So all groups outsourced their thinking to an LLM. Will they have learned anything they can apply to different types of projects in future?
In my school projects I've found them super useful for working with libraries. In the past it felt like the theory I learned was pretty low impact. 80% of my time was spent learning the quirks of a library. Now it feels like I can take theory and iterate over a ton of different solutions without having to worry about learning whatever library the professor requires. Basically I'm I feel like it lets me spend more time learning the thing I want to learn rather than all the busywork around it. Would be curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Intuition for library design and the architecture of software packages/external APIs is something you can only learn by doing.
- "Responsible for the code", i.e. understands it, can explain it, can modify it on request, is the right bar for a working engineer using an LLM to go faster. But it's the wrong bar for a student, because in a course the deliverable isn't the point, the practice is.
I presume that as course like 'Parallel Computing' exists to build the habits of reasoning about decomposition, contention, race conditions, strategy tradeoffs. Those habits come from doing the reps, the same way you don't learn to write by reading good prose. Your two "successful" groups outsourced exactly the reps the course is (or should be) there to build.
Being able to follow and tweak a solution proves comprehension, but comprehension is a much lower bar than producing the solution.
Your students may understand this particular solution well enough to explain it. But did they learn enough that they could tackle a different problem with a different shape, without using an LLM?
Of course that the "succesfull" groups implemented their solutions, tweaked them and, tried their best to escape from race conditions and were able to talk about the performance/memory/etc. tradeoffs. We have a grid to grade for those and other items. They did not outsource all of their thinking to an LLM.. That is what I mean as taking responsability for their code, maybe not the correct word, but the one that came to my head when I wrote it..