I have included the basic "I am a student -- help me learn, don't just do everything for me," but I also am trying out telling it to generate a .history folder with a markdown history of every prompt and a summary of the action take in response.
I _know_ there are some tools that offer the prompt history automatically, but I've told students they can use _whatever_ tool they want, but should let me know if the folder isn't showing up as they work.
The .history folder is required if they used AI and I intend to review it and try to give specific feedback to the students using it as too much of a crutch.
I just started this last Friday, so wish me luck!
https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
Teaching, fairness and measuring student performance might seem like similar goals, but it's just so very easy to make sure you succeed at one while messing up the others.
It turns out that it's much less memorable if you're too "clear and helpful", so nothing helpful sticks for students. A good teacher (tutor, educator, pick a word) challenges students and makes them the right amount of uncomfortable.
The best tutor, as always, is your TA or professor, during office hours that you already pay for in tuition. No one takes advantage though, well the students who were getting As already do just to validate their understanding. The students who really ought to go never go.
(They have the same content duplicated in an AGENTS.md as well - I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.)
Surely such a trivial feature could be implemented in seconds using e.g. Claude? It's not about them not "hurrying up".
@AGENTS.mdOpencode is good enough for most workflows IME, even if it doesn’t have the kitchen sink of features as cc
https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
Do you have further insights on AI and education since?
I imagine this applies here, too, if they want to enforce it strictly.
How could you tell? I proctored. People cheat pretty frequently and other students are none the wiser. It really takes like 4 proctors if you want to do it right. Even then I'm sure the clever ones are slipping through. These were scantron though. Short response/essay format you'd be screwed if you didn't know your stuff.
best to
a) adapt assignments so that agents are bad at producing solutions
b) have more scenarios where students have to do things in controlled environments. Universities managed to adapt to 'any solution you need is readily available online' so I don't think it will be that different to have several times a month/year where students have to go into a room with nothing but pencil and paper to prove what knowledge they have vs what they have the skills to access
For the linear algebra written exam it didn’t work as if you learned to solve the 4 previous years exams, you could be sure most of it was familiar, so you could just prepare for a few standard exercises without really understanding the content.
Our advanced algorithm course used a bit of a combination, with a project take home exam (knapsack like optimization problem - competing for the fastest implementation) combined with a two hour written exam with multiple choice answers, but again only with books, pencil and paper to get to the right answer. This I think could work today, having both the opened ended project + some multiple choice with pencil/paper.
> * Run bash commands
Students who prefer to use zsh keep winning.
The onus should be on the instructor to make sure that the student ends up actually understanding and being able to code/solve problems that they pose without using coding agents.
Why? Because:
1. this is exactly what is going on in the real world. People are able to get AI to do whatever the hell they want, but the ones who just use it lazily end up with huge cognitive debts and codebases riddled with opaque bugs that they do not understand whatsoever. If we prevent students from confronting this temptation, then we are sort of coddling or shielding them from it, and not really preparing them to avoid pitfalls of this type.
2. you can actually learn a LOT by being given the answer, if you actually care to learn. i personally think it's pretty fucking lame to handicap a student's ability to learn in an attempt to prevent lazy abuse. isn't the whole point of a grade to measure how well you understand things? can't you have pop quizzes, assignments on a computer with no agent use, written tests, etc etc. to catch the lazy abusers? this is an unnecessary prevention of lazy abuse that unfairly handicaps learning
Even if you "actually care to learn", this is a huge mental shortcut and you're deceiving yourself if you think deep learning is happening from looking at the answer.
On top of that, the pressures to just finish the coursework and move on to your other homework due tomorrow seems pretty high. Your suggestion means we're no longer coddling/shielding students, but we also aren't actively helping them, are we?
There really needs to be diversity in delivery styles for different modules of courses according to their aims, with 'ai access' as a key variable.
If AI is allowed, it should be based on $x of usage/student, with an audit trail to prove no external funding was used, and module aims based on using AI to the max while conserving token use. Like actually creating wild, ambitious shit which takes cutting edge services to the max.
If AI is not allowed for a module, then it really needs to go back to the old skool, with handwritten exams, or coding using old machines and textbooks. Some skills, techniques, etc, really do need drilling.
Straddling the middle will help nobody, result in accusations, increase the burden on teaching staff, and result in a course without a realistic focus.
Though I guess if you're a big brand university, you don't really need to care about innovating. The money will keep pouring in. The whole further education sector is in dire need of a shake up.
During my undergrad it was normal to see people refer to Chegg solutions to get their answers, or as a friend for theirs.
Maybe there’s a reason my first CS professor wrote out Java code with pencil and paper I guess.
I bet most people would not steal even if they knew they could get away with it.
Universities should be places which are at the bleeding edge of development and providing society with the best new ideas/tech, etc has to offer. Junior workers should be hotbeds of exciting talent which have the ability to revolutionise industries.
By creating such milquetoast environments to study in, which are seemingly scared or unable to prepare people for the future, students are being done a disservice.
Far too many people are far too comfortable with their cushty positions, and it's not doing the youth any favours.
CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch
The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students.
Reorient the university around physical laboratories and timesharing resources no single student could afford. It's already like this in many STEM disciplines.
More internships, more networking, more large projects. Less trivial tests of knowledge and credentialism.
I think we have a tendency to think the worst of your people. They frequently surprise me though.
Nevertheless. The peer pressure is to be anti-AI.
Getting fat is one thing, but getting stupid is another, and I really fear for the future of humanity when it becomes so easy to sidestep the processes that let us actually learn and grow because stuff like "using agent ai coding is trivial".
They shouldn't be thrown into a big soup with shaky aims.
We still - as a society - manage to have PE and driving as different subjects. The same can equally apply here.
The "but we do not let them write code directly" is a smoke screen to appease critics and parents. Yes, hello parents, you pay for your offspring to become a mindless industry tool.
Let's train people to use all the tools available to solve the hardest problems, rather than solving toy problems with a slide rule.