Coping with Copilot

More important than even fundamentals, though, is modeling a successful software development mindset and problem solving technique. Too many professors have not _had_ any success in software development, which is sad. I can count dozens of examples of my own personal growth that could have been handled in college, that I instead ended up inflicting on my first employer.

Cheating on programming assignments has been rampant forever at every undergrad institution I have experience with and somewhat present among graduate students. My experience spans about 25 years in that space now.

When I taught an introductory class, I gave open-book exams with no laptops or phones allowed. About 1/3 of the class was unable to write a syntactically correct for loop in Python despite our textbook being an introductory Python-based book chock full of examples. It was pretty clear that a subset of students were either working together on project assignments or out-and-out having someone else do the assignments for them. I mainly compensated for this by having a large part of the grade being a 1-1 meeting with me to talk me through the code. That and the exam had the effect of actually making cheating somewhat less worthwhile. But this approach simply doesn't scale these days - my max class was around 32-33 students and the time I spent meeting with students was insane. I haven't taught in a few years and understand that class sizes of 150+ are not uncommon. I could have never used the same approach with that many students. I probably would have doubled-down on exams and made exam length darn near impossible to finish without actually knowing the material well enough to do without referring to the textbook.

I was teaching more from a practice-based viewpoint so mostly I came up with "weird" projects that mirrored problems I spend time on (data cleaning, using existing libraries to do neat little things, and also having students pick a personal project to implement that I helped them scope appropriately).

We bitch and moan about interview whiteboarding but given grade inflation its kind of hard to trust university credentials. Grade inflation was kind of disheartening in that the worst students didn't really get a poor grade. But I also didn't have any problems with the top 1/3 of the class getting a very high grade - these students were motivated, understood the material, and often impressed me with where they got in a single semester.

Like they picked some random port configuration issue that had stumped them for days in the past and thought cool let’s remove the internet, the command line, and ask people to solve it on the spot.

I offered plenty of plans for how I would go about debugging, but I didn’t know the one simple trick.

I agree with trying to use challenges that are closer to the real work, but it’s really hard to do that without over-testing domain knowledge.

For instance, I ask candidates to do some asynchronous control flow. These are all candidates with js listed as their best language and I offer to let them look things up or to show them the promise apis they need, but a certain percent just refuse to engage with the problem because they don’t have the domain knowledge and seem to feel they’re being tested unfairly.

The problem does a really good job of showing a candidates grasp of all the tricky parts of js, so I keep using it despite the drawbacks.