Copilot, which is free for students to use, will soon become a tool for cheating on programming exams

Copilot is an AI programming assistance tool jointly created by Microsoft, OpenAI, and GitHub. Copilot was integrated into Visual Studio 2022 earlier this year. In addition, GitHub also has a dedicated campus program that allows students to obtain this programming artifact for free.

But then came the downside: Copilot demonstrated so much power in one test that it could be used as a cheating tool on programming exams.

Emery Berger, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, published a blog post earlier this month warning educators, saying, "Students equipped with Copilot It's like bringing your own artifacts to take a programming exam."

Suppose you ask introductory CS students to write an iterative Python program , output the sum of all numbers from 1 to N. Students with Copilot only need to copy and paste the question statement as a comment into the IDE, then enter the function definition "def output_sum(N):" and press the Tab key to get the rest of the content (the bolded parts are all generated by Copilot ).

He worried that Copilot would make traditional programming exercises meaningless because Copilot knew all the answers.

"To my knowledge, Copilot has completed specialized training for all entry-level programming tasks," Berger wrote.

Berger also wrote sarcastically: For students using Copilot, educators might as well describe their course goals as "pressing the Tab key" because all it takes is such a simple By operating, students can easily generate codes and complete programming questions with the help of Copilot.

Berger gave an example of this situation. The bold parts in the code below are automatically completed by Copilot. Berger only manually entered the function name and parameters.

Programming plays an important role in many computer science courses, especially in introductory computer science courses, Introductory Level 1 programming topics include sorting numbers, finding the nth element of the Fibonacci sequence, etc. These simple programming questions seem to be difficult for Copilot.

Berger said Copilot is different from searching for answers on Stack Overflow and other Internet programming resources. Because the code answers searched by the latter can also be searched by teachers, and they can use plagiarism detectors to test the codes submitted by students.

And Copilot "actually generates new solutions. Although the new solution will not be very good, it looks different enough from the searched answers that Let the teacher misunderstand that the code is completed by the students themselves."

Therefore, Berger believes that teaching methods related to programming are in urgent need of improvement, and reminds us: we cannot cover our ears and pretend that this kind of "cheating" is not exist.

"If you think that everyone will restrain themselves and not use this cheating artifact installed on their computers, that is really unreasonable or irresponsible. It's The temptation is too great. To be honest, software development may become like this in the near future."

Berger admitted that Copilot is useful. He said it makes sense that developers would want to use the software.

"Of course, from an assessment point of view, we can ask everyone to take the test in an environment where Copilot cannot be used. It is like asking primary school students not to use a calculator when doing basic arithmetic problems. ."

A colleague of his in Illinois described that the computers they used were exam-specific and had some functions locked, so students were taking part in a controlled environment. experimental. He suggested that these measures, along with methods like oral exams, could help reduce some of the negative impacts of Copilot.

Berger also found there were some positive aspects to Copilot, such as the ability to fill out boilerplate and implement APIs.

"I don't think there's much point in memorizing the tedious details of those APIs, that's not something we should be teaching or focusing on. Do you know the exact syntax for creating a DataFrame with those characteristics? I don't care. If you can I think it's great to be able to find these things on Google, Stack Overflow, or hit the Tab key and they'll come up," he said.

Still, he thinks it's important for educators to make sure students are actually learning the material in their hands, which could mean when calculating total scores. Reconsider how many homework assignments can be solved using "Copilot".

It may be too early to tell if Copilot is having an impact on students, Berger said, because the software has only been available to the public for a few months. But he thinks it won't be long before its effects are felt.

“I’m optimistic about it,” Berger said, “but I think we need to at least consider it. I don’t think that many educators are aware of it yet. What a revolution."

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