I really like this blog post, I think it fairly describes some of the challenges teachers are going to face with this technology, while also admitting that this tech is inevitable.
> 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.
I don’t disagree with this at all (at least for where we are now, in ten years, it might not matter as much), and I don’t want to be glib, but I do think the answer is to “teach students to program.” Don’t rely on rote assignments that you’re checking with an auto-grader (not saying this professor does that, but a lot do) and cookie-cutter materials; actually teach them to program.
And yes, LLMs will almost certainly mean that some students will cheat their way out of their assignments. But just like most cheaters who cheat on things they don’t fundamentally understand (which is different from people who cheat to hurry up and get through an exercise they could do in their sleep but don’t want to waste the energy doing), it will catch up to them when they have to do something that is not part of the rote assignment.
Or maybe, adjust how you test/assign homework. That isn’t to imply that that won’t take more work, but if your concern actually is that students aren’t learning and are just successfully copying and pasting, the testing/grading is the problem.
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In high school (and college), I was a top student in math and in English. But I hated doing homework. In one math class in high school, although I got near perfect scores on all of my math exams, the teacher still gave me a C because 20% of my grade was “homework” that I didn’t do (I had already taken the same class a year earlier at another school — I didn’t need to do the homework. My math tutor my mom got me out of fear of my bad grade taught me Calculus and Fortran instead of trying to get me to do the useless homework). This taught me nothing and frankly, soured me on taking more advanced math classes that were all taught by this same teacher.
In contrast, I had an English teacher who would assign vocabulary homework. Basic, “write a sentence with each word” shit. Again, a total waste of time for me. So I worked out a deal with him, let me just orally tell you what each word means, saving us both time and energy. He took the additional step of assigning me/grading me on different criteria than the rest of the class for essays and the like.
Which class do you think I learned more from? Which teacher actually cared about whether I knew/understood the material, versus what checkboxes I needed to follow to show “completion.”
If the goal is to teach students to understand what they are doing, then do that. Don’t get obsessed with trying to stop the inevitable few from cheating, or become overly focused on only having one way to measure comprehension.