You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study. Doing the homework and the tests are just the "goalposts" to check for yourself whether you made progress on this.
So, as long as you are not under time pressure (which you in some degree courses unluckily are), there is simply no need to "speed up" any homework assignments.
If, on the other hand, LLMs help you with making much faster progress in understanding the subject that you study (which is only loosely correlated to homework and tests), I guess it's fine to use them. Just always keep in mind that very often the pain of attempting to understand the topic on your own often makes you smarter - something that you will miss when you take an "LLM shortcut".
This is probably not true for majority of people. Most go to school because it is mandatory, pushed by parents and society, and university gives you credentials and better job opportunities. Homework and tests are a way to get a number grade on 'how well you memorized something', it doesn't really measure a deep understanding of the topic.
As I said: they are goalposts.
Typically homework and tests are sufficiently easy (yes, there are exceptions) that if you fail them, you can assume that you didn't make sufficient progress in improving your understanding.
But I do agree that at least sometimes the difference between being good and exceptional at homework and tests can indeed be rote, "unnecessary" memorization.
- doing - failing - discovery>learning - remembering
With learning predicated on both failing and remembering it's unfortunate uni scores on 100% successful doing but doesn't teach failing well, and scores for remembering but not for learning well.
This has not been true for something like 70 years now. People go to university because it is expected that that is what you do after high school.
In Germany, many people indeed say if you are not deeply into the topic that you study, you should rather get a vocational training (Ausbildung), or attend a different kind of tertiary education than a university such as
- Fachhochschule
- Berufsakademie
(these words have no good English translation). Basically these are kinds of tertiary education that are more applied than the much more scientific training that you get at a university.
Specifically for mathematics (I guess the same holds for physics), a lot of people say that if you don't consider it to be an ideal life to think about math exercise sheets when you sit in the bathtub while other people are having fun at some party, you simply are not made for studying mathematics and should change your degree course as soon as possible.
With CS students this is one thing. Medical students? Air traffic controllers?
That is to say, there is a huge gap in the educational integrity of degrees, and this is probably partly driven by people who do not really want to be at university for educational reasons (and, believe it or not, there are other ways to party in your early twenties) and for whom a degree in XYZ is not rationally connected to 80% of their options after school. And there are many such people.
This really needs to be thought through, because education is expensive, and it is an enormous waste of money to pay for a couple of years of university and end up failing out or being sanctioned for AI cheating, or being educated for something you do not really want or need to be taught. That is true whether or not education is paid for privately or by the public.
ETA that when I graduated from school the idea of not going to university was really discouraged by the guidance counselor. It seemed like vocational courses were not really a worthwhile option unless you were a poor (significantly below average) student. There was a lot of emphasis on ‘getting a degree’ probably related to (nonsense) job requirements. Not a lot on what career you should pursue, or why you should consider university. It was more like why would you not consider university, since it was the de facto default. It was, I guess, unseemly for the school to end up with fewer university entrants and more apprentices.
At the time, there was somewhat of a social stigma with apprenticeships. The people that pursued them seemed to only genuinely have been set on the idea, and there were few if any that were diverted thereto. Now, of course, ‘the trades’ pay much better than a middling office job. Egg on my face.
~"Speed doesn't matter unless you need it."
~"LLMs can be good, but if you don't use them properly™, then they become a crutch."
It's hard to deny that "cognitive offloading" via LLMs is becoming a more acute problem [0]. The intelligentsia were supposed to be immune.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260417-ai-chatbots-coul...
Echoing the other comments here, at least in the US, this is generally untrue. I went because my parents made me, because the choice was that or get kicked out of the house. It was beaten into my head since I was in grade school that "people in this family go to college" and "you can't get a good job without a college degree."
I hated every moment of it and I was glad to take my BSc and never look back once it was over (University of Houston, c/o 2000). And, indeed, without the degree I wouldn't have had the jobs I've had.
But I didn't go because I was "interested." I went because it was an effectively mandatory life-path objective. I'm very happy for you if your lived experience is different, but it is also—at least in the US—both extremely uncommon and extremely privileged.
There is only one classmate in my class who came to study CSE because they are interested in CSE. And since we all enrolled after AI became somewhat good at everything none of them know how to code. After two years of study I had to explain someone how to swap two number by drawing boxes. This are the things you learn in the first week if you're interested in programming.
My point is very tiny percentage of people study something because they're genuinely interested in that subject.
I don't think I've met anyone who fits that description. The ones deeply interested in the subject would likely skip college anyway if not for future economic prospects.
There exist a lot of things that are much "easier" or even (currently) only possible to learn by attending a university because, for example,
- for the access to various devices and experts,
- you walk a much more "established" and "time-tested" hike for getting good in the subject,
etc.
Spoken like a true software engineer ;), there are jobs where you have to have a degree to get the job. "Real" engineers with sign-off responsibilities, Medical Doctors, etc.
Does college even work for future economic prospects, by the way?
I think this was true a long time ago. Perhaps with LLMs this can become true again in the future. But definitely that was not why I went the first time, nor most of my classmates. (Second time I did post-secondary, sure, 100% -- but I was almost 30, not an average student)
Some students do not have this privilege and implicitly see university as first and foremost a funnel into a paying career.
Unfortunately that, on its own, very much does not translate to being able to explain it all oneself, or to having the skills.
Ease and norms of outsourcing to software invites and amplifies this trap, I think.
I can really certify that this was my lived experience. In the math degree course, basically everyone who was not incredibly passionate about mathematics (NB: "passionate" does not necessary imply "great academic achievements") changed their major or decided for a different kind of tertiary education.
Former co-students who attended the same university and degree course had the same experience.
I guess the reason was that it was a decent university in a "boring" town where learning for your studies was one of the more exciting things that you could do.
This is a bit of a naive or maybe affluent take? Like, theoretically, I agree. And I myself was curious. But most people, by and large, are going to university because they know they need a degree to get a job, unlike their parents or grandparents. And even "the degree" is quickly becoming devalued in this current AI age.
I would guess that if all basic needs were met through UBI, the fraction of individuals going to school would drop and the makeup of subjects they pursue would change. Probably more cooking and art classes and less stem. Although, if UBI existed and AI did not, we'd probably see more educated individuals in the first place so maybe there would be an uptick in stem attendance and general curiosity in such a utopian world.
> This is a bit of a naive or maybe affluent take?
Concerning the "naive" aspect, I wrote something at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397759
Basically, this was really my lived experience, which might have been amplified that it was a decent university in a "boring" town where learning for your studies was one of the more exciting things that you could do.
Concerning the "affluent" aspect, I can clearly assure you that neither I am nor my parents were.
You must come from a wealthy background because what you described is far beyond the vast majority of people's means - at least here in the US.
Most of us go to college because it's the only reliable way to get a tollerable job that pays well. Only a few of my college courses aligned with my interests. The rest were just the price paid for the degree.
My experience is that they uncomfortably do both. You can "understand" something conceptually quicker -- like you have a new brain-muscle-thing that lets you cut through the hard difficult tedious corners to get to the meat of the matter.
But then you also can become reliant on it, and have difficulty doing the mechanistic rote work of working through it yourself.
Like the really big powerful calculator that it is, really.
You can use AI or the internet to learn the basics of how a gas engine works in a couple of minutes. But you'd be incapable of actually working on a gas engine or designing one.
Surface level knowledge gets you surface level functionality. You don't become good at something from surface level knowledge, but you might think you're good at it.