10 ms·

I have mentioned this in a few comments: for my CS classes I have gone from a historical 60-80% projects / 40-20% quizzes grade split, to a 50/50 split, and hav

I have mentioned this in a few comments: for my CS classes I have gone from a historical 60-80% projects / 40-20% quizzes grade split, to a 50/50 split, and have moved my quizzes from being online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-written notes Rather than banning AI, I'm showing students how to use it effectively as a personalized TA. I'm giving them this AGENTS.md file: https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac And showing them how to use AI to summarize the slides into a quiz review sheet, generate example questions with answer walk throughs, etc. Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves: the projects are designed to draw them into the art of programming and give them decent, real-world coding experience that they will need, even if they end up working at a higher level in the future. AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations (e.g. how twos complement works) that I wouldn't have otherwise. But it is obviously extremely dangerous as well. "It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."

buckle8017 9mo ago
hopefully you've also modified the quizzes to be handwriting compatible. I once got "implement a BCD decoder" with about a 1"x4" space to do it.
- recursivedoubts 9mo ago
  We just had our first set of in person quizzes and I gave them one question per page, with lots of space for answers. I'm concerned about handwriting, which is a lost skill, and how hard that will be on the TAs who are grading the exams. I have stressed to students that they should write larger, slower and more carefully than normal. I have also given them examples of good answers: terse and to the point, using bulleted lists effectively, what good pseudo-code looks like, etc. It is an experiment in progress: I have rediscovered the joys of printing & the logistics moving large amounts of paper again. The printer decided half way through one run to start folding papers slightly at the corner, which screwed up stapling. I suppose this is why we are paid the big bucks.
  - NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
    > I have also given them examples of good answers: terse and to the point Oh man, this reminds me of one test I had in uni, back in the days when all our tests were in class, pen & paper (what's old is new again?). We had this weird class that taught something like security programming in unix. Or something. Anyway, all I remember is the first two questions being about security/firewall stuff, and the third question was "what is a socket". So I really liked the first two questions, and over-answered for about a page each. Enough text to both run out of paper and out of time. So my answer to the 3rd question was "a file descriptor". I don't know if they laughed at my terseness or just figured since I overanswered on the previous questions I knew what that was, but whoever graded my paper gave me full points.
- logicchains 9mo ago
  Was it a Perl exam?
thenipper 9mo ago
How do you handle kids w/ a learning disability who can't effectively write well?
- recursivedoubts 9mo ago
  We have a testing center at Montana State for situations like this. I deliver my tests in the form of a PDF and the testing center administers it in a manner appropriate for the student.
- leviathant 9mo ago
  >How do you handle kids w/ a learning disability who can't effectively write well? It's embarrassing to see this question downvoted on here. It's a valid question, there's a valid answer, and accessibility helps everyone.
  - wredcoll 9mo ago
    It's a question that's too vague to be usefully answered especially on a forum like this. There's not such thing as "disabled people who can't write well", there's individuals with specific problems and needs. Maybe there's jessica who lost her right hand and is learning to write with the left who gets extra time. Maybe there's joe who has some form of nerve issue and uses a specialized pen that helps cancel out tremors. Maybe sarah is blind and has an aide who writes it or is allowed to use a keyboard or or or...
    - zajio1am 9mo ago
      There is a specific condition called dysgraphia that pretty much fits descripion "can't write well".
  - sjwgjnj 9mo ago
    Because it’s another nonsensical “think of the children” argument for why nothing should ever change. Your comment really deserves nothing more than an eye roll emoji, but HN doesn’t support them. Reasonable accommodations absolutely should be made for children that need them. But also just because you’re a bad parent and think the rules don’t apply to you doesn’t mean your crappy kid gets to cheat. Parents are the absolute worst snowflakes.
softwaredoug 9mo ago
Do you find advocating for AI literacy to be controversial amongst peers? I find, as a parent, when I talk about it at the high school level I get very negative reactions from other parents. Specifically I want high schoolers to be skilled in the use of AI, and particular critical thinking skills around the tools, while simultaneously having skills assuming no AI. I don’t want the school to be blindly “anti AI” as I’m aware it will be a part of the economy our kids are brought into. There are some head in the sands, very emotional attitudes about this stuff. (And obviously idiotically uncritical pro AI stances, but I doubt educators risk having those stances)
- copilot_king 9mo ago
  [dead]
- libraryofbabel 9mo ago
  Not OP, but I would imagine (or hope) that this attitude is far less common amongst peer CS educators. It is so clear that AI tools will be (and are already) a big part of future jobs for CS majors now, both in industry and academia. The best-positioned students will be the ones who can operate these tools effectively but with a critical mindset, while also being able to do without AI as needed (which of course makes them better at directing AI when they do engage it). That said I agree with all your points too: some version of this argument will apply to most white collar jobs now. I just think this is less clear to the general population and it’s much more of a touchy emotional subject, in certain circles. Although I suppose there may be a point to be made about being more slightly cautious about introducing AI at the high school level, versus college.
  - danaris 9mo ago
    > It is so clear that AI tools will be (and are already) a big part of future jobs for CS majors now, both in industry and academia. No, it's not. Nothing around AI past the next few months to a year is clear right now. It's very, very possible that within the next year or two, the bottom falls out of the market for mainstream/commercial LLM services, and then all the Copilot and Claude Code and similar services are going to dry up and blow away. Naturally, that doesn't mean that no one will be using LLMs for coding, given the number of people who have reported their productivity increasing—but it means there won't be a guarantee that, for instance, VS Code will have a first-party integrated solution for it, and that's a must-have for many larger coding shops. None of that is certain, of course! That's the whole point: we don't know what's coming.
