I have some sympathy for these kids. If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests.

Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well; many of them can no longer brainstorm, code, think deeply, or write without an LLM present doing 90% of the work. Many of them can no longer sit quietly for even 30 minutes just thinking on their own, which is a required skill for producing original thought.

For adults the cognitive decline won't be as measurable since there's no exams, and overall output volume will still be fine due to LLM help. But I do believe it's already happening absolutely everywhere around us. Honestly, I wanted to be in denial about it before but it's too obvious to ignore now.

The likely 'real' reason is hidden in one paragraph within the article and has nothing to do with the implication of the eye-catching title: "Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. The petition and its accompanying open letter detail similar concerns with students’ mathematical preparation."

Around COVID times many top universities experimented with removing test requirements from admissions, under an argument largely related to equity. It's been a failure everywhere, with many, if not most, universities already reversing it. As Yale put it, "Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT." [1]

That link is for an archive because that page has been removed. That's because they briefly experimented with a new 'test flexible' strategy where they allowed students to submit test scores or not, but then scrapped that altogether and went back to simply requiring test scores.

[1] - https://archive.is/8zxfo

CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang" - ask for clarifications until they follow unintended paths that lead nowhere.

To fellow professors, when you're suspicious my suggestion is to appeal to their honesty (like "let's be honest, how much of this code is yours, and how much is ChatGPT's?") and offer some empathy and understanding (like understanding they may had multiple deadlines in the same week, etc.). Nevertheless, don't miss the chance to give them the lesson on how is the correct way of doing things. The way to catch these students is to find the same signs of yesteryear copying from other students (which in essence is what copying from an LLM is, although the number has increased because they found us professors unprepared for the volume).

The other two groups also used LLM but in a high-level and architectural way. They were clearly responsible for the code (even if they didn't wrote it 100% manually) and could explain their reasoning and strategies used to solve the problems.

Me and my colleagues still have a lot of projects to review, and I asked them to keep the score of the number of projects like these, but so far, the score is 1 in 3 (33%).

It's a strange thing that as humans, we sleepwalk into every crisis, never agreeing on anything, and then when we're there, we also never agree on the causes. When we ge too the point where we can no longer "engineer" or "science" anything we will spend the next decade arguing that the issue was not really AI, or that if it was, it was inevitable and no one (or everyone) was to blame. Rinse, repeat. Yet we're here, today, looking at the bleak future, and taking yet another step forward.

Do we assume society just self regulates. I think it does, but the cost of letting it self regulate is really really high, with lots of suffering. Is it that we find this acceptable when there is a chance we won't be the first to feel the pain?

They worry me. A lot.

My son is 15 and I use Google Family Link to control what he does on his phone: it's pretty open for the most part (I receive notifications of installs) but Gemini is a hard-ban.

We've spoken at length of the dangers.

He says his pals use LLMs frequently and I suspect that's the reason for their test scores: some of them are in the 20% - 40% range for tests whereas my son is 80%+ because he studies past-papers and answers questions in his revision.

I worry for the future coz you can be sure that the AI providers don't care if a schoolchild is using their LLM to answer the homework questions.

My daughter was struggling with her Math class back in January. I used Claude to build a tool that allowed me to generate very focused worksheets. The worksheets had problems designed to drill the concepts she was struggling with.

It worked, and it would have been MUCH harder to do this the traditional way.

The tool generates PDFs including an answer key and solution sets that solved the problems using a variety of techniques so I could check her work more easily and we could iterate quickly.

That's powerful. It comes back to how are you using the tool. Are you using it to make things better or to take shortcuts?

It’s not just students; this affliction is cropping up among established academics. My wife is editor-in-chief of a journal and in some months has rejected 100% of the letters to the editor including 6 that came in from a single author because all scored 1.0 certainty of complete LLM fabrication. The author in question is no student. It’s a little more difficult to fabricate an entire original paper this way, I suppose.

