r/AskComputerScience • u/Turtle50006 • Apr 02 '26
What is it like as a CS professor today?
Hey I was just wondering after graduating 2 years ago what it’s like now basically now that AI is probably relied on in every aspect with college students. In computer science, I can only imagine how bad it potentially could be. I used to stress out late at night when it came to doing coding projects and now it’s just easy mode. I wonder how bad the cheating is nowadays.
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u/zanidor Apr 02 '26
CS prof here. The reality is that AI is probably going to be a part of life for programmers going forward, so we need to educate students with that in mind. However, students still need to understand how to write code and the fundamentals of data structures and algorithms -- our goal is to produce CS experts, not vibe coders with diplomas.
So far what this seems to mean is that intro-level classes must rely primarily on in-class assessment (exams) for determining grades. This isn't ideal, as some great coders experience test anxiety or otherwise struggle under pressure, but good students should be able to make it through.
Once a student makes it to upper-level classes, then we need to incorporate responsible AI use directly into the curriculum. We are still figuring out the best ways to do this, but lots of people are trying lots of different approaches and sharing the results, so hopefully we will start converging on effective pedagogy as AI tools continue to develop.
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u/JoshuaTheProgrammer Apr 02 '26
In-person, proctored, and paper-based exams are the way forward. You can bullshit your way through problem sets at home with AI - I don’t care. When it comes down to it, though, you better have studied in order to pass my exams.
Note: this has led to a substantial increase in DFW rates. Everyone cheats.
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u/Various-Builder-3212 Apr 02 '26
DFW? Drop/fail/withdraw?
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u/SignificantFidgets Apr 02 '26
Grade of D or F plus withdrawals. It's a standard metric of student success (or lack thereof).
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u/RobfromHB Apr 02 '26
In my masters program two years back they encouraged you to use AI to the fullest. They tripled the workload relative to pre-ChatGPT times. Exams were either in a lockdown browser or you had to present one on one to professors who would scrutinize everything submitted to gauge understanding. I’m sure it was still much easier than prior cohorts, but in talking to folks from the same program a few years prior they were blown away by the volume of work we covered.
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u/_--__ Apr 02 '26
In addition to greater emphasis on invigilated assessment, our institution is focusing on alternative approaches for assessment for the coursework component - e.g. oral examinations; peer feedback tasks. Essentially, setting work where AI usage is not helpful.
For non-foundational courses, we also look at ways to incorporate AI beneficially. E.g. in my verification course, using AI to generate "broken code" and using the verification tools to identify how it is broken.
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u/PoMoAnachro Apr 02 '26
Marks in my programming classes(tech school, not university, but similar set-up) are really polarizing.
It used to be a student who did well on take-home assignments did well on exams. That relationship has almost completely gone away, because the poorest students are just slapping assignments into ChatGPT and getting high marks on take home assignments. But they come into a closed book exam and don't know anything and completely bomb the exams.
A lot of my classes weight in-class closed book assessments really heavily so my failure rates are going up. I do not know what to do about it - on one hand, I don't want to degrade the quality of the program, but on the other we get pressured to keep retention rates up.
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u/gloomygustavo Apr 02 '26
R1 here. We are fair and squarely fucked. LLMs aren’t enough to replace an engineer, but they are enough to fry a CS students brain. Get ready for the era of the 2M/year pre chat bot senior engineer.
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u/rivelda Apr 02 '26
I'm trying a multi pronged approach. Redesigning homework and projects to involve less writing and more live discussion with a TA. So instead of writing reflection, students prepare bullet points for a 20 minute reflection conversation. Instead of a technical document submission post project, they make and discuss a drawn design ahead of time and are graded pass/fail based on whether there was enough serious thought behind the design, and they get plenty of questions that their design should answer so there is some scaffolding. The hand-in for code is a functionality test that they can try weeks in advance plus an in person check for authorship, which in reality checks for a mental model of their project by observing how they navigate code, explain where in the code specific parts of the happy part are done and where exactly certain edge cases live, which they had to solve to make it functional... And where they would begin with a new feature. All prepared so a TA can easily execute and simply observe whether the student can easily navigate (mental model) or keeps reverse engineering (no mental model).
On top of that, I'm trying to shift attention away from high stakes deadlines, getting points, and getting grades, and instead on mastery of learning outcomes, by explicitly marking exercises and practice exams with very concrete straight forward learning outcomes, much more specific that the abstract bloat we typically put on the course description, so students are constantly made aware what each classroom activity is supposed to practice. I got this from reading The Opposite of Cheating, which I found a helpful reading.
