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  • I'm pretty convinced now that grading take-home assignments is pointless with the prevalence of AI cheating. (There's surely already "innovation" going on targeted at letting people cheat on assignments while staying undetectable.)

    It's probably best going forward to grade only in-person proctored exams using paper, or offline air gapped computers in the case of programming courses.

  • 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.

  • Professors will be the last to admit their skill set is outdated. Those folks and academia in general aren't outcome-driven. They don't care if students will be ever able to find a job or not. They just want to educate like they got used to, and want their money. Or is it me being jealous? I had to change. Change a lot, learn a lot in last couple of years. But what about those folks who still use Borland compiler? I can imagine they're comfortable in academia, and can be in the next 10 or even 20 years - depends on how aggressive they're defending their old-world principles.
  • It's beyond me how binary their thinking is when dealing with an issue as nuanced as AI. For instance euros have oral exams often and they are much more helpful on seeing if the kid has any idea on what they are doing. Furthermore it forces them to think through the problem more clearly since they have to explain it to someone else at some point (rather than some autograder).
  • 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.
  •   * Do not use variable length array in this class
      * Some of are you are copying code and concepts from things outside of course material
         * `fgetc()`, `sizeof()`, `malloc()`, etc
         * You're probably cheating.
         * You're also making your life more difficult
    
    I always found these sorts of instructions quite frustrating as a student. If I'm a student enthusiastic about learning a language, I would have definitely been one of the kids trying to figure out how to use malloc and creating novel approaches to the projects that are assigned to me. It's a university class, why the hell not? Besides, isn't that going to be an advantage towards me considering the code is going to be evaluated by a anti cheat engine?

    The AI stuff aside, this comes across as a professor who feels threatened when his course isn't taken as doctrine. Being called a cheater for using external resources is ridiculous to me.

  • > 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.

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