Mastodawn

I think it's really sad that programming assignments have basically become untenable in the era of LLM/coding agents. I'm a theoretician in my research but I learned so much more by actually writing code and debugging than I did from topics that I only saw in lecture. Exams make a lot more sense to me for an actual theory course rather than compilers class.

If I deploy projects that were designed for a pre agent world, then students can basically use the LLM to get a perfect score unless I play a losing cat and mouse game of LLM police. And the students who don't use LLMs are at a huge disadvantage score-wise.

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jules Mar 9

@maxsnew I think LLMs have just exacerbated the preexisting contradiction between university as a place for education and university as a system for professional certification.

goodhart's law tells us that using grades for more than just feedback will inevitably distort behavior.

Engaging with a course in order to maximize learning and engaging with a course to maximize your grade have always been imperfectly aligned, LLMs have just served as wedge to widen that misalignment.

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MikeStok

@hegeliantaco @maxsnew don’t forget the most important functions of many modern “educational” institutions run by MBAs and a cadre of administrators which dwarfs the full time teaching staff: extracting money from students, maximizing the leader’s bonus, and padding the résumés of the admistrators who flee before the damage they wrought becomes apparent.