchase) in courses like this?
4 points per assignment. Pass the assignment to a peer for grading. If they wrote down the problem and attempted it: 3 points. One more point if the logic and steps were followable, even if wrong.
The answers were in the back of the book. The homework grade should reflect attempts and practice, not mastery as that is what exams are for.
Have you considered trying to do the problems yourself, away from the computer, then checking your work with ChatGPT or the like?
But if my classes were 300 people, I couldn't do that.
I also have relaxed deadlines so students can take more time if they need it, and request it in advance.
The object is to learn stuff. That's where I'm aiming.
Also know that there's a yin and yang here. You're in a broken system--but the system used to be broken in other ways. Your point about there being too many resources strikes me as fascinating and true--and yet we have efforts like Three Blue One Brown taking teaching to a whole new level. People who figure out how to learn are always in a golden age.
even if not, try putting the textbook and the question into an AI (I use the paid version of gemini, the $20/ month is the best money you’ll ever spend at college), then as it to explain how to answer the question. Then ask it to generate a similar question, and then give you feedback to you as you try to answer it. Then try and answer it step by step, repeat as many times as you like until you understand and keep getting the right answer, then answer the actual homework question.Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss!
Mind you, I already apply linear algebra daily—I simply refuse to waste my time computing basic operations on matrices by hand when that's why we have computers and partial credit isn't available.
"It’s the phones, stupid"
That's it. Every other variable, including the transactional nature of acquiring a middle class job, has stayed the same. People are just getting dumber [1], and the phones are causing this drop.
I am as tech forward as the next person. I think AI deserves the time to figure out what it is. But the phones have basically shown us where all their negatives and positives are. Time to regulate, get the phones out of the schools. If you're in one of these states [2] get behind the active legislation, if not, start it!
[1]: https://theweek.com/science/have-we-reached-peak-cognition
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-bans-states-e6d...
The whole way through this sorry excuse for an essay I was thinking, "so your fail rate is way up, right? Right??" Insert padmé meme here. Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money! I'm not kidding, the author actually said this. Well, apparently reading all those novels about the philosophy of the Underground Man didn't help because that's the only explanation needed; phones are entirely superfluous. If a degree is a transaction and you keep lowering the price, of course people will pay that lower price.
It's also silly to claim there's an issue with phones specifically, given the author says he can't stop people using laptops in class because the administration is easily manipulated through claims of disability. One student spent the whole time gambling on a laptop and the professor didn't even notice. Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.
It's pretty clear outside of academia in restaurants, in lines waiting, in bed in the morning or evening... the phones (and screens) have won our attention.
Do people actually quit their addiction?
You could take every positive child development intervention known to man, and get what like, +5 IQ points?
But be related to a Senator, and you will be hundreds of times more likely to become a Senator (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/21/wh...) Show me how phone use delivers a +/-10,000% affect on outcomes the way nepotism does, and then I'll start listening to all this nonsense about variables and dumber students.
If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.
Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.
These skills, and the understanding of how to use them, are the real goal -the material is just there to keep your interest.
Yes, obviously, if you are going into chemistry then learn chemistry and so on. But round out your course with other things. Oceanography can give you insight to computer science, literature can promote better communication.
Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.
But if you are at college now, or perhaps going soon, try and see beyond the next assignment. Try and see the process which underlies it.
Most of all college is there to teach you to think. So stop doing for just a moment and start thinking.
Once you see behind the curtain you can't unsee it. And ironically even if I tell you it's there, I can't make you look. Experience doesn't work like that.
Grow up with a safety net, you’ll enjoy the process.
Grow up poor and/or with people depending on you and you focus on the end state?
I really love this. I'll try and bear this in mind over the next few years.
I'm a mature-aged student going for their second degree (CS the first time, science this time). I am loving the subject but it's hard at the beginning because the amount of new stuff I have to absorb is overwhelming. At the times when I have a bit of a breather -- either when I'm "getting it" or during mid-semester break -- I find the subject (biology) wonderful.
Of course, it has impacted all parts of my life - I think differently than I did before studying engineering, and I sometimes try to apply this problem solving in non-technical parts of life with.. mixed results.
> If you're lucky (and I was) at some point you understand that it's not about the material, it's about the process.
> Research, assimilate, question, formulate, communicate.
But then follow that with:
> Alas a large number of folks will leave college and never grasp the real value of why they were there. That's OK. The world needs workers.
Like... I guess it depends what precisely you mean by "workers" but in my mind at least, if we're thinking similarly, that would be white-collar office workers. And what you describe in the previous quoted section is, IMHO, a perfectly reasonable breakdown of what college is preparing them to do. But then the subsequent line feels like a criticism of the output of that.
If so, why would transactional-ism be the cause?
Read on:
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.
And then, crucially:
> Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.
When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.
Don't hate the player — hate the game.
Only so long as the college doesn't devalue the credential.
If I interview a few people with a CS degree from College A and I find they don't know the basics of programming - then the credential loses value; why would I bother interviewing people from such a college?
So colleges have to balance the needs of their stakeholders - employers/ graduates want the credential to be a sign of education; and current students who want good grades and less work.
The "implied terms of the transaction" have always been that current students have to learn enough that they're not devaluing the credential.
Full. Stop.
That said: plenty of big name research universities are housing folks who do little except study coding interviewing questions for FAANG and expect you to be impressed that they spent 9-18 months at one.
