It's challenging. Assignments (and particularly programming assignments) were by far the larger and more difficult part of my CS degree, and also the place where I learned the most. I cannot imagine losing that portion of my education and just replacing it with a few exams.

That's how it works in Germany. Usually assignments are either optional or you just have to get 50% of the total assignment marks over the semester to be admitted to the exam (written or often oral, in person). Then your grade is entirely based on the exam. Hand-holding throughout the semester assignment-to-assignment, checking attendance etc. is more an Anglo-specific thing where students are treated as kids instead of adults.

As someone who did CS 15 years ago, assignments show you can actually understand and build programs. Exams show you bothered to re-read the lecture notes the day before and can regurgitate information on command that you could just as easily forget the next day. Not to mention they’re hugely stressful and some students can’t cope with them well even if they’d make excellent programmers.

I can’t imagine disincentivising actually getting stuck into programming and incentivising being good at regurgitating info in an exam room being a good thing for CS students.

If the exam is made well, it's not just regurgitation. It's not multiple choice, but I agree this doesn't test programming skills. But programming is also a quite small slice of the CS curriculum. It has so many other things like linear algebra, real analysis, formal logic, graph theory, automata, coding theory like Reed Solomon, compression, complexity, operating systems like scheduling and virtual memory, how flip-flops and adders and CPUs work. A self taught web developer who can program well still wouldn't know most of these. Programming knowledge is neither fully necessary nor sufficient for a CS degree. I hear American colleges are more vocational, but in most of Europe it's understood that you gain practical experience either in internships, side jobs, doing hobby projects or simply after graduation at your first job.

I don’t think there’s anything childish about assigning large-scale programming assignments. I had to do everything from implement a compiler to building a ray tracer as an undergrad, and it set me up very well for an independent career as a software developer at a research lab.

As a professor today, assignments are the place where I’m happy to throw my students into the “deep end” (go learn a new language and a set of library toolkits while also learning this skill.) Exams just don’t provide that experience. Worse, students tend to cram for exams which is the worst way to retain information. I can’t even imagine thinking that the two are comparable in terms of retention and skill-building.

It is challenging. In my CS degree grading for programming questions fell into two areas

1. Take home projects where we programmed solutions to big problems. 2. Tests where we had to write programs in the exam on paper during the test.

I think the take home projects are likely a lot harder to grade without AI being used. I'd be disappointed if schools have stopped doing the programming live during tests though. Being able to write a program in a time constrained environment is similar to interviewing, and requires knowledge of the language and being able to code algorithms. It also forces you to think through the program and detect if there will be bugs, without being able to actually run the program (great practice for debugging).

I agree, and it was the same for me. I just don't think it's possible in the same way. Or if it is, perhaps it's okay to use ChatGPT for that stuff.

I wonder if you could invent a teaching language so the LLM wouldn't know about it. A little drastic, but still.

Pretty sure you could just give an LLM the given docs / course material and it would be able to write the language to a reasonable standard. Especially if it had sensible error messages.

Hah, that's true.

Or how about we actually collectively learn a lesson from this - if your assignments just ask people to generically regurgitate info, don’t be surprised that 90% of students lose interest and see it for what it is, pointless busywork.

I genuinely believe I had many excellent learning experiences at university, and I can assure you none of them were the times I had to re-write course info and hand it back to them in order to check off a box.

Maybe, if one student does something they might be wrong, but if 90% of students do something, perhaps the assignment is wrong? Doubling down and saying “we’ll force them to do it by hand then!” Is rather blindly missing the point here no?

I had a lot of great experiences at university too, and was disheartened to see others thought those same things were all pointless busywork.

Honestly I think we'll get back there. I remember ... fondly(?) exams from my history courses in undergrad in the mid 90s. 3-4 questions, 3 hours, anything less than what would amount to a pretty decent length and moderately thorough term paper would fail and have to be made up with an absolutely BRUTAL multiple choice + fill in the blank exam at the end of the term.

Those classes are what taught me how to study and really internalize the material. Helped me so much later in college too. I really can't imagine how kids these days are doing it.

You might be the only person in history who remembers fondly being stressfully forced to write essays in exams.

I don't think so. If you're able to write essays and know the subject matter, it's not too bad. It's stressful because of what the essay stands for in terms of your future, but so is solving a simultaneous equation in that sense.