- AI (meaning, large language models such as Chatgpt) will not help you in this course.
- This is because you do not know enough about R for Chatgpt and the like to benefit you: the output from these large language models might be correct or it might be plausible but wrong, and you have no way to know the difference at this point.
- I agree with some of this, but I agree more with the discussion about it here. You are at university, and so you have paid for an intellectual gym membership to build up your intellectual muscles. That means it is your job to do the learning yourself to figure out how things work, so that when called upon, you know what to do. (The bit I disagree with is using AI at work: if your job can be done with AI, why does your employer need you there?)
- If you nonetheless think that using AI is a good idea, you need to read this and you also need to have a well-reasoned response to every one of the links listed in the fourth paragraph.
- The point of a course like this one is for you to learn how to do statistical analyses in R and for you to talk about the meaning of the results. Outsourcing this effort to another person or machine does two things, neither of them good:
- in the short term, you will struggle on the exams in this course, even though they are open book. If you have not done the preparatory work yourself, you will not know where to look in your notes for ideas (and if you don’t know where to look, you will run out of time). The questions on the exams reward understanding, which means that you need to do the work to get there.
- in the long term, your would-be employer will discover very quickly that you don’t know what you are doing, either at the interview or in the first few weeks of your employment, with predictable consequences for you.
- An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”
- Using devices in the classroom will only help you if you use them appropriately. Education requires focus (you may think you can multitask, but you can’t). I am happy for you to use a laptop in my lectures to follow along with the code we are discussing, but if you use a device for some other purpose, you are not only depriving yourself of learning, but also you are distracting all the people around you and preventing them from learning.
- Taking notes by hand is better for your understanding. There are links at the top of this that explain why. I share my lecture slides, but I say a lot more than is on them in lecture (including extra context to help you understand, exam tips etc.), and you need to attend lectures and take notes to make sure you get everything. It is a good idea to find a “buddy” whose notes you trust, to borrow from in case you have to miss lecture (which should be a rare event), and who can borrow your notes should they have to miss lecture.
- A link for you if you want to get rid of AI tools on your devices. R Studio has a thing called Posit Assistant that you would do well to disable (Tools, Global Options, Assistant, uncheck all the boxes).
- This is not meant to be a difficult course. In my experience, the people who struggle in it are people who try to get through without doing the work themselves. If you do put in the effort, I think you will find it a rewarding course in which you can learn a lot.