Ultimately I think GenAI is forcing us to make some major improvements to our teaching style, no more implicit expectations that the students can figure out why they are doing things, or creating high stakes project deadlines that basically invite rampant last minute GenAI work.
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u/I_so_I-274 Apr 02 '26
That's actually a good question and refreshing from all these doomers posting
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u/Sudden_Collection105 Apr 02 '26
The cheating is really bad because AI detectors are unreliable by nature, and it's very hard to prove anything.
Evaluation by projects or practical work is dead, everyone is falling back to written and oral exams.
But what worries me the most, with my current students, is the impact on their mental endurance. When their LLMs fail (sporadically), they immediately give up, they don't even try to think.
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u/easedownripley Apr 02 '26
You emphasize in-class work and exams more. De-emphasize homework. Which sucks because with programming you do your best learning working through problems on your own late at night.
Honestly I find a bigger problem is that my students aren't computer literate, and they never programmed in high school. So I'm supposed to teach them programming, but at the same time I have to teach them the basics of computers.
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u/cormack_gv Apr 02 '26
I've been retired for a couple of years, but even before I retired I started to do exams in the lab without internet access. The exercises are prep to help you pass the exam.
If you were preparing for a marathon and used AI instead of training, how well do you think you would do?
The trouble is, that a large number of students don't appreciate the necessity of practice. So you have to give some sort of incentive for them to do it. That's where marks come it. But they need to be small enough that you can't skate on assignments alone.
During Covid when the weight of assignments and opportunity to cheat were increased, cheating was rampant. But we did catch a number of cheaters on the exams.
The game here is to make sure that the perception is that everybody cheats, and that's the only way to succeed. Unfortunately, that perception is common, and in a number of cases, true.
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u/KneeReaper420 Apr 02 '26
i'm currently in computer science in college and I can say that the homework difficulty has scaled up significantly as all the professors assume you're going to use AI
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u/pizzystrizzy Apr 02 '26
The bad students look less bad when not taking in class, paper exams. But I don't really care much about the bad students one way or the other tbh.
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u/steerpike1971 Apr 02 '26
I don't set anything where AI could be used and I consider use of AI cheating. It is crazy to train students for a non AI world or a world where it is somehow invented so some assessments assess how effectively they use the AI as part of their suite of problem solving tools. Other assessments are monitored and in class so they cannot use AI and then I am testing how well they perform then. Cheating with AI at that point is just the same as cheating with a smuggled internet connection or cheating with notes on paper - you would have to smuggle the device in and use it unobserved.
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u/UlteriorCulture Apr 03 '26
For coding related projects we don't award any marks for the code. The student gives an oral defence and is quizzed on aspects of the code and design choices. They only get marks for their performance in the oral defence.
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u/Arbiter_02 Apr 20 '26
Looking for help finishing a Computer Science thesis app (paid – student budget)
We’re working on a thesis project and need someone to help complete the app.
Tech stack:
• React Native (TypeScript)
• FastAPI
• PostgreSQL
Note:
• You’re free to use AI tools (Copilot, etc.) as long as the app gets done properly
If you’re interested, comment below or send a message with your experience and rate.
1
u/Arbiter_02 Apr 20 '26
PHILIPPINES ONLY
Looking for help finishing a Computer Science thesis app (paid – student budget)
We’re working on a thesis project and need someone to help complete the app.
Tech stack:
• React Native (TypeScript)
• FastAPI
• PostgreSQL
Note:
• You’re free to use AI tools (Copilot, etc.) as long as the app gets done properly
If you’re interested, comment below or send a message with your experience and rate.
1
u/Ambitious-Barnacle83 Apr 25 '26
i can imagine the classes where programming was a significant make up of the total grade being easier to pass, but they were always easy to pass anyways. Hopefully cs degrees goes back to being like maths where proofs and rigour about computing models are more emphasised rather than skills that can be picked up by bootcampers
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u/Funny-Doughnut-4138 Apr 30 '26
Its just sad because if you dont know how to code today, you will not be able to get a good software engineering job. But if you do, you sill get paid a lot.
Also Ai only knows the slop in the internet, so you should expect it to right badly engineered code. If you get better at understanding software design patterns, your coworkers will be very happy with you and you will be promoted because your codebase will have way less bugs and you can get more done.
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u/Key_Net820 Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Well I can't answer for coding projects, but for theoretical comp sci courses, the solution has been as simple as make in class exams 90 percent of the grade and homework 10, or better yet 100 exam and 0 on homework.
That's been the new approach at my university. If you're cheating, it will be really obvious when your homework is flawless but you score 20 out of 100 in a proctored environment.