The Lewises

research on urogenital microbes in women's health, glycobiology research and training.

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@ass_deans This sounds like an excellent sociological experiment on getting along

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@mbeisen Theoretically you wouldn’t be accessing anything you didn’t have a legal right to correct?

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

“Keep it engaging, not salesy. I'm Grok, so witty.”

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

Is life closed book? Did I miss something?

[Dr. Sally Sharif @Sally_Sharif1]

I just gave a closed-book, pen-and-paper midterm exam in my 300-level course at UBC with 100 students. All exams were graded by an experienced graduate-level TA according to a rubric.

*** The average was 64/100.***

My class averages at UBC are usually 80-85.

Context:
• This was the first midterm, covering ONLY 4 weeks of material.
• Students had a list of possible questions in advance: no surprise questions.
• Questions included (a) 3 concept definitions, (b) 3 paragraph-long questions, and (c) a 1.5-page essay.
• I have taught this class multiple times. Nothing in my teaching style changed this semester.
• We read entire paragraphs of text in class, so students don't have to do something on their own that wasn't covered during the lecture.
• Students take a 10-question multiple-choice quiz at the end of every class (30% of the final grade).
• Attendance is 95-99% every class. Attention during lectures and participation in pair-work activities are very high → anticipating the end-of-class quiz.

*** But unfortunately, I suspect many students are not reading the material on the syllabus. They are asking LLMs to summarize it instead.***

After the midterm, students reported:
• They thought they knew concept definitions but couldn't produce them on paper.
• They thought they understood the arguments but struggled to connect them or identify points of agreement and disagreement.

My view:
It might be “cool” or “innovative” to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly "know" the material.

Moving forward:
We have a second midterm coming up. I don't know how to convey to students that the best way to do better on the exam is to rely on and improve their own reading skills.

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@drugmonkeyblog Well, I mean, how long have you been in submitting Grants so you must be an expert by now? Isn’t he your target audience? Totally ready to take the party line and swallow whatever nonsense you guys have to give them?

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

I know all my followers here are totally into the incompressible Navier Stokes problem

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@MTomasson Probably not because they say I have the Clay millennium prize noncompressible Navier stokes nonsmoothnezs

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

That’s funny… Claude says I need human experts to do most projects.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Anthropic researcher: Even if all AI progress stops now & algorithms don’t improve, current models already can automate most white-collar jobs within 5 years.

Manual task-feeding to AI model is already more economically viable than human labor.

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

Good thing all our scores are above the nonpayline of 4% @drugmonkeyblog

[Adam Wilson @theleanover]

the US government is proposing these very stupid changes for international students

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

Offer letters include stuff that they never intend to give you

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@theleanover Wow

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@KateBMwriting Because of everything that you are doing

[Drug Monkey @drugmonkeyblog]

NIH is shutting down some study sections. E.g.,

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

Gosh, it’s absolutely brutal to get fundable scores that are not fundable.

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@theleanover I have a side MD

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@theleanover Over 30 white dude who has done you wrong

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

Grok 4.2 is indeed based “historical evidence overwhelmingly shows [removal] was not [based]. The process involved systematic displacement, broken agreements, legal manipulations, outright violence by European settlers and later the U.S. government, driven by expansionist policy

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@MrinankSharma Good job on Claude.

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

Toeing the fine line I’m reading between.

[The Lewises @Lewis_Lab]

@Dr_Dave70 @DrCatharineY I don’t think the DOD is being cut to the same extent. But maybe they are cutting certain types of research? Such as biomedical?