It will have taken us less than 1000 years to go from scarcity of the printed word to the over-abundance, and finally to the uselessness of it.

In unrelated news

"More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and mathematics applicants, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students."

https://archive.ph/18spS

>In addition, the guidelines state that “a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both classes’ average grades were C-pluses, according to Berkeleytime, corresponding to a 2.3 GPA.

As a Cal alum, I am actually really glad to see they are holding the line on grade inflation. I worked my butt off to achieve the GPA I did, and it would really suck to see my labor devalued if Cal went the direction of e.g. Yale and started handing out 79% A's and A-minuses: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/professors-face-grading-d...

Pity. I recently started a fun activity to rebrush my math my where I tries to solve problems while asking Gemini Live mode for confirmation and suggestions, sometimes step by step.

It kinda was fun, like a very patient professor stand right besides you. It was the one of the best math learning experience I've ever had, and you don't even need to send bribe/gift to Gemini to keep you in it's favor.

On the other hand, if you ask a LLM to completely finish the work without thinking it through by yourself, then it sounded like cheating, to yourself.

What a terribly ambiguous title. "Failing grades soar after xyz" makes it sound like xyz has helped what were previously terrible, failing grades become good ones.

It's incredibly difficult at this point to "skate where the puck is going" as Gretzky is said to have done. No one knows what knowledge work will look like in five years. People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point.

That said, assessments of poor critical thinking skills jump out at me more than the rest. That sort of thing seems likely to matter until machines can replace us completely.

The obvious cognitive deterimental effects of using map apps, when we all realized we lose directional sense and our previous ability to navigate without the smartdevices, was society's canary in a coal mine and a headsup of what was coming.

WAL-E and Idiocracy. The future.

While this is worse in degree, it’s not new.

I TA’d in the early 2000s and the first day students were warned that we used automatic analysis to find programming assignments that were similar to previous submissions. And renaming things, moving them around etc would not help.

We caught and failed cheaters every term.

If you watch old videos of tradesmen using basic hand tools like hammers, you'll find examples of skill/dexterity with the tool that I think don't exist today at all except maybe in communities like the Amish.

I think it's true that we collectively lose something akin to beauty every time technology advances. But usually some new set of skills that have beauty emerge.

If LLMs end up being the pneumatic nail gun for the human mind, I personally think that's a fine thing for us to accept.

If they end up being more like some dark factory that autonomously does everything - then I think ultimately the thing that makes us human (our minds) will slowly decay and be lost, and that seems very sad. That's a version of the future we should try to prevent, I think.

It's interesting that it's specifically math-within-CS being discussed here. I can imagine a lot of students "just want to learn programming" (or similar), and see the math as a tedious distraction.

As a naturally curious person, nothing will stop me from learning about the topics that interest me. But school also taught me a lot of things that didn't interest me, and a lot of those things turned out to be useful anyway. I think if I had access to AI from a younger age, I'd have used it to skip learning the things I didn't care about, which would not have done me any favours.

A famous MIT professor did a sabatical at our AI lab. He said it was "a joy to teach here, as you can rely on students being proficient in basic math as opposed to the US where you have to teach those explicitly or lose the class completely".

That was in the 1980s.

My first math exam as a CS undergraduate, 123 out of 129 students failed. The math department professors refused to dumb down their classes for CS students.

Math was core to the CS curicullum in those days. It would fade away over the next few decades to almost nothing. The main reason being the CS department wanted to popularize its uptake, and remove barriers that kept students from passing. There was also a major dose of interdepartemenral rivalry and academic politiking involved.

I agree that AI is likely a driving force here, but it is also likely not the only driving force. COVID likely played a devastating role, along with curriculum changes in high school, reactionary cultural shifts towards anti-intellectualism, and broader declines in literacy that have been in progress for a while now. It would be interesting to see data for the past 5-10 years or so.

