431–440 of 463 posts
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> Teach your whole course in a fake language or on a fake machine like MMIX. Sorry, what's the point of that? I don't think it would make any difference for cheating?
There isn't any MMIX machine code in Copilot's training corpus.
This seems like a problem for educational institutions, not for industry. We're already inundated with mediocre programmers, many of whom have CS degrees, which is precisely why the industry looks at job experience more than credentials [0]. I don't see how this is going to further reduce the supply of competent candidates. What it will do, however, is make it difficult for CS departments to evaluate students based o…
> We're already inundated with mediocre programmers, many of whom have CS degrees, which is precisely why the industry looks at job experience more than credentials How does looking at job experience help to distinguish good from bad developers?
My sense is that hiring managers think academic experience is so far removed from the needs of industry that that won’t be able to understand or evaluate the merit of academic experience. I’m of the opinion that they’re mistaken, but ah well…
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The grind you have to go through in a "google style" interview has nothing to do with the actual work you normally do. It's done to show 1) you will do large amounts of boring work without questioning the need for it 2) you got the fundamentals and you know what's there / when using something you can grok what's going on under the covers. Nobody needs to implement a sorting algorithm until they do - the risk of NIH a…
Nobody at Google wants you to do boring work without questioning the need for it. That would be a waste of money and time. Hard interview questions are asked for the same reason hard questions are asked in SAT tests. The assumption is that if you can do a hard thing in the interview (implement a mutex using a semaphore or whatever) then you can probably write simple code too. A few years ago I was working somewhere t…
The low hiring bar is relative. If all you do is put together crud apps and it's mostly stitching things together you might not even need a formal CS education. In fact a lot of people I know are wildly successful because they found their niche. They would have an exceptional bad time in a whiteboard setting.
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I’ve seen many instances where a low-skill programming place either lives with a bug, or alternatively, adopts a solution that involves meticulously copy&pasting a workaround into 300 places. Having said that, I know great, intelligent programmers, sone of who worked on compilers, who are simply bad in a whiteboard setting. Having a filter is necessary, I’m just not convinced a Google-style interview filters exactly…
The google-style interviews are certainly filtering for something though. An unfounded theory of mine is that the unfortunate eagerness of Google to sunset their products [1] might be a side effect of hiring for people that rather want to solve exciting coding problems and furthering their career by using X new language/framework, than maintaining legacy systems and keeping backwards compatibility, which might not so…
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> I mean, they're delusional, but I understand the mindset for cheating. 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…
> 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. There's a lot more going on here than maybe you realize. First, the students are not your only customers. The administration is also one of your customers. If you make the course T…
If not, you might want to try a new business. You may not be cut out for the one you're in. The business world is not very forgiving, nor should it be. Those who can't adapt need to perish.
Just add a requirement where the student has to explain how the code works. To be honest there should be a class called language model querying because for simple tasks it does well but eventually you will have to debug the output (not just copilot but GPT3 and dall-e).
# I solved this problem by using the % operator to get each digit from the number. I declared and initialized a sum variable to keep track of the sum of the digits of the number. I set a temp variable equal to the input number. I then used a while loop to loop through each digit of the number. In the loop, I used the % operator to get the remainder of temp divided by 10. This gave me the last digit of the number. I added this digit to the sum variable. I then divided temp by 10 to remove the last digit of the number. I repeated these steps until all of the digits of the number were added to the sum variable. Finally, I printed the value of the sum variable.The solution doesn't seem that hard to me. Put less weight on homework grades and more weight on projects and tests. If they cheat the homework they'll bomb on tasks that can't be solved with Copilot.
Here's a thought: Replace mandatory homework with proctored, time-limited exams on systems that don't have copilot available (or dramatically reduce homework's percentage of one's grade). If one cares about cheaters (and I'm not convinced we should), doesn't that solve the problem?
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I think an accelerated bs/ms might be another exception you should consider. (This being when a bs student can do another year immediately following to get their ms.) It makes sense on ROI as many companies have HR departments more likely to get you into the interview process, and then it’s often a slightly higher starting role. Also, from a knowledge standpoint, some graduate classes help practical abilities only. A…
Undergraduates in CS can fill their senior year with 500 level courses easily. Motivated ones also much of their junior year. Why would I take the applicant who did it five over the ones who did it in four? Worrying about the “MSc” label at the end for the same work is just credentialism.
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> I find it curious that the customer using the product in an unintended way would be upsetting to the vendor Because your customer, in so doing, is stealing from your other customers and undermining your reputation as a vendor. Plus, you're disheartened because this interaction is a waste of time, regardless of the fact you get paid: if money was all you cared about, you wouldn't be in education.
> Because your customer, in so doing, is stealing from your other customers That's always going to be the case, though. Imagine you built software that helped businesses find customers. Using it the intended way they can realize a small number of new customer each day distributed across your customer base. Now, someone finds a new way to use your software in a manner that you never envisioned and they're attracting a…
And yes it's a waste of time! If you want a fake credential then it's much cheaper and easier to just lie on your CV. It's not like many employers will check your certificates, at least not in software. I'd really rather people did that than waste my time first trying to teach them and later handling their academic misconduct cases.
If I'm marketing social need, this is the first time I've heard of it ;-)