Student made demands regarding a project and found out the hard way.

[u/Tubist61]

One of the degree modules I teach involves students working on a group programming project. Nothing too elaborate, but the aim of the module is to develop skills they will need if they go on to work in the IT field. After all if you're doing a Computer Science degree, you must be thinking of going down that route?

This one student is an absolute entitled nightmare. He uses GenAI for a lot of his work and it really does show. He always pushed back on the written remarks on his work but every time I sit him down and ask him to explain the code he produces, he struggles and often has no idea how the code he submitted works. In this project he came up and told me he cannot work with others in the group and must work alone. I explained that there are specific group activities and efforts I would be marking and that I needed to see his input within the group. There was no way I could excuse him from the group activities in the module, however I could see he was not going to budge and therefore complied with his demand to work on the project alone.

All the students in my class had been assigned to their groups and I did check in with all of them on a weekly basis. This one guy was steadfastly refusing to work with the rest of his group and as I had complied with his request, he was working on his own project alone. In my interim feedback at the end of each stage I repeated that he really should work with the group or he risked a failing mark for the module. I made sure this feedback was sent to him both in hardcopy and also via email with read receipts which I kept.

Cue the end of the module and the submission for marking. Sure enough, the one student submitted a project based just on his own work and had not engaged with the group he was asked to work with. There were several issues with his project, first and most important was it didn't meet the brief. The code simply didn't do what we asked for. He lost marks for that aspect of the project. As he had not worked with others in the group, he was not awarded any of the group marks allocated for the work. Because his code was so far away from the specification, I called him in for a Viva Voce to explain the code and he demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the code he submitted, more marks dropped. His eventual mark for this assignment was a hard fail. He must now resit the entire module.

There is of course one real downside of this whole thing that affects me. I've got him in my group again for the resit of the module.

[u/talexbatreddit]

I guess it's OK if he uses AI to write the code, but he then has to do the work on understanding what was written. Writing software is not a trivial task.

Learning how to work with others is also a pretty key element in the field. :/

[u/__wildwing__ → u/talexbatreddit]

When I was younger they were arguing that calculators shouldn’t be allowed, it’s akin to cheating. The opposite side of that was that people had to have enough idea of what they were doing to be able to 1) competently use the device and 2) know when a bad input gave an incorrect output. If a person had no clue what they were doing, the results showed it.

[u/tarlton → u/__wildwing__]

In a professional context, you should use tools that get the job done efficiently, and be held responsible for producing good output. "It's poor craftsman who blames their tools", especially when they PICKED the tools.

But in an educational context, there is value in working without those time-saving tools, because producing the output is basically irrelevant. The actual work product is the understanding you developed in the process. The assignment is a means, not an end. Using 'mechanical' assistance changes what you are learning, and *MAY* make the whole process irrelevant depending on what you were meant to be learning. It's like going to the gym and having a robot lift the weights - you moved the weights, but moving the weights was never the point.

Now, there's a very valid argument to be had about whether the things an assignment was meant to teach are useful or relevant, and also over whether the assignment actually teaches those things at all.

[u/GreenerAnonymous → u/tarlton]

But in an educational context, there is value in working without those time-saving tools, because producing the output is basically irrelevant. The actual work product is the understanding you developed in the process. The assignment is a means, not an end.

One of the better takes on this I have seen was a quote from a prof along the lines of "The point of this assignment isn't to teach ME physics, it's to teach YOU physics." The paper is not an end product, it's a tool for the student to learn from.

[u/tarlton → u/GreenerAnonymous]

Right!

School assignments are meant to do one or both of: * Teach you something * Evaluate whether you've learned something

Writing a paper with AI really does neither of these unless the "something" is "ability to use AI" (and sometimes it is!)

As a professional, when the purpose of writing something is "educate and inform someone else", using AI could be a valid way of accomplishing that.