GitHub Copilot eignet sich möglicherweise perfekt zum Schummeln von CompSci-Programmierübungen

Microsofts KI-Code-Vorschlagstool GitHub Copilot erweist sich als so leistungsfähig, dass Pädagogen möglicherweise überdenken müssen, wie sie Informatik unterrichten.

Emery Berger, Professor für Informatik an der University of Massachusetts Amherst, veröffentlichte Anfang dieses Monats a Blog-Post warning educators that "students armed with [Copilot] will be bringing Uzis to a knife fight."

Das ist seine Sorge Copilot wird traditionelle Programmierübungen – Teil der Informatikausbildung, aber keineswegs alles – sinnlos machen, weil Copilot alle Antworten kennt.

"As far as I can tell, Copilot was specifically trained on all the intro programming assignments ever," Berger wrote. "Copilot frickin’ loves intro programming assignments."

Soweit ich das beurteilen kann, wurde Copilot speziell für alle Intro-Programmieraufgaben geschult

For students using Copilot, he wrote, educators might as well describe their course objectives as "hitting the Tab key," in reference to the key command to generate code from a description of the desired output.

"Programming plays a role in a lot of computer science classes, and especially in introductory computer science classes," explained Berger in a phone interview with Das Register. Dabei handelt es sich oft um Übungen, um eine Liste von Zahlen auf eine bestimmte Weise zu sortieren oder das n-te Element einer Fibonacci-Reihe zu finden und so weiter.

"Copilot will just do them," said Berger. "It's not just that it does them and it does them well. It's also that it does them using the tools that you would want and expect your students to actually be using to write their code. If they start writing code and Copilot is installed, it will fill out the solution."

Laut Berger unterscheidet sich Copilot von der Suche nach Antworten auf Stack Overflow und anderen Internet-Programmierressourcen.

"You can already find examples of code online," he said. "But you know, the instructor can also Google for them and then compare that code against the code submitted with a plagiarism detector."

Copilot is different, he said, "It actually generates novel solutions. Not like they're super-crazy, sophisticated, genius solutions. But it makes new solutions that are superficially different enough that they plausibly could have come from a student."

It actually generates novel solutions ... that are superficially different enough that they plausibly could have come from a student

As a result, Berger argues, pedagogy related to programming needs to adapt. One approach, which he ridicules in his post, is "to plug our ears with our fingers and kind of shout while pretending [Copilot] doesn't exist, which is more or less the same thing as pretending plagiarism doesn't exist, and pretending that the internet doesn't exist."

"But if you care about the integrity of the process … this is just a cheating machine," he said. "Like somebody gives you a spec for an assignment, you just type in this back in comments and hit Tab, right?"

"So I don't think that it's reasonable or responsible to think that everybody is going to refrain from using this amazing cheating machine that's installed on their laptops … I think that the temptation is too great. And honestly, it's what software development is probably going to look like, very, very soon."

Berger erkennt an, dass Copilot nützlich ist, und sagt, dass es sinnvoll ist, dass Entwickler die Software verwenden möchten.

"We just need to really rethink things altogether," said Berger. "Certainly from the evaluation standpoint, we can obviously just require people to do things in environments where they can't use Copilot. Just like elementary school kids don't get to use calculators when doing basic arithmetic. So we can have paper and pencil exams."

Er sagte, er habe einen Kollegen in Illinois, der die Verwendung von Computern beschreibt, die für Programmiertests gesperrt wurden, sodass die Schüler ihre Prüfungen in einer kontrollierten Umgebung ablegen. Diese Art von Maßnahmen und Dinge wie mündliche Prüfungen, schlug er vor, könnten dazu beitragen, einige der negativen Aspekte der Verfügbarkeit von Copilot anzugehen.

Berger beobachtete auch, dass Copilot positive Aspekte hat, wie die Fähigkeit, Boilerplates auszufüllen und APIs zu implementieren.

"I don't think that memorizing the minutia of countless APIs is really interesting intellectually," he said. 'It's not the kind of thing we should really be teaching or focusing on. Do you know the exact syntax to create a DataFrame with these characteristics? I don't care. If you have to look it up on Google or on Stack Overflow, or you just hit Tab and it just does it for you, that sounds fine to me."

Nonetheless, he argues it's important for educators to make sure students are actually learning the material, which may mean rethinking how much homework assignments that can be solved with Copilot should count when calculating an overall grade.

Berger said it's probably premature to say that Copilot has had an effect on students, because the software has only been publicly available for a few months. But he argues it won't be long before its impact starts to show.

"I would like to be optimistic about this," said Berger. "But I think at minimum, we just need to be thoughtful of it. I just don't think that there are many educators out there who are aware of how much of a revolution this is." ®