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?
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?
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.
To put it another way, modern high school level math classes disadvantage students who want to learn without using a calculator, but it would be quite odd to suggest that we should exclude calculators from math curricula as a result.
LLMs have their place and maybe even somewhere in schools but the more you automate the hard parts of tasks, the less people value the struggle of actually learning something.
I see LLMs as almost sufficiently advanced compilers. You could say the same thing about gcc or even standard libraries. "Why back in my day we wrote our own hash maps while walking uphill both ways! Kids these days just import a lib and they don't learn anything!"
They are still learning, just at a higher level of abstraction.