[HN Gopher] Student Perceptions of AI Coding Assistants in Learning
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Student Perceptions of AI Coding Assistants in Learning
Author : victorbuilds
Score : 45 points
Date : 2025-11-29 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| bgwalter wrote:
| It is notable that so many publications try to salvage "AI"
| ("need for new pedagogical approaches that integrate AI
| effectively") rather than ditch "AI" completely.
|
| The world worked perfectly before 2023, there is no need to
| outsource information retrieval or thinking.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The world worked perfectly before 1982, there is no need for
| the internet.
|
| (...I actually kind of think this. "Kind of" being the key
| word.)
| awesome_dude wrote:
| God no.
|
| Speaking as someone that communicates primarily through text
| (high likelihood of Autism) the internet was the first chance
| a lot of us had to ... speak.. and be heard
| deadbabe wrote:
| That's not a problem that generalizes to the broader
| population. We don't really need internet.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Screw the broader population I can speak now dammit!!!!!
| danaris wrote:
| In other words "disabled people can suck it, because I
| don't care about their lives or experiences"?
|
| We often fall short, but as a society we do _try_ to make
| sure we 're accommodating disabled people when we make
| big changes in our systems.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Just FTR - I read them as being facetious
| danaris wrote:
| Poe's Law applies.
|
| There are far, far too many people who genuinely think
| disabled people should just disappear or die for it to be
| "safe" to be facetious about that without a clear sarcasm
| indicator.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| People have a need to be heard and understood. That's
| half of what we are doing here posting.
|
| Many ("not disabled") people don't fit in with their
| local peer group / society. The internet gave them a way
| to connect with other like-minded individuals.
|
| Do I need to give examples? Let's say: struggling with a
| rare disease.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| But on the other end you have genocide triggered by
| Facebook. You can't speak if you're dead.
|
| Perhaps some of that violence would have happened anyway.
| I don't know how it all nets out.
| sukhdeepprashit wrote:
| I swear this place is like the I'm so special olympics now
| might as well go to reddit
| manmal wrote:
| Not much has changed, only people get diagnosed now. I
| think GP makes actually a good point that, with all its
| downsides, there are also net positive upsides to the
| internet.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| there are upsides but I dont know if its net upside. In
| this particular example, communicating by text - letter
| writing has existed for millenia and has arguably
| degraded considerably in this age of instant messaging
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Sorry, i know it's a bit "flavour of the month" but I
| mentioned it because I have a difficulty communicating
| face to face, which is common amongst a certain group of
| people, and I figured that mentioning it would help
| people understand my thinking.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| Why couldn't you write letters instead of texting?
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I didn't have your mailing address :P
| srpinto wrote:
| Ah yes, the perfect world we had when governments could get
| away with anything because the press was not enough to
| showcase their attrocities. A beautiful, perfect world, with
| rubella and a global population living in extreme poverty
| close to 50% (compared to today's 10%).
|
| I see this mentality almost exclusively in americans and/or
| anglo people in general, it's incredible... if you're not
| that, I guess you're just too young or completely isolated
| from reality and I wish you the best in the ongoing western
| collapse.
|
| (... I actually wish you're joking and I didn't catch it,
| though).
| daseiner1 wrote:
| last sentence in your first paragraph has nothing to do
| with the current state of the internet and certainly not
| AI. first sentence? turns out governments can still get
| away with pretty much anything and propaganda is easier
| than ever.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > propaganda is easier than ever.
|
| It is so much harder now. There are people who are
| willfully ignorant now, almost proud to be; snooty about
| it. But it's impossible for governments and institutions
| to lie like they used to be able to. People are trading
| primary source documents online within the day.
|
| It's why the popularity of long-ruling institutional
| parties is dropping everywhere, and why the measures to
| stop people from communicating and to monitor what
| they're saying are becoming more and more draconian and
| desperate.
| rezz wrote:
| Why stop there? We could do long division before the calculator
| and hand write before the typewriter.
| maplethorpe wrote:
| I do wonder if the calculator would have been as successful
| if it regularly delivered wrong answers.
| Bootvis wrote:
| It does if you're a clumsy operator and those are not rare.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Yes, but the machine itself is deterministic and
| logically sound.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Yes, but the machine itself is deterministic and
| logically sound.
