I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is

> Oral exams because it becomes obvious how skilled they are, how deep their knowledge is. Assuming you have access to a computer lab, have you considered requiring in-class programming exercises, regularly? Those could be a good way of checking actual skills. > Maybe providing the IDE online and observing copy-paste is a way forward. I just don't like the tendency that students can't run software on their own computers. And you'll frustrate the handful of students who know what they're doing and want to use a programmer's editor. I know that I wouldn't have wanted to type a large pile of code into a web anything.

There you go. Actually that would be a great service, wouldn't it? Having them explain to an LLM what they are doing, out loud, while doing it, online. On a site that you trust to host it.

I'm not that old, and yet my university CS courses evaluated people with group projects, and in-person paper exams. We weren't allowed to bring computers or calculators into the exam room (or at least, not any calculators with programming or memory). It was fine. I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student entitlement. If anything, the classes that required extensive paper-writing for evaluation are the ones that seem to be in trouble to me. I guess we're back to oral exams and blue books for those, but again...worked fine for prior generations.

> I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. > small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them ... won't lead them to a meaningful existence I don't see a problem, the system is working. The same group of people that are going to loose their job to an LLM arent getting smarter because of how they are using LLM's.

> it gets work done quickly and poorly This is only temporary. It will be able to code like anyone in time. The only way around this will be coding in-person, but only in elementary courses. Everyone in business will be using AI to code, so that will be the way in most university courses as well.

> Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. It has been interesting to see this idea propagate throughout online spaces like Hacker News, too. Even before LLMs, the topic of cheating always drew a strangely large number of pro-cheating comments from people arguing that college is useless, a degree is just a piece of paper, knowledge learned in classes is worthless, and therefore cheating is a rational decision. Meanwhile, whenever I’ve done hiring or internships screens for college students it’s trivial to see which students are actually learning the material and which ones treat every stage of their academic and career as a game they need to talk their way through while avoiding the hard questions.

> But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life Wow.

When I was studying games programming we used an in house framework developed by the lecturers for OGRE. At the time it was optional, but I get the feeling that if they still use that framework, it just became mandatory, because it has no internet facing documentation. That said, I imagine they might have chucked it in for Unity before AI hit, in which case they are largely out of luck. >But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life and won't lead them to a meaningful existence as a professional programmer. This happened to me with my 3d maths class, and I was able to power through a second run. But I am not sure I learned anything super meaningful, other than I should have been cr…