The real impact of AI at university level that I've watched in real time is how so many students come onto courses now - including Masters level - who straight up don't know how to analyse/evaluate things anymore. They just accept whatever they first read/hear completely uncritically. Every time you point it out you have to coax them into Actually Thinking.
I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.
"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"
"I'm sure I read it," he said.
"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."
The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.
"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."
Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.
"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."
Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.
A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.
I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.
Ngh. Yelling at the choir here, I know, but NNNNGH
I can't be the only one who thinks this isn't a problem with AI, it's a problem with a for-profit college system that pushes inadequate students through in order to extract debt from them while failing to stop the progress of the illiterate. Back in the day you'd be laughing out of 7th grade English if you delivered something like that, let alone a master's degree. These people should have flunked out way before AI was invented, and forced to repeat half the curriculum in order to graduate, and only then be allowed to move on to the next stage. AI has become a scapegoat for all the growing problems the education system had long before its invention; it's the same as blaming phones or Wikipedia. The reason these students shouldn't have a master's isn't because they became stupid overnight in November 15th, 2022; it's because they were already stupid and no one educated it out of them, so the moment they found a shortcut to avoid using their brains they forgot what little they already contained. But just like with phones and Wikipedia, everyone will just blame the new tech and those damn kids on their internet, and absolutely nothing will be done to prevent dangerously ignorant people from eroding the meaning of a university degree because extraction tuition money is more profitable than giving a shit.
No.
This, as I said in the post, is a noticeable and significant problem in the last two years. It is affecting students who were fine three years ago, and now aren't. It is a very specific issue that is affecting very specific skills, including previously very intelligent people
This is already attested in the literature. Meanwhile, the for-profit education system has not changed in the last two years
Additionally, prior to the last 2-3 years, I had failed one student ever, and flagged one student ever for plagiarism. This year we've had to deal with five separate plagiarism cases on the Masters course alone, all of whom admitted to LLM use. Not one of them can analyse information worth a damn; all of them had excellent prior undergrad scores.
This is an LLM problem
Getting students to engage in critical thinking about literally anything anymore has become nearly impossible. Getting them to see the problem with this state of affairs is even harder. Including when I teach a course on….
Critical thinking.