|
| Because arithmetic itself, by definition, is.
|
| Human language is not. Which is why being able to talk to
| our computers in natural language (and have them
| understand us and talk back) now is nothing short of
| science fiction come true.
| maplethorpe wrote:
| Even worse is if it's in the other room and your fingers
| can't reach the keys. It delivers no answers at all!
| Bootvis wrote:
| My point is, needing to use something with care doesn't
| prevent it becoming from wildly successful. LLM's are
| wrong way more often but are also more versatile than a
| calculator.
| analog31 wrote:
| My typerwriter delivered wrong answers.
| ashu1461 wrote:
| Google is successful and it's page rank algorithm also does
| not deliver correct results all the times.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's no such thing as a correct result to a search
| query. It certainly delivered exactly what was asked for,
| a grep of the web, sorted by number of incoming links.
|
| They also don't use it at all anymore, they barely even
| care about your search query.
|
| Google is successful, however, because they innovated
| once, and got enough money together as a result to buy
| Doubleclick. Combining their one innovation with the ad
| company they bought enabled them to buy other companies.
| walt_grata wrote:
| Did you learn how to do long division in schools? I did, and
| I wasn't allowed to use calculators on a test until I was in
| highschool and basic math wasn't what was being taught or
| evaluated.
| moregrist wrote:
| I also learned long division in school.
|
| I was allowed to use a calculator from middle school
| onward, when we were being tested on algebra and beyond and
| not arithmetic.
|
| Some schools have ridiculous policies. Some don't. Ymmv. I
| don't think that's changed from when I was in school.
| ako wrote:
| Where is this perfect world you're speaking of? Surely not the
| one we're living in...
| dcre wrote:
| Interesting to see quotes but note N=20 and the methodology
| doesn't seem all that rigorous. I didn't see anything that wasn't
| exactly what you would expect to hear.
| taurath wrote:
| I am not a student and I wonder often whether we fill in
| memorization for the idea of learning, as though it's somehow
| more valuable to be able to write valid syntax from memory on a
| blank file than it is to know and practice the broader strokes of
| abstractions, operators, readability and core concepts which make
| up good software craftsmanship.
|
| Sometimes I'm doing something in a new to me language, using an
| LLM to give me a head start on structure and to ask questions
| about conventions and syntax, and wondering to myself how much
| I'm missing had I started just by reading the first half of a
| book on the language. I think I probably would take a lot longer
| to do anything useful, but I'd probably also have a deeper
| understanding of what I know and don't know. But then, I can just
| as easily discover those fundamental concepts to a language via
| the right prompt. So am I learning? Am I somehow fooling myself?
| How?
| jjmarr wrote:
| Because not everyone can truly be great at their craft, but
| everyone can memorize syntax.
|
| Schools compromise their curriculum so that every student has a
| chance in the interests of fairness.
| tehjoker wrote:
| You have to know the basics to build higher level knowledge
| and skills. What's the use of high level book learning
| without the ability to operationalize it
| thomasahle wrote:
| I'm not sure we really know how much of learning is
| memorization. As we memorize more stuff, we find patterns to
| compress it and memorize more efficiently.
| raincole wrote:
| Sounds awfully like machine learning, doesn't it?
| mjburgess wrote:
| No, because ML is compression via interpolation and does
| not imply decompression.
| throwaway31131 wrote:
| That's an interesting idea.
|
| But the magic is in the "find patterns" stuff as
| memorization is just data storage. If you think of the
| machine learning algorithms as assigning items a point in a
| space, then it does uncover neighbors, sometimes ones we
| might not expect, and that's interesting for sure.
|
| But I'm not sure it's analogous to what people do when they
| uncover patterns.
|
| Definitely interesting to ponder though.
| jeltz wrote:
| Which school teaches programming as memorization? My school,
| KTH in Sweden, did not. I feel you may be trying to solve an
| already solved problem.
| j45 wrote:
| Testing Regurgitation on concepts or process is a large part of
| what learning is too often the case.
| fn-mote wrote:
| You should only use the word learning (without scare quotes)
| if it's something you believe is learning.
