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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

Putting aside this sudden change for a moment...

I can't be the only one that is concerned by the title of this post?

Why is copilot being used by students? That seems... like that should be against every school's policy?

Without speaking to the ethics of the situation in either direction, I will say as a student that the vast majority of my time spent programming is on open source, or random personal projects. Assignments are maybe 10% of the time maximum. At least among my circle of friends (a fairly enthusiastic crowd, not a perfect representation of the major) this seems to be typical.

Copilot is the calculator for a new age. In spite of everything my math teacher warned me about, if I am in a situation where I do not have immediate access to a calculator, I am not in a situation where I need to do quick math. We make determinations all the time about what amount of technology assistance is "ok" and what isn't and it usually correlates to what the educator had access to as a child. That's kind of weak, if you ask me. We need to stop pretending we're educating most people to live in a world that won't have immediate access to technology.

I think a calculator is very very different from an AI tool.

With a calculator you still had to have enough knowledge to properly input any formulas. In school you were also still forced to learn the fundamentals with less featured calculators.

Also a calculator was an accepted tool once you are out of school. AI tools like copilot are still controversial within the industry and have no business being in education.

It may be hard to believe, but this was the same argument I heard about calculators in the 80s. All that's really changed is that calculators are "normal." AI tools aren't going anywhere. They're just stackoverflow with fewer steps. Pretending they don't exist in education means students will be disadvantaged when they get to the real world and the thing that matters are results.

Pfft. Students come out of college with effectively none of the knowledge they actually need to write code for a company. Never have.

Knowing, or not knowing, how to use autocomplete (ML powered or not) isn’t going to change their employability one iota.

Let's wait until you get a doctor who got his certificate with tools like Copilot.

In high school, the first thing I did when I encountered a new type of assignment was write a small BASIC program on the TI83+ that solved this type. You could argue that if I can write a generalised solution to a problem, I've understood it. And that anyone copying my program would be cheating, but I wouldn't.

But it meant I got good at programming, but had limited math solving time.

> AI tools like copilot are still controversial within the industry

Those of my colleagues who dared try it greatly appreciate it.

The rest of us don't think they're cheating. They're just being productive.

> have no business being in education

You can say that.

But it won't change whether students use AI-powered learning tools.

These tools force us to rethink education so that we don't simply verify if people did something they could have got help with, since now help has become cheaper. Using a computer should not be considered cheating. It changes the game, and anyone stuck in the old game thinks it's cheating, while everyone in the new game are trying to do something else now.

I don't think I've ever taken a maths class where calculators were allowed (or made sense), from elementary through university.

The problems were usually designed to emphasize the thing you were trying to learn at the time, so once you were beyond simple arithmetic then "I think I'll need a calculator for this step" was a clue that you were on the wrong track anyway.

Every math class I've taken past elementary school and through college has required a graphing calculator. They don't care if you can do arithmetic in your head, they want to know that you know how to solve a problem, which steps to take. Though I think in this way, you can't even really compare copilot to a calculator, as it seems that copilot tries to know how to solve the problem.

I thought in middle school I was still using a normal calculator and was not allowed to use a graphing calculator. But now I don’t remember.

The other important part of that at least in my school, we had to use a graphing calculator but were also not allowed to use certain models that made things too easy.

That’s exactly my concern here.

Once you’re taking algebra it should be a assumption that given the time you can do basic multiplication, division, square roots and others given enough time but there isn’t any point when the more important part is solving other issues. That’s the simple stuff so why not make that easier as long as you learned how to get where you need to get.

But can you imagine having a tool like this when taking data structures?!?

It sounds like we were in very different classes. I was using a graphing calculator mid-way through high school for calculus and statistics. Before that, I was using a basic one for trig and geometry.

that's cap. a ti-84 is a monopoly

TI calculators were required from middle school forward albeit the ones with stored memory were not allowed because of answer storage. just a straight 83+ 84, you had to write and show the work but the arithmetic was definitely allowed via calculator.

upvote. this will be argued against but in 10 years we'll all have "generative answer tools" as a standard in all industries. The "autofilling" of industries.

If Copilot is allowed then using a ghost writer should also be allowed.

It likely will be with language models becoming ubiquitous.

This will truly force language teachers to rethink their job.

Let's not forget that PhD students (or better named "student researchers") exist.

lets ban calculators too, or any sort of cleverness, procedural answers written by blood no pen or papers either.

Why? Learning to use AI tools properly will be far more valuable to these students in the workplace than any personal knowledge or skill they accumulate.

I strongly disagree.

First off, this tool is still a new tool so "properly" does not exist yet and even if it did it likely won't be the same in a few years.

Second, we should be actually teaching programming and how to solve problems (and how to search for them, even if you do just copy and paste from stack overflow you had to understand enough to find it in the first place).

This is a shortcut that you should be using once you understand what you are actually writing.

Edit: Or are you prepared to make the same argument that using something like chatGPT is perfectly fine for any papers students turn in because they are "learning to use AI tools properly"

>Or are you prepared to make the same argument that using something like chatGPT is perfectly fine for any papers students turn in because they are "learning to use AI tools properly"

Yes, because I believe all so-called creative fields will be dominated by AI in the near future. Programming jobs will mostly be replaced with jobs writing prompts for the AIs that write the code, stories, make the art, music, etc.

If people want to learn programming and problem solving, it would be better to do so online, and in their free time, as a hobby. At least in the US, that won't mean taking on a lifetime debt burden in the midst of a market working as aggressively as possible to make you obsolete.

> Yes, because I believe all so-called creative fields will be dominated by AI in the near future. Programming jobs will mostly be replaced with jobs writing prompts for the AIs that write the code, stories, make the art, music, etc.

I'm not convinced of that. Mostly in that for every "easy" tool to do things like make forms for input, store data and print reports... there has always been a limit to where you need an actual developer/programmer to do more. And in many cases, it's more work to customize the tooling than if it was written in a more programmer friendly environment to begin with.

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