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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#161

Post by matheusmoreira »

aaomidi wrote: post #50
russfink wrote: post #31

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.

> 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.

I'd rather people had better opportunities in life that didn't depend on education. There's a lot of people who hate school and are just going through the motions because they believe it's the only path to success in life.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#163

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

bayindirh wrote: post #137
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will try it at some point, but I have... feelings... about its abuse of open source licenses software as a learning set. Also I work in Rust these days, and use CLion. Not sure if it would be much help in that environment.

I left GitHub on the spot, and moved to Source Hut the day Copilot released.

someone can still mirror your stuff on github. I wonder if they should make a special open source license, that disallows use of the source code for the purpose of training something like Copilot.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#164

Post by dragonwriter »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #163
bayindirh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left GitHub on the spot, and moved to Source Hut the day Copilot released.

someone can still mirror your stuff on github. I wonder if they should make a special open source license, that disallows use of the source code for the purpose of training something like Copilot.

> I wonder if they should make a special open source license, that disallows use of the source code for the purpose of training something like Copilot.

Since Microsoft uses material for copilot outside of licensing on the basis that it is Fair Use, that would probably have no effect in practice on whether or not the material is used in training something like Copilot. For that to matter, you’d first have to win a lawsuit on the basis that training something like Copilot requires permission of the copyright owner of the training material, to invalidate the premise of Microsoft’s action.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#165

Post by Kamq »

mannykannot wrote: post #109
Kamq wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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 idea…

> They're, for the most part, things we tried to put in libraries. We need some people who can do things like making those libraries. It also seems plausible that the people who have at least some of the knowledge and judgement to do that effectively will, on average, be more effective on more mundane tasks as well. Larry Wall is one who wrote (somewhat drolly) about the virtues of laziness, but there was nothing laz…

> We need some people who can do things like making those libraries.

Do we? For things as simple as copilot tends to put out? Why?

Do you also believe we need to keep people around that do other automated things? Plowing fields by hand? Hand compiling higher level languages (as the first lisp compiler was bootstrapped)?

I mean, keep the information around. Don't go burning textbooks on subjects just because we automated something. But, what exactly is the value proposition of having students do these things?

> It also seems plausible that the people who have at least some of the knowledge and judgement to do that effectively will, on average, be more effective on more mundane tasks as well.

And your claim is also that this is the only way to get the requisite knowledge and judgement? Have students take in a string from stdin with a format that changes every semester, munge it around, and do things with it instead.

> Larry Wall is one who wrote (somewhat drolly) about the virtues of laziness, but there was nothing lazy about what he did.

As someone who has done string munging in C, I'm not entirely convinced that creating perl isn't an effort saving defense mechanism (only half joking).

Re: Coping with Copilot

#167

Post by matheusmoreira »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #83
aaomidi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evaluation is vital but the current model used in education today is not evaluation, it is punishment. Failed to get the answers right? You are punished. You lose points. Your GPA plummets. You could even fail the class and have to take it again which means the punishment is not only social but economical.

There's real life consequences to this kind of evaluation. Huge consequences. Students cannot afford to make mistakes. There's huge pressure and anxiety before and during a test because the stakes are so high. Failing at this stuff can cost someone their future: future jobs, future career, even the student loans that enable them to study in the first place may only be afforded to students who get good grades.

Is it any wonder people cheat?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#168

Post by pclmulqdq »

busyant wrote: post #117
pclmulqdq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some courses really are required bullshit to some students. A lot of professors don't realize this, but if you teach a required course, it is simple math to say that some of your students just don't need to learn what you are teaching. Sure, a lot of students do need it but don't think they do, but a good fraction of the class does not need to learn the content you are teaching. The only remaining question is how to…

I know a lot of what I teach is not really relevant to students who aren't chemistry majors--I even say this UP FRONT at the beginning of the course. I tell the students that they should think of the course as a way of assessing whether they can think logically and critically about "weird things." Because life is full of weird things that need logical and critical analysis. In general, they appreciate my candor. That…

In the time I was at school, I heard of a lot more cheating than would be justified solely by people conserving time. I have recently seen studies that argue that 50-80% of students cheat at some point, and something like 10-20% cheat in every course they take. Personally, when I conserved time, I just accepted the bad grades - it was easier than trying to cheat and not get caught. The OP was talking about students cheating because they are not engaged with the material. I think that's only part of the problem with cheating: there are lots of other factors, like pressure to get a high GPA.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#169

Post by cpuguy83 »

tgv wrote: post #126
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #89

I 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 codi…

> if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run That's a very limited, and dismissive view. If you allow students to use copilot, you're handing out certificates or diplomas to people who can't code. That will very quickly erode the value of your institute's certification, and with it, that of the other students. Otherwise, why not give everyone an MSc in CS…

I don't think copilot is to the point where this is true.

Copilot mostly helps write boiler plate. It can also do a good job with adding correct comments to that boiler plate.

It's a tool that saves time and repetition. It's not a tool that's writing algorithms or solving problems for you.

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