I'm not a native EN speaker (I'm Portuguese), therefore a lot is lost in my attempt to find the right words. I'm writing these words without any use of AI or even a sentence-checker (only the spell-checker in Firefox).
Of course that the "succesfull" groups implemented their solutions, tweaked them and, tried their best to escape from race conditions and were able to talk about the performance/memory/etc. tradeoffs. We have a grid to grade for those and other items. They did not outsource all of their thinking to an LLM.. That is what I mean as taking responsability for their code, maybe not the correct word, but the one that came to my head when I wrote it..
Everything that provides students with a workflow to think and to try to find solutions to a problem is much better than giving the answer directly! Unfortunately there will always be students that prefer to take the shortcut..
How could we "force" the students to use an LLM that confronted their doubts with more questions? We could tell them to start each chat with a specific prompt (to use the socratic method, etc), but they could eventually jail-break it..
But nevertheless, I like your idea! This is something that a document highlighting methodologies for students on how to use LLMs effectively could/should contain..
This is all so new, and caught us completely unprepared that there's no official university-level policies. Most of us are still navigating the waters and seeing what works and what doesn't work anymore.
I have colleagues that are teaching for more than 30 years, few years away from retirement, who suddenly have been confronted with a new way of doing things. Those are the ones that are still insisting on doing practical projects, etc. I've only been doing this for 20 years, and I'm quite lazy (worked previously as software engineer), so I've moved to those practical tests. I guess that there should probably exist a class or workshop to teach these students how to use LLMs effectively, but as I said, this technology and its implications is quite new.
Personally, what I did was to give them the "lecture" in the line of that they do not understand what the machine has generated, that is not the way a true engineer does, try to do some parallel with things like an LLM designing a bridge and civil engineers building that bridge, and a fatal flaw collapsing the all thing, etc.
In other words, we do not have a formal system in place, it's all talking and convincing them. Obviously it's a big enough problem that should deserve more investment in solutions, but we are all overwhelmed by other tasks. Maybe LLM studios should be held responsible for all these "disruptions" and provide solutions to problems they created! :)
> Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project?
Yes, if they are "responsible" for the code delivered, where responsible means they understand the code, the architecture, the decisions made, etc.
In this case, the students had to invent multiple strategies to solve a specific problem. The "successful" groups did a mix of generated and hand-crafted code (don't know percentages), implemented different strategies and knew their plus and minuses, could change the code in a timely manner to accommodate some of my requests, etc. The "unsuccessful" group couldn't do any of that.
I'm not anti-AI (and really, what could I do if I were?) since I use it myself, I'm just anti-slop, especially from my students.
But in reality I've been slowly transitioning from group projects (for a subset of the grade) to "practical tests", where they must implement a significant subset of a larger project in a 2h class. Still experimenting though.
CS Professor here: just yesterday I did the discussion of a course projects' (Parallel Computing), and one of the three groups that I did yesterday have clearly gone the ChatGPT way. They couldn't even understand the choices the LLM made regarding the architecture, etc. The way to "catch" these students is similar to what we did in the past when students copied from other students which is "to give them rope to hang" - ask for clarifications until they follow unintended paths that lead nowhere.
To fellow professors, when you're suspicious my suggestion is to appeal to their honesty (like "let's be honest, how much of this code is yours, and how much is ChatGPT's?") and offer some empathy and understanding (like understanding they may had multiple deadlines in the same week, etc.). Nevertheless, don't miss the chance to give them the lesson on how is the correct way of doing things. The way to catch these students is to find the same signs of yesteryear copying from other students (which in essence is what copying from an LLM is, although the number has increased because they found us professors unprepared for the volume).
The other two groups also used LLM but in a high-level and architectural way. They were clearly responsible for the code (even if they didn't wrote it 100% manually) and could explain their reasoning and strategies used to solve the problems.
Me and my colleagues still have a lot of projects to review, and I asked them to keep the score of the number of projects like these, but so far, the score is 1 in 3 (33%).
It were not astrologers, it was a company that creates astrology software.. Don't mix people with companies, they are different things! One is there definitely for the money, the other may or may not..
