I see this argument “why stop students if we can’t check it anyway” so much, so let’s dive in a bit!
You can’t stop students from doing X
Firstly, we have been saying things like this for decades, if not longer. “Don’t collaborate on homework”, “Do this exercise without a calculator”, or when I was a student “Don’t use Wikipedia”.
Why do we see so much more fatalism in algorithm use then in collaboration or other tools? Why do we give up so quickly and assume students will “cheat anyway”? One reason I think is the narrative that AI companies are pushing: there is no escaping the AI wave, everyone will use these tools in the future, all the time. That creates a situation in which teachers assume that all students will use AI in their daily life also, so, why prohibit them now.As they say “resistance is futile”?
Is it though? Haven’t we all been quite successful at prohibiting students in elementary schools to use calculators, even though professionals use them all the time? Most educators agree kids should still learn the tables of multiplication even though they can easily be automated. Kids complain about that 9as they do) but we all keep this line: you need to be able to do small calculations in your head; the whole tower of math skills leans on that!
Why do students cheat (with or without AI)?
A wise old professor once told me, when I was complaining about cheating in the pre-GPT era: “When students cheat, *you* are being unreasonable.” I of course thought that was a silly thing to say, the students were just being lazy!!
But in retrospect, this colleague made a great point: Students come to university to learn, they might be lazy a bit, but if many of them are, is your assignment clear enough? Is it doable? Are there many other deadlines? I think if we critically examine CS ed from a learning perspective, it is totally reasonable for them to cheat, and it we’d make it more reasonable, they would not cheat (as much).
Professors set the norm, even if students don’t follow them
Much as with “don’t collaborate on this”, we can set norms even if we know damn well not all students will listen. This is because setting rules also set norms. Contrary to popular belief, laws often shape, not follow what people think! For example, when gay marriage was introduced in the Netherlands, a minority of people were in favor, and the law helped increase support. After all, what is allowed, must be good, and what is forbidden is not.
Students doing an exercise with AI, knowing it is not allowed, will feel like their are breaking a norm, and will thus differently about their work, and that matters.
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