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Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

independent.co.uk

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Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#41

Post by Paul-Craft »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #14

What does the chatbot say, when asked to do a complete course assignment question?

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Just kidding, of course.

In all seriousness, when I asked GPT-4 to solve a problem from the 2020 version of CS50, not only did it spit out a correct solution, it also correctly used "#include "

I imagine they'd put some kind of guardrails up against literally spitting out the complete solution. I kinda doubt CS50 students would be sophisticated enough to a) realize that they're talking to GPT-4, and b) try to jailbreak it to give them the complete code. However, if they did, and they said they did, as a teacher, I'd be inclined to give full marks for the solution, provided they also tested it and it worked. ;)

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#42

Post by rmbyrro »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #32
chefandy wrote: post #18

CS50 was a gigantic intro class designed to whet non-comp-sci students appetite for coding and computer science, generally. (I took it when it was C/PHP, so they may have changed things.) While the lectures are very straightforward, the smaller 'sections' lectures with the dozen-or-so teaching fellows were more intensive, and p-sets were pretty challenging for newbies. The weekly help sessions ended up being a millio…

> The weekly help sessions ended up being a million lost students in a giant hall waiting to see one of a few dozen TAs offering uneven pedagogical quality. The assignments were often automatically graded upon submission and you often have some equivalent of a unit test to see if you got it right before submission, so you know if you got it wrong, but not how wrong. Just having a resource for sanity checks and walkth…

Providing factual context in the prompts reduces hallucinations to nearly zero in my anecdotal experiences.

For example, I once copy pasted an OSS code base into ChatGPT and all hallucinations went away. I had to limit to the files relevant to my questions, due to the context window limitation, but worked really well.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#43

Post by misnome »

p-e-w wrote: post #24
donkey_oaty wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my experience most lecturers and professors welcome challenge because it allows them to expand on what they are teaching.

They welcome shallow challenges that allow them to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by correcting them. They most certainly don't welcome challenges to the basic assumptions on which their teachings rest. Not that professors are in any way unique in that regard; it is a trait shared by all people with power and authority.

It sounds like you had a bad experience with a bad professor, or - came in starting with this attitude.

Because this doesn’t match my experience, at all.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#44

Post by cdperera »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #32
chefandy wrote: post #18

CS50 was a gigantic intro class designed to whet non-comp-sci students appetite for coding and computer science, generally. (I took it when it was C/PHP, so they may have changed things.) While the lectures are very straightforward, the smaller 'sections' lectures with the dozen-or-so teaching fellows were more intensive, and p-sets were pretty challenging for newbies. The weekly help sessions ended up being a millio…

> The weekly help sessions ended up being a million lost students in a giant hall waiting to see one of a few dozen TAs offering uneven pedagogical quality. The assignments were often automatically graded upon submission and you often have some equivalent of a unit test to see if you got it right before submission, so you know if you got it wrong, but not how wrong. Just having a resource for sanity checks and walkth…

Regarding providing hints, my university does this actually. The automated testing software we use (in house built, actually) allows the lecturer / TA team to define hints in case that test case fails.

Providing hints is a bit tricky, however. Often times, students fail the test case for unexpected reasons, and our hints actually mislead them. I've had students come to me (as a TA) saying that the test case is wrong because they take into account the hint.

Naturally, we could just give better test cases / give a broad disclaimer, which we try to. We do the latter, but the former is tricky, especially when we are trying to come up with novel problems.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#45

Post by josefrichter »

aklein wrote: post #40

Imagine paying for a Harvard education and getting taught by a chat bot. Not sure they thought the optics of this one through.

cs50 is also a “public” course studied remotely by folks all around the world for free. It’s hugely popular.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#46

Post by josefrichter »

I went thru cs50 a few years back. Fantastic course. I think they may teach you how to use AI in computer science. Not blindly copying generated code, but rather explain concepts, patterns, data structures, etc. chatGPT is an invaluable tutor already, so this makes perfect sense to me.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#48

Post by michaelt »

p-e-w wrote: post #24
donkey_oaty wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my experience most lecturers and professors welcome challenge because it allows them to expand on what they are teaching.

They welcome shallow challenges that allow them to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by correcting them. They most certainly don't welcome challenges to the basic assumptions on which their teachings rest. Not that professors are in any way unique in that regard; it is a trait shared by all people with power and authority.

Well, there are challenges and there are challenges.

A professor teaching about evolution will answer students' questions within reason - and students with a religious background might have heard some anti-evolution gotchas the professor will be happy to explain - like how something as complex as the eye could evolve.

But that doesn't extend to debating bible verses, allowing so many challenges that it disrupts the class, or changing the exam so you can pass it while denying evolution exists.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#50

Post by hourago »

> “Our own hope is that, through AI, we can eventually approximate a 1:1 teacher:student ratio for every student in CS50, as by providing them with software-based tools that, 24/7, can support their learning at a pace and in a style that works best for them individually,”

Is the goal to improve students learning or to reduce cost? The article does not even mention it. And I think that it is important to state the goal to know if the technology succeeds or fails. Too many "new technologies" are promoted by salesmen that move posts as soon as it fails and claim victory for things that nobody asked for.

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