As an aside: I don’t care that someone is ex-Amazon; it’s their work that will impress me, not where they worked previously and were presumably let go because they couldn’t hack it.
Let’s not lump all students into groups simply because of the college they attended. I went to a regional university because they offered the biggest D1 athletic scholarship for early signing; not because I cared about anything other than free education. Similarly, my masters was free through my employer.
Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.
I get the sense the author just doesn’t have the same rapport with students they likely once did. Students stop coming to class and don’t go to office hours and they don’t know why.
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.
I went to college 20 years ago and lots of professors distributed slides and lecture notes to students. I assume it’s even more common now. Yes, I wouldn’t ask a speaker to let me read their private notes, but that’s not how PowerPoint slides shown in class are generally perceived.
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That is a purely rational take, but people are seldom rational. My pet theory is that inertia is a huge reason why people choose college. Majority of people who go to college do it as a continuation of 10-12 years of continuous schooling (or partying). As they climb educational or social hierarchies they are constantly reminded that college is a next step. Thus going to college feels far more familiar and less scary than joining the workforce. Thus, going to college is a default choice for many.
After the gut decision is made it can be wrapped into whatever rational argument.
"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. They just have better tools to respond to the same incentives.
I'm not saying it's good - it's clearly an unsustainable trend, but the students are not the ones driving it, so they're not equipped to stop it.
It’s worth pointing out that this is a perception that has been cultivated. Position the degree as first and foremost a job credential, cut state support, and force students and their parents to directly bear the cost for this supposedly individualized benefit through higher tuition. “The customer is always right” and no learning need occur.
“Starving the Beast” is a documentary on this topic: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5444928/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_p...
If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.
I could see even, that employers themselves would take up the cost to train if they lacked qualified applicants. Imagine for example there wasn't a billion CS students. All the company still need programmers, so what are they going to do?
IMO, instead of funding universities, simply give people a stipend to be used for some sort of educational purpose.
> My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.
They (the prof class) created this situation. They could have upheld their standards and seen the number of students go down but they preferred to fill their classrooms at the expense of quality.
This is like a manager who is complaining that no one can code while offering McDonalds hourly rates.
I failed a student recently. He did no work for the entire quarter, then insisted I tutor him through all the homework assignments until he passed with an A. I said no, you failed. I was verbally harassed and threatened for weeks by the student, had other staff actively harassed and threatened, heard a member of staff get physically assaulted by the student, and the administration ultimately sided with the student. They came to me and said "You will run a private 1-person classroom with just this student so he can make up the work and his graduation date won't be impacted. Also we won't pay you for this, and we're going to 'cluster' the class so it doesn't show up on your credit load. If you refuse, it may impact the future of your program, and your tenured role."
In other words, I was heavily punished for failing a student by being assigned an extra class for no pay, in such a way that they can avoid paying me more later that year for a course overload, and my job was threatened. Why would I fail a student if this is the outcome?
At this point failing even a single student can lead to loss of employment. This may sound ridiculous, but my college just slashed 30% of its programs, cut a dozen tenured professors (including me), shut down all bachelor's programs, and killed all computer science programs. They cited low enrollment, but they also said "Even if we ran your programs at full capacity we would be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Process that for a second. About a dozen tenured professors are now unemployed because a school is so financially mismanaged that even in maxed classrooms they are losing money. This is the reality at many colleges, and it's about to get worse with the DoE and other funding cuts.
As people in engineering regularly say, when you use KPIs to determine performance and promotions, your workers will maximize those KPIs. Professors are no different when it comes to moving up the career ladder, or achieving employment security.
In my opinion it was mostly a rite of passage thing. It was the first time I was granted independence including personal responsibility, a brand new social network, sex, etc.
It was just adulthood with training wheels. I’m not going to argue that sounds like an ideal social structure but it was very useful to me. The raw alternative of jumping into the workforce probably would have led to bad outcomes even if it all worked out economically.
The stepping stone to employment felt like it was just sort of assumed like finishing high school. I felt nothing getting either diploma.
I might feel some serious existential dread if the market I was entering resembled the one now though.
I was one of those 'rounds to zero' students, in the physical sciences, long ago. I wanted to learn how to verify a hypothesis by looking at the evidence. And after 4 years, I was greatly disappointed by the lack of significant lab exposure. What we did get was cookbook labs, mostly on the very basic stuff. What we also got after that was theory, theory and more theory. Usually from unenthused teachers, going through the motions. From my perspective, it was mostly a waste of time.
Years later I learned what Feynman meant when he said "Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." Maybe if I'd heard that, I've have dropped out after two years instead of hoping I'd get to the part where someone cared.
What OOP is lamenting is that that's no longer possible.
They did the steps, got all the regional accreditations etc. but its all self driven and structured to cater to speed running a college degree.
You can learn alot at WGU, don't get me wrong, but they are clearly just fine if you are there simply to speed run getting that diploma.
Entrenched companies use this to their advantage and have their own recruitment pipelines.
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Further - even if someone wants to learn these subjects, most don't see the value in paying for a college course to learn them. Close to no one, after receiving a college degree in a subject, says "I want to learn more about X, I'm going to go ahead and pay $4,000 to take a class in it at the nearby college."
Plenty of people learn things after they graduate. Just about everyone does so in a better manner than a college course. Colleges are only viable because they dangle degrees over students' heads, and then they complain that students are only coming for the degrees.