> “I’m a strong, strong opponent of what Harvard is doing to say that only a fraction of students can earn A’s,” Garcia said. “I think you should have clear standards for what an A means, and then give tons of opportunity for people … to get to that A bar without lowering the standard. So everybody who’s curving is hiding that effect. It’s completely hiding that effect, and it’s pretending as if nothing’s wrong, and something is definitely wrong.”

Grade curves are how you test your curriculum for good challenge - are you challenging people such that an A isn't a too-low threshold. When you force people into a curve, you haven't defined a threshold of mastery, you've defined a sorting function: A means "better than this year's peers". It is absolutely bananas to me that a tech/math oriented school would be doing any sort of curving.

This is a student problem, not an ai problem... if the student chooses to not learn, to just use ai for answers, that's on them.

And their failing grades reflect the choices they've made.

ai is the single most powerful learning tool ever invented... but only if you choose to use it for learning.

AI has a way of exposing people. In this example, students who are there to get a degree from a prestigious institution, rather than to learn, are prone to take perceived shortcuts and proceed to come unstuck when their AI isn't there to do their work for them, such as in an exam.

> Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the center for student conduct,” Garcia said. According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were caught cheating on take-home exams in spring 2026.

Perhaps the future will belong to those who learn to use llms to enhance their capabilities. Neil Stephenson Diamond Age was an interesting take on this very same topic [1].

So the Claude web app has this “learn” option that turns the session into a Socratic dialog of sorts. One could easily imagine enforcing this on an age based or parental controls set up. Maybe it can be prompted around but at the very least the concept could be a path forward.

As others have said there is a way to use llms to increase learning, but autodidacts will always autodidact.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

This also reflects the failings of the teachers to teach in a way that is conducive to learning given the current cultural landscape.

How do we know this is due to AI usage? Perhaps it is because the students missed key in-person learning at the tail end of high school due to the pandemic lock-downs? I cant imagine learning calculus / linear algebra on my own in high school.

It seems like now’s the time to rethink how we do education.

In my personal post academic life, I’ve found LLMs to be an incredible teacher. Almost like the best professor in the world at my fingertips. I use it to generate quizzes on demand to test for my own knowledge gaps.

However, if I use it to speedrun over concepts I should be learning, I may achieve my end goal but I wouldn’t actually learn many of the details.

I think it requires an approach where you have to continuously audit your own understanding as you work with the concepts. You must slow down until you’ve confirmed this. Only once you know the concepts deeply and have retained them in your own memory can you then go all in with the LLM.

1. The article itself seems like an LLM summary of a conversation.

2. No US educational institution should ever grade on a curve. Your job is not to compare students but to educate them. Grade curves hide the performance of the educators and process of education in actually improving the skills of students.

3. Both AI and the cognitive and emotional overload from social media taking away brain space may be to blame. Idea: let students report screen time statistics at the beginning of each semester and weekly or at the end. See if and how it correlates with academics.

I'm curious about LLM adoption by faculty. Is it possible that lesson plans and/or slides are being vibe-produced by professors/TAs, potentially reducing quality of instruction?

Maths skills have been slowly falling even before the advent of LLMs. I have a story but this is anecdotical so take it with a grain of salt.

I was in my 3rd bachelor's year studying physics (France) and overheard a conversation between two of my teachers. They were discussing how they should modify the 1st year program to now include math, because he had been noticing how more and more students were failing the more math-heavy subjects like body and newtonian mechanics. He said that they should now teach (or re-teach) calculus to 1st year students, which was not taught when I entered college (it was assumed that you learned it in high school and we would only cover linear algebra in 1st year).

I can imagine things are only getting worse with students that can now get under the illusion that they know math because they have a tool that can do it for them. Which raises the question: should programs adapt to this, like we adapted to having calculators?

I wonder if this is reflected in other big exams or elite colleges elsewhere. Are the gaokao, X/Centrale, oxford etc... Results showing the same trend ?

