Boris, What you are telling us is not particularly new or spectacular in a sense. It has often been hard to grade assignments students do when they choose an unexpected path. I had one instructor who always graded my exams (in the multiple courses I took with him) because unlike most of the sheep, I did not bother memorizing the way something was done or proven and created my own solutions on the fly during the test, often in ways he had to work hard at following and that almost amused him as mine tended to be correct, albeit not what he would have thought of.
Your issue is not particularly about R as similar scenarios can be found in many languages and environments. In programming, it is arguably worse as it is common to be able to do things so many ways. But plain old R has so many packages available, often with source code, that any student who finds one that does something they want, may be able to copy and modify some of the functions involved into their own code already and fool an evaluator into thinking they did it on their own. That is a tad harder, as many packages improve the code efficiency by (re)writing many parts in C/C++. I have seen things like a GUI that lets you click on various check boxes and other controls and then use those instructions to read in data files, do various operations on them, and provide output. Some allow quite a bit of functionality and also offer you the opportunity to see the R code it generates, and let you adjust that if it does not quite meet your needs. Much of it involves including various packages and calling functions in them, but if your students are allowed to use such things, how would you know how little actual work they did? I echo what someone else wrote. Training students for their future jobs in an uncertain and changing future, may be more effective in teaching them how to find ever better or different ways to get things done, or even switch to growing areas near their field. All kinds of automation of jobs are happening and will continue to happen in the knowledge professions. People who read manuals cover to cover and keep consulting them constantly are a rarity. Many people often first do web searches or consult experts including online versions of the documentation. Many will happily use software that lets them do more and more with fewer lines of code written by them and especially when that software has been used and tested long enough to be relatively free of bugs when used as directed. Why would anyone these days want to constantly re-invent the wheel and write routines to read in data from files using known formats when you can use ones that exist and, if needed in special cases, make some tweaks such as converting a column it made into integer, back into the floating point you want for some later reason? But if your students are using something that is error-prone when used the way they are using it, that is a problem as they are not only not learning some basics or techniques you want them to know, but relying on what may be bad tools without taking the time and effort to check the result or make their own tweaks. Such software may not provide a way to do something like treat multiple entries of various kinds as being NA, as an example. So you would need your own code to check the result between some steps and do your own further conversions so that "." and "" and "NA" and "-" all become NA, again, just a made up example. Yes, some students will easily fool you when grading but that already happens when someone hires out getting some work done and claims it as their own. -----Original Message----- From: R-help <r-help-boun...@r-project.org> On Behalf Of Boris Steipe Sent: Monday, December 19, 2022 3:16 PM To: Milan Glacier <n...@milanglacier.com> Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] Amazing AI Exactly. But not just "error prone", rather: eloquently and confidently incorrect. And that in itself is a problem. When I evaluate students' work, I implicitly do so from a mental model of the student - aptitude, ability, experience, language skills etc. That's useful for summative assessment, since it helps efficiency - but that won't work anymore. I see a need to assess much more carefully, require fine-grained referencing, check every single fact ... and that won't scale. And then there is also the spectre of having to decide when this crosses the line to "concoction" - i.e. an actual academic offence ... Best, Boris > On 2022-12-19, at 03:58, Milan Glacier <n...@milanglacier.com> wrote: > > [You don't often get email from n...@milanglacier.com. Learn why this > is important at https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification ] > > On 12/18/22 19:01, Boris Steipe wrote: >> Technically not a help question. But crucial to be aware of, especially for those of us in academia, or otherwise teaching R. I am not aware of a suitable alternate forum. If this does not interest you, please simply ignore - I already know that this may be somewhat OT. >> >> Thanks. >> ------------------------------------------------------ >> >> You very likely have heard of ChatGPT, the conversation interface on top of the GPT-3 large language model and that it can generate code. I thought it doesn't do R - I was wrong. Here is a little experiment: >> Note that the strategy is quite different (e.g using %in%, not duplicated() ), the interpretation of "last variable" is technically correct but not what I had in mind (ChatGPT got that right though). >> >> >> Changing my prompts slightly resulted it going for a dplyr solution instead, complete with %>% idioms etc ... again, syntactically correct but not giving me the fully correct results. >> >> ------------------------------------------------------ >> >> Bottom line: The AI's ability to translate natural language instructions into code is astounding. Errors the AI makes are subtle and probably not easy to fix if you don't already know what you are doing. But the way that this can be "confidently incorrect" and plausible makes it nearly impossible to detect unless you actually run the code (you may have noticed that when you read the code). >> >> Will our students use it? Absolutely. >> >> Will they successfully cheat with it? That depends on the assignment. We probably need to _encourage_ them to use it rather than sanction - but require them to attribute the AI, document prompts, and identify their own, additional contributions. >> >> Will it help them learn? When you are aware of the issues, it may be quite useful. It may be especially useful to teach them to specify their code carefully and completely, and to ask questions in the right way. Test cases are crucial. >> >> How will it affect what we do as instructors? I don't know. Really. >> >> And the future? I am not pleased to extrapolate to a job market in >> which they compete with knowledge workers who work 24/7 without >> benefits, vacation pay, or even a salary. They'll need to rethink the >> value of their investment in an academic education. We'll need to >> rethink what we do to provide value above and beyond what AI's can >> do. (Nb. all of the arguments I hear about why humans will always be >> better etc. are easily debunked, but that's even more OT :-) >> >> -------------------------------------------------------- >> >> If you have thoughts to share how your institution is thinking about academic integrity in this situation, or creative ideas how to integrate this into teaching, I'd love to hear from you. > > *NEVER* let the AI misleading the students! ChatGPT gives you > seemingly sound but actually *wrong* code! > > ChatGPT never understands the formal abstraction behind the code, it > just understands the shallow text pattern (and the syntax rules) in > the code. And it often gives you the code that seemingly correct but > indeed wrongly output. If it is used with code completion, then it is > okay (just like github copilot), since the coder need to modify the > code after getting the completion. But if you want to use ChatGPT for > students to query information / writing code, it is error proning! ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