My brother and I graduated from university a little over 4 years ago and we were both top students (he studied music and I studied applied math). There were classes where he and I (without exaggeration) skipped more than 90% of the lectures.
I understand that some professors view this as disrepsectful, but when your lectures consist of simply reading off the lecture notes that you're going to upload online anyway, lectures become a waste of time that could be better spent with more studying on our own.
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes.
It makes you wonder whether the lecturer actually values the time of the students. Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
I understand that a professor may dream of lectures passing through students' brains before being recorded in high-quality, personalized notes. The reality is that lectures are easier to follow when you aren't frantically trying to copy down the lecture slides as well as what the instructor is saying (after all, it might be on the exam!)
Presentation slides are valuable instructional materials, and withholding them is unlikely to improve learning. In my experience, the best lecture-based courses (in science/math/engineering at least) provide material in at least three ways: in the textbook or readings, in the spoken lectures, and in presentation slides or provided lecture notes – with reinforcement and active learning via problem sets, labs, and/or projects. Interactive review sessions, discussion sections, and tutorials can also help.
Half the time my lecture notes consist of a couple of problems to use as examples and nothing else.
Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.
The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.
In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.
The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.
Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.
Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.
I'm somewhat convinced that the average person can't sit and listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes straight without their mind wandering. If a lecture is non interactive, then just make it available in written form and use that lecture time for seminars instead.
Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.
One thing it helps with is for professors with their own special take on a subject where you have to use the exact right obscure method that only exists in their 20 year old slides and nowhere else. Or if the textbook is garbage or doesn't exist. When your course context is not the latest and greatest information, having the slides is handy for passing.
I come from physics, but basically at the undergraduate level above introductory courses most of the professors simply wanted to talk about physics with students. They didn't even want to lecture they wanted to have a conversation. I think this is what is missing here. Building personal relationships with students based on the interest in the material. The author fails at this because they won't even share power point slides and think they are an arbiter of knowledge that the student must write down as notes.
in fact, this is why I currently want to find opportunities for teaching in addition to my current role as a research scientist. I miss discussing fundamental topics with people who are building an understanding and not already experts on some topic.
I understand that one could jump to such a conclusion; and I’ve attended more than my fair share of talks where the speaker over little more than I could glean from looking over the printouts for a few minutes.
But here, can we truly come to the conclusion that the slides are being read verbatim, or whether they are placeholders for a richer discussion that comes out verbally in class? We obviously cannot know, but I can’t say that I’d pre-commit to skipping before knowing more.
Also, the taking of notes is a distraction in a class. You can't pause the teacher while writing or rewind, so whatever the teacher explains while you're writing is just missed. This isn't true for everyone, but many people can't blindly type while paying attention to something else.
I prefer to just listen and interact with the teacher over writing down what they say (and is already written on their slides).
Rather than sitting through a 50 minute lecture, I found a similar lecture on the same topic (c debugging, I think it was), and pointed out that the MIT instructor covered the same topic, in more depth, in real-time, with a live demo, in overall less time than it took the State University professor to explain. It was concise, wasted no time, and gave me clear information on what I needed to know with minimal extra examples.
And my course instructor hated me pointing that out.
[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/
The students referred to in the article don't have the wherewithal to study effectively on their own; the lectures are their only hope for learning, assuming they were to take advantage of them. Also, many classes are not simply lectures, but an opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. By not coming to class, one robs themselves of that opportunity.
Jeez I wish they would have uploaded all the material online, not everyone does that (perhaps thinking if they do it lots of people won't show up). And even if they do it , it is often sparse slides with half the material passed in person - so very missing. It's enough to not understand the first 10 minutes of the lecture and then you're completely lost for another frustrating 35 minutes ( or more, some lectures are double). It's enough not to fully remember the last lecture and you don't follow what the professor is talking about now. It's not a fun experience and happened to me a lot - the material is hard, my intelligence is good but nothing stellar so it's super easy to become lost.
The truth is it's probably better for the average person to study at their own pace with an LLM or something like that, I had a real rough time following computer science lectures. I can ask the LLM to stop, to re explain, to re explain in a different way etc etc. If I'm tired I can stretch a bit. I think its the really bright kids or those with superior concentration and preparation skills that got something out of those lectures, the rest of us hated it.
If the university isn't going to invest anything in lecturing, why should I attend the lectures?
But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.
From experience on the professor's side, the problem isn't the brilliant students who show up to one class and ace the exam like everyone in here seems to have been. The problem is the students who miss most lectures and get 50% or lower because they (and, increasingly, most students these days) don't actually understand how to study from a textbook.
So I could listen to lecture at 1.5x speed and skip any parts I thought were filler. Of course I didn't show up to class...
Although I do sympathize with many of the author’s broader points.
Unfortunately, some colleges doesn't value efficiency nearly as much as they do their self respect. Because of which we now have strict attendance requirements (75%) for every course.
I would add that reading this piece and the attitude the author has towards students, I doubt I would want to attend their class (or possibly even take it in the first place, professors have reputations).
(Things are of course different when there are practical considerations to the teaching, such as labwork, which of comes with a degree of associated testing anyway.)
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TFA omits this trend (seemingly since wide spread availability of the internet) to being solitary - the view that nothing of value can come from interactions with peers or superiors other than wasted time. [this is different from missing classes because of laziness which is implied].
