I'm at a public southeastern R2. Not selective. Mostly regional catchment. Most of our students have to learn how to be good students their first year or two.
We're making major changes in course structure as a result, so if things go well we won't have enough data to measure any kind of meaningful trend
The fact that you are talking about Dan Garcia, a huge figure in computing education research and an excellent teacher, and the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum makes this hilarious. You should look up some details about both.
You'd be amazed at how many students we know are obviously cheating because the logs reveal that they copy pasted a long, complete answer within seconds of opening a problem for the first time, full of sophisticated code constructs that we didn't teach them, and lot's of nicely formatted comments. Sometimes they even copy/paste the entire GPT output and then format it down.
Public schools around me have done more than just turn a blind-eye to cheating. During COVID, one of our kids cheated in every subject, we showed the proof to the school and only one of the teachers had any consequence at all, and that was to give her a failing grade for the test we could prove she cheated on (quizzes and HW were ignored).
It was trivial to show she had plagiarized every single essay she wrote (just put any unusual sounding sentence in google with double quotes around it), and her English teacher said roughly: "Yeah, lots of kids are doing that these days, nothing we can do about it"
This has been my wife’s experience as a college math professor. Instead of code it’s extremely formal problems with way more steps than the student normally performs using notation never taught in class.
It’s not that students didn’t cheat before, LLMs have just lowered the bar so far many can’t complete a live test in a class that requires effort.
It's an incredible curriculum. I have a lot of fond memories myself. I frequently wonder nowadays if it isn't the right approach to force students to stop and think a bit more about "Computer Science" and not just "Programming" in an introductory context.
It's crazy to me that people think of Python as dynamically typed by default. Strong static typing has been an option in Python for years now, and it should just be the default.
"The Python runtime does not enforce function and variable type annotations. They can be used by third party tools such as type checkers, IDEs, linters, etc."
Which third-party enforcement mechanism do you propose become the default?
The python type hints are useful for static analysis (and yes, should be the default) but it’s a joke compared to the utility of types in a language like Haskell.
Typing with tools like Pyright doesn't come close to providing what a good statically typechecked language provides.
There are many reasons for this. A big one is that many libraries are only partially typed at best, and dynamic types tend to propagate, weakening the guarantees you get from type checking.
Dynamic idioms in general, including something as common as string-indexed dictionaries, negate type checking. Runtime metaprogramming is the same. All of these things have equivalents in a good statically checked language, but Python doesn't follow those models.
Fundamentally, in Python static typing is an optional analysis layer over a dynamic language, and the consequences of that can't be fully mitigated. The result is a big difference in what types can guarantee.
TypeScript had this _exact_ same problem when it started out. As more libraries add annotations, the ecosystem will become stronger, and it will eventually be about as good as a "real" statically typed language.
> Dynamic idioms in general, including something as common as string-indexed dictionaries, negate type checking.
Do you have any proof of this? It hasn't been a problem in TypeScript, and I doubt it's an issue in Python
Also for deadlines and social accountability. There's a reason why there was a lot less learning during the pandemic. The simple fact that most online learning advocates don't want to acknowledge is that humans learn better from other humans in person. On average, of course.
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