CS240 AI Cheating Retrospective

woopwoop

> Second, while the percentage of students identified was substantial, it was still less than 50%. No doubt the student body will learn this lesson, and in the future the number of students identified as having cheated will be near zero.

summarity

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.

djoldman

> This form must be completed .... Failure to complete the form will result in an unfavorable letter being sent to the Dean of Students along with further potential disciplinary action. > Through careful analysis and manual review, we have identified what we consider to be clear and concrete indicators in one or more of your homework assignment solutions that it was partially or entirely generated by an AI/LLM tool like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, etc.... > You are required to submit a response to this form....Failure to respond will result in a grade of 'F' for the course. > Honest responses that align with our analysis will result in a score of O for the identified assignment(s). > You also have the option to meet and dispute our findings. Should you choose to do so and we determine that our original findings of AI/LLM usage stand, we will instead apply the standard course policy from the syllabus and assign a grade of F for the course. The above letter sent to a bunch of students. > It is an open question whether this is reflective of their actual behavior or instead something that underscores the purported, and unintentional, potentially coercive nature of the form. Sounds like the professor discovered (or disputes the possibility of?) the concept of forced confessions. "Honest responses that align with our analysis": did the professor consider the possibility of dishonest responses that align with the analysis? "Should you choose to do so and we determine that our original findings of AI/LLM usage stand" Not much needs to be said about that. If the professor was confident enough about the analysis to send the letter, then all of the students getting the letter should have gotten an F and no letter at all.

personjerry

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.

vintagedave

> 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.

aenigmaclamo

* 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.

ThrowawayR2

Anyone who is lame enough to cheat on an intro to C class is doomed anyway; the AI they cheat with will be the AI that replaces them as a worker because they didn't learn anything. Give 'em hell, Prof. Turkstra!

gred

I'm a fan of zero tolerance policies for academic dishonesty. The dean getting involved and mitigating consequences for the ~~customers~~ students is classic.

doctorpangloss

it's hard to rein in cheating with LLMs in the classroom. this guy is trying at great cost to his personal life - i mean, if not in academia, where else are mean people supposed to achieve great things? imo watermarking will do little to reduce this awkward, personal, adversarial thing. as always, technology cannot 100% solve, or even 50% solve, a political problem. > the decision that was reached was to reverse the retroactive use of the tool on earlier homework submissions... Students that had dropped the course would be permitted to re-enroll. it's too bad the professor completely capitulated. like people have so much angst against H1Bs, so much excitement about unionizing, agitation about layoffs or whatever... look, 40% of your classmates are cheating. 40% of your colleagues are cheats. the call is coming from inside the house!

fapjacks

Haha calling the fire marshal ahead of time "to ensure we remained within the capacity constraints for the facility" is an amazing touch!

RomanPushkin

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.

dbalatero

I'm surprised by the negative response towards this professor. The syllabus was extremely clear up front, and students did not respect it and decided to see what they could get away with instead. Yeah there's some weird rules to follow, but the homework seems fairly scoped to smaller problems and it's just one class out of a few dozen.

2001zhaozhao

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.

OptionOfT

> Every student is also responsible for protecting his/her own work. If you inadvertently allow your work to be accessed, you may still be held responsible for facilitating an academic integrity violation. This is insane. Absolute power tripping. And I say that being in favor of banning AI throughout the course.

dhon_

Any policy that asks students not to use AI and trusts that they will comply is giving a massive advantage to dishonest students and punishing honest ones. This article sounds like the professor was reprimanded by higher powers and tried to dig themselves out of a hole for having a badly structured grading system. Students should be encouraged to use AI in their learning, because they will anyway. The understanding should be that they will be assessed in supervised environments so they need to learn the work either way. This gives the students incentive to learn without fear of using the best tools available to do so, and provides evidence to the powers that they actually did so.

EduardLev

I recently completed my masters in CS. I agree with the sentiment of wanting to avoid LLM use in general, but that ship has sailed. No amount of policies and slides is going to be enough for this systemic issue. I remember all the policies and volumes of reading I would have to do to keep up with what was expected to be done in a very rigorous and usually pedantic way. Change to oral exams or something similar

0xbadcafebee

Can't they just do in-person testing? Build a cluster of cheap, crappy dumb terminal from 40 years ago. Have students type out the source code live. Grade the work. Hell, let them use reference books! Just don't allow re-typing AI-generated code on notebook paper. They can cheat all they want in the interim, it'll all become clear on the midterm and final exam.

crispr245

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).

marcus_holmes

It's part of the problem with academia being behind industry. I had a similar problem when doing my MBA; Lean Startup had just been released and the whole "startup scene" was getting going. But I couldn't use any of that in my MBA entrepreneurial course, because no-one had written a paper on Lean. I had to write business plans (which, obviously, no-one was doing out in the real world). I was being taught a useless skill because academia couldn't adapt quick enough. For these CS grads who are being punished so harshly for using AI, the same: the first thing they will meet when they start their new developer job is a Claude prompt. Their CS course will not have prepared them for this, and they will suck at using an LLM to generate code. There is an argument that universities should not be vocational, and should teach people how to be better humans, not better employees. I agree completely with this, but that also means universities need to stop advertising how getting a degree leads to more lucrative employment. Which is it? Because if it is vocational, and if a CS degree is supposed to lead on to a career in software development, then they need to teach orchestration not C. We don't teach prospective developers how to write machine code on punched cards any more, for exactly the same reasons.

LelouBil

I was an assistant teacher at a private engineering school, teaching a toy kernel project. We had to add a new significant assignment which was the student sitting down next to me and we both look at their code and I ask questions. Our policy for the project wasn't even anti AI, it was simply "do not submit code you do not understand" so obviously we had to test understanding, but already with 90 students it was hard, I don't know how you would manage something like this with 500