You raise a good point, but in this situation I would usually either: 1) go to office hours or 2) ask my question to other capable students.
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But, seriously, how's that lack of engagement working out in "the rest of your life"? Meetings? Why bother? Seems like a lecture. Reply to Slack or Email? Does that sound like something you ought to do? Or a judgement call, based on your intuition of their value?
The article mentions that most students are only in it for the diploma anyway, but somehow most people are yet to realize that those diplomas will soon be toilet paper, precisely because they no longer require any actual effort to obtain.
I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.
I asked around with my fellow students what they thought about them and not one minded that they were essentially enrolled in a "how to proompt" class. When I asked one student that it was all nice and well that you pass the module but isn't the ideal outcome that you actually know the language by the end? He laughed and said "Yeah sure, do you think the same about maths"?
Besides that, these are ridiculous claims from the teacher. LLMs are powerful but in the end they are still a tool with random output, which needs to be carefully evaluated. Especially Python is my personal view much more subtle than people assume on first contact. Especially the whole numpy universe is like a separate language and quite complicated for a beginner if you want to write fast and efficient code.
I've had courses where LLMs where allowed for projects but we had to provide prompts.
> I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.
Knowing the education system in Germany rather well, I ask myself in which (kind of) educational establishment this happened, since I'd consider this to be rather unusual for at least universities (Universitäten) and Fachhochschulen (some other system of tertiary education that has no analogue in most countries).
You should bring this up with the department chair of your study. The purpose of your CS degree is to build a strong theoretical foundation, replacing programming with prompting directly goes against this.
Given that it is billed as a Python course that is reasonable.
But, to be fair, the intent of the course is almost certainly to provide background in the tools so that you can observe CS concepts learned later. Which is kind of like astronomy majors learning how to use a telescope so that they can observe its concepts. If Google image search provided the same imagery just as well as a telescope, the frustration in being compelled to teach rudimentary telescope operation is understandable. It is not like the sciences are studied for the tools.
Wow! I think this is an extreme comment to make. I get it.. but WOW! It really makes you wonder about the future of universities. If the answer is to let AI do our work.. even to cheat in final exams... what is the point of universities? Not only are we talking about Software Engineers dying.. but so if his lecturer job!
Anyway..
I am developer for over 20 years.
I have kids -- both are not even teenagers... but there are times I think to myself "is it worth them learning XYZ" because of AI?
By the time my eldest get his first job.. we are talking (atleast) around year 2032. We have to accept that AI is going to do some pretty cool things. HOWEVER, I still "believe" that AI will work alongside software developers. We still need to communicate with it - to do that, you need to understand how to communicate with it.
Point is, if any of my kids express interest in computer programming in the next year or so, I will HAPPILY encourage them to invest time in it. What I have to accept is that they will use AI.. a lot.. to build something in their chosen language.
I can see this being a typical question for new coders:-
"Can you create a flappy bird game in python"
Sure.. AI might spit something out in a matter of minutes and it might even work, but are they really learning? I think I would encourage my kids to ban using AI for (around) 4 days a week.
At the end of the day it is very difficult to know our future. Sometimes I have to think about my future.. not just my kids. I mean, would my job as a software engineer be over? If so, when? What would I do?
Overall It doesn't not bother me because I do think my role will transition with AI but for the younger generation, it can be a grey area understanding where they fit in all this.
I try to be optimistic that the next 100 years will be a very exiciting time for the human race (if we do not destroy ourselves beforehand)
To counter your lecturer, I am reminded of a John Carmack quote: "Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul"
Not even low-level -- any programming. If you really like to code, you are going to learn it whether in School, College, or University. To me, the best times I learned was outside of official education, shutting myself away in my bedroom. "Official education" is nothing more that doing what you are told for a peice of paper. What is its worth these days?
Whether AI exists or not - those that like coding will invest the time to code. This is what will seperate average to good programmers or developers. What seperates a good programmer to a great programmer will be their lack or AI generated code... to DIY!
Thats my view... but this is a large topic and I am only scratching the surface.
Rather than simple laziness, it was often because they felt intimidated by their lack of knowledge and wanted to be more productive.
However, the result of a ChatGPT based workflow is that reasoning often is the very last resort. Ask the LLM for a solution, paste it in, get an error, paste that in, get a new solution, get another error, ask for a fix again, etc. etc.
Before someone chimes in to say this is like Stack Overflow: no it isn't. Real people expect you to put some work and effort into first describing your problem, then solving it. You would rarely find someone willing to go through such an exercise with you, and they probably wouldn't hallucinate broken code to you while doing it.
15 minutes of this and it turns out to be something silly that ChatGPT would never catch - e.g. you have installed a very old version of the Python module for some internal company reason. But because the reasoning muscle isn't being built up, and the context isn't being built up, they can't figure it out.
They didn't see the bit on the docs page that says "this function was added in version 1.5" because they didn't write the function call, and didn't open the documentation, and perhaps wouldn't even consider opening the documentation because that's what ChatGPT is for. In fact, they might not have even consciously chosen that library because again.. that's what ChatGPT is for.
That's exactly what I've seen as well. The students don't even read the code, let alone try to reason through how it works. They just develop hand-eye coordination for copy-pasting.
> Rather than simple laziness, it was often because they felt intimidated by their lack of knowledge and wanted to be more productive.