bbor 9mo ago
You seem like a great professor(/“junior baby mini instructor who no one should respect”, knowing American academic titles…). Though as someone whose been on the other end of the podium a bit more recently, I will point out the maybe-obvious: Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves This is the right thing to say, but even the ones who want to listen can get into bad habits in response to intense schedules. When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus exam prep needs to happen but you’re stuck debugging frustrating pointer issues for your Data Structures project late into the night… well, I certainly would’ve caved far too much for my own good. IMO the natural fix is to expand your trusting, “this is for you” approach to the broader undergrad experience, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to adapt while admin & senior professors refuse to reconsider the race for a “””prestigious””” place in a meta-rat race… For now, I guess I’d just recommend you try to think of ways to relax things and separate project completion from diligence/time management — in terms of vibes if not a 100% mark. Some unsolicited advice from a rando who thinks you’re doing great already :)
- recursivedoubts 9mo ago
  Yes, I expect that pressure will be there, and project grades will be near 100% going forward, whether the student did the work or not. This is why I'm going to in-person written quizzes to differentiate between the students who know the material and those who are just using AI to get through it. I do seven quizzes during the semester so each one is on relatively recent material and they aren't weighted too heavily. I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for the quiz. I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad, so I'm trying to remove that for them.
  - WalterBright 9mo ago
    > I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad The pressure was what got me to do the necessary work. Auditing classes never worked for me. > I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for the quiz. Isn't that what the lectures and homework are for?
mmooss 9mo ago
I think that's a great approach. I've thought about how to handle these issues and wonder how you handle several issues that come to mind: Competing with LLM software users, 'honest' students would seem strongly incentivized to use LLMs themeselves. Even if you don't grade on a curve, honest students will get worse grades which will look worse to graduate schools, grant and scholarship committees, etc., in addition to the strong emotional component that everyone feels seeing an A or C. You could give deserving 'honest' work an A but then all LLM users will get A's with ease. It seems like you need two scales, and how do you know who to put on which scale? And how do students collaborate on group projects? Again, it seems you have two different tracks of education, and they can't really work together. Edit: How do class discussions play out with these two tracks? Also, manually doing things that machines do much better has value but also takes valuable time from learning more advanced skills that machines can't handle, and from learning how to use the machines as tools. I can see learning manual statistics calculations, to understand them fundamentally, but at a certain point it's much better to learn R and use a stats package. Are the 'honest' students being shortchanged?
j_french 9mo ago
I had planned to move towards projects counting towards the majority of my CS class grades until chatgpt was released, now I've stuck with a 50/50 split. This year I said they were free to use AI all they liked (as if I can do anything about it anyway) , then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas. Would like to give them some guidance on how to get AI to help prepare them for their interviews next year, will definitely take a look at your AGENTS.md approach. What's your student feedback on it been like?
- alexpotato 9mo ago
  > Then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas. This is amazing and wish professors had done this back when I did CS in the late 1990s.
- subhobroto 9mo ago
  > then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc Was there something fundamentally different from those who used "AI" a "lot" vs those who didn't? Did they mention the issue of hallucination and how they addressed it?
- recursivedoubts 9mo ago
  i would absolutely love to do individual interviews, but I have three classes of 50-80 students each and, at 10 minutes per interview, that would be ~35 hours worth of interviewing and there just isn't time to do that given the schedules of the students, etc. my feedback has been pretty good on the in-person quizzes, we just had our first set
  - pjc50 9mo ago
    > that would be ~35 hours worth of interviewing and there just isn't time to do that given the schedules of the students, etc. Great example of AI decreasing labour efficiency (because you need to invest more in fraud prevention).
bsder 9mo ago
As someone who has taught CS before, I just wanted to say thanks for doing all this for your students. They don't understand how much work you are putting in, but I'd like you to know that at least one other person does. Thanks for taking the time for your students. Your students will thank you, too, but that will be years from now.
viraptor 9mo ago
> AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations I feel like this is still underappreciated. Awesome meaningful diagrams with animations that I would take me days to make in a basic form can now be generated in under an hour with all the styling bells and whistles. It's amazing in practice because those things can deliver lots of value, but still weren't worth the effort before. Now you just tell the LLM to use anime.js and it will do a decent job.
commandersaki 9mo ago
I'm not sure I agree with the example interactions. If a lecturer prepared slides with basically an x86 assembly to show how to loop, what is so bad about an AI regurgitating that and possibly even annotating it with the inner workings.
- recursivedoubts 9mo ago
  nothing
joshstrange 9mo ago
> have moved my quizzes from being online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-written notes I guess it depends quite a bit on what the answers to these questions look like but in college nothing frustrated me more than being asked to write a C program on paper. Even back then IDE autocomplete was something I depending on heavily and I felt forcing me to memorize arcane syntax was a complete waste of everyone's time. It's not at all representative of work in the real world nor does memorizing exact syntax IMHO. Now, if you are being asked to write pseudo code or just answer questions it's a bit different but I really hate writing, my handwriting has never been great but why should I care? I've been typing on a computer since elementary school. Being asked to use paper/pencil in a computer class always rubbed me wrong. I hear the concerns on AI/LLMs/cheating but I can't help but feel like there must be a better solution.

