[jventura]

Everything that provides students with a workflow to think and to try to find solutions to a problem is much better than giving the answer directly! Unfortunately there will always be students that prefer to take the shortcut..

How could we "force" the students to use an LLM that confronted their doubts with more questions? We could tell them to start each chat with a specific prompt (to use the socratic method, etc), but they could eventually jail-break it..

But nevertheless, I like your idea! This is something that a document highlighting methodologies for students on how to use LLMs effectively could/should contain..

[LovelyButterfly]

Yeah that makes sense. I'm a Master's student myself, ironically on Artificial Intelligence. Often I feel overwhelmed by the amount of papers and the mysterious math logic I have to understand when presented with a model.

Accidentally in Google Colab, I've found that there is a "Learn mode" and somehow I managed to access the instructions for it which indeed instructed to ask questions, then I researched a bit more and learned about the socratic method.

So far I'm doing the combo of Zettelkasten + Socratic on Claude on papers + slides or video classes. I'm not sure if it's placebo or not, but I feel much more confident after iterating with each paper or topic this way. Asking the answer to the LLM never felt like I was studying. I read, but I never understood, I was never challenged. Perhaps what we need is the Unis around the globe to come up with a standard, a guideline so that the students can maximise the advantages of having the LLM when a professor or assistant is not available.

[e-topy]

I'm curious on your opinion, as a professor, how should universities (not individual professors) adapt to LLMs?

As an undergrad, I hope schools move to educating students to use LLMs in a more responsible way. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and resisting progress is futile, might as well use the tool we now have to help students learn even faster and better (e.g., making feedback instant and not answers, helping digest or split up material, checking answers).

I know opinions about AI at (not only at) my faculty are very mixed, but I think the answer is going to be in the rational mean, just like how technorealism reacted to the internet[0].

In our last program board sitting, some teachers said that they think programming as a job will be completely irrelevant in two years, while other pushed for more adoption. And meanwhile I know of some students that are basically only passing because of LLMs, and it's bad, like "leaving claude output in markdown files and finished source code on the faculty server in /tmp because opencode did so" bad. And our first year classes completely prohibit even sharing tests or talking about the solutions, which in my opinion a) makes people extremely asocial and atomized b) doesn't prepare students for real life c) promotes dishonesty.

Still, I think our university's thinking is in a stalemate, not wanting pure AI output and useless students, while also wanting to move with the times, and I doubt it's the only one.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081009111415/https://artefaktu... (absolutely amazing read, recommend it)