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CheatGPT

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131–140 of 544 posts

Re: CheatGPT

#131

Post by wpietri »

kube-system wrote: post #120
wpietri wrote: post #110

This is definitely going to require changes in interview practices for a lot of places. For those looking for an alternative, may I suggest pair programming? I've been doing pairing interviews for years. These days I have a standardized, practical problem, something that's reasonably like the work. (E.g., let's use APIs A and B to build features X, Y, and Z.) I let them pick their preferred language and tooling, so t…

The emergence of this problem is exactly why I don’t like giving people programming exercises that are overly explicit. Most coding tests just tell people what to write and then have them write it. Real world problems are more complicated. Instead, tell your candidates what your problem is and then ask them for a solution. Let them write their own requirements. It’s a lot harder for language models (and developers wi…

Exactly. At points during a pairing interview when I get asks for more details on requirements, I'll make sure to reply with something like, "Which do you think is better for the user?" It turns out most developers have a pretty good sense for this, even if they're not used to being able to use it.

Re: CheatGPT

#132

Post by sgu999 »

wpietri wrote: post #110

This is definitely going to require changes in interview practices for a lot of places. For those looking for an alternative, may I suggest pair programming? I've been doing pairing interviews for years. These days I have a standardized, practical problem, something that's reasonably like the work. (E.g., let's use APIs A and B to build features X, Y, and Z.) I let them pick their preferred language and tooling, so t…

If some places need to change their interview practices, I think it means they've been doing it wrong all this time. You ask them to write some code, then to explain and justify it. Whether or not it has been mostly written by an LLM really shouldn't matter... (leaving aside edge cases preventing to use some tools)

Re: CheatGPT

#133

Post by travisgriggs »

otterpro wrote: post #118

If I were a teacher, I'd give written exams for coding, as we used to have back in the 80's when we didn't have enough dedicated computers for everyone in the class, and most of kids didn't have a home computer to work with. So instead, we'd implement simple algorithms on paper for in-class quiz/tests/homeworks. I remember in high school, we had an exam, and one of the question was to write a for loop counting from 1…

> If I were a teacher...

You'd be wondering how the heck you get out of a profession where pay is stagnant, the backlog of problems has been growing for a long time, and the minimization of resources to deal with has been in the wrong direction for a long time. You'd join the league of "you can never go wrong hiring another administrator" or exit for some related parlayable field in industry and throw your hands in the air with a "somebody else's unsolvable problem" disgruntled attitude.

Re: CheatGPT

#134

Post by Spivak »

> Apparently, it's not even something students feel they need to hide.

Why would you feel the need to hide it? It's a tool, it's not like the library, other professors, your friends, Sourcegraph or StackOverflow is cheating. Trying to argue why GPT is cheating is just going to devolve into "you can have outside help, as long as it isn't too good for some arbitrary line.

Re: CheatGPT

#135

Post by warning26 »

jimbobimbo wrote: post #130

All this tells us that whiteboard interviews are here to stay.

With the general shift to remote-first, it's a lot more difficult to verify that your whiteboarder isn't ChatGPT-ing just off-screen.

Re: CheatGPT

#136

Post by gattilorenz »

corbulo wrote: post #79
dcow wrote: post #71

It seems ChatGPT should be treated the same way institutions treat plagiarism. It's fine to use LLMs for inspiration but the work you submit must be meaningfully your own. Of course it's not perfect, it never will be. But ultimately it's the student that suffers when they plagiarize. Professors ought have this conversation with students at the same times they're discussing the value of learning & education. I suspect…

It will be a hard sell since it or similar tech has already been long embraced commercially. A bit like forcing students to use an abacus while calculators are around. The student should still be responsible for what they submit and all of its errors of course. But what should really change is our methods of assessing students. The University model for undergrads has already been long broken in need of fixing. I don'…

> A bit like forcing students to use an abacus while calculators are around.

