> Do not look at other students’ homework files and do not work with other students. At all.
This is a horrific policy. We work better with other people.
When I studied computer science, other students came to me for help. I helped them. We discussed problems together. I saw their code. They saw mine. No one copied: we shared approaches and style and thinking. I shared how I solved things. They learned my thinking. By explaining, I understood what I knew better. Sometimes I learned from them: an idea I wouldn’t have had alone, a new direction. All of us were better off. This was across multiple people.
It was in no way discouraged and so long as you wrote your work — while asking others for help was fine — you were okay.
Humans learn through teaching. We learn through discussion. We learn through interaction. Solitude — ‘do not work with other students. At all’ — is the exact opposite of a healthy learning environment.
I don’t care what their artificial intelligence policy is. I cannot state strongly enough how much I revolt against their human intelligence policy.
As for the lecturer’s warnings in slides: that reads like a trap.
If you remove the mention of AI from this post, the authors process and setup of the notice to students is absolutely mental. The intentions might be good, but damn if this isn’t a comically inept way to set up a kafkaesque nightmare rather than a place for actual learning. The defensive attitude doesn’t help either. Just the sheer energy that went into all the steps mentioned here, not invested in any even superficial attempt to perhaps adapt. That isn’t to “give into AI” or cheating, but if 50% of students break your rules, more rules and litigation about the rules are not the next step to take.
My comment explicitly did not focus in the use of LLMs and in fact much of the post doesn’t. Leading with the depressing “work alone” slide, it focused on similarity, not AI use. Between students, ruling even “inadvertent” exposure as the same punishable (and literally literally undeniable!) offence. There’s millions of ways to structure a class for learning, this myopic focus is not one of them. Ironically the setup ignores the very basics of human collaboration. AI merely amplifies extremes, it’s a factor but neither the cause nor culprit here.
The title includes “retrospective” but the learning and changes following such a process are absent.
This is the professor who had beef with a /middle schooler/ for copying some content on how to use a calculator from his website. His defensive attitude is clearly indicative of the massive, massive chip on his shoulder. Just reading this triggered me to my experience with similar professors in college about a decade ago. What a jackass
The insistence that you must "work alone" and that similarity between submissions will get you flagged would make me really uncomfortable. I think I would be afraid to talk to the TAs lest I get poisoned by their knowledge.
Like other comments, I can't help feel uncomfortable with the way everything was written defensively, where every example is used to justify the author's actions.
The author concludes near the end:
> That said, I have no judgment to pass on you here.
And follows with this as the very next sentence:
> We are all human beings, we all make poor choices and mistakes in our lives.
Which seems to be clearly judging the students for their "poor choices and mistakes".
I feel the author is out of touch with the students and the times; If so many of them are leveraging AI perhaps the better move is to find ways to align that usage with learning. He quotes:
> "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer"
But if there is such a scenario in a classroom rather than a courtroom, then perhaps the methodologies should be revisited?
It feels like the author is the ACKCHYUALLY meme, striving to prove themselves technically right, rather than empathizing with the students, which I feel shows a lack of maturity for an educator more than 2 decades older than his students.
I understand that education and evaluation is difficult in this AI era, but I can't come to agree with the author's actions or conclusions in this case.
Assuming that the students were using generative AI when told not to...
The way you leverage AI for learning is to do the work yourself and ask it to review and provide feedback, or to ask it to explain some concept, ask it questions to check your understanding, ask it to generate questions for you to answer, etc. If the entire point of the exercise is the exercise, then generating the answer... misses the point.
Like I can easily find online how to encode if statements in the lambda calculus, or how to make a half-adder out of logic gates, or how to prove that bijections are invertible. It's always been cheating to not do it yourself. School intentionally gives you easy problems with known solutions, not open research problems where you should use any and all tools and information you can find.
> This form must be completed .... Failure to complete the form will result in an unfavorable letter being sent to the Dean of Students along with further potential disciplinary action.
> Through careful analysis and manual review, we have identified what we consider to be clear and concrete indicators in one or more of your homework assignment solutions that it was partially or entirely generated by an AI/LLM tool like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, etc....
> You are required to submit a response to this form....Failure to respond will result in a grade of 'F' for the course.
> Honest responses that align with our analysis will result in a score of O for the identified assignment(s).
> You also have the option to meet and dispute our findings. Should you choose to do so and we determine that our original findings of AI/LLM usage stand, we will instead apply the standard course policy from the syllabus and assign a grade of F for the course.
The above letter sent to a bunch of students.
> It is an open question whether this is reflective of their actual behavior or instead something that underscores the purported, and unintentional, potentially coercive nature of the form.
Sounds like the professor discovered (or disputes the possibility of?) the concept of forced confessions.
"Honest responses that align with our analysis": did the professor consider the possibility of dishonest responses that align with the analysis?
"Should you choose to do so and we determine that our original findings of AI/LLM usage stand" Not much needs to be said about that.
If the professor was confident enough about the analysis to send the letter, then all of the students getting the letter should have gotten an F and no letter at all.
The wording at the end is quite clear, even if it does not use the exact word "deprecate":
> "NSA advises organizations to consider making a strategic shift from
programming languages that provide little or no inherent memory protection, such as C/C++ and assembly, to a memory safe language when possible."
> Do not look at other students’ homework files and do not work with other students. At all.
This is a horrific policy. We work better with other people.
When I studied computer science, other students came to me for help. I helped them. We discussed problems together. I saw their code. They saw mine. No one copied: we shared approaches and style and thinking. I shared how I solved things. They learned my thinking. By explaining, I understood what I knew better. Sometimes I learned from them: an idea I wouldn’t have had alone, a new direction. All of us were better off. This was across multiple people.
