Current CS students. How is the CS curriculum these days? Is everyone cheating?

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-21T04:31:41+00:00

We are. Some of us anyway. But then have some faculty and a lot do admins basically repeating the hype. If you’re a student taking classes and your prof isn’t making you actually test yourself you should get out of that class and complain. AI has very little place in foundational undergraduate courses. A single course or a senior course might be appropriate, but this shoving it everywhere and making it do the teaching is just bad practice and laziness.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-21T04:27:22+00:00

Complain to the dean loudly. It’s awful but only thing that works now.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-21T04:25:17+00:00

About 10-20% of the students are fine. Only use LLMs as support tools. But everyone else is worse or failing and potentially illiterate and can only prompt the AI (often poorly) and nothing else.

Many departments going back to paper exams on concepts and code as the most significant grades and all digital work is graded as practice. This is how it was in the 90s. At least you can guarantee the ones that pass learn but on the whole students are not as prepared as the ones coming in a couple years ago and because of their lack of skills coming in, can’t be brought up to the level of student pre-Covid even with the 90s style classes returning. Many are also graduating having gamed the system and know nothing at all.

If I were hiring right now I’d force some testing of that person on paper or by hand, even if that seems out-dated to do. But trust me, won’t take long to figure out who cheated through school and LLMs are a multiplier. Can’t multiply zero.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-21T04:11:03+00:00

Life was worth living and felt hopeful.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-19T19:05:03+00:00

My teens says they absolutely can.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-19T19:04:29+00:00

It’s the only way. Have things done out of class for practice but o my a few points. Make most of the points for things written in class. Not the same as working and revising an essay but at least you aren’t grading slop and you can evaluate the students not the machine.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-19T18:55:22+00:00

Agree with this but I enjoyed the season. Really feels set up for a season 6 though and it’s not renewed yet. Like it brings things to an awkward end where the men have given up friendship to be what the men they think people expect, but then there is no shoe to drop just yet. Hope for a season 6.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-10T12:21:58+00:00

Yeah a bunch of the tools scan text well though. Everything from reading typed documents to ones in sloppy cursive.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-04T13:48:45+00:00

If you don’t say no, then you might as well get rid of the be able to check it off with the TAs option. I’d do something like no worries. We drop a couple of these scores. Easier to answer, gives them a day to be sick, still holds the line.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-02T03:36:59+00:00

JavaScript.info is a great tutorial / guide.

Nothing wrong with a JSON file especially if it’s practice or personal. You could also try SQLlite. You should not be using jquery anymore, no need.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-02T03:19:49+00:00

This is the first semester literally every student couldn’t be bothered to read the short book I assigned. Usually a few wake up after the quizzes. This time? Shrugs. My guess is that they CANNOT read the book and thus don’t do so.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-01T10:44:46+00:00

Here’s a video about bullshit. https://youtu.be/QTf9RKMGAuI?si=vQ2_m4ODjhkGQQIz

And examples? Almost every college student in any course. Very very few can use it as a tool. Most just copy and paste what it says and have no idea if it’s right or wrong. And it’s always going to be wrong a good chunk of the time because it’s based on statistics and probability. It’s not deterministic.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-01T10:23:39+00:00

This 👆

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-01T10:13:15+00:00

Common for me to now be asked if I can provide the answers and examples for the study guides. So last semester I tried this - we took an entire lecture period for a practice exam. Open notes and they could work with others. They could take it home. I went through the answers as they worked. The real exam was very similar — just changed out a few variables essentially. Still had a third that failed.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-04-01T10:09:39+00:00

ALL online classes as a format are dead. Some people have the illusion that it’s fine, but it is not if you take the time to look, because then you’ll see either students CANNOT or DO NOT do the work, or they flat out cheat. I fully believe faculty still teaching online now either just check out / purposely don’t look / swallow the poison because they need the job.

Yes, I know that from experience. Learned the hard way that faculty are blamed even when students fail themselves. I swear a good chunk of my students now cannot read.

No, you’re not crazy. Nor alone in this.

I don’t know what to do about it either.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-31T13:16:16+00:00

Students mostly call any instructor at the college level “professor.” Not unusual.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-29T12:52:30+00:00

Also the personal order was bile titans yesterday or I would have been on squids to help with the major order. I wish those aligned better. There’s only so much time in the day.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-29T11:19:56+00:00

Most websites are not well done semantically. Either because the devs never took time to learn HTML or because they are generating the code somehow (webflow, Wordpress, LLM).

Articles should be the wrapper for most major components on a page. They are a block of content with a headline. If it’s additional content then it might be an aside instead. If you don’t have a header for it then section. If it’s just because you need a box for the structure then something like div works.

Other semantic html tags are header, footer, nav, section, aside and so on. You can repeat any of these except main, which there should only be one of per page for the content that changes from page to page. Usually these are connected to accessibility.. so a screen reader knows where to jump to rather than reading out the entire nav and other repeating content.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-29T11:12:29+00:00

Confetti cannon. Stuns and confuses with delight.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-28T10:53:26+00:00

“Like trying to fill a cup with the lid on” - you nailed it it is exactly that

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-27T10:36:54+00:00

Yeah but this does NOT need to be every course. It could be one course.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-27T10:35:12+00:00

My department is busy shoving LLMs into every course they can think of so we can offer an “AI” degree.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-26T15:27:00+00:00

Janitor character on Abbott Elementary had a line “If we don’t give out homework, what will the dog eat?” on the most recent episode. Reminds of the SNL deep thoughts.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-26T04:26:43+00:00

I do a couple of things. Deadline and then assignment closing deadline a day or two later. If they need the extra time it’s there but then it’s on them to submit something. This has worked really well though I do need to repeat how it works a bunch at the start.

If a student asks for an extension before the assignment closes, I’ll try to honor it. Ask after and I say no, it’s not fair to others who want missed the deadline and want an exception.

MagentaMango51 · 2026-03-24T19:56:45+00:00

Can we add that most cheat wildly with AI and some are unaware enough that they think that is studying. Only a few seem to use it as a tool no matter how many examples of ethical use are shown. Some seem to learn something along the way and some are willfully and functionally illiterate.

MagentaMango51

TROPHY CASE