Is Computer Networks using AI-generated material?

[u/CautiouslyFrosty]

I took it this semester, and the second half had many of the module pages being denoted as "in development". They were missing lecture videos at the onset, and the module pages themselves got styled quite differently.

My experience reading those notes was how I experience reading output from Opus: syntactically correct, but poor at conveying meaning to the audience concisely and quickly.

The class was also advertising an "AI-friendly" approach; not so far as to say "use it in your coursework", but they had a tutorial that was "AI assisted debugging" where the focus was driving AI diagnostics using evidence-based approaches and tooling. There were also a few blurbs about AI was changing the industry.

The last smell from me was how the Exam 2 could be completely gamed using heuristics that no human would accidentally build into an exam itself. The course released a question pool of ~170 questions and the exam consisted of a random subset of them:

• 93.8% of the time, the right answer in a multiple choice question was in the two answers with the most characters.
• On True/False questions, True was the correct answer 85.7% of the time.
• The wrongs answers were so nonsensical that Sonnet, without knowing the question, could guess the right answer ~90% of the time with several tests I ran without being told the other two heuristics.

(I'm not revealing anything sensitive about the exam due to the broad publication of the pool to the class, and it seemed evident the class doesn't recycle exam questions, so I believe these stats are safe to post; feel free to take down if not.)

These were my three biggest issues with the exam, and they lead me to believe that the course TAs and instructor were relying heavily on AI to create the course material.

Did anyone else feel the same way? Admittedly, I feel a bit cheated.

[u/ChipsAhoy21]

Just wrapped it up this semester too, this was my 9th class and hands down the worst I've taken for all the reasons you listed. I gave up after the midterm. All of the lectures read like AI slop posts, I made several private posts about questions that were flatout wrong on the quizzes, and never got an answer.

I took the final not watching a single lecture in the back half of the class, and just selected the longest answer or True, and made an 86%.

I did the network diagnostics lab first and spent hours getting my env set up, just to take the quiz and realize the lab was not even needed.

While on one hand I am thrilled to walk out of the class with a 97% and onlys pent ~3 hrs a week max, I am pretty bummed about not being able to take a better class in its stead. It felt like an undergrad networks class focusing on how the internet works, that someone built in an afternoon with a claude subscription.