|
| One of the first precepts of ML is that "memorization is not
| learning".
|
| Learning is generalization, application to new circumstances.
|
| Schooling might not have learning as a product, but that's a
| different problem.
| j45 wrote:
| I'm referring to students learning in school, relative to
| student perceptions of their learning experience in using
| early stage coding assistants.
| awongh wrote:
| > Automatic creation of an initial billboard: Upon starting the
| program, a predefined list of movies currently showing must be
| automatically generated, including their details (title, genre,
| duration, and showtimes).
|
| I would say that these results might be relevant for a university
| CS program setting, but I would make the distinction between this
| and actually learning to program.
|
| The context of this task is definitely a very contrived "Let's
| learn OOP" assignment that, for example, just tires to cram in
| class inheritance without really justifying it's use in the
| software that's being built. It's a lazy kind of curriculum
| building that doesn't actually tell the students about OOP.
|
| In that sense it's no wonder that AI is not that helpful in the
| context of the assignment and learning.
|
| I wouldn't chalk this up to "AI doesn't help you learn". I would
| put this in the category of, _in an overly academic assignment
| with contrived goals, AI doesn 't help the student accomplish the
| goals of the course_. That conclusion could be equally applied to
| French literature 102.
|
| And that's very different from whether or not an AI coding
| assistant can help you learn to code or not. (I'm actually not
| sure if it can, but I think this study doesn't say anything new).
| borski wrote:
| Crazy idea but: what if we built an AI pair programmer that
| actually pair programmed? That is, sometimes it was the driver
| and you navigated, pretty much as it is today, but sometimes you
| drive and _it_ navigates.
|
| I surmise that would help people learn to code better.
| manmal wrote:
| LLMs with their current context size suck at navigating in
| larger codebases. They are better left in the driver seat for
| now.
| calepayson wrote:
| > Our findings reveal that students perceived AI tools as helpful
| for grasping code concepts and boosting their confidence during
| the initial development phase. However, a noticeable difficulty
| emerged when students were asked to work un-aided, pointing to
| potential over reliance and gaps in foundational knowledge
| transfer.
|
| As someone studying CS/ML this is dead on but I don't think the
| side-effects of this are discussed enough. Frankly, cheating has
| never been more incentivized and it's breaking the higher
| education system (at least that's my experience, things might be
| different at the top tier schools).
|
| Just about every STEM class I've taken has had some kind of
| curve. Sometimes individual assignments are curved, sometimes the
| final grade, sometimes the curve isn't a curve but some sort of
| extra credit. Ideally it should be feasible to score 100% in a
| class but I think this actually takes a shocking amount of
| resources. In reality, professors have research or jobs to attend
| to and same with the students. Ideally there are sections and
| office hours and the professor is deeply conscious of giving out
| assignments that faithfully represent what students might be
| tested on. But often this isn't the case. The school can only
| afford two hours of TA time a week, the professors have
| obligations to research and work, the students have the same. And
| so historically the curve has been there to make up for the
| discrepancy between ideals and reality. It's there to make sure
| that great students get the grades that they deserve.
|
| LLMs have turned the curve on its head.
|
| When cheating was hard the curve was largely successful. The
| great students got great grades, the good students got good
| grades, those that were struggling usually managed a C+/B-, and
| those that were checked out or not putting in the time failed.
| The folks who cheated tended to be the struggling students but,
| because cheating wasn't that effective, maybe they went from a
| failing grade to just passing the class. A classic example is
| sneaking identities into a calculus test. Sure it helps if you
| don't know the identities but not knowing the identities is a
| great sign that you didn't practice enough. Without that practice
| they still tend to do poorly on the test.
|
| But now cheating is easy and, I think it should change the way we
| look at grades. This semester, not one of my classes is curved
| because there is always someone who gets a 100%. Coincidentally,
| that person is never who you would expect. The students who
| attend every class, ask questions, go to office hours, and do
| their assignments without LLMs tend to score in B+/A- range on
| tests and quizzes. The folks who set the curve on those
| assignments tend to only show up for tests and quizzes and then
| sit in the far back corners when they do. Just about every test I
| take now, there's a mad competition for those back desks. Some
| classes people just dispense with the desk and take a chair to
| the back of the room.