Part of it really is laziness, but what you say is also true. Unfortunately, this is the nature of learning. Reading or listening is by itself a weak stimulus for building neural pathways. You need to actively recall and apply, and struggle with problems until they yield. It is so much easier to look up a solution somewhere. And now you don't even to look anything up anymore -- just ask.
Real coding can, unfortunately, be as bad as that or worse. Here is one very famous HN comment from 2018, and I know what he is talking about because participating in this madness was my first job after university, dispelling a lot of my illusions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
I went into that job (of porting Oracle to another Unix platform for an Oracle platform partner) full of enthusiasm and gave up finding any meaning or enjoyment after the first few weeks, or trying to understand or improve anything. If AI could do at least some of that job it would actually a big plus.
(it's the working-on-Oracle-code comment if you didn't already guess it)
I think there's a good chance code becomes more like biology. You can understand the details, but there are sooo many of them, and there are way too many connections directly and indirectly across layers. You have to find higher level methods because it's too much for a direct comprehension.
I saw a main code contributor in a startup I worked at work kind of like that. Not all his fault, forced to move too quickly and the code was so ill defined, not even the big boss knowing what they wanted and only talking in meta terms and always coming up with new sometimes contradicting ideas. The code was very hard to comprehend and debug, especially since much of it was distributed algorithms. So his approach was running it with demo data, observing higher level outcomes, and tweaking this or that component until it kind of worked. It never worked reliably, it was demo-quality software at best. But he managed to implement all the new ideas from management at least.
I found that style interesting and could not dismiss it outright, even though I really really did not want to have to debug that thing in production. But I saw something different from what I was used to, focus on a higher level, working when you just can't have the same depth of understanding of what you are doing as one would traditionally like. Given my Oracle experience, I saw how this would be a useful style IRL for many big long-running projects, like that Oracle code, that you had no chance of comprehending or improving without "rm -rf" and a restart which you could not do.
I think education needs to also show these more "biology-level complexity" and more statistical higher level approaches. Much of our software is getting too complex for the traditional low-level methods.
I see LLMs as just part of such a toolkit for the future. On the one hand, there is supplying code for "traditional" smaller projects, where you still have hope to be in control and have at least the seniors fully understand the system. On the other hand, LLMs could help with too-complex systems, not with making them understandable, that is impossible for those messy systems, but with being able to still productively work with them, add new features and debug issues. Code such as in the Oracle case. A new tool for even higher levels of messiness and complexity in our systems, which we won't be able to engineer away due to real life constraints.
For example, you could have ChatGPT write your code for you, then explain it to you step by step.
It can be an interactive conversation.
Or you could copy/paste it.
In one case it acts as a tutor.
In another case it just does your work for you.
I've used AI as a crutch for a time, and felt my skills get worse. Now I've set it up to never have it give me entire solutions, just examples and tips on how to get it done.
I've struggled with Shader Programming for a while, tried to learn it from different sources and failed a lot. It felt like something unreachable for me, I don't really know why really. But with the help of an AI that's fine-tuned for mentoring, I really understood some of the concepts. It outlined what I should do and asked socratic questions that made me think. I've gotten way better at it and actually have a pretty solid understanding of the concepts now (well, I think).
But sometimes at work I do give in and get it to write an entire script for me, out of laziness and maybe boredom. Their significant advances as of late with "extended thinking" and the likes made them much more likely to one-shot the writing of a slightly complex script... Which in turn made it harder to not just say "hey, that sounds like boring work, let's have the AI do the biggest part of it and I'll patch up the rest".
There are still ways that LLMs can be used in that case, eg having them review your code, suggest alternatives to your code, eg more idiomatic ways to do sth, when you delve into sth new etc, and treat their output critically of course, but actually writing one's code is important for some kinds of understanding.
This can be very useful when you are learning programming.
You don't always have a tutor available and you shouldn't only rely on tutors.
It might be useful when you start learning a new programming language/framework, but you should learn on how to articulate a problem and search for solutions, e.g. going through stackoverflow posts and identify if the post applies and solves your problem.
After a while (took way too long for me) you realize that the best way to solve problems is by looking up the documentation/manpage of a project/programming language/whatever and really try to understand the problem at its core.
Basically most people will be idiots, except for the mental exercise type people who like using their mental muscles.
So education will stop being a way to move up in life.
I feel like that was always the case, at least since like 10 years ago and by my definition.
I've always felt my real education in software engineering started at work.
20 odd years later I lead a large engineering team and see the same with a lot of graduates we hire. There's a few exceptions but most are as clueless as I was at that age.
I don't get why schools can't just get strict in response to these issues. No electronics in class, period. Accessibility problems can be fixed by having each impaired student get a volunteer scribe for the class.
You're in school to learn, and electronics hinder in-person education more than they help, especially as ChatGPT style AI is available on them.
The real damage is in the brains and attention spans, traditional school just can't compete with the massive dopamine overstimulus of System A thinking students get every day for an average of 6-8h outside school, by simply requiring focused System B reasoning on tiresome and (comparatively) dull tasks while enforcing dopamine withdrawal.
This is a bit less cut-and-dried, but IMO cryptocurrency has normalized this kind of view where simply wasting resources is itself a way to generate, or at least represent, value.
LLMs are, in fact, one of the few products in the past decades that - at least for now - align with this vision. That's because they empower the end users directly. Anyone can just go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai to access a tool that will understand their problem, no matter how clumsily formulated, and solve it, or teach them how to solve it, or otherwise address it in a useful fashion. That's pure and quite general force multiplier.
