Could you just use another teaching language? Does copilot work as well with e.g. Racket, Raku or Pascal, which all seem like decent CS101 languages to me?
If it doesn't now, it will quickly if that solution is adopted.
Coping with Copilot
81–90 of 463 posts
Re: Coping with Copilot
#82While it is true code pilot is quite amazing and can produce some very decent snippets, if the exercice you give is specific enought (using a special database schema, file format, or API), with objectives that are not common (ask the user specific questions, and draw conclusions out of it or react to events), then it cannot produce a fully working program. I use code pilot regularly now, and it does speed up my work,…
As I moved as well, I experienced three different Canadian universities' Computer Science Program.
There was only one professor and course that I still remember 20 years later: CS408, Software Engineering, Professor Wortman, UofToronto.
Class project was in four phases, cumulative (basic functionality for the application in phase 1, progressively additional functionality in other phases, frequently strongly interacting with previous phase code).
Here's the kicker: After each phase, you had to swap your code with another team. So you had to pick up somebody else's code, figure it out, and then build up on it.
Few of us that had real-world working experience loved the course and flourished in it. This is what we are training for! This is what programming is like! You are taking real code and building a real thing with it!
About 250 other students signed a petition to the Dean on how this is unfair and awful and they will not put up with it. They were just too used to / spoiled by 16 years of 5 assignments per semester with abstract, entirely separate questions of 1.a), 1.b), 1.c), etc.
All I could think of - if you did not like this course, you are about to not enjoy next 4-5 decades of your life :D
Other than this one course, I can say that I'm a prolific, enthusiastic, life-long learner, and my university experience was the absolute dumps - it was far less about learning, and far more about bureaucratic hoops and artificial constraints and restrictions. I was top of the class in some hard courses (generative compilers etc), mid-pack in the some of meh courses, but in retrospective, my life opened up when I was done with academia and could work and learn in the 'real world'.
Re: Coping with Copilot
#83Earlier 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.
Do you also believe that we should move away from evaluation entirely? Genuinely asking.
Re: Coping with Copilot
#84Copilot is limited to short snippets. You can't just ask it to write a HTTP server. Also I don't see how having copilot generate the code for listening on a server socket is any better than when I copied how to do it out of a man page. Copilot doesn't add anything new, you've always been able to look up the documentation or look up how other people approach the problem.
The fibonacci example doesn't make much sense either due to how trivial it is. Without copilot you are just copying from the definition of the function and with it copilot copies it for you. The other algorithms that follow are both online and probably in their textbook.
Re: Coping with Copilot
#85I have been using copilot for two months and I find it more annoying than useful, am the only one that feel like this?, I also used tabnine, and it gives a lot of syntax errors in rust, so I could barely use it for a week. I definitely can agree that copilot is better than tabnine, but I feel like writing code is the easy part of programming, and copilot doesn't offer a crazy help to justify the monthly payment and that my private code is uploaded to Microsoft servers. Not only that, but I find that my IDE suggestion are good enough most of the time.
Re: Coping with Copilot
#86While it is true code pilot is quite amazing and can produce some very decent snippets, if the exercice you give is specific enought (using a special database schema, file format, or API), with objectives that are not common (ask the user specific questions, and draw conclusions out of it or react to events), then it cannot produce a fully working program. I use code pilot regularly now, and it does speed up my work,…
As I moved as well, I experienced three different Canadian universities' Computer Science Program. There was only one professor and course that I still remember 20 years later: CS408, Software Engineering, Professor Wortman, UofToronto. Class project was in four phases, cumulative (basic functionality for the application in phase 1, progressively additional functionality in other phases, frequently strongly interacti…
Wow, your professor had an amazing idea! I wonder why isn't this strategy more common in college classes.
Re: Coping with Copilot
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
School assignments are so different from the dynamics of a real workplace that I find this point very moot. Always hated them with a passion, but otoh I always enjoyed team math and programming competitions, situations where you have to do stuff that's actually hard, work with people you actually respect and trust them to do their job.
That's the thing.
For me at least, the dynamics of "School Group Project" are basically completely different and separate from "Work team". I happen to do well in both, but I do not enjoy both: the motivations and structure and dynamics and goals and timelines of "School Group Project" are so much more artificial and ultimately pointless, and obviously to all from the start.
Same things with discussions - I happen to be an engaged student, usually front row, hand always up, discussing with instructor and team and colleagues and everybody. I like to be engaged and figure things out together. But I'll never be half the developer than my colleague who barely speaks a word unless asked. He's friendly, meek, polite, and excellent team player and developer - he just does not initiate conversations, especially in group settings. I can imagine he'd have a nice big 0 in that category if that was a grade criteria.
Which is not to criticize the professors who try to use group discussions; just to point out, this is not a solved problem at scale any more than interviewing/hiring. There's too much humanity and too few absolutes :)
Re: Coping with Copilot
#88Grading students is probably an archaic way of teaching. You want them engaged not cheating. But ok, institutions want grades... What about this solution?:
https://theconversation.com/i-no-longer-grade-my-students-wo...
Re: Coping with Copilot
#89I understand the problem here and I sympathize with professors in these circumstances. Learning the fundamentals will remain important. But as others have pointed out: if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run.
One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely coding clever for-loops to perform algorithmic magic (for things usually already in the standard library) is the best measure of the competence of a software developer. If it can literally be done by a machine, maybe we should be measuring based on something else. Especially since this kind of thing is best done on the job by looking in a good textbook or using the standard library. Probably grading at the university level needs to consider this also.
I haven't used Copilot. I doubt I'm its intended audience. After 30 years, actually writing code is perhaps the easiest part of my job. The mechanics is the easy part. The big picture thinking and figuring how to get it all together into a system is the hard part (and honestly there are plenty of people far better at it than I am). Now, if we get a Copilot for that ... then our profession is in trouble.
Re: Coping with Copilot
#90I have been using copilot for two months and I find it more annoying than useful, am the only one that feel like this?, I also used tabnine, and it gives a lot of syntax errors in rust, so I could barely use it for a week. I definitely can agree that copilot is better than tabnine, but I feel like writing code is the easy part of programming, and copilot doesn't offer a crazy help to justify the monthly payment and t…
Yeah I was going to post this. I did some coding the other day and it kept spitting out code that looked right but was calling functions that didn't exist. It also competes with IntelliJ's auto-complete making things doubly irritating.
I leave it disabled more often than it's enabled, unless I'm doing something simple like wanting to copy a file, which in Go is stupidly obtuse.