Instead of failing them on this assignment, why not make them do an oral presentation and grade this assignment on that, if there is doubt?\ Failing them completely seems a bit heavy-handed and unfair. Surely some did leverage ChatGPT, but likely not all did so.
Been saying this for a while. There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative.
> There are very simple and effective ways to teach your class that can't be cheated with AI. These professors are simply lazy and uncreative.
I can attest to the following problems to good homework creation, from my own experiences playing with ChatGPT and teaching:
1. If you want to give a very illustrative yet easy theoretical exercise in algorithm design, one that computer scientists have solved over and over in the last few decades and which furthers your understanding, there are very likely solutions online and ChatGPT will give you the solution with very high probability.
2. If you create your own dataset and want the students to implement some algorithm and create a simple plot/discussion from the results, it will be very hard to distinguish a "student solved it on their own, but they did not invest too much time into it" submissions from ChatGPT submissions produced by a couple of queries.
3. Switching to oral presentations is hard to scale (as others attest) and also does not resolve much, because some students are perfectly okay with being handed a solution from somewhere (colleague, ChatGPT), not understanding it very well, and yet presenting it. Failing these students likely leads to overly difficult classes.
4. In-classroom exams without a computer work best, but they also do not scale very well (a lot of prep/correction needs to go into them) and some students with bad anxiety management skills, which includes me as a former student, dislike them passionately.
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As you can see, this topic is quite critical for my profession. The ugly truth is that university professors have only a very limited time allocated in their busy workweeks for teaching, and hence they have to take many shortcuts, including suboptimal homework sheets and limited innovation year-over-year. I also do not allocate as much time for philosophy of teaching/improving teaching skills as I would have liked.
If anyone here has novel ideas how to actually implement "a class that can't be cheated with AI", specifically university CS classes, I am all ears.