buckle8017 9mo ago

hopefully you've also modified the quizzes to be handwriting compatible. I once got "implement a BCD decoder" with about a 1"x4" space to do it.

recursivedoubts 9mo ago
We just had our first set of in person quizzes and I gave them one question per page, with lots of space for answers. I'm concerned about handwriting, which is a lost skill, and how hard that will be on the TAs who are grading the exams. I have stressed to students that they should write larger, slower and more carefully than normal. I have also given them examples of good answers: terse and to the point, using bulleted lists effectively, what good pseudo-code looks like, etc. It is an experiment in progress: I have rediscovered the joys of printing & the logistics moving large amounts of paper again. The printer decided half way through one run to start folding papers slightly at the corner, which screwed up stapling. I suppose this is why we are paid the big bucks.
- NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
  > I have also given them examples of good answers: terse and to the point Oh man, this reminds me of one test I had in uni, back in the days when all our tests were in class, pen & paper (what's old is new again?). We had this weird class that taught something like security programming in unix. Or something. Anyway, all I remember is the first two questions being about security/firewall stuff, and the third question was "what is a socket". So I really liked the first two questions, and over-answered for about a page each. Enough text to both run out of paper and out of time. So my answer to the 3rd question was "a file descriptor". I don't know if they laughed at my terseness or just figured since I overanswered on the previous questions I knew what that was, but whoever graded my paper gave me full points.
logicchains 9mo ago
Was it a Perl exam?

thenipper 9mo ago

How do you handle kids w/ a learning disability who can't effectively write well?