But don't you worry, plenty of corporations and countless startups are hard at work to, like with all computing before, strip down the bicycle and offer you Uber and theme park rides for your mind.
So if I can outsource the mundane, annoying and repetitive parts of SW development (like typing the coding) to a machine, so that I can focus on the parts I enjoy (debugging, requirements gathering, customer interaction, architecture etc), what's wrong with that?
If the end product is good and fulfills the customers needs who cares if a large part of it was written by a machine and not by a human?
I also wish we can go back to the days we were coding in assembly in stead of say JavaScript, but that's not gonna happen professionally for 99% of jobs, you either use JS to ship quickly or get run over by the companies who use JS while you write assembly. ML assisted coding will be the next step.
Which is understandable. All societies are constrained by lack of experts / intelligence. Think about how relatively inaccessible healthcare is, even in rich countries.
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I had a data structures professor (over a year ago now) that actively encouraged a class of sophomores - most of whom were fresh out of "intro to Java" - to have Copilot (GPT-4 at the time I believe) help churn out assignment code on the university's dime.
Being somewhat ahead and an avowed LLM hater, I mostly forgot about this and plowed through the assignments unassisted... until the first midterm (on paper, in person) hit. The mean was something like a 40.
I eventually spoke to some classmates that weren't in my immediate group, and predictably heard several variations on "I let Copilot become a crutch."
Ugh. Fortunately there was ample opportunity to turn grades around, but I'm sure some people are still feeling that bad advice in their GPAs.
A friend who's a high-school teacher says all the students want to be software engineers, so there's also a glut of them coming...
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Having recently finished studies and still being in contact with teaching assistants today, the problem is big. Attendance going down, participation going down, courses and curriculum simplified. I already noticed a big shift after Covid and I'm glad I missed the ChatGPT era.
Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding. In our efforts to standardise everything and come to objective exams, we've rewarded a culture that just intends to pass with the least amount of effort. Next to that are the burdens of being a student; if I didn't have to work most nights of the week, I'm sure I'd have put more effort into studying.
Lectures were often boring and questions would be answered by referring to pages in a textbook. Maybe with recorded media, we should revisit the use of lectures.
All in all, I don't see how academia can keep the standards high in current society. We'll see how it goes.
I remember being a poor student burning through my savings. I had no patience for humanities and anything that didn't directly help me get gainful employment.
Years later, I love those things, mostly because I am free to pursue them at my own pace, without worrying about maintaining a high GPA, courting companies that offer internships, building up my portfolio, and learning the things that are actually related to my job. That's on top of working my way through school, trying to make friends in a new city, and pursuing happiness.
I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.
I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about.
Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me
This was definitely the case for me.
However, it always left me with the idea of “then why did I study?”. To get a job, of course, but in retrospect a better path might’ve been to work and then study at a later phase in life.
If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.
Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.
Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.
You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.
I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.
It doesn't matter. There is literally no assignment you can give students that they won't cheat on. In an intro college astronomy class, "Look at these pictures of planets, what do think is interesting about them?" or "Walk around your house and look at the different types of light bulbs, what kinds do you have?" Both of these will include 20% ChatGPT responses.
The hardest course I took at uni had a final oral exam and weekly homework assignment. Your final grade would be the average of all the homework assignments, but the final oral exam decided if you passed (with previous mentioned grade) or failed.
I thought that was a great way to do it, you can cheat your way through the course but in the end you’ll fail the oral exam. However, it was more subjective.
I’ve sat in other classes which were indeed boring but I don’t think this is the common denominator. Undergrads are just high schoolers with a different title.
The students from our schools foreign branch that come here for a semester or so are leagues beyond local students.
Haha, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's great this guy wrote a textbook, but perhaps he should have authored a series of documentaries.
Perhaps reading dense texts isn't actually the best way to make an impression on a students mind, but that's just all we had up until about 20 years ago.
I think Khan Academy is really great because of the video content.
It’s also clear that kids whose parents restrict phone use seem to have superpowers compared to those that don’t.
A good starting point would be fully banning all phones for the entirety of the school day in K-12.
Why is this obvious? Unless you’re talking CS = Programming a specific language, I think it’d be better for the K-12 version of CS to be completely analog save for maybe a “lab” for students in later years of high school.
Of course, this kind of thing is easy to do wrong. Programs like D.A.R.E. and THRIVE tried going the way of fear tactics which seems to really not work well. We need to have an open and honest discussion about "yes, this is fun. But it DOES have a bad side" instead.
The last sticking point there is that it assumes people will be rational and come to the conclusion of using with moderation. Hopefully people can be rational... Otherwise I think there's no hope for us in solving the brainrot epidemic.
From my own experience and that of fellow parents that I talked to, explanations will be dismissed outright by the all-knowing teenagers, and any attempt to have a rational conversation on the topic will fail. Just like any addict, kids will deny that they are addicted. I had to act once the smartphone addiction reached a disaster level. What worked the best for me was "no you cannot bring your phone to school or use it before the homework is done, that's my decision and I don't have to provide you with any explanation." Did this generate some resentment and a few tantrums? You bet, but I got the result I wanted, peace of mind and homework done on time. I disagree with you.