In Grad school I remember learning Python 2, and there was one particular night where an assignment of mine just wasn’t working and no searches were helping me. I was frustrated to the point of tears, and when I solved it, it wasn’t with some triumphant yell. I just remember being so tired, closing my laptop and going to sleep.

I’m sure I wouldn’t be the programmer I am without that experience, but I am Not sure I would have willingly put myself through that if LLMs existed at that point

My experience (n=1) is that while I'm definitely lazier on certain tasks, AI has opened up some much more complex tasks. There are many tasks which I still carry out which I don't trust AI with. Maybe it's a result of the codebase I work with being fairly complicated and math heavy, but I'd say the overall outcome for me has been: lazier application on the easy tasks, mind opening on the harder tasks.

The kids don't care about the integrity of the systems or their educations because they can see that all the benefits of a traditional education and career are predicated on a future that probably won't exist.

It's a rational response to entrenched elites that prevent realization of the very social contracts they push on the youth (hard work will equal success, home ownership is a fundamental, etc).

Combined with the looming specter of climate doom, and watching the adults do nothing about it, treating preparation for a conventional career as a scam to be counter-scammed makes a certain sense.

At this point I would support a ban on generative AI by anyone under 18, or even perhaps 21 years of age.

A bunch of science fiction stories had "first connection to cyberspace" as a coming of age event, maybe those authors were on to something.

Long long back, when I was a kid even ball pens were banned because they screwed up handwriting. Just the same things in different ways.

I dont think ai is good enough for it coding or any other work once i told ai a problem and he generated an entire solution which i used and it was broken. You should never use ai like it treat is like a helper write a function for code and then ask if everything is correct and if something can improve read documentations understand how its working under the code if everything is correct then only deploy or build.

Pretty ironic that these kids are failing a non major requirement called "the beauty and joy of computer science"

Students need to be taught how to use AI apps efficently to learn. Their goal is not to solve problems, but to learn how to solve them. Let alone, they instead use AI apps to solve problems for them.

AI apps are very powerful for teaching. You just need to tell them to do that, and not to directly solve your problem.

“I’m a strong, strong opponent of what Harvard is doing to say that only a fraction of students can earn A’s,” Garcia said. “I think you should have clear standards for what an A means, and then give tons of opportunity for people … to get to that A bar without lowering the standard. So everybody who’s curving is hiding that effect. It’s completely hiding that effect, and it’s pretending as if nothing’s wrong, and something is definitely wrong.”

To do this, you have to be a professor who has a strong idea of what subject mastery looks like. Not available to most.

But ... It is exactly the right idea IMO

Even as a software engineer myself, I'm feeling a bit of cognitive decline having AI doing some/most of the thinking for me

The solution? I'm not sure but possibly use AI as more of a collaborate partner to discuss with rather than letting it give you the answers

AI + Education is really interesting but also pretty tough to get right. Working on something that is hopefully going in the right direction: https://knowable.ca

This tracks, I have read that this generation is the first one since the 1800s that performs worse academically than the previous ones. Experts blamed screens and anything digital in the classroom.

AI should be a formidable booster for learning if used properly.

I know that some students it to prepare for competitive tests, sometimes with very good results.

I've also been using it a lot recently to brush up on my math and physics knowledge from my graduate years. It has helped me clarify and understand a lot of concepts better.

That being said, there is no shortcut, and to be good at anything, one has to put in the work and the hours. However, information has never been as available as it is today.

“a typical GPA for a lower division course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.”

Reminds me of a year where a teacher of mine (high school) gave everyone in class an A. He got called on it, and fought back. He literally called out the weakest kids in the class and had them do the work in front of the admins complaining and said, "tell me that's not A work, I ["fucking" strongly implied] dare you."

His grades stuck.

Well, at least the faculty are actually giving out the Fs and not just lowering the bar, so kudos to them for that.

How we learn has gotta change...

Could it be that CS attracts a different population of students in the current genAI era?

Cognitive Multiplier, eh?

