Coping with Copilot
I understand the problem here and I sympathize with professors in these circumstances. Learning the fundamentals will remain important. But as others have pointed out: if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run.<p>One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely coding clever for-loops to perform algorithmic magic (for things usually already in the standard library) is the best measure of the competence of a software developer. If it can literally be done <i>by a machine</i>, maybe we should be measuring based on something else. Especially since this kind of thing is best done on the job <i>by looking in a good textbook</i> or <i>using the standard library</i>. Probably grading at the university level needs to consider this also.<p>I haven't used Copilot. I doubt I'm its intended audience. After 30 years, actually writing <i>code</i> is perhaps the easiest part of my job. The mechanics is the easy part. The big picture thinking and figuring how to get it all together into a <i>system</i> is the hard part (and honestly there are plenty of people far better at it than I am). Now, if we get a Copilot for <i>that</i> ... then our profession is in trouble.