recursivedoubts 9mo ago
We have a testing center at Montana State for situations like this. I deliver my tests in the form of a PDF and the testing center administers it in a manner appropriate for the student.
leviathant 9mo ago
>How do you handle kids w/ a learning disability who can't effectively write well? It's embarrassing to see this question downvoted on here. It's a valid question, there's a valid answer, and accessibility helps everyone.
- wredcoll 9mo ago
  It's a question that's too vague to be usefully answered especially on a forum like this. There's not such thing as "disabled people who can't write well", there's individuals with specific problems and needs. Maybe there's jessica who lost her right hand and is learning to write with the left who gets extra time. Maybe there's joe who has some form of nerve issue and uses a specialized pen that helps cancel out tremors. Maybe sarah is blind and has an aide who writes it or is allowed to use a keyboard or or or...
  - zajio1am 9mo ago
    There is a specific condition called dysgraphia that pretty much fits descripion "can't write well".
- sjwgjnj 9mo ago
  Because it’s another nonsensical “think of the children” argument for why nothing should ever change. Your comment really deserves nothing more than an eye roll emoji, but HN doesn’t support them. Reasonable accommodations absolutely should be made for children that need them. But also just because you’re a bad parent and think the rules don’t apply to you doesn’t mean your crappy kid gets to cheat. Parents are the absolute worst snowflakes.

softwaredoug 9mo ago

Do you find advocating for AI literacy to be controversial amongst peers? I find, as a parent, when I talk about it at the high school level I get very negative reactions from other parents. Specifically I want high schoolers to be skilled in the use of AI, and particular critical thinking skills around the tools, while simultaneously having skills assuming no AI. I don’t want the school to be blindly “anti AI” as I’m aware it will be a part of the economy our kids are brought into. There are some head in the sands, very emotional attitudes about this stuff. (And obviously idiotically uncritical pro AI stances, but I doubt educators risk having those stances)

copilot_king 9mo ago
[dead]
libraryofbabel 9mo ago
Not OP, but I would imagine (or hope) that this attitude is far less common amongst peer CS educators. It is so clear that AI tools will be (and are already) a big part of future jobs for CS majors now, both in industry and academia. The best-positioned students will be the ones who can operate these tools effectively but with a critical mindset, while also being able to do without AI as needed (which of course makes them better at directing AI when they do engage it). That said I agree with all your points too: some version of this argument will apply to most white collar jobs now. I just think this is less clear to the general population and it’s much more of a touchy emotional subject, in certain circles. Although I suppose there may be a point to be made about being more slightly cautious about introducing AI at the high school level, versus college.
- danaris 9mo ago
  > It is so clear that AI tools will be (and are already) a big part of future jobs for CS majors now, both in industry and academia. No, it's not. Nothing around AI past the next few months to a year is clear right now. It's very, very possible that within the next year or two, the bottom falls out of the market for mainstream/commercial LLM services, and then all the Copilot and Claude Code and similar services are going to dry up and blow away. Naturally, that doesn't mean that no one will be using LLMs for coding, given the number of people who have reported their productivity increasing—but it means there won't be a guarantee that, for instance, VS Code will have a first-party integrated solution for it, and that's a must-have for many larger coding shops. None of that is certain, of course! That's the whole point: we don't know what's coming.

bbor 9mo ago

You seem like a great professor(/“junior baby mini instructor who no one should respect”, knowing American academic titles…). Though as someone whose been on the other end of the podium a bit more recently, I will point out the maybe-obvious: Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves This is the right thing to say, but even the ones who want to listen can get into bad habits in response to intense schedules. When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus exam prep needs to happen but you’re stuck debugging frustrating pointer issues for your Data Structures project late into the night… well, I certainly would’ve caved far too much for my own good. IMO the natural fix is to expand your trusting, “this is for you” approach to the broader undergrad experience, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to adapt while admin & senior professors refuse to reconsider the race for a “””prestigious””” place in a meta-rat race… For now, I guess I’d just recommend you try to think of ways to relax things and separate project completion from diligence/time management — in terms of vibes if not a 100% mark. Some unsolicited advice from a rando who thinks you’re doing great already :)

recursivedoubts 9mo ago
Yes, I expect that pressure will be there, and project grades will be near 100% going forward, whether the student did the work or not. This is why I'm going to in-person written quizzes to differentiate between the students who know the material and those who are just using AI to get through it. I do seven quizzes during the semester so each one is on relatively recent material and they aren't weighted too heavily. I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for the quiz. I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad, so I'm trying to remove that for them.
- WalterBright 9mo ago
  > I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad The pressure was what got me to do the necessary work. Auditing classes never worked for me. > I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for the quiz. Isn't that what the lectures and homework are for?