|
| Every one of the great students I know is murdering themselves to
| try to stay in the B+/A- range.
|
| A common refrain when people talk about this is "cheaters only
| cheat themselves" and while I think has historically been mostly
| true, I think it's bullshit now. Cheating is just too easy, the
| folks who care are losing the arms race. My most impressive peers
| are struggling to get past the first round of interviews.
| Meanwhile, the folks who don't show up to class and casually get
| perfect scores are also getting perfect scores on the online
| assessments. Almost all the competent people I know are getting
| squeezed out of the pipeline before they can compete on level-
| footing.
|
| We've created a system that massively incentivizes cheating and
| then invented the ultimate cheating tool. A 4.0 and a good score
| on an online assessment used to be a great signal that someone
| was competent. I think these next few years, until universities
| and hiring teams adapt to LLMs, we're going to start seeing
| perfect scores as a red flag.
| abenga wrote:
| If sitting in the back and cheating guarantees a good grade,
| that's a shit school, honestly. The school seems to know that
| people cheat, and how, but nothing is being done. Randomize
| seating, have a proctor stand in the back of the class,
| suspend/expel people who are caught cheating.
| calepayson wrote:
| Ya it drives me crazy. I know someone who scored an 81% on a
| midterm where a few people scored in the high 90%. The
| professor told them, that among the people they didn't
| suspect of cheating, they got the highest score. No curve, no
| prosecution of the cheaters.
| quesera wrote:
| FWIW: When I was in undergrad, the students who showed up only
| for exams and sat in the back of the room were not cheating,
| and still ended up with some of the best scores.
|
| They had opted out of the lectures, believing that they were
| inefficient or ineffective (or just poorly scheduled). Not
| everyone learns best in a lecture format. And not everyone is
| starting with the same level of knowledge of the topic.
|
| Also:
|
| > _A 4.0 and a good score on an online assessment used to be a
| great signal that someone was competent_
|
| ... this has never been true in my experience, as a student or
| hiring manager.
| calepayson wrote:
| > FWIW: When I was in undergrad, the students who showed up
| only for exams and sat in the back of the room were not
| cheating, and still ended up with some of the best scores.
|
| For many classes this is still the case, and I lump these
| folks in with the great students. They still care about
| learning the material.
|
| My experience has been that these students are super common
| in required undergrad classes and not at all common in the
| graduate-level electives that I've seen this happening in.
|
| > ... this has never been true in my experience, as a student
| or hiring manager.
|
| Good to know. What've you focused on when you're hiring?
| fn-mote wrote:
| Look, I agree with the sibling that the school needs to do
| something about cheating.
|
| Individual instructors should do something about it, even.
|
| The fact that there is no feedback loop causing instructors to
| do this is a real problem.
|
| If there were ever a stats page showing results in your
| compilers course were uncorrelated with understanding of
| compilers on a proctored exit exam you bet people would change
| or be fired.
|
| So in a way, I blame the poor response on the systematic
| factors.
| ghm2180 wrote:
| I wonder when will there be something more rigorous on what works
| clearing house
| https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/Search/Products?searchTerm=AI&&&...
|
| I am actually hoping someone there studies such interventions the
| way they did with CMU's intelligent tutor -- which if I recall
| correctly did not have net strong evidence in its favors as far
| as educational outcomes per the reports in WWC -- given the fall
| in grade level scores in math and reading since 2015/16 across
| multiple grades in middle school. It is vital to know if any of
| these things help kids succeed.
| bombdailer wrote:
| Knowledge not earned is not gained.
| bequanna wrote:
| Well said. I've often been able to trick myself into thinking
| I've learned something, especially if it is somewhat intuitive.
|
| But unless I practically apply what I learned, my retention is
| quite low.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Our findings reveal that students perceived AI tools as helpful
| for grasping code concepts and boosting their confidence during
| the initial development phase. However, a noticeable difficulty
| emerged when students were asked to work unaided, pointing to
| potential overreliance and gaps in foundational knowledge
| transfer.
|
| This is basically what would be expected. However n=20 is too
| small. This needs to be replicated with x10 the n.
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