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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#251

Post by randomdata »

bo1024 wrote: post #229
randomdata wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, they're delusional, but I understand the mindset for cheating. Parental (other similar) pressure can indeed be quite strong. Absent of that pressure they wouldn't be there in the first place, so perhaps it is not so much being delusional as a rational response to their environment? If they cheat their way through the parents are happy and then they can return to the life they otherwise would have lived. The…

Famous professor quote/reply about this: "in teaching, students are not the customer. They are the product."

That certainly would be true within the public education (primary, secondary) system, where the government is the customer. Hence why attendance is mandated. However, typically college level students are initiating and fulfilling the transaction, thus they are the customer. They offer up money in exchange for keeping arbitrary social pressures at bay. In rare cases they offer money in exchange for learning things.

It is possible for the customer to also be the product. Especially in the age of salable data, that is becoming more and more common. However, when that is the case there is incentives given to the customers to shape them into what selling them as a product requires. In context here, that would mean something like giving discounts to those who don't cheat, which I am not familiar with any college doing, so... That brings us back to why would a vendor get emotional about the customer not using the product as intended?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#252

Post by DangitBobby »

johndough wrote: post #202
NikolaNovak wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I moved as well, I experienced three different Canadian universities' Computer Science Program. There was only one professor and course that I still remember 20 years later: CS408, Software Engineering, Professor Wortman, UofToronto. Class project was in four phases, cumulative (basic functionality for the application in phase 1, progressively additional functionality in other phases, frequently strongly interacti…

> After each phase, you had to swap your code with another team. I'd expect that most students would just "rewrite" the code they received from the other team and replace it with their own.

I'm sure that various strategies for gaming the system were anticipated and prohibited.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#253

Post by bcrosby95 »

nightpool wrote: post #184
tgv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run That's a very limited, and dismissive view. If you allow students to use copilot, you're handing out certificates or diplomas to people who can't code. That will very quickly erode the value of your institute's certification, and with it, that of the other students. Otherwise, why not give everyone an MSc in CS…

I'll be honest: has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well"? Surely there are some research level jobs where a PhD in CS is necessary, but for most coding jobs, an MSc is just 2 years of missed experience where you're learning bad habits and antipatterns by never having your code used by other people in any strenuous way. Certainly there are…

I've thought of going back for an MSc because it sounds kinda fun. Although probably in math rather than CS.

I never thought it would be held against me though. Seems weird.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#254

Post by omginternets »

This seems like a problem for educational institutions, not for industry. We're already inundated with mediocre programmers, many of whom have CS degrees, which is precisely why the industry looks at job experience more than credentials [0]. I don't see how this is going to further reduce the supply of competent candidates.

What it will do, however, is make it difficult for CS departments to evaluate students based on homework, and it's not clear to me that this is such a bad thing. My experience with university CS courses has been that assignments are largely auto-graded, with systems akin to unit tests. In the common case, an overworked TA quickly spot-checks the source code to look for obvious signs of academic dishonesty, but that's it. So, universities are left with the following choice: give everyone an A, or grade differently. In the optimistic case, this might even produce a grading strategy that improves the value of a CS degree as a predictor of programming competence. It likely won't, in which case we have a status quo.

[0] This is a problem in its own right. I recently referred a grad student as a job candidate in my current company. I'm the most senior backend engineer, and this grad student was a highly competent contributor to my open-source project, which currently plays a strategic role in our backend. Said grad student is unusually bright and productive in a complex specialty (distributed systems), and I had to push our VP Eng very hard to hire him. His initial reaction was along the lines of "he doesn't have any industry experience, so we don't know if he's good". It gives me nausea to think about how many outstanding, 2-sigma engineers are rejected because companies don't know how to evaluate their talents. In the end, we ended up hiring him, but only because I stated that I would take full responsibility for his productivity. I regret nothing.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#255

Post by vladtheimpala »

morelisp wrote: post #239
nightpool wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest: has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well"? Surely there are some research level jobs where a PhD in CS is necessary, but for most coding jobs, an MSc is just 2 years of missed experience where you're learning bad habits and antipatterns by never having your code used by other people in any strenuous way. Certainly there are…

