181–190 of 451 posts
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Syntax seems like a stupid thing to test in university level courses. That's trade school stuff. And I don't mean that as a criticism of trade schools, they just have a different focus.
Knowledge is built on foundations. Knowing syntax in one language is necessary to be able to do anything practical, which interacts with theory. You build valuable schema of the world by iterative theory and practice.
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Knowledge is built on foundations. Knowing syntax in one language is necessary to be able to do anything practical, which interacts with theory. You build valuable schema of the world by iterative theory and practice.
Nah. Syntax is trivial and irrelevant for teaching CS theory.
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I personally dislike placing a heavy emphasis on exams. Assignments/projects have been consistently the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of the courses I've taken so far in university. It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI.
The problem with exams is that everyone has a bad experience with a poorly written one. Well-written exams will have questions that test students at different levels of understanding across the whole curriculum. So a student who only understands the basics should be able to answer most of the easy questions and students who have a deeper understanding can answer the harder ones. Well-written exams should feel pretty…
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Syntax seems like a stupid thing to test in university level courses. That's trade school stuff. And I don't mean that as a criticism of trade schools, they just have a different focus.
Syntax is not the focus of your testing, but it’s often a pre-requisite to be clearly and accurately speaking the same language. Think not of taking off points for missing a semicolon but instead understanding the difference between the syntax for a method call and a property access. The different syntax conveys different meaning and so we should expect some basic level of accuracy to the language in question. At lea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with exams is that everyone has a bad experience with a poorly written one. Well-written exams will have questions that test students at different levels of understanding across the whole curriculum. So a student who only understands the basics should be able to answer most of the easy questions and students who have a deeper understanding can answer the harder ones. Well-written exams should feel pretty…
Exams almost filtered me out of this industry before I even got started. I later went on to be a lead developer! I went to a rural high school with a poor math curriculum. I understood the concepts, but I was slow. When I got to undergrad, my first calc professor gave us a 60 question test with 50 minutes of allotted time. He told us if we couldn't do the problems fast enough we weren't cut out for the work and it wo…
I think AI should be treated the same. Who cares if it assists in a lot of the work that is a good thing. BUT as we all know AI has been incorrect on many things so I think what would be a much better learning practice would be to forget if AI wrote the paper and focus heavily on students backing up their claims with sources. So if your paper says ABC is true and AI writes it up in a perfect paragraph you would still need to confirm the facts as true and find a reputable source that shows it to be true.
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I'm really not seeing how you can do PhD level work as an undergrad. You wouldn't have the foundational knowledge necessary to do PhD level work, and you have no idea how much of what you're learning is accurate.
Without going into too much detail, when I said “Ph.D level” I’m meaning active research that adds a meaningful contribution to a field. I’ll probably be posting on here in a couple months about it but I’ve been doing thousands of tests with beefy GPUs on a certain theory we have about small 9b LLMs under certain external constraints. Am I saying I’m as knowledgeable or capable as a Ph.D right now? Absolutely not. Th…
Sounds like a fun project, I wish you the best. I ran a similar program (independent study that encouraged freshman/sophomore undergraduates to explore using microprocessors, at the time the EE curriculum was completely focused on analog circuit theory and ended at boolean logic) and it went well enough that it eventually became part of the official undergraduate curriculum.
When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.
Yeah exactly, I remember having to write Java and C++ by hand in college in the early 2000s. It was also a good test how well you knew the syntax.
I would make this the focus for 90% of the first 2 years of their degree.
I would then have them spend 75% of their last 2 years learning how to use and program with AI. Aside from knowing how things actually work, there's no more important skill now than mastering AI.
When I was in college, your grade fully depended on the oral exam/debate with the professor. Everything else was but the entry ticket. Not sure anyone even attempted to cheat in that scenario. And the conversations were usually great, although very stressful for us cramming types