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 coding clever for-loops to perform algorithmic magic (for things usually already in the standard library) is the best measure of the competence of a software developer. If it can literally be done by a machine, maybe we should be measuring based on something else. Especially since this kind of thing is best done on the job by looking in a good textbook or using the standard library. Probably grading at the university level needs to consider this also.
I haven't used Copilot. I doubt I'm its intended audience. After 30 years, actually writing code is perhaps the easiest part of my job. The mechanics is the easy part. The big picture thinking and figuring how to get it all together into a system is the hard part (and honestly there are plenty of people far better at it than I am). Now, if we get a Copilot for that ... then our profession is in trouble.
One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely coding clever for-loops to perform algorithmic magic (for things usually already in the standard library) is the best measure of the competence of a software developer. If it can literally be done by a machine, maybe we should be measuring based on something else. Especially since this kind of thing is best done on the job by looking in a good textbook or using the standard library. Probably grading at the university level needs to consider this also.
I haven't used Copilot. I doubt I'm its intended audience. After 30 years, actually writing code is perhaps the easiest part of my job. The mechanics is the easy part. The big picture thinking and figuring how to get it all together into a system is the hard part (and honestly there are plenty of people far better at it than I am). Now, if we get a Copilot for that ... then our profession is in trouble.