Comment by recursivedoubts
5 hours ago
I am returning to this model in my classes: pen in paper quizzes, no digital devices. I also do seven equally weighted quizzes to deescalate them individually. I have reduced project/programming weight from 60-80% of my grade to 50% because it is not possible to tell if the students actually did the work.
I am also doing the same. 50% for project work and 50% for individual work, including paper and pen exams with no digital devices allowed.
The days of take home exams and coding lab assignments are gone...
is "individual work" the pen and paper?
For a project I'm but so sure banning LLMs is actually the right approach.
Industry is full of people trying to use them to become more productive.
Why wouldn't you let students use the same tools?
Seems like you need to make the projects much harder.
But the problem is, students need to learn to do the easy things themselves before they can do the hard things with LLMs.
If you ask them to build a web browser when they can't do a hello world on their own, it's going to be a disaster. LLMs are like dumb juniors that you command, but students are less skilled than dumb juniors when they start programming classes..
Why should my 5 year old learn anything if he can just ask chatGPT?
Using chatGPT as a professional is different than using it for homework. Homework and school teaches you many things, not only the subject. You discover how you learn, what your interests are, etc.
ChatGPT can assist with learning also but SHOULD NOT be doing any of the work for the student. It is okay to ask "can you explain big O", then answer follow up questions. However, "give me method to reverse a string" will only hurt.
It's like learning to factor polynomials even thought a computer algebra system on a graphic calculator can do that.
Do you think children should still be expected to be able to do arithmetic by hand?
I think the answer maybe comes down to figuring out exactly what the goal of school is. Are you trying to educate people or train them? There is for sure a lot of overlap, but I think there's a pretty clear distinction and I definitely favor the education side. On the job, a person with a solid education should be able to use whatever language or framework they need with very little training required.
Don’t compare LLMs to calculators. Only one of those is deterministic.
We're trying to evaluate the student not the LLM. You need to tease apart their contributions. Isn't this obvious?
> Industry is full of people trying to use them to become more productive
The goal of learning is not to be as productive as possible. You need to learn the material so you can check and fix the output of an LLM.
> Why wouldn't you let students use the same tools?
Students should use those tools, after they've learned how to do it without
> Seems like you need to make the projects much harder.
The goal of a project should be to learn the material with hands on experience.
I will always be grateful to my school teachers that forced me to learn arithmetic and not rely on the calculators we all carry in our pockets.