A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

I'm really curious to see where higher education will go now that we have LLM's. I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will be able to taught in less time.

Are there any students here who started uni just before LLM's took off and are now finishing their degrees? Have you noticed much change in how your classes are taught?

I teach at the university level, and I just expect more from my students. Instead of implementing data structures like we did when I was in school, something ChatGPT is very good at; my students are building systems, something ChatGPT has more trouble with.

Instead of paper exams asking students "find the bug" or "implement a short function", they get a takehome exam where they have to write tests, integrate their project into a CI pipeline, use version control, and implement a dropbox-like system in Rust, which we expect to have a good deal of functionality and accompanying documentation.

I tell them go ahead and use whatever they want. It's easier than policing their tools. If they can put it together, and it works, and they can explain it back to me, then I'm satisfied. Even if they use ChatGPT it'll take a great deal of work and knowledge to get running.

If ChatGPT suddenly is able to put a project like that together, then I'll ask for even more.

I also teach in a university. There are two concepts: teaching with the AI, and teaching against it. At first, I want my students to gain a strong grasp of the basics, so I teach “against” it - warnings for cheating, etc. This semester, I’m also teaching “with” it. Write an algorithm that finds the cheapest way to build roads to every one of a set of cities, given costs for each street segment. I tell them to test it. Test it well. Then analyze its running time. What technique did it pick? What are the problems with this technique? Are there any others? What input would cause it to break? If I assumed (some different condition), would this change the answer?

Students today will be practitioners tomorrow, and those that know how to work with AI will be more effective than those who do not.

No they won't. It takes 10 min to be "effective" with an "AI", it takes 10 years to be effective with TAOCP.