I TA for an electrical engineering class. It’s amusing, to look at student’s code these days. Everything is so needlessly wrapped up in 3-line functions, students keep trying to do in 25 lines what can be done in 2, and it all becomes impossible to debug.

When their code inevitably breaks, they ask me to tell them why it isn’t working. My response is to ask them what its meant to be doing, but they can’t answer, because they don’t know.

The sad thing is we try to make it easy on them. Their assignment specs are filled with tips, tricks, hints, warnings, and even pseudo-code for the more confusing algorithms. But these days, students would rather prompt chatgpt than read docs.

I’ve never seen chatgpt ever benefit a student. Either it misunderstands and just confuses the student with nonsense code and functions, or else in rare cases it does its job too well and the students don’t end up learning anything. The department has collectively decided to ban it and all other genAI chatbots starting next semester.