luke0016

> A bunch of kids failed an important class and he didn't do a damn thing to address it.

It's unclear to me how you reach that conclusion when the alternative that was suggested to the Dean and Department Head of allowing students to resubmit the assignments would have done just that.

> its just not reasonable to expect self study on everything.

That is not an expectation in the course. There is an army of graduate and undergraduate TAs available to provide assistance and answer questions.

It was also back in 2001, when he was 18 years old. The dangers of having a site spanning multiple decades. Heh.

This sounds snarky, but I don't quite get why. That's exactly what was done, and in the end nobody needed to be (nor was) removed from the building. Although those not enrolled in the course were relegated to the surrounding open spaces/hallway. Which was a good thing, because lecture attendance on that day was near 100% (i.e., almost all seats were occupied by students).

> I can easily see that in a couple of years students are taught those new skills directly.

Definitely. We're already getting ready to prototype a course that does just that.

> Yet I also understand your view -- students providing and copying code yet not learning and doing work themselves. I completely get that needs to be found. Yet, reading the article I felt truly scared for the students who might get caught up in this yet I don't think would have actually done anything wrong.

I get that, and I think that is partly what drove a lot of the initial turmoil when this started. But, the important thing to recognize (and this could have been better emphasized for sure) is that it's really easy to tell whether someone caught up in this is cheating. A 5 minute discussion is all it takes. And, yeah, maybe some could BS their way through a discussion like that if they had a heads up, but at that point 1) they've now learned at least some of the material and 2) you're not going to catch everyone anyway. Processes like this are somewhat like a police officer catching people speeding. The enforcement alone discourages the behavior, to a degree, and you're never going to catch everyone.

Only rivaled by the ugly website :-)

> For these CS grads who are being punished so harshly for using AI, the same: the first thing they will meet when they start their new developer job is a Claude prompt. Their CS course will not have prepared them for this, and they will suck at using an LLM to generate code.

You're assuming that this policy continues for higher level courses. It does not. Use of LLMs is discussed, and in some cases even encouraged, in higher level courses like Software Engineering I.

I would argue that if they use an LLM at the stage of a lower-level fundamentals course, they'll suck even more at using an LLM for more interesting tasks. They also won't have the skills necessary to address problems when the LLM invariably doesn't do exactly what is desired.

It does not say that one cannot use those things, it says that one is likely making their life more difficult. Implementations that utilize those things are, with high probability, more convoluted and involved. This slide is specifically around the time we introduced fscanf() and friends. If one is using the things mentioned in the slide, they're likely partially re-implementing *scanf() on their own. Which, while certainly a good exercise, misses the goal of developing familiarity and understanding surrounding *scanf().

While there are certainly a handful of experienced students that use these things, ten years+ of experience shows that most are copying from elsewhere. A simple, brief meeting with the student is easy enough to ascertain that, however. And that was certainly a part of the process.

Regardless, that alone would not have triggered an academic integrity investigation and, again, there was no prohibition here.

You're not wrong. But, that type of concern usually needs to be addressed by someone at a higher pay grade than professor ;-)

It is certainly lower this semester, but not near zero (it was never near zero, even before "AI").

With regard to judgment, there is a difference between judging a person's character and judging their actions. That was the point there. The actions clearly violated course policy.

I am curious what leads you to believe that there's a desire for someone to agree with the actions when the retrospective opens by saying the situation should have been addressed better.

I think there are two somewhat orthogonal things addressed here. The first is adapting in the face of AI, and that is happening albeit not instantaneously. The other part is simply ensuring students are working within established policies. In some sense at this level using AI is similar to handing a student a calculator while teaching them to do basic mathematics. They're not going to learn addition and subtraction if they don't actually do the work.

As far as the "comically inept" setup, I think that's acknowledged in the retrospective - including an apology.

This is a good approach, and is used in some situations. But, it has challenges in terms of scalability. It is not impossible for larger enrollment courses (this course had 600 students), but there are certainly trade-offs in terms of consistency in grading, overall student experience, etc.

It's important to note that the students are encouraged to interact with the many teaching assistants that we have available. And, while that slide is somewhat harsh in how it states it, the larger lecture discussion surrounding it makes it clear that students are permitted to discuss assignments in a general way. When you get into implementation details, that's where the academic integrity problem arises.

For people that haven't spent time teaching lower-level programming courses, policies like this may seem overly harsh. But, remember, they're not solving particularly advanced problems at this stage. Instead they're mastering fundamentals. An analogy I like to use is learning to play the piano. If someone else is doing it for you, you're not going to develop the skill.

The main reason for the policy is that many students are not able to walk the line between leading someone to a solution and giving them a solution. The teaching staff know how to do this. When students help each other in situations like this, many times they end up just providing code or allowing someone to look at their code (ultimately copying it), etc.

Or similarly having a gasoline engine without an alternator and making the observation that there's an absurdity there in that you're generating large amounts of energy, yet aren't able to charge a relatively small 12V battery with any of it. It's a very practical and natural limitation, yet in some sense you have exactly what you want - energy - you just can't use it because of the form. If you step back there's an amusing irony buried in that. At least in my humble opinion :-)