[bArray]

This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished.

Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy.

Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly.

[1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...

[Der_Einzige]

Good good and good.

Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams.

All exams should be verbal. The fact that verbal exams are so rare is because teachers/professors are overworked and (outside of AI) underpaid. Too many students, not enough time.

The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much.

There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.

[bArray]

> Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams.

Universities consist of a wide range of people with different incentives, the lecturers typically (in my experience) have very pure motives. It's the management parts that put pressure to pass students, meet metrics, etc.

> The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much.

Homework is essentially dead post-LLMs. The lecturer's responsibility is to provide guided learning, but also most importantly to assess each student's attempt to learn.

> There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.

You'd be surprised how much 1:1 with students there are. One example I'm aware of is CS students getting 4 hours 1:1 for one module per semester - that's a hell of a lot.

What you're ultimately up against is cost per student. The overheads in Universities are enormous. It's usually 40:60:+, so £40k pay, £60k overhead plus research and investment (conference paper, travel, journals, new tools, etc).

[heresie-dabord]

> a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments

The decline in quality of STEM students/graduates is alarming, but the decline in intellectual quality of students is generalised.

Little did Dodson think he was being prophetic when he wrote satirically of Reeling, Writhing, and the arithmetical operations of Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.

[0] _ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

[camdenreslink]

> many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments

Isn't this just grading on a curve, which has been done probably as long as universities have existed? The key is the instructor making sure a high standard is met (which seems to be the crux of the issue).

[bArray]

Yes it has been in practice for a long time, but it's now being used to push clear fail cases into passing grades just to meet quotas. Prior it was used to adjust for particularly difficult assessments, and was closely monitored.