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CheatGPT

blog.humphd.org

11–20 of 544 posts

Re: CheatGPT

#11
post #7

Another thing to keep in mind is that (unlike stackoverflow, wolframalpha and such) this tool is going to evolve dramatically over mere months. I'm not sure universities are structured to deal with such a rapid rate of change.

IRL universities will probably develop a protocol to remove access to helper tools for this sort of thing, maybe metal detectors at the door and specially tailored computers if needed for quizzes. Online universities OTOH are probably going to feel the bite of this the hardest. The CKA exam I took a while back had draconian measures to try to prevent me from cheating, such as taking the test with a webcam on me the w…

Or remote proctoring centers will show up as a business opportunity, and the cost of this will be passed on to students, who will pay it with financial aid.

Re: CheatGPT

#12
post #8

> Apparently, it's not even something students feel they need to hide. Which is good! If a bit of work is trivially accomplished by a machine, we should take it for granted and move on to the next layer of complexity. I have always maintained that teachers complaining about students cheating at homework assignments with AI need to instead work on providing better homework.

You seem to have misunderstood the purpose of homework.

Re: CheatGPT

#13
post #8

> Apparently, it's not even something students feel they need to hide. Which is good! If a bit of work is trivially accomplished by a machine, we should take it for granted and move on to the next layer of complexity. I have always maintained that teachers complaining about students cheating at homework assignments with AI need to instead work on providing better homework.

The point of school work isn't to complete schoolwork, it's to learn.

Re: CheatGPT

#14

Another thing to keep in mind is that (unlike stackoverflow, wolframalpha and such) this tool is going to evolve dramatically over mere months. I'm not sure universities are structured to deal with such a rapid rate of change.

> This tool is going to evolve dramatically over mere months.

Why do you say this with certainty?

Re: CheatGPT

#15
"In my opinion, the students learning to program do not benefit from AI helping to "remove the drudgery" of programming. At some point, you have to learn to program. You can't get there by avoiding the inevitable struggles of learning-to-program."

Couldn't you say the same about how compilers 'remove the drudgery' of writing machine code? Or is that a bad analogy? Provided AI eventually gets good enough in its code generation, maybe 'programming' is moving up another layer of abstraction.

Re: CheatGPT

#16
When I was a freshman in college the professor would live code various data structures and algorithms on the projector and ask the students to follow along. Each time he did this it was subtly unique.

It was required that you continue to use this same base code for the assignments plus your edits to complete it. This made it obvious who didn't attend the lectures and who they copied from. Assignments were graded by your peers and did not affect the final grade unless you didn't do them at all. Quizzes were not code, but proofs written in your own informal style. Tests were a mix of both proofs and code on paper with no notes or devices allowed.

I don't see how ChatGPT threatens this.

Re: CheatGPT

#17
post #8

> Apparently, it's not even something students feel they need to hide. Which is good! If a bit of work is trivially accomplished by a machine, we should take it for granted and move on to the next layer of complexity. I have always maintained that teachers complaining about students cheating at homework assignments with AI need to instead work on providing better homework.

???

By this reasonning nobody should ever learn anything, because it's all 'trivially doable' by machine.

Like 'addition' and 'subtraction'.

So let's gaslight those dumb teachers by saying they should make up 'better' homework assignments?

Re: CheatGPT

#18
Excercises should not be about evaluating and judging. They should be about learning. If a student uses an AI, or copies someone else's work, it is to their own detriment. (Exams are a whole different question.)

Even before AI, you could read a book and copy-paste the excercises, or just skip them, but if you wanted the full learning benefit you would type them out. I think we will have to focus more on teaching how to learn. This situation is nothing completely new. Even though you have power tools in woodworking, apprentices learn the basic techniques with hand tools (AFAIK).

Re: CheatGPT

#19
post #5

Did a try with ChatGPT asking to write a react hook doing something really basic. Code was ok, as expected. I asked to write tests for it, code looked good but it won’t run for some act() errors. Then it was mocking network calls… After trying for a while I had to write tests myself

I tend to find it works best as a tool for generating situation specific examples rather than writing you entire code for you.

Like when every stack overflow answer you find just doesn't fit because of one major difference in your situation, chatgpt often has you covered. Then you take the example code it gives you and adapt it to your actual codebase, testing to see if it works as expected as you go.

Re: CheatGPT

#20
"Cheating" is good. School teachers and professors should not be the arbiters of how much money you earn later in life, but they are based on their subjective assessment of you (via grades).

Many do not realize the intensely adversarial relationship one is in with a teacher. You are not there to learn. You are there to get an A. In the case of social sciences, you support the ideas your professor espouses. In the case of CS, you do whatever it takes to get your code running as the assignment specifies.

Anything else is idealism which will harm your future earning potential. It's insulting to ask kids to surrender their future earning potential due to "ethics" in an academic world where ever top tier conferences and journals are filled with unreproducible BS science.

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