Yeah, and sizeof and malloc are very easily things students could have been exposed to in high school or their own studies. I’ve seen C books that use them in the first chapter.

It’s fine to say solve this problem using the following tools, but not great to say “if you find another approach, I assume cheating.”

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.

Maybe you would have. Maybe you wouldn't have. But they have to design these things for the 90% case. People using things that are far outside what's being taught—in the age of AI—are maybe more likely to be cheating than everyone going above and beyond.

Students are human. Many have been taught to focus on one end goal: a grade. They see a mythical program that knows 6000x more than is taught in this 200 level course; of course they want to use it!

My professor in a C course said anyone that uses `goto` gets failed. It was quite liberating for me to then end up writing `goto`s for a living

The course Programming in C, and other courses like Compilers, have this policy across many CS universities for many years now. It s a strict policy but it has its reasons. Assignments on early semesters are simple and short, and if students cooperate on the implementation, the result would be almost identical for everyone, while very few would have truly thought it out by themselves. Most students would not go easily through the process to struggle in order to think about the solution, if they could just copy the answer from someone else.

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.

I agree. Here at U. Lisbon, we are following the recommendation by the recent MIT report: Evaluate students by talking with them, making it a social interaction, which they are lacking.

We need students to work together and share their experiences. Then we need each one to achieve the learning goals (and we should not assess work they did far from our eyes. We should assess their understanding and skills in front of us).

Some of us are perfectly happy to learn in silence and solitude, and we thoroughly excel at doing so. Sorry that you don't. The broad sweeping "we humans" language gets a groan out of me. It's the sort of mentality that leads to unproductive gatherings in the working world where people want to force "learning through collisions/synergy".

  >> 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.

  > You may discuss assignments in a general way with other students, but you may not consult anyone else's work.

As someone who's graded lots of undergrads I can tell you that cheating is prolific. It's easy to identify who is copying code, but it is hard to prove. My wife teaches in another department and says the same thing. AI use has grown exponentially and it's really destructive to the education process. Though I have more complex thoughts on this and that it is just exacerbating larger problems that no one wants to actually solve because they'd be very hard to solve in a way you can have clear metrics for the bureaucrats (including industry). Proper evaluation is unfortunately always going to be fuzzy. Metrics are in contention with making a meritocracy, especially if you don't have a deep understanding of said metrics

naive to think people would follow this policy in the spirit in which it’s intended, but even then it clearly selects for the most social animals amongst your students instead of the most talented. And discussion alone is all it takes to describe the right approach, so if that’s the test, it’s meaningless to protect the mechanical syntax of implementation.

Clearly in this world the frats and the sorority members get the highest scores, and after that the best looking, the most amusing or charming etc.. so unless that’s the intent the whole approach is perhaps worth reconsidering.

If you want to teach to improve your understanding the normal thing is you become a TA so that access is open.. not open every assignment to ad hoc collaboration so you disadvantage half of the students on every assignment

I'll pile onto the agreement stack. Abso-100%-freaking-lutely. I worked with my friends through all our assignments, bouncing ideas off each other, talking through confusing bits, etc., and then doing the work ourselves. We didn't ask "how do you write this line of code", but "how are you approaching this problem?". I learned as much from the discussion as I did from the implementation. Throwing that out is absolute madness. No way.

I sat on a university student disciplinary panel. I assure you that your experiences are biased. There are plenty of people that flat-out copy each other.

Given the professor's professional interest in cheating-catching tools, I'm suspecting wanting to get good, interesting data motivated a lot of their behavior here, even in ways he might not consciously realize.

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?

Yea, this letter could have been written about garden variety "suspected cheating" 20 years ago. And the professor's attitude is the same as a couple of professors I remember back then:

Prof: "I know you cheated."

Student: "How do you know it, can you prove it?"

Prof: "I have ways, trust me I know."

Student: "I know the material, I'll re-take the test right in front of you if you want."

Prof: "Either admit that you cheated and get a F, or don't admit and I'll send you to the school's academic integrity department."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> If so many of them are leveraging AI perhaps the better move is to find ways to align that usage with learning

Should the course be updated to better leverage AI? Sure.

But as a student, if you're explicitly instructed not to use AI for a particular course/assignment and you do it anyway, that's academic dishonesty. No matter how much you disagree with the principle of the thing, you still lied and cheated.

I had many classes in college that didn't administer homework or take-home assignments. All we had were just exams. Most of those professors operated on the logic that if you wanted to pass their class, then you would do the (suggested) work.

Also, I never had a computer science class where exams were administered on a computer. I only graduated like 10 years ago, too. I shit you not, even my x86 assembly class was all pen and paper too, and yes, we were graded for code accuracy.

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

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

> 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.

> There is an argument that universities should not be vocational, and should teach people how to be better humans, not better employees. I agree completely with this, but that also means universities need to stop advertising how getting a degree leads to more lucrative employment. Which is it?

I read a reply to a similar question in a different HN thread a while back that stuck with me. It went something like, "The point of university is to get an education. The point of student loans is to get a job."

Only rivaled by the ugly website :-)

I suppose it's to close a loophole where students can collaborate/cheat and then, if caught, claim that someone else copied off of them.

Universities teach one of the most influential and ubiquitous programming languages, crazy

Deprecated or not, there are billions of lines of code out there that use it, and the odds of a random CS graduate encountering it are very, very high. So it makes sense to be familiar with it.

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...