I think this is changing rapidly.
I'm a university professor, and the amount of students who seem to be in need of LLM as a crutch is growing really exponentially.
We are still in a place where the oldest students did their first year completely without LLMs. But younger students have used LLMs throughout their studies, and I fear that in the future, we will see full generations of students completely incapable of working without LLM assistance.
This has also something to do with it. Hard to make very accurate conclusions.
Hardware is still improving, though not as fast as it used to; it's very plausible that even the current largest open weights models will run on affordable PCs and laptops in 5 years, and high-end smartphones in 7.
I don't know how big the SOTA close-weights models are, that may come later.
But: to the extent that a model that runs on your phone can do your job, your employer will ask "why are we paying you so much?" and now you can't afford the phone.
Even if the SOTA is always running ahead of local models, Claude Code could cost 1500 times as much and still have the average American business asking "So why did we hire a junior? You say the juniors learn when we train them, I don't care, let some other company do that and we only hire mid-tier and up now."
(Threshold is less than 1500 elsewhere, I just happened to have recently seen the average US pay for junior-grade software developers, $85k*, which is 350x cheaper, and my own observation that they're not only junior quality but also much faster to output than a junior).
* but also note while looking for a citation the search results made claims varying from $55k to $97.7k
My feeling is that for many/most students, getting a great understanding of the course material isn't the primary goal, passing the course so they can get a good job is the primary goal. For this group using LLMs makes a lot of sense.
I know when I was a student doing a course I was not particularly interested in because my parents/school told me that was the right thing to do, if LLMs had been around, I absolutely would have used them :).
Are you sure student desire is the driving force here?
CS exercises that we can expect an average student to solve is trivially solved by LLMs. Even smaller local models.
Makes me wonder if they should also get a diploma together then, saying "may not have the tested knowledge if not accompanied by $other_student"
I know of some companies that support hiring people as a team (either all or none get hired and they're meant to then work together well), so it wouldn't necessarily be a problem if they wish to be a team like that
Less educated people are easier to steer via TikTok feeds anyway.
The main strategy is collaboration. If you are smart enough to:
1. Identify your problem 2. Ask someone about it 3. Get an answer which improve your understanding
Then you are doing pretty good by all standards
Another trick I sometimes use. I take one student which has hard time articulate it a concept. I take student two who don’t understand that concept. I say to student 1: "You have 20 minutes to teach student 2 the concept. When I come back, you will be graded according to his answers"
(I, of course, not only grade that. But it forces both of them to make an extra effort, student 2 not willing to be the cause for student 1 demise)
I wished other universities adapt so quickly too (and have such a mindful attitude to students e.g. try to understand them, be upfront with expectations, learning from students etc).
Majority of professors are stressed and treat students as idiots... at least that was the case decade a go!
I’m different because I was a bad student. Only managed to get my diploma with minimal grade, always rebel against everything. But some good people at my university thought that Open Source was really important and they needed someone with a good career in that field. I was that person (and I’m really thankful for offering that position)
In my experience LLMs can significantly speed up the process of solving exam questions. They can surface relevant material I don't know about, they can remember how other similar problems are solved a lot better than I can and they can check for any mistakes in my answer. Yes when you get into very niche areas they start to fail (and often in a misleading way) but if you run through practise papers at all you can tell this and either avoid using the LLM or do some fine tuning on past papers.
For most of us--myself included--once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired". This is far less than most curriculums ask you to know, and every year, "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar. With LLMs, it's practically on the floor for 90% of full-time jobs.
That is why I propose exactly the opposite regimen from this course, although I admire the writer's free thinking. Return to tradition, with a twist. Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset", where the turning-in of the assignment feels more real than understanding the assignment. Publish problem sets thousands of problems large with worked-out-solutions to remove the incentive to cheat.
"Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity" -- paraphrase of an HN comment about a fondly remembered physics professor who made the students memorize every equation in the class. In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.
Western education passing as many fee paying students as possible seems to be very much a UK/US phenomenon but doesn't seem to be the case of European countries where the best schools are public and fees are very low (In France, private engineering schools rank lower)
This is in tech now, were the first adopters, but soon it will come to other fields.
To your broader question
> Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"
You should know things because these AIs are wrong all the time, because if you want any control in your life you need to be able to make an educated guess at what is true and what isn't.
As to how to teach students. I think we're in an age of experimentation here. I like the idea of letting students use all tools available for the job. But I also agree that if you do give exams and hw, you better make them hand written/oral only.
Overall, I think education needs to focus more on building portfolios for students, and focus less giving them grades.
Gosh that sounds horrifying. I am not an expert on that piece of system, no I do not want to take responsibility for whatever the LLMs have produced for that piece of system, I am not an expert and cannot verify it.
You are describing how school worked for me (in Italy, but much of Europe is the same I think?) from middle school through university. The idea of graded homework has always struck me as incredibly weird.
> In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.
They do change what is worth learning though? I completely agree that "oh no the grades" is a ridiculous reaction, but adapting curricula is not an insane idea.
I thought the point was to continue in the same vein and contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge. I suppose this is why people criticize colleges as having lost their core principles and simply responded to market forces to produce the types of graduates that corporate America currently wants.
> "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar.
Usually people get fired for their actions and not their knowledge or lack thereof. It may be that David Graebers core thesis was correct. Most jobs are actually "bullshit jobs," and in the era of the Internet, they don't actually require any formal education to perform.
To the horror of anyone struggling with anxiety, ADHD, or any other source of memory-recall issues under examination pressure. This further optimizes everything for students who can memorize and recall information on the spot under artificial pressure, and who don't suffer any from any of the problems I mentioned.
In grade school you could put me on the spot and I would blank on questions about subjects that I understood rather well and that I could answer 5 minutes before the exam and 5 minutes after the exam, but not during the exam. The best way for me to display my understanding and knowledge is through project assignments where that knowledge is put to practical use, or worked "homework" examples that you want to remove.
Do you have any ideas for accommodating people who find it easier to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding in different ways?
But the response to that will be further beatings until morale improves.
What about technology professionals? From my biased reading of this site alone: both further beatings and pain relievers in the form of even more dulling and pacifying technology. Follow by misanhtropic, thought-terminating cliches: well people are inherently dumb/unmotivated/unworthy so topic is not really worth our genuine attention; furthermore, now with LMMs, we are seeing just how easy it is to mimic these lumps of meat—in fact they can act both better and more pathetic than human meat bags, just have to adjust the prompts...
They should be encouraged to read and review the LLM output so they can critically understand it and take ownership of it.
I believe there is a mechanism for this already.
Is it possible, and this is an interesting one to me, that this is the smartest kid in the class? I think maybe.
That guy who is playing with the latest tech, and forcing it to do the job (badly), and could care less about university or the course he's on. There's a time and a place where that guy is the one you want working for you. Maybe he's not the number 1 student, but I think there should be some room for this to be the Chaotic Neutral pick.
He might as well be the dumbest guy in the class. Playing with tech is not a proof of being smart on itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcQPAZP7-sE
LLM reasoning models are very good at searching well documented problems. =3
10 years ago, we wrote exams by hand with whatever we understood (in our heads.)
No colleagues, no laptops, no internet, no LLMs.
This approach still works, why do something else? Unless you're specifically testing a student's ability to Google, they don't need access to it.