acbart

The closest I ever saw this working was a site called OhYay. It really felt like spaces you could move around in. It wasn't the same as IRL, but it was about as close as I think you could get. Sadly, the company shut down before they could become profitable.

The best talks at a conference are the ones in the hallway.

I mean, did you read the linked article?

Regarding the changes to your grading weights: https://acbart.github.io/2026/04/19/proctored-grades/

Sounds like 50/50 for the distribution? That means you are okay with a student getting a 40% across all your quizzes and then passing the class with a C-?

I'd be interested in seeing the "slop" version for comparison.

Some of the permissions problems related to window.showDirectoryPicker have been frustrating. I'm developing a client-side Python web framework, and during development I need to mount the library locally; I hand off the directory to Pyodide using this API. But that doesn't work in VSCode's internal browser, apparently because the API just simply isn't able to be approved.

Yep, I'm starting to hear this more and more. Matches my local data. It's a very massive and visible shift in DFW rates.

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.

In the spring, but not the fall?

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.

Or "Age of Ultron".

Due to broader product alignment decisions at Microsoft, the Visual Studio Code for Education product roadmap will be coming to an end.

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.

Last time I dove into its research, I found that Math Blaster had no impact on student learning.

The witness was fine, but The Looker was much better.

Tunic is such an incredible experience. If you ever enjoyed the original Zelda and its manual, you simply must play tunic. It captures something incredible. And it has some amazing twists.

Where are you seeing CS classes with increasing enrollment? Everyone I know is saying they're seeing smaller classes. Maybe some upper division from the last swell, but we're all definitely declining this year and last year, from what I'm seeing.

I agree, I think many people who rail against exams underestimate how important memory is to more complicated skills. How can you debug a complex application if you have to keep looking up every operator and keyword in the language you're using? It'd be like trying to interpret poetry in a foreign language but you have to look up every single noun. I'm not saying people can't do it, but it's tedious, slow, and you probably wouldn't think of them as a "professional worth paying for their service". Some amount of memorization is key.

Exams happen all the time in real life. Or rather, situations where you can't just look up fundamental knowledge. Job interviews, presentations, even mundane work tasks - all these require you to know the basics quickly "The basics" are relative, of course, but I often point out to my students: "you don't care if your doctor needs to look up the specific interactions of your various meds. You do care if you see them googling 'what is an appendix'." Proctored, in-person exams are the only reliable mechanism we have for ascertaining if a specific individual has mastered key fundamentals and can answer relevant questions about them in a relatively timely fashion. Everything else is details and thresholds - how fast do you need to be able to recall, how deep, what details are fundamental. From there, I think it's fine to hate poorly made exams, and it's a given that many folks making exams have no idea what they're doing (or don't have the resources to do it right). But the premise of an exam is not completely divorced from reality.

So at 50%, someone who uses AI to get 100% of the homework grade will earn a D (sometimes passing) if they can get at least a 20% on your quizzes, and a C (always passing) if they get at least a 40%. Did you make your exam so difficult that students who truly didn't learn the material earn less than 20-40%? Because if it was, say, multiple choice questions with four possible answers, then you can expect them to earn at least 25% just by chance.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hpxl9PEAAAAJ&hl=en

The researcher seems to be real, at least? Perhaps the quote has not previously been written down?

It makes it easier to make sure it runs right. Code that is easier to make sure is quality code. Code that is hard to make sure is not quality code.

Yes, exactly. I'm having a frustrating time reminding senior teachers of this, people with authority who should really know better. There seems to be some delusion that this technology will somehow change how people learn in a fundamental way.

You would be correct, except that this is a published blog post. It may not be in an academic journal, but this person has still conducted human subjects research that led to a published artifact. It was just "playing around" until they started posting their students' (summarized, anonymized) data to the internet.

I'm afraid you misunderstand what it means to be "exempt" under the IRB. It doesn't mean "you don't have to talk to the IRB", it means "there's a little less oversight but you still need to file all the paperwork". Here's one university's explanation[1]:

Exempt human subjects research is a specific sub-set of “research involving human subjects” that does not require ongoing IRB oversight. Research can qualify for an exemption if it is no more than minimal risk and all of the research procedures fit within one or more of the exemption categories in the federal IRB regulations. *Studies that qualify for exemption must be submitted to the IRB for review before starting the research. Pursuant to NU policy, investigators do not make their own determination as to whether a research study qualifies for an exemption — the IRB issues exemption determinations.* There is not a separate IRB application form for studies that could qualify for exemption – the appropriate protocol template for human subjects research should be filled out and submitted to the IRB in the eIRB+ system.

Most of my research is in CS Education, and I have often been able to get my studies under the Exempt status. This makes my life easier, but it's still a long arduous paperwork process. Often there are a few rounds to get the protocol right. I usually have to plan studies a whole semester in advance. The IRB does NOT like it when you decide, "Hey I just realized I collected a bunch of data, I wonder what I can do with it?" They want you to have a plan going in.

[1] https://irb.northwestern.edu/submitting-to-the-irb/types-of-...

So is there a place where this compares to data from last year, or previous years?

I've had colleagues argue (prior to LLMs) that oral exams are superior to paper exams, for diagnosing understanding. I don't know how to validate that statement, but if the assumption is true than there is merit to finding a way to scale them. Not saying this is it, but I wouldn't say that it's fair to just dismiss oral exams entirely.

I have a lot of complicated feelings and thoughts about this, but one thing that immediately jumps to my mind: was the IRB (Institutional Review Board) consulted on this experiment? If so, I would love to know more details about the protocol used. If not, then yikes!