As someone born and living in a country that uses the metric system, I do not understand a bit of what inches and feets mean. Tell me something has 10-15 cm, and I know what it means. I measure 173cm, I know what one meter is about. 5'10? What the hell is that?! 5 feet and 10 inches? Some people have small feet, some have larger. And what is an "inch"? :)
Oh, and fahrenheit, what the hell it means? 0ºC means ice, 100ºC means boiling water, 40º feels summer around here..
I guess I'm saying that you understand the values of the imperial system because you're used to them, as I'm used to values in the metric system..
If you're still working on this, you can add a "Pedantry mode" ou "Really faithful" switch that turns some of the suggestions on. It could work as a way to show that you're really aware of the shortcomings of the first implementation without messing too much with what you've got already done. And it can also work as a way to show some kind of "appreciation" for the feedback you're getting here..
Personally, I've used XP a lot back in the day, but don't remember much of the details like most users are reporting here, so I really liked to play with your website, and would definitely hire you if I was in such position.
Im not a native english speaker, what I mean by more credible is the outcome, not the degree itself. In other words, this guy that took 100 hours, I would say that it seems more credible to have learned more than the other that says he took only 15 hours...
> I completed Operating systems in 5 weeks with about 15-20 hours of work a week. I used Georgia Techs Udacity course on operating systems to supplement my learning.
Which gives ~75h-100h, way more credible than the 15h the author mentions in the post..
My students have 3h/week of Lecture, 2h/week of labs which is about 75h of classes (15 weeks). If we add ~60h estimated time for two projects, it's 135h. It means to me that you had enough time to learn the concepts and may have internalized some/most of them..
> If I'm reading that right you taught 7 hour per day for 4 months? 16 weeks * 5 days a week * 7 hours = ~500 hours?
There were 6 professors. I taught ~75h of server-side web development..
> I think the traditional style of teaching (large class, one teacher) isn't very time efficient, so it makes me sad to see something like WGU dismissed solely because of the time spent.
Not that time spent == quality, but as in the examples I mentioned above, 15h for operating systems concepts (which I've been teaching for the last 3/4 semesters) doesn't teach you anything unless you already know most of it, and 9h30 for Math is only enough if you are reading a book (diagonally, that is)..
Again, the author's effort is something that he should be proud, but I, personally, think that he hasn't learn much things with enough quality..
> It was being taught by a substitute teacher from the art department who knew some programming. The class was 5 assignments (...)
I guess you were unlucky! Teacher from the art department, and a class with only 5 assignments?! Didn't your university had a CS department with CS-competent people to substitute? For instance, the CS department of my college has at least 40 teachers, and it's a polytechnic school (more like a vocational school than a theoretical university)..
What I want to say with this is that maybe your university is also questionable for delivering CS courses like that..
When I say that the quality of the degree is not good, it is somewhat implied that the quality of the work of the person who did the degree is also questionable.. :/
While I praise the author's effort, as a professor myself (I teach CS in a local polytechnic school - something like the US community colleges) I really doubt the quality of either the WGU and of the knowledge retention.
As an example, this semester I'm teaching Operating Systems concepts (definitions, processes, threads, semaphores, mutexes, signals, memory layouts, IO, etc.), and even if I take the theoretical concepts out (like not explaining how a fork() works under the hood), I still have 20 hours of labs and some 60 hours for two projects. How can this author ever reach the same level of competency as my students who let these concepts "sink", as he dedicated 15 hours in only 2/3 days.
Second example: in 2019 I taught some classes for a 4 month course on basic programming and web apps. Even having 7h of classes per day, things had to be really succinct, and in 4 months, although they were capable of doing some web apps, there was a lot of confusion in their heads because of the fast pace.
Some other examples on his post: 9h30 minutes for Discrete Math I. Either trivial things were handled, he is a math wiz, he rushed through all the exercises, or no exercise solving was necessary..
Again, I don't want to undervalue the author's effort, but as someone who as been teaching for quite some time, and has taught people from the 7th grade to MSc, I'm really suspicious of the quality of the degree and of the knowledge retention..