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I get that copilot is AI and pretty cool, but students could look up a Fibonacci program on Google before it existed. What's more these algorithms are written in books. If students wanted to cheat on your "write depth first search" assignment then they already were.
Just add a requirement where the student has to explain how the code works. To be honest there should be a class called language model querying because for simple tasks it does well but eventually you will have to debug the output (not just copilot but GPT3 and dall-e).
Do you think the skills taught in that class would be relevant for very long?
Cheating is getting easier by the day, but the bottom line is that if the student is cheating, they're probably not absorbing the coursework (or if they are cheating and absorbing the coursework, there might be something wrong with the coursework). The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to…
Because of this, there will always be considerable pressure to detect cheating and remove offending parties from the program, be that the students copying answers from the internet, or the institutions failing to detect the problem before handing out a degree.
Just pose better questions and more open ended assignments.
Cheating is getting easier by the day, but the bottom line is that if the student is cheating, they're probably not absorbing the coursework (or if they are cheating and absorbing the coursework, there might be something wrong with the coursework). The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to…
I don't teach CS, but I teach an online course in a STEM field. I give out a similar message ("you're only hurting yourself in the long run").
My anecdotal evidence is that my warning does nothing--I have trap questions on various quizzes/exams and the frequency of cheating hasn't changed with or without the warning.
My suspicion is that the students who cheat feel this way: "This is just some bullshit hoop that I have to jump through, so it's okay if I cheat. I'll figure out the important stuff when the time comes."
I mean, they're delusional, but I understand the mindset for cheating.
edit: amusing story.
Faculty members in my department are required to take an on-line course on how to handle hazardous waste. There are a few hours worth of videos to watch and a test that you need to pass at the end.
Last year, one of the faculty members took the test, compiled the answers and emailed them around to everyone else (to save them the time for this "bullshit task.").
I said to him, "Isn't this precisely the kind of shit that makes every faculty member angry when the students do it?"
That being said, it was a bullshit test.
Just add a requirement where the student has to explain how the code works. To be honest there should be a class called language model querying because for simple tasks it does well but eventually you will have to debug the output (not just copilot but GPT3 and dall-e).
> there should be a class called language model querying Do you think the skills taught in that class would be relevant for very long?
Just add a requirement where the student has to explain how the code works. To be honest there should be a class called language model querying because for simple tasks it does well but eventually you will have to debug the output (not just copilot but GPT3 and dall-e).
The perceived productivity boost that people get from it could be interpreted as a condemnation of how verbose a lot of coding still is even in known areas. Lots of brain cycles wasted on doing things suboptimally that we can already do optimally.
I get that copilot is AI and pretty cool, but students could look up a Fibonacci program on Google before it existed. What's more these algorithms are written in books. If students wanted to cheat on your "write depth first search" assignment then they already were.
I think the big change here is how much easier it is? Students, like everyone else, are lazy. Previously just doing the assignment was typically less work than cheating, and Copilot makes that much less common.
I don't think this is generally true, especially for algorithms and smaller programs: Googling 'fibonacci python' takes 3 seconds.