But... we do that already. We ask students not to use calculators, or not to use scientific calculators, during exercises, exams, etc. And it's not because we want to impose an extra load on them, but because we think that by not using calculators you learn to deal with numbers, you build a strong foundation for thinking about math, quantities, etc.

But since we're talking about essays and coding assignments that are graded, one of the objection is that they should not be graded, because the goal is to use them for learning.

Sure, at the university, the ideal scenario is that students are there to learn and will do assignments even when they are not graded. That happens, but it's for a minority of them, because (understandably) the university is also a time for parties, relationships, etc, and students are young... In practice, many assignments are graded mostly to make sure the students do them, learn from them, and pass the course (maybe a patronizing approach, but in the end, if only 10% of the students pass, the teacher won't have an easy life with his/her superiors - but that's another story).

Re: CheatGPT

#137

Post by iLoveOncall »

hiq wrote: post #124
iLoveOncall wrote: post #43

Cheating in academia isn't a problem, because the only people students are cheating is themselves. I've seen plenty of cheaters, they were the worst students, and despite cheating couldn't graduate or couldn't find a job after graduating. If some moron is stupid enough to cheat when he's paying 50K a year, let them.

> I've seen plenty of cheaters, they were the worst students In other words, you haven't seen the "cheaters" who were among the best students. "cheaters" in quotes because it's not clear to me that people using freely available resources when doing homework are really cheaters. If an instructor wants to do a closed-book exam, they can do just that.

> In other words, you haven't seen the "cheaters" who were among the best students.

If they were able to fool everyone to the point of being considered good students, it means they weren't cheaters, just that they had a different approach to problems than others (which is kinda what you say after).

Re: CheatGPT

#138

Post by savolai »

In earlier versions of Moodle there used to be a peer review assignment type, where students evaluated each others' submissions and both scores and other students' evaluations were scored. Thwn teacher only had to evaluate the reliability of some evaluators to infer skill level for everyone, if I recall correctly.

My understanding was that this scaled quite well but you wouldn have to ask the professors.

This was used in an HCI course at my uni in Tampere, Finland, years ago. As a student the experience was very communal and enlivening.

Re: CheatGPT

#139

Post by Spivak »

humanizersequel wrote: post #119
rpearl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of writing an essay is not to learn how to produce an essay. It's to learn analytical thinking, research, and argument skills.

Knowing how to produce an essay is exactly the same as "analytical thinking, research, and argument skills" with the added challenge of making it legible to a reader — which is what makes those skills useful.

I suppose, but having written plenty of essays as an adult I can say with complete certainty that nothing I learned from my 5 paragraph days was of any use. No one, not you, not your teacher, not any real life audience for any topic you would be presenting on or publishing for, wants to read anything remotely close to what you're forced to write in school.

Re: CheatGPT

#140

Post by gchallen »

I teach CS1. A lot of this post resonated with me.

In particular, I don't think that beginners are well-served by relying on AI to complete their assignments. Later on, once they've developed some computational thinking abilities, sure. Starting out, no.

There's a real dearth of good options available to computer science educators today for teaching introductory material effectively in the face of all the new and existing ways there are for students to cheat. A lot of what people offer up as alternatives are unworkable or downright bad ideas:

* Paper exams represent an unrealistic environment, encourage terrible programming habits, are a nightmare to grade, and don't test student abilities to identify and correct their mistakes—which is maybe the most important thing we want to assess.

* Oral exams also don't scale and raise obvious equity issues.

* Beginners have to build basic skills before they are ready to work on larger open-ended projects.

We're fortunate at Illinois to have a dedicated computer-based testing facility (https://cbtf.illinois.edu/) that we can use to allow students to take computer-based assessments in a secure proctored environment. This has been a really important support for our ability to continue to teach and assess basic programming abilities in our large introductory courses. I'm not sure why this idea hasn't caught on more, but maybe AI cheating tools will help drive broader adoption. (Such facilities are broadly useful outside of just computer science courses, and ours is heavily scheduled to support courses from all across campus.) Anything would be better than people returning en masse to paper programming exams.

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