61–70 of 463 posts
This reminds me of when my school teacher insisted that real engineers didn't use calculators. They'd calculate their sines and cosines from a table. 3 years later, the education ministry decided that was BS and let everyone bring calculators to math exams. Surprisingly, math scores didn't go up much.
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…
When you say into the field, do you mean academia or industry?
Because the things copilot does for you are absolutely not the things you need to know yourself to be in industry. They're, for the most part, things we tried to put in libraries (or more ideally language standard libraries for a lot of things).
The fact that is solves a lot of interview questions just means our interview process was absolutely garbage.
And I'm skeptical of the academic side of this as well. It sounds like professors from the early 60s being annoyed that students have compilers (another tool that saves a ton of work and repetition). Y'all are forgetting that this is the ultimate lazy man's field. This isn't the first time the basics have been swept away and replaced with something easier to work with (and hopefully won't be the last).
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That’s very easy to deal with. Oral exams or blue-book exams.
What's a blue-book exam? You can test loop-writing in an oral-exam, too. Thus your proposed solution for GPT-3 writing ethics essays is so good, that it fixes the original problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adjunct instructor here. Before I came into the program, cheating was on the rise. When given programming assignments, students would go to Geeks for geeks and download solutions, some of them mostly correct, and submit those for credit. One remedy was to try to make programming assignments harder and harder. Eventually, they got so hard that we were asking people new to computer science to implement a full arbitrary…
I do want to say that, those criteria exclude neurodivergent folk (who for many reasons may have never even been diagnosed). Honestly I think moving away from grades is going to be the way forward. Part of this is also making university, etc cheaper so you’re not financially incentivized to not take a class one, or multiple more times.
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> but also class discussions and group participation I really, really hated those parts of school, second only to group projects. I do appreciate why teachers want that, and I hear you about how it can surface those who are cheating, but I do wonder if it's causing the class to suffer for the alleged misdeeds of a few
I disliked them in school, for the usual reasons, but found them the most useful exercises for developing career skills. No person an island. And if they are, I don't want to be on a work team with them.
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…
> 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 go into the field and if you're using copilot here you are damaging yourself in the long run. 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 anecdo…
Parental (other similar) pressure can indeed be quite strong. Absent of that pressure they wouldn't be there in the first place, so perhaps it is not so much being delusional as a rational response to their environment? If they cheat their way through the parents are happy and then they can return to the life they otherwise would have lived. The time lost is unfortunate in some respects, but at the same time if you're cheating, the time investment likely isn't that great and an acceptable cost given the circumstances.
> the kind of shit that makes every faculty member angry
I find it curious that the customer using the product in an unintended way would be upsetting to the vendor. What drives such emotions? In my businesses, I couldn't care less how the customer uses my product. If they're happy, I'm happy.
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…
> 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 go into the field and if you're using copilot here you are damaging yourself in the long run. 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 anecdo…
The only remaining question is how to engage these people. I have seen good approaches to that problem and really, really terrible approaches, and it seems that most professors go for the terrible approaches. Unfortunately, engaging people who don't want to be there is a lot harder than just having a bunch of required tests.
These students are not all wrong that some courses are BS hoops to jump through. Meet them in the middle. Teach them something.
These examples of producing known algorithms in response to function signatures make it seem to me like Copilot is an intelligent, vendoring "package manager", not something that solves problems by itself. 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…