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…
What I don't know (I can't try the 'free' Copilot without providing a credit card), is how well it understands unusual constraints and separate pieces of C++ classes that make the real programs we write.
For instance, a simple test would be: "write a fibonacci function but skip the number 5". Does it do the right thing?
Another challenge would be a C++ class with several fields. That's what our real programs look like: composite data objects, mixing several different algorithms together to implement complex behavior.
Maybe my data structure has a hash table of items, as well as a direct link to the largest item. When I say: "write the function to insert a new item in the list, and remember to update the largest item if it is larger than the current one", would Copilot do the right thing? Each step is easy in itself (adding an element to a hash, comparing an item to another one).