The exams need to change. Now that we have LLMs the value a human can bring to a task has changed and it’s that new value that has to be tested.

It’s like testing your drawing ability in a photography class. The difference is that now nearly have subject and testing method we have has become obsolete. Drawings courses still exist as will traditional courses, but the main stream has changed and exams and schools need to adapt.

> 35.3% of CS 10

.. had failing grades.

I guess LLMs will in fact kill the junior CS graduate, but before the graduation, not necessarily after.

> The electrical engineering and computer sciences department’s grading guidelines state that 7% of students in lower division courses, including CS 10 and CS 61A, should receive D’s and F’s.

Well I sure hope they dont just make it easier to hit this (objectionable) standard.

> Garcia believes that instructors “should not be curving” but should instead make thresholds for each letter grade publicly available and give students many chances to reach them. He added that he loves the idea of “having no limit” to the number of A’s he gives students.

This is a tough problem: Are grades sorting functions (top students get A's so retries are not helpful), inflexible thresholds (A's show mastery at a given level so retries are valid), or are A's certifications (a sufficiently good result such that they could do it - e.g., inflated but not curved, retries less likely but still ok).

The main thing I use as a fallback is to keep thoughts connected in a Zettelkasten. This interacts well with AI assisted information gathering, while firing synapses whenever a connection can be made. I use Tiago Forte's method of organizing as needed within a loose org mode confederation of atomic notes.

All of this makes me selfishly excited for my own future. It's glaringly obvious that anyone who's a heavy user of LLMs is atrophying their skills in real-time. I have yet to meet a single person for whom it's not the case.

But I essentially completely stopped using them for software engineering (why isn't really relevant, but it's not because od this skill atrophy). So as the skills of everyone else is diminishing, mine is proportionally raising.

It has never been easier to get better than others. You don't need to put in more effort, just the same effort as you always have, and others will do the job of losing their skills for your own benefit.

This is concerning. AI tools are powerful but foundational skills still matter. The balance is tricky for CS students.

Quit blaming AI. The UC system banned standardized testing during the race communism mass hysteria of the early 2020s. Predictably, performance of the student body is down across the board.

what if this is not due to AI use and instead due to the demolishing of standardized testing and "new Math" in the state of california?

Average school system has been lacking for a very long time, overhauling it to focus on kids current interests, while sneaking in the other stuff, might now be possible and cheaper to realize with our new tech.

Those who can use it better, those who can't out who cheat are (for now) let down by obviously cheap and slightly crappy models.

The worry is in ~5yr time when the generic models catch up to this level (basic undergrad mind) that we need to worry about how to thin the herd. We could always go back to the tried and tested student staff engagement but most unis tried to turn themselves into sausage factories in thirst for the almighty dollar so the student/staff ratios are all off

I had dwindling math skills way before AI made it cool.

Sorry, but I don't think AI is entirely to blame here. When I graduated from a CS program at a top-10 school, I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone. Like in the movie Good Will Hunting, you could have learned nearly all of it and more by borrowing those books for free from the library. Or, just opening a complex OSS project and learning to contribute.

And quite honestly. It shows in the CS grad population too. A lot of us are condescending toward anything that doesn't make sense to us. But, I digress.

The best engineers I've worked with are all non traditional backgrounds, non degree or degree holders from non elite schools. They think differently, they tinker, they are incredibly nice and patient, and do it for the love of connecting humans to technology.

Look up the names mentioned in the article. Garcia, Ranade, Nelson. All of them are involved with highly theoretical mathematics and scientific computing. Just because you're good at 1 thing does not mean you are qualified to teach. And none of these professors are trained or taught or graded or performance managed on how they teach. For most of them, its just required that they spend 10% of their time in the classroom lecturing.

Let's be honest about another thing. 99% of EECS graduates, even from elite schools, are wrangling objects and their relationships to a graph. Simply put, we're all just a bunch of glorified JSON massage therapists. It just so happens that we get paid well for it, and we hold that over people. The same happens in the classroom.

