This would be an interesting approach if the course supplied a custom Harness (perhaps in place of a textbook) and this was part of the instruction set inside of it. As a standalone thing you ask students to import into their agent, seems unlikely to work.
This is interesting. I don't know how the AI agent guidelines will be enforced because there will always be a model outside the curriculum that a student can use to bypass the guidelines. Encouraging academic integrity is useful but requires the student to buy into the idea that they are paying for an education, not a diploma. This is a tough problem and I have been wondering how CS departments are incorporating AI into the curriculum while encouraging appropriate use in a learning environment.
Stanford has an honour code. Meant no oversight even during exams. Worked surprisingly well when I was there. The flipside is, if you’re ever caught cheating, there are no second chances.
I imagine this applies here, too, if they want to enforce it strictly.
In an ideal world guidelines should be suggestions for those willing to make the best of the course and improve as a person and professional. However a degree has real world value and repercussions, so enabling someone incompetent to do a dangerous job can put innocent lives in jeopardy. It's tough, but I hope in time we learn how to live with this new tech.
Hah, I like that these are presented as a CLAUDE.md.
(They have the same content duplicated in an AGENTS.md as well - I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.)
This seems somewhat sensible to me - the genie _is_ out of the bottle, and students absolutely will use AI agents to finish assignments without learning a thing, but there is some value to showing how agents can be used as teaching tools and what healthy use _can_ look like
They're only cheating themselves in a world that increasingly cares about knowledge (market trend of seniors being preferable hires to fresh out of school juniors) and not the piece of paper that "proved" you had such knowledge.
Agreed. I don't know how they plan to enforce this but this is way better than some other articles that have come up indicating educational bans on AI use, in-person proctoring, verbal assessments, pen and paper exams etc. This is the first attempt at an approach I've seen that doesn't seek to isolate education from reality; students that are effective at integrating AI into their work and actually understand what they're doing are going to get jobs, which is ultimately the goal of school.
yeah I don't think that's going to work - it would be kind of like "we're releasing model answers to all assignments but please only use them as a teaching aid and don't copy from them"
best to
a) adapt assignments so that agents are bad at producing solutions
b) have more scenarios where students have to do things in controlled environments. Universities managed to adapt to 'any solution you need is readily available online' so I don't think it will be that different to have several times a month/year where students have to go into a room with nothing but pencil and paper to prove what knowledge they have vs what they have the skills to access
I did most of my CS class tests this way within the last year. It’s not that bad because prof doesn’t care about syntax so much (unless that’s what we’re testing on of course) and details, but wanting instead to make sure we understand broader concepts.
Seeing my own kids (teens) go through some of this, I'm becoming slightly less pessimistic as it all shakes out. Among their peer groups there does seem to be an opinion forming that sure, anyone can just ask ChatGPT for quick answers on assignments, but actually knowing stuff is a bit of a "flex" that's respected.
This is ridiculous. The genie is not going to go back into the bottle. This is the equivalent of "you wouldn't download a car". (Yes, we would.)
The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students.
Reorient the university around physical laboratories and timesharing resources no single student could afford. It's already like this in many STEM disciplines.
More internships, more networking, more large projects. Less trivial tests of knowledge and credentialism.
When calorie dense food and gas powered vehicles came on the scene, humans (generally) got fat and out of shape. "Why eat that salad and go for a run?" one might say, "This cheesecake tastes much better and I can just drive wherever I want to go."
Getting fat is one thing, but getting stupid is another, and I really fear for the future of humanity when it becomes so easy to sidestep the processes that let us actually learn and grow because stuff like "using agent ai coding is trivial".
I imagine this applies here, too, if they want to enforce it strictly.
(They have the same content duplicated in an AGENTS.md as well - I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.)
https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
best to
a) adapt assignments so that agents are bad at producing solutions
b) have more scenarios where students have to do things in controlled environments. Universities managed to adapt to 'any solution you need is readily available online' so I don't think it will be that different to have several times a month/year where students have to go into a room with nothing but pencil and paper to prove what knowledge they have vs what they have the skills to access
> * Run bash commands
Students who prefer to use zsh keep winning.
The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students.
Reorient the university around physical laboratories and timesharing resources no single student could afford. It's already like this in many STEM disciplines.
More internships, more networking, more large projects. Less trivial tests of knowledge and credentialism.
Getting fat is one thing, but getting stupid is another, and I really fear for the future of humanity when it becomes so easy to sidestep the processes that let us actually learn and grow because stuff like "using agent ai coding is trivial".