I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's a…

One does not typically return to undergraduate study after gaining a first BS degree. If you have a BS (or in my case a MS as well) in a not-directly related technical field and wish to study CS, you get a graduate degree. This often requires extensive additional coursework, in my case about 12 additional semester hours. Thanks for ranking people like me lower than someone with less education; I doubt I would enjoy working for you anyway.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#256

Post by morelisp »

vladtheimpala wrote: post #255
morelisp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's a…

One does not typically return to undergraduate study after gaining a first BS degree. If you have a BS (or in my case a MS as well) in a not-directly related technical field and wish to study CS, you get a graduate degree. This often requires extensive additional coursework, in my case about 12 additional semester hours. Thanks for ranking people like me lower than someone with less education; I doubt I would enjoy w…

I described precisely this case even before my edit and said it was an exception.

There are a lot of people coming with 4+1y or 4+2y purely CS/SE. That's who I'm talking about.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#257

Post by Barrin92 »

emeryberger wrote: post #212

Hi everyone, article author here. I was also interviewed by The Register about this topic: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/19/copilot_github_studen... .

>"Copilot is different, he said, "It actually generates novel solutions. Not like they're super-crazy, sophisticated, genius solutions. But it makes new solutions that are superficially different enough that they plausibly could have come from a student.""

virtually every cheating student has always slightly altered their solutions. At best copilot saves you the five minutes of Googling and refactoring. For the committed cheater who wants to avoid a week's worth of homework and learning that's hardly meaningful. And in fact probably not even that because you still need to actually read what copilot outputs because it makes obvious bot-like mistakes quite often.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#258

Post by squeaky-clean »

Karellen wrote: post #225
hedora wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed lots of new grads, and also observed my own classmates. Most institutions have been granting CS diplomas to people that cannot code for decades. Those people tend not to find long-lasting programming jobs.

Computer science is to programming what materials science is to construction. It produces really interesting new building blocks that actual practitioners can put to amazing uses. But research scientists aren't necessarily great engineers, and engineers aren't necessarily great research scientists. That's OK though, it's why we have separate disciplines.

The CS program at my university, and most people I've spoken too, wasn't research oriented. At least not until the graduate level. Maybe at really respected places like MIT. Yes there were algorithms classes and such, but it was more about memorization than actually studying how they were made or how you would make a novel one. Final projects were always about building a real-world-ish application on a team.

But I'd say about 20% of the students that graduated still didn't understand things like references very well. They'd write their code with "foo.bar" and when it didn't compile they'd randomly change "." to "->" or add random asterisks around until it compiled.

(Classes were primarily in C++. We did some classes Java as well, and in my 3rd year Microsoft came in with a big sponsorship to change all the Java classes to C# classes.)

Re: Coping with Copilot

#259

Post by vladtheimpala »

morelisp wrote: post #256
vladtheimpala wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One does not typically return to undergraduate study after gaining a first BS degree. If you have a BS (or in my case a MS as well) in a not-directly related technical field and wish to study CS, you get a graduate degree. This often requires extensive additional coursework, in my case about 12 additional semester hours. Thanks for ranking people like me lower than someone with less education; I doubt I would enjoy w…

I described precisely this case even before my edit and said it was an exception. There are a lot of people coming with 4+1y or 4+2y purely CS/SE. That's who I'm talking about.

I'd quibble with the meaning of weakly related vs. not directly related, but fair enough.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#260

Post by geraldwhen »

tgv wrote: post #126
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #89

I understand the problem here and I sympathize with professors in these circumstances. Learning the fundamentals will remain important. But as others have pointed out: if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run. One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely codi…

> if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run That's a very limited, and dismissive view. If you allow students to use copilot, you're handing out certificates or diplomas to people who can't code. That will very quickly erode the value of your institute's certification, and with it, that of the other students. Otherwise, why not give everyone an MSc in CS…

Most people I meet with CS degrees cannot code. Not anything. Some can’t declare variables or get a file to compile.
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