mmooss 9mo ago

I think that's a great approach. I've thought about how to handle these issues and wonder how you handle several issues that come to mind: Competing with LLM software users, 'honest' students would seem strongly incentivized to use LLMs themeselves. Even if you don't grade on a curve, honest students will get worse grades which will look worse to graduate schools, grant and scholarship committees, etc., in addition to the strong emotional component that everyone feels seeing an A or C. You could give deserving 'honest' work an A but then all LLM users will get A's with ease. It seems like you need two scales, and how do you know who to put on which scale? And how do students collaborate on group projects? Again, it seems you have two different tracks of education, and they can't really work together. Edit: How do class discussions play out with these two tracks? Also, manually doing things that machines do much better has value but also takes valuable time from learning more advanced skills that machines can't handle, and from learning how to use the machines as tools. I can see learning manual statistics calculations, to understand them fundamentally, but at a certain point it's much better to learn R and use a stats package. Are the 'honest' students being shortchanged?

j_french 9mo ago

I had planned to move towards projects counting towards the majority of my CS class grades until chatgpt was released, now I've stuck with a 50/50 split. This year I said they were free to use AI all they liked (as if I can do anything about it anyway) , then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas. Would like to give them some guidance on how to get AI to help prepare them for their interviews next year, will definitely take a look at your AGENTS.md approach. What's your student feedback on it been like?

alexpotato 9mo ago
> Then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas. This is amazing and wish professors had done this back when I did CS in the late 1990s.
subhobroto 9mo ago
> then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc Was there something fundamentally different from those who used "AI" a "lot" vs those who didn't? Did they mention the issue of hallucination and how they addressed it?
recursivedoubts 9mo ago
i would absolutely love to do individual interviews, but I have three classes of 50-80 students each and, at 10 minutes per interview, that would be ~35 hours worth of interviewing and there just isn't time to do that given the schedules of the students, etc. my feedback has been pretty good on the in-person quizzes, we just had our first set
- pjc50 9mo ago
  > that would be ~35 hours worth of interviewing and there just isn't time to do that given the schedules of the students, etc. Great example of AI decreasing labour efficiency (because you need to invest more in fraud prevention).

bsder 9mo ago

As someone who has taught CS before, I just wanted to say thanks for doing all this for your students. They don't understand how much work you are putting in, but I'd like you to know that at least one other person does. Thanks for taking the time for your students. Your students will thank you, too, but that will be years from now.

viraptor 9mo ago

> AI can be a very effective tool for education if used properly. I have used it to create a ton of extremely useful visualizations I feel like this is still underappreciated. Awesome meaningful diagrams with animations that I would take me days to make in a basic form can now be generated in under an hour with all the styling bells and whistles. It's amazing in practice because those things can deliver lots of value, but still weren't worth the effort before. Now you just tell the LLM to use anime.js and it will do a decent job.

commandersaki 9mo ago

I'm not sure I agree with the example interactions. If a lecturer prepared slides with basically an x86 assembly to show how to loop, what is so bad about an AI regurgitating that and possibly even annotating it with the inner workings.

recursivedoubts 9mo ago
nothing

joshstrange 9mo ago

> have moved my quizzes from being online to being in-person, pen-on-paper with one sheet of hand-written notes I guess it depends quite a bit on what the answers to these questions look like but in college nothing frustrated me more than being asked to write a C program on paper. Even back then IDE autocomplete was something I depending on heavily and I felt forcing me to memorize arcane syntax was a complete waste of everyone's time. It's not at all representative of work in the real world nor does memorizing exact syntax IMHO. Now, if you are being asked to write pseudo code or just answer questions it's a bit different but I really hate writing, my handwriting has never been great but why should I care? I've been typing on a computer since elementary school. Being asked to use paper/pencil in a computer class always rubbed me wrong. I hear the concerns on AI/LLMs/cheating but I can't help but feel like there must be a better solution.