That’s not universal. For instance, last week I got help writing a bash script. But I hope they’re helping lots of you in lots of ways.
I TA for an electrical engineering class. It’s amusing, to look at student’s code these days. Everything is so needlessly wrapped up in 3-line functions, students keep trying to do in 25 lines what can be done in 2, and it all becomes impossible to debug.
When their code inevitably breaks, they ask me to tell them why it isn’t working. My response is to ask them what its meant to be doing, but they can’t answer, because they don’t know.
The sad thing is we try to make it easy on them. Their assignment specs are filled with tips, tricks, hints, warnings, and even pseudo-code for the more confusing algorithms. But these days, students would rather prompt chatgpt than read docs.
I’ve never seen chatgpt ever benefit a student. Either it misunderstands and just confuses the student with nonsense code and functions, or else in rare cases it does its job too well and the students don’t end up learning anything. The department has collectively decided to ban it and all other genAI chatbots starting next semester.
This is my big concern at my day job. Management keeps pushing AI chat on my younger co-workers, but they can’t tell when it’s hallucinating. And since there’s no feedback loop (our chatbot doesn’t learn from us as we type), it just keeps spewing the same lies.
Yeah, been dealing with that a bunch lately too, I’ve started pushing them towards the documentation directly (though to be fair, sometimes that’s ass or nearly nonexistent) with some success.
How do you know if it doesnt benefit a student? If their work is exceptional, do you assume they didnt use an LLM? Or do you not see any good code anymore?
It replaces the work required to research and think about the problem. You know the part where you’d normally learn and understand the issue at hand
Im asking about this individuals experience as a ta, not for an opinion on llms.