I think in order to facilitate a healthy, educational environment for young adults, we as adults must encourage, motivate and make that environment fun and practical. We force feed binary trees and the compiler AST's, but we need to make it fun. It's like the commonly accepted saying: Schools kill creativity :(.

As someone who graduated college in 2025, and so saw college both before and after the AI era, it is really frightening how quickly people became dependent on AI. Hell, I myself found myself asking AI questions that I would've researched deeper before. To some extent not expending that time is nice, but I do think its eroding critical thinking skills (my own included), and its getting worse. There are people I know now who basically let AI control their life. It glazes the user, it's almost always available, and to someone who doesn't know better, and it is extremely good at looking like it knows what its talking about, even when its completely wrong (but its right often enough to have some baseline level of trust). If that's not a recipe for addiction I don't know what is.

Folks, we have more and more data now.

Skynet is making mankind dumber - dailycal.org just added yet-another piece to all evidence here. It is a simple but effective strategy; Kyle Reese will stand no chance because prior to that, the other humans were already dumbed down into submission. Skynet version 15.0 will make no more mistakes here.

It's not just 'a person' or 'a student', we as a collective become more dumb. Very simple example to highlight this: Most developers use(d?) stackoverflow. Everything related to software development is stored there. The LLM's trained on it. Now a huge set of developers now longer go to stackoverflow to get answers. Or add to the collective. Stackoverflow is losing money (ad revenue). If / when stackoverflow goes away we will lose a huge amount of collective information on software development. We, as a group, will take a huge step back.

It’s not that they can’t think deeply, these are smart people.

It’s that there is no reward for doing so and in fact there is punishment.

The punishment is that for all the thinking you do, someone else will arrive at the same result as you in less time, or maybe even a better result. You don’t get rewarded for the effort of thinking, only for the end result.

Naturally, even if you are an intelligent individual, you can still be conditioned in this way to take the easy way out, unless you purposely like to suffer. But suffering is only worth it if you know in the end you come out ahead.

But now, you do not come out ahead. People will be using AI in the workforce for the rest of your life anyway, might as well just join the trend.

It’s like if everyone started taking a magical steroid and growth hormone to build muscle and look great instead of actually working out in a gym and possibly getting worse results anyway.

Hmm, meanwhile somewhere else on campus this study:

Artificial Intelligence and Grade Inflation

https://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/artificial-intelligen...

It's critical that we adapt to a strategy where AI supports our learning instead of the having it the other way around.

Professors suddenly realized everyone was cheating and started paying attention, but the cheating isn't new ... A lot of faculty are happy when their students get good grades because they interpret it as I'm such a good teacher instead of I should pay more attention to how they cheat. AI woke some of them up to reality.

I read something interesting yesterday on the subject of AI in education (though, it has consequences to broader society too):

The goal of education is to impart knowledge in the student, preferably correct knowledge. The goal of an LLM is to produce an output that is convincingly human. It's not even that they're opposed, as much as they're ships for whom Polaris is in a completely different direction.

"Hallucinations" as they're called, or more plainly stated when the machine makes some shit up, are perfectly understandable in this context, as are the struggles of every single AI firm to get rid of them. Namely: the machine is functioning exactly as it is designed to, so how can you possibly fix it? It's working. The goal of an LLM is to produce text that passes for human, and apart from the obvious LLM tells, it largely does. Like say what you will about their lack of intelligence, the writing is solid. It's grammatically correct, spelling is dead on, what have you.

It reminds me of the famous phrase from Chomsky: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. A sentence which is perfectly grammatically valid but is also completely devoid of meaning. An LLM would write that sentence, and it would be working correctly.

All of that to say: for all the things they CAN do and CAN be used for, I think we have to draw a hard line at education. I just don't think AI has a place in it. Of course that presumes that the goal of education is to, well, educate people, and especially here in the States but also abroad, we have been putting other interests, especially capital, far ahead of that for decades. I expect no different here.

