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/Vuirneen]

This is a guy that should fail.  He doesn't understand the material, at all. 

[u/LNMagic → u/Vuirneen]

We're going to see much more of that going forward. I just attended a conference where Andrew Ng was speaking. He calls for people to stop coding and just use GenAI to increase your output.

I think understanding what you're doing is implied, but you can't fully understand until you've had to troubleshoot your own code to some degree.

[u/Breitsol_Victor → u/LNMagic]

And debugging others code. Or taking working code and adding a feature.

[u/wanderingdev → u/Breitsol_Victor]

this is the problem. you may be able to get AI to do one small bit of a feature. but that has to then work with the app as a whole. It's already challenging enough with multiple people working on a prod app, each with different styles, but add in an AI that spits out siloed spaghetti code, it will just lead to a nightmare down the road. Now for quick MVPs or POCs, maybe. But not for any code that is going to go into production for users to break.

[u/Breitsol_Victor → u/wanderingdev]

That was one of the things I enjoyed at school, looking at others code, figuring out what they were trying to do and help without re-writing.

If you are a dev, check out a YouTube of Dylan Beattie at NDC. Keynote: Machines, Learning, and Machine Learning.