I think it should be fine to outright ban them in certain contexts, like classroom learning; just as they are outright banned (usually) in theaters or playhouses or places of worship.
And to cite your example, even in the most liberal jurisdictions I think it's not acceptable for students to take drugs in the classroom. Phones are basically the same thing.
They may be 'forbidden fruit', but does that means that it would lead to more use of them?
Do you think people drank more in 2020 or 1920 during prohibition?
Do you think people smoked more weed in 2025 or, say, 1985 when it was less legal?
Do you think there is more gambling in 2025, or in 1925 when the laws banning it were still fresh?
I think you'll reach the conclusion that outright banning does in fact reduce the usage of the vice.
How many 10 years old smoke weed, have sex, and drink alcohol ?
10 years old spending hours per days on their phone on the other hand...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-06/mobile-phone-ban-canb...
It's surprising that this isn't done everywhere.
Note, kids from year 4 (9 years old) in many parts of Australia do have a Chromebook.
I think you chose well
I make sure that my daughter (6) sees me writing in my notebook, reading, making things etc. More often than not, she then wants to join in.
I will hold out giving her a smartphone as long as possible, and up until she has one, I will try and show her all the other fun things.
It's the apps, which overcharge everyone's (not just kids!) brains, by algorithmically "mAxImiZinG eNgaGeMent"
It's time to ban them all. Okay that's a bit much. Ban all algorithmic feeds, all apps must adhere to strictly chronological feed of the strictly subscribed authors.
There, the phone addiction crisis solved.
I am part of the generation that grew up with MMORPG's from early childhood (I was about 9 years old when I made my first RuneScape account), but approaching 30, I don't game at all anymore for the exact same reasons I don't touch cannabis anymore. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, it's all the same thing for teenagers. At a neurological level, these platforms are as highly addicting and neural-network-altering as actual psychoactive pharmaceuticals, legal or otherwise.
Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.
Instead, tax ad impressions per day per user on a sliding scale that makes it quickly unprofitable to display more than a handful of ads and use the money to fund media literacy classes in schools. Restrict the number and types of advertising that can be shown to children and adolescents, like forbidding animated ads.
I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV. Cutting back to chronological feeds might improve some things but I don't think that's the root of the issue.
I would suggest the primary difference between then and now is accessibility. As a kid, my screen time was limited not just by my parents indulgence but the social pressure from using a shared device. Smart phones let you carry your personal distraction with you.
I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.
I vaguely recall too students back in the era where our biggest distraction was MSN messenger and our university forums. They kept both off until late at night.
We're letting people experience the downsides of the attention economy when it's almost (if not entirely) too late to avoid the negatives.
Love this phrase. What might happen is that the next generation, upon seeing this opportunity, will do the opposite of their elders and highly value focus, and more readily dismiss quick gains.
1) Parents in the US are overworked, underpaid and (increasingly) unable to participate in the lives of their children. It should come as zero surprise then that phones are used as a way to get kids out of their hair. If you don't fix this problem then banning phones entirely won't matter, because parents will yell, scream and quite literally assault your schools for taking away phones from their kids.
2) Our K-12 educational system is broken. Kids are graduating with lower literacy rates than ever. College is functioning less as higher education and more like remedial programs, having to teach basic topics that should've been covered as part of the core curriculum.
3) Teachers are also underpaid, overworked and having to deal with the deficiencies in parenting as well as the advent of AI making cheating significantly easier and harder to detect.
These three factors all compound to create a whole generation that we're effectively failing. And given the attacks/teardown of college as an institution, I fear we're going to have our own version of the 'lost generation' until people get angry enough to fix it or our business capabilities collapse.
I can only speak anecdotally. Way before smartphones were invented, I had enforced limits on computer time to 1-2 hours a day via time tracking software. All this did was breed resentment between me and my parents that led to conflict and punishment. As soon as I got to college I was back to being on my computer all night nearly every day, relieved that I didn't have to put up with them anymore.
The technology restriction wasn't the beginning and end of my mentality all through college. The true cause was how I was raised and my relationship with my parents. They were the only real bullies I've ever had.
People will always attack apps, algorithms and corporations since they're easy to feel powerless about. But if a developing person is given good enough reason to doomscroll so that they able to forget the pain that was imbued in them from an early age, then 1) the outcome in the article results, 2) a major underlying factor in the analysis of why we're failing young people will be missed, and people will assume it's solely the fault of addictive "algorithms" and capitalism, and 3) it's unlikely that people are going to open up about stressors as personal as childhood trauma (a cause) as opposed to behavioral addictions like doomscrolling (a symptom), so the focus will be on attacking and regulating the symptoms, and this cycle of trauma will only exacerbate and repeat itself.
A certain level of trauma can steal decades away from developing persons and set them up for failure, with or without smartphones, and smartphones only make their problems worse. Not to mention, past a certain age people start to blame you for your own failings, even though many of them have roots in actions taken against you that were not your fault, and this only contributes to feelings of misery and hopelessness. Knowing this firsthand, it's no wonder so many people find little else interesting than doomscrolling all day - myself included.
You can regulate apps and restrict smartphones, but I have no idea how to fix bad parenting/emotional trauma at scale. What goes on in families is private by its nature, emotional abuse is legitimized if you never lay a hand on the child and some arbitrary standard of defiance is crossed, and intergenerational trauma can have completely arbitrary causes going back decades, which end up transmitted as meaningless stressors to a victim trapped in an endless search of anything at all to hold close to them...