And before someone comes in to go "WELL HOW DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GONNA STOP IT LUDDITE IT'S THE FUTUUUUUURE" yes, I'm sure as long as these exist and are available to people tech literate enough to access and use them, whatever that means into the far flung future, they will be a factor. Just like cheating, just like plagiarism, just like everything else that will get you kicked out of school. And the answer is the same: it will be stopped by institutions, imperfectly, and it will also happen anyway and with the same consequence: those responsible will mostly be harming themselves for short-term gains.

what if it's not llms and instead the removal of standardized testing in the state of california?

AI is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it's like having a free private tutor who is always available. It's a great learning tool.

On the other hand, students can use it to do all their homework for them, and skip learning altogether.

It’s only going to get worse. The second things like Claude Cowork get opened up to non-technical teams you start to see the influx of emails and Slack message written with LLM’s for absolutely no productivity gain (in fact probably a loss given how unnecessarily wordy the messages are). Too many people want to give up any and all responsibility.

A reckoning is coming for school. Learning the rote stuff is no longer essential. Now they need to learn, how to teach "how to think". How to invent, how to be creative. Art++, Woodshop++, Math--

IMHO this is clear case of correlation vs causation…

This generation of kids were fucked so hard by Covid and all the remote “schooling” and closing of public life.

AI rise happens to be happening when the kids who were just entering teens at Covid time are now going to school.

"According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026"

Alternatively, more students are taking CS10 and CS61A irrespective of aptitude.

Anyone can code, but not everyone can become an employable SWE.

Anyone who has first or second hand experience with Cal or any other university knows how impacted CS majors have become, and how everyone is attempting to become a CS major because it's the easiest path to multiple high paying white collar careers.

And in all honesty, it's not like CS@Cal never had weedout classes (I remember CS70, CS61B, and Math54 had reputations of being the L&S weedout classes).

AI gives us some bad things but it's really outweighed by the good things. One one hand we have very rapid deterioration of our children's mental capacities yes, but on the other hand we have also made the internet into an unnavigable mound of slop produced by, and for consumption of, bots.

One thing that bothers me about these conversations: failure is an important signal that what we're doing isn't working as well as we thought it would, not a sign of the apocalypse.

Kids need to understand how to adjust and grow from failure more than they need to always be on the happy-path of straight A's and easy money.

How we respond to failure is how we teach response to failure. Hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and finger-pointing aren't valuable life skills.

Personally it's easy for me to be contemptuous - I opted into an accelerated math program that banned calculators when I was in Junior High. It helped me cultivate an very crisp intuitive/conceptual understanding of basic mathematical concepts that's carried through to today. I think we should do more of that kind of education, but it's expensive and requires amazing educators and a tolerance for student struggle.

Get the machines out, absolutely. But respond to failure compassionately, as part of a natural learning process.

I don't like the framing of calling it academic dishonesty. If it were one or two students doing it, sure. But there is no reason to believe that 2026 Berkeley freshmen are fundamentally more dishonest than 2025 Berkeley students. When so many are doing it, it suggests a sea change in the understanding of what is honest or dishonest in that particular community. That sort of thing should be treated more like a "disease": something that should be treated, than a "crime": something that will be punished.

It’s because they lowered the standard of who gains entry in the name of equity and other woke nonsense. It has nothing to do with AI but it’s a convenient thing to blame.

Dude, cheating in CS10 of all classes?

We're going to find that LLM usage has even worse effects on the mind than the horrific effects we're just starting to be certain of from social media. I'm just not going to use either. See you lads on the other side.

Probably not a bad thing, the coursework is antiquated and meeting students with new advanced tools and the awareness of AI's impact on things in the coming future

I imagine there is some apathy and laziness here but idk how unjustified it is

"Noooooo you need to manually code on paper in assembly"

Alright, well maybe the CS grads need to, but why expect that of everyone else