It was in no way discouraged and so long as you wrote your work — while asking others for help was fine — you were okay.
Humans learn through teaching. We learn through discussion. We learn through interaction. Solitude — ‘do not work with other students. At all’ — is the exact opposite of a healthy learning environment.
I don’t care what their artificial intelligence policy is. I cannot state strongly enough how much I revolt against their human intelligence policy.
As for the lecturer’s warnings in slides: that reads like a trap.
[delayed]
If you remove the mention of AI from this post, the authors process and setup of the notice to students is absolutely mental. The intentions might be good, but damn if this isn’t a comically inept way to set up a kafkaesque nightmare rather than a place for actual learning. The defensive attitude doesn’t help either. Just the sheer energy that went into all the steps mentioned here, not invested in any even superficial attempt to perhaps adapt. That isn’t to “give into AI” or cheating, but if 50% of students break your rules, more rules and litigation about the rules are not the next step to take.
Using LLMs for the classroom assignment is like using a forklift to lift weights in a gym: completely inappropriate and atrophic.
That some 50% are using the LLMs rather than spend effort learning is not a cause to remove the ban of LLMs in the classroom.
90% of the power of an LLM is being yourself competent enough to judge its outputs. Besides, do we really need more humans coding like LLMs?
My comment explicitly did not focus in the use of LLMs and in fact much of the post doesn’t. Leading with the depressing “work alone” slide, it focused on similarity, not AI use. Between students, ruling even “inadvertent” exposure as the same punishable (and literally literally undeniable!) offence. There’s millions of ways to structure a class for learning, this myopic focus is not one of them. Ironically the setup ignores the very basics of human collaboration. AI merely amplifies extremes, it’s a factor but neither the cause nor culprit here.
The title includes “retrospective” but the learning and changes following such a process are absent.
This is the professor who had beef with a /middle schooler/ for copying some content on how to use a calculator from his website. His defensive attitude is clearly indicative of the massive, massive chip on his shoulder. Just reading this triggered me to my experience with similar professors in college about a decade ago. What a jackass
The insistence that you must "work alone" and that similarity between submissions will get you flagged would make me really uncomfortable. I think I would be afraid to talk to the TAs lest I get poisoned by their knowledge.
Like other comments, I can't help feel uncomfortable with the way everything was written defensively, where every example is used to justify the author's actions.
The author concludes near the end:
> That said, I have no judgment to pass on you here.
And follows with this as the very next sentence:
> We are all human beings, we all make poor choices and mistakes in our lives.
Which seems to be clearly judging the students for their "poor choices and mistakes".
I feel the author is out of touch with the students and the times; If so many of them are leveraging AI perhaps the better move is to find ways to align that usage with learning. He quotes:
> "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer"
But if there is such a scenario in a classroom rather than a courtroom, then perhaps the methodologies should be revisited?
It feels like the author is the ACKCHYUALLY meme, striving to prove themselves technically right, rather than empathizing with the students, which I feel shows a lack of maturity for an educator more than 2 decades older than his students.
I understand that education and evaluation is difficult in this AI era, but I can't come to agree with the author's actions or conclusions in this case.
Assuming that the students were using generative AI when told not to...
The way you leverage AI for learning is to do the work yourself and ask it to review and provide feedback, or to ask it to explain some concept, ask it questions to check your understanding, ask it to generate questions for you to answer, etc. If the entire point of the exercise is the exercise, then generating the answer... misses the point.
Like I can easily find online how to encode if statements in the lambda calculus, or how to make a half-adder out of logic gates, or how to prove that bijections are invertible. It's always been cheating to not do it yourself. School intentionally gives you easy problems with known solutions, not open research problems where you should use any and all tools and information you can find.
> Second, while the percentage of students identified was substantial, it was still less than 50%.
No doubt the student body will learn this lesson, and in the future the number of students identified as having cheated will be near zero.
> This form must be completed .... Failure to complete the form will result in an unfavorable letter being sent to the Dean of Students along with further potential disciplinary action.
> Through careful analysis and manual review, we have identified what we consider to be clear and concrete indicators in one or more of your homework assignment solutions that it was partially or entirely generated by an AI/LLM tool like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, etc....
> You are required to submit a response to this form....Failure to respond will result in a grade of 'F' for the course.
> Honest responses that align with our analysis will result in a score of O for the identified assignment(s).
> You also have the option to meet and dispute our findings. Should you choose to do so and we determine that our original findings of AI/LLM usage stand, we will instead apply the standard course policy from the syllabus and assign a grade of F for the course.
The above letter sent to a bunch of students.
> It is an open question whether this is reflective of their actual behavior or instead something that underscores the purported, and unintentional, potentially coercive nature of the form.
Sounds like the professor discovered (or disputes the possibility of?) the concept of forced confessions.
"Honest responses that align with our analysis": did the professor consider the possibility of dishonest responses that align with the analysis?
"Should you choose to do so and we determine that our original findings of AI/LLM usage stand" Not much needs to be said about that.
If the professor was confident enough about the analysis to send the letter, then all of the students getting the letter should have gotten an F and no letter at all.
It's just a textbook, garden-variety power trip. It's neither the first nor last time this professor will go on one.
https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/2231495
Wow, universities still teach deprecated programming languages.
Universities teach one of the most influential and ubiquitous programming languages, crazy
And in case anyone is not sure what I am talking about, see this: https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/10/2003112742/-1/-1/0/CSI...
Note that the word "deprecate" appears nowhere in that document.
The wording at the end is quite clear, even if it does not use the exact word "deprecate":
> "NSA advises organizations to consider making a strategic shift from programming languages that provide little or no inherent memory protection, such as C/C++ and assembly, to a memory safe language when possible."
Deprecation is a speech act. It's something that can only occur if you use the word itself.