HACKER Q&A
📣 hacb

As a teacher, should I ban ChatGPT-generated assessments?


Since I started teaching 2 years ago, LLMs exploded and ChatGPT has become a thing. My position on LLM-assisted assessments has always been the same: I don't care. As a professional, you'll probably use those tools a lot (GitHub Copilot, etc.). So better start learning how they work and how to use them properly.

But I must admit that correcting and marking projects that have been mostly written by LLMs is kinda sad, as none of the codebases I saw was interesting to read. They are all just average, following the same patterns and idioms. I also see a lot of basic errors and misunderstandings, indicating that students simply copy-pasted stuff without even trying to understand what they are doing, or generating.

So what's the solution? As those assessments are do-at-home ones, the only thing I can think of for students to get more involved in the project is to make them a lot harder. As all the boilerplate code is now handled by ChatGPT and co, they will have to focus on the core of the project that can't be easily done by LLMs: projects requiring multiple source files, or longer OS-specific code with more constraints.

Grades are not here to evaluate the assessment per-se: grades are here to monitor learning and progress. When the assessments are done without any learning behind, then aren't the grades useless?

What do you think? Am I thinking wrong about it?


  👤 kai_ferr Accepted Answer ✓
ChatGPT is super handy for us, students, but I can recall studying without it pretty clearly. Sometimes, I struggled with complex projects and ended up asking my teachers for help. But what really bugs me is when students don't even bother to check what they've generated. Back in my day, I had to go over tons of information by myself, but it helped me to remember stuff. If you just let an AI generate your work and don't even take a second look at it, what kind of learning is that, right?

👤 jasiek-net
The point of school / university is to teach you how to think and program so it's different from commercial work (where you want to speed up things). So yes, I would force my students to write code by hand without any shortcuts, there will be time to use copilot or gpt ;)

👤 ggm
Ask them to critique the code. Own up or fail.