That's not universal. For instance, last week I got help writing a bash script. But I hope they're helping lots of you in lots of ways.
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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I TA for an electrical engineering class. It's amusing, to look at student's code these days. Everything is so needlessly wrapped up in 3-line functions, students keep trying to do in 25 lines what can be done in 2, and it all becomes impossible to debug.
When their code inevitably breaks, they ask me to tell them why it isn't working. My response is to ask them what its meant to be doing, but they can't answer, because they don't know.
The sad thing is we try to make it easy on them. Their assignment specs are filled with tips, tricks, hints, warnings, and even pseudo-code for the more confusing algorithms. But these days, students would rather prompt chatgpt than read docs.
I've never seen chatgpt ever benefit a student. Either it misunderstands and just confuses the student with nonsense code and functions, or else in rare cases it does its job too well and the students don't end up learning anything. The department has collectively decided to ban it and all other genAI chatbots starting next semester.
A friend of mine works in a similar position and we discussed it a bit.
Since ai is a thing and we have some newer, younger and motivated profs, they actually kind of teach and discuss the use of ai in class, which is pretty important.
In my opinion we will not get rid of them, just like the internet.
And we have no metric to determined if ai was used or not.
So the only way to deal with this situation is to accept the existence and use of ai and create different tasks.
For example make them explain the code and make it clear there will be questions. That way they have to learn code. If they use ai or not does not matter.
And create tasks that require human interaction, like collaborative tasks, those can't be done by ai and you have to structure the project.