Two years later, I heard that some students didn't pass the exam and wrote a letter to the faculty director, demanding an easy way. The professor was replaced with another one and they passed the class.
Even in reputable public universities, professors have to adjust their teaching to make sure enough students are satisfied with their facutly choice so they can continue receiving government funding.
Discrete maths back in my days was one of those almost universal weed-out classes which got rid of people with limited abstract thinking ability who weren't willing or able to get over that with hard work. Very heavy correlation between how well you did in that class and core CS subjects.
80% of students failing the exam is the fault of the teacher or fault of university for having admitted unprepared students.
I might suffer from a bias, but what I did was study to pass the test. I don't expect everyone to pass every exam as I don't expect everyone to get a degree. Universities need to be hard if they want to keep their reputation and not be outlived by online courses on YouTube. A degree, more than a certificate that the student attended some classes, should prove that a person is capable of thinking, studying and doing hard work.
Is it to filter out ppl that cannot do well with the teaching style of the teacher or is to transfer a skill and knowledge into the student?
This has always been my pet peeve. My classes were mostly like this. I like to think and dig into topics and instead of doing that, there was regurgitation without any pause. Whoever could write fast and have breathing space to think won. I wish they had given out the notes upfront, use a portion of the class to go through the overall thing and then use the rest for getting into the tougher parts/Q&A.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/wp-content/uploads...
Certainly there is no time to read widely or sit around thinking or chatting with people who challenge our views .. no time to hang around campus and engage in conversation.
Gary of Garys Economics YT channel makes the point that inequality - in and of itself - robs the middle class of wealth :
Essentially he argues that the fraction of dollars allocated to the middle class is less, and the total amount of dollars is used to apportion 'real' wealth - ie. the total number of atoms, people, energy supply, houses, land, paintings does not go up in proportion, so the same dollar amount will buy less realworld goods.
Science and Technology - universities and startups - require an abundant over-apportionment of capital to make sure that we cast a large net in order to reach those rare talents that make significant advances.
The side effect of wasted funding - students who learn/research stuff they wont use in jobs, and startups that fail to find PMF and scale fast .. is a well educated, better society in which to live.
Relatively low inequality and high progressive tax post-WWII funded the new medicine and tech we now enjoy.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/labor-force-participation-...
The demographic across the board works less today than in the past. They might accrue debt, but they're not working it off while at college.
Further, you're even more wrong than you think you are.
The average student at college is now painfully average. This is because the average student is admitted to college at rates higher than ever before.
College participation rate is higher than in the past as well.
> Relatively low inequality and high progressive tax post-WWII funded the new medicine and tech we now enjoy.
You're not even correct about the taxes either. The taxes were TIED to the war.
So, IMO, standards should be kept very high. There is no need that all people finish the University. There are plenty of jobs that can be done without attending an University. But the problem is that even for those jobs there's a degree of competence required and some willing to work. And there are people who fail at low qualification jobs. Solution? Bring some competition. Hire only well prepared people.
Americans aren't used to having to compete. When they lose (and especially when they lose to foreigners) they get extremely resentful and behave as if something has been taken from them.
I think a large part of it is an entitlement issue that's pretty common in our culture. But there are also cultural undercurrents from resentful Americans who failed to get ahead in life that actively denigrate the concept of education and the educated.
I you even know how often I've heard students complain about "having my A taken away from me". It's insane, but it's also what to expect from a society just like you described who has been told that the point of school is to get good grades.
Now, a lot of students here are discovering that minmaxing to get a high GPA in a degree like compsci lands them firmly in jobless land if they failed to use those 4 years in an environment of learning to actually learn things. Doesn't even have to be from courses, things like student groups and competitions, research opportunities, etc.
Employers don't really want people whose sole interest is to do nothing and be rewarded for it.
I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”
Otherwise the potential downside of not graduating with at least a bachelor's degree is so devastating that the population (who don't want to be perpetually responsible for their adult children that have been made unemployable in any decent capacity for no reason other than to make certain email job people feel important) will accept nothing less than a pass rate approaching ever closer to 100%.
If you want to make education rigorous, you have to address that problem and then also try to address the K-12 education system that faces a similar but more extreme version of the same issue (because not being able to properly read and write are genuinely bad indicators for the majority of white collar jobs, and failing to graduate high school tends to indicate fundamental issues in that respect moreso than failing to graduate with a bachelor's, which usually just indicates immaturity / lack of money / boredom / a million other things that don't imply missing fundamental skills).
In the West kids can randomly decide to drop entire years after high school, or even skip college altogether - because it's (apparently) easy to not be immediately destitute without a good job. In India and China children grow up witnessing how much of a divide that makes, and how thin the line seperating their fates from "respectable" to brutal poverty is. No kid growing in such an environment will take school lightly.
I most certainly will transmitting a different set of values to my kids. Not going to go full straight A’s psychopath because I’ve seen what that’s done to some peers, but unless I win the lottery my kids will not be being told to just “do what they love” (unless they happen to love applied math lol)
This is an unfair comparison. The equivalent of those chinese students do work as hard in America - they just wouldn't be found at OP's school, there would be in a Tier 1 school.
A) the median university student in the USA?
B) the median university student in China?
Hint: in China, university admissions is based in large part on students's performance on the 高考, a national entrance exam, taken at the end of high school.
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