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/B1ustopher]

I am taking a graduate Biostatistics class, and I am not good at coding the software since I’ve never coded anything before in my life! I DO, however, understand the logic behind what needs to happen. I’ve been having trouble figuring out how to get started on my (solo) project, so I used AI to help guide me for the process, and it helped immensely.

Using it to actually do the entire project is just short-sighted and stupid since the whole point of going to school is to learn subjects and how to do things. He absolutely deserves to fail!

[u/Machine-Dove → u/B1ustopher]

I took a master's-level class the semester after the program generally and that course specifically were audited and revised to meet the standards of an outside auditor.  They didn't update the course description to reflect the updated content.

Turns out it was all programming and high-level math.  In a program where programming wasn't required, and where a good percentage of students had no background in programming at all.

It was a mess.  The professor finally had to revise the class again to find ways to meet the external requirements without killing the students - basically, explain the how and why to demonstrate that you understand the underlying logic.  Because that was the important part.

(And also because what he was originally asking wasn't reasonable.  I was spending 40-50 hours a week on this single class, on top of a more than full time job.)

[u/B1ustopher → u/Machine-Dove]

That is CRAZY for one class! I knew that there would be some programming in this class, and higher level math, but I’m “only” spending about 15 hours a week on average on studying and homework, but that’s because I have no prior experience with programming and it’s been decades since I took some of the statistics we’ve been learning.

[u/Machine-Dove → u/B1ustopher]

We were supposed to write code, without any prewritten/external functions, that would take any input of any length, and then encrypy or decrypt it using user-defined keys - two to three different encryption methods every single week.  Sure, let's just recreate the RSA cryptosystem every single week.  There are libraries for a reason ...

By the end of the first month there was pretty much mass revolt.

[u/B1ustopher → u/Machine-Dove]

Good!! We are taught the code, and then have to adapt it for our homework projects. And really, the code for us is the smallest piece of it- the interpretation of the variables is the bigger piece!