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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#51
In computer class back in 9th grade there were one or two exams about Excel, where we were to use excel to compute some of the answers for questions. The fact that "memorization questions" (if that's the right English term?) about several functions and concepts were on the same exam sheet and that the Excel help function was right there was something that seemingly slipped the teacher's mind.

Although he was an older physics teacher who only really did computer class ("Informatik") because there was nobody else available or (more) qualified to do the job. When later on there were classes on programming, he made us use TurboPascal instead of something less cluttered and actually useful in modern economy like Python.

That same teacher later on performed some show experiments about induction and electromagnetic forces in physics class where he let a magnet fall through a glass tube with several copper coils around it. So far so good, but he then tried to readjust one of the coils one the glass tube, which predictably shattered in his hands, nearly severing some fingers and actually severing some tendons, which IIRC were later replaced with other tendons from his legs or something. Needless to say, not the sharpest tool in the shed.

My other physics teacher during 10th-12th grade physics classes was a severely esoteric nutjob, preferring to hold long rants about "science" being able to diagnose diseases in people by somehow shining a laser at a drop of their blood and interpreting the reflection/refraction because there was a "connection" between the person and their blood (or something like that, I honestly tuned out his ravings after a while). Apparently his wife is/was some kind of homeopathic "healer".

All that is to say, computer and physics class teachers for me were "very fun" and "useful", since one did not have a clue that their students were "cheating" and both were not very in tune with modern and/or scientific methods.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#52
post #19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think GPT-3 (or similar) won't write your ethics essay for you?

That’s very easy to deal with. Oral exams or blue-book exams.

What's a blue-book exam?

You can test loop-writing in an oral-exam, too. Thus your proposed solution for GPT-3 writing ethics essays is so good, that it fixes the original problem.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#53
post #33
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We never did much calculation in math exams. That's what physics class was for.

It was 8th or 9th grade for me when the switch happened. We were still doing areas and perimeters. A calculator actually helped me understand physics a lot better, especially things like slopes.

Makes sense!

Re: Coping with Copilot

#54
post #11

Cheating is getting easier by the day, but the bottom line is that if the student is cheating, they're probably not absorbing the coursework (or if they are cheating and absorbing the coursework, there might be something wrong with the coursework). The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to…

There's more to this: it used to be that a college degree carried with it something of a soft guarantee that the student could achieve a baseline level of work on their own. This acted as a useful filter for employers. If cheating runs rampant that filter becomes meaningless, and once the student has successfully cheated their way into the work force, their incompetence can (depending on field) do very real damage to…

A college degree used to signal competence. Now it signals you have the ability to show up and avoid doing something to get kicked out for 4 years.

I feel we'd probably get the same value to society if we just made grades 9-12 optional. It would remove the people that don't want to be there, improve the quality of instruction, and college would actually be a meaningful achievement so we no longer have requirements for entry level jobs to require a Master's degree.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#55
Guess how I learned query/replace in Emacs in 1985?

My friend who copied my Pascal programming assignment is now a director at a $1B hedge fund. I'm the founder of a series of scrappy, ramen noodle startups. I guess it's the "Senator Blutarsky" effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_%22Bluto%22_Blutarsky

Re: Coping with Copilot

#56
I love their take at the end which is to not expand the already crazy anti-cheating apparatus and just give students more interesting problems and let them use all the information at their disposal. I wish more professors took this attitude. Having every student implement the exact same famous algorithms is really silly when you take a step back. You don’t gain any appreciation for them because they’re unmotivated and you lack all the foundational knowledge. The proofs/explanations are all totally bespoke and don’t generalize.

You really win as a professor when you design a project that naturally causes you to reach for the knowledge you’re trying to teach. One of the best was my networking class where the project had us secretly rediscover tcp by trying to invent reliable transmission over UDP and then once we sufficiently cut our teeth the second half of the course was implementing a real working version on top of the professor provided userspace ip stack.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#57
post #11

Cheating is getting easier by the day, but the bottom line is that if the student is cheating, they're probably not absorbing the coursework (or if they are cheating and absorbing the coursework, there might be something wrong with the coursework). The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to…

Adjunct instructor here. Before I came into the program, cheating was on the rise. When given programming assignments, students would go to Geeks for geeks and download solutions, some of them mostly correct, and submit those for credit. One remedy was to try to make programming assignments harder and harder. Eventually, they got so hard that we were asking people new to computer science to implement a full arbitrary…

> One remedy was to try to make programming assignments harder and harder.

How is that going to stop cheating? Surely that will just make people more inclined to cheat, since they have less chance of solving it on their own.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#58
post #11

Cheating is getting easier by the day, but the bottom line is that if the student is cheating, they're probably not absorbing the coursework (or if they are cheating and absorbing the coursework, there might be something wrong with the coursework). The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to…

If someone is just looking to fill a course requirement and has no interest in being a programmer, my response is "meh, whatever".

If someone is cheating and actually expects to land a decent CS job, my response is "good luck on the leetcode questions and the 5-7 hours of questions you'll have to answer between the intro call, panels, and an offer".

And if someone magically manages to get all that way without actually learning the material they will get absolutely crushed at work. Meetings where you have to give your professional opinion will induce fits of anxiety. Making changes to your code based on feedback and not having any idea what the feedback means. Even just the amount of work alone that needs to be done at most tech places crushes great engineers. Without the knowledge it will just stack up on you even further.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#59
This is no different from finding the solutions on wikipedia, or any of a thousand other websites. People that want to cheat will do so, and they might even be correct in a completely selfish sense.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#60
post #11

Cheating is getting easier by the day, but the bottom line is that if the student is cheating, they're probably not absorbing the coursework (or if they are cheating and absorbing the coursework, there might be something wrong with the coursework). The most effective policy might not be to try and mechanically prevent cheating, but to explain that, this is information that you're going to need if you actually want to…

> is the purpose of the course to measure the student or to teach the student?

The very basis of the scientific method is measurement. If you can not measure your learning progress, how are you to know if your training methods are adequate or failing?

I really don't understand this idea that testing and measuring students is a problem. Even the dreaded "teaching to the test", sounds like a good idea. If doing so would somehow exclude important learning, that just identifies an area where the testing needs to be improved.

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