Next year, artificial intelligence (AI) will teach Ivy League students at one of the priciest universities in the country. Currently, the educators of the well-received beginner coding course at Harvard University are in the process of “trying out” a teaching assistant empowered by ChatGPT.
The course, known as CS50, enrolls approximately 1000 students each semester. Professor David Malan, the course’s instructor, argues that the introduction of the “CS50 bot” is justified due to the frequent inclusion of new software in the syllabus. According to him, a ChatGPT AI instructor is simply an “evolution of that tradition.”
In an interview with Harvard’s newspaper, the Crimson, Professor Malan expressed the aspiration that AI would enable the attainment of a teacher-student ratio of 1:1 for all students in CS50. This would involve the provision of software-based resources that support individualized learning, accessible around the clock and adaptable to each student’s preferred pace and learning style. He further mentioned that they are currently experimenting with both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models.
However, the new ChatGPT-4 from creator OpenAI has encountered difficulties outside of the Ivy League, leading developers and software engineers to mistrust the coding skills of the algorithmic coworker. On the Hacker News forum of the Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y-combinator, a user questioned whether GPT-4’s quality had significantly declined lately. The user claimed that it generates more buggy code and overall feels much worse than before.
Others in the community criticized the AI’s software abilities, stating that they are significantly worse than previous ChatGPT iterations. They believe the AI is prone to superficial responses and is almost “lobotomized” in its responses to coding cues. With the exorbitant price tag of approximately $334,000 for a four-year education at Harvard, as determined by the rates for the 2022-23 academic year, it is reasonable to assume that students who are paying for their education would anticipate the CS50 staff to have resolved these problems by September.
CS50 is one of Harvard’s most popular courses on the online learning platform edX, which the university started in partnership with MIT in 2012. When edX was sold to educational technology company 2U in 2021 for $800 million, both institutions agreed to administer the platform as a public benefit organization, making their courses available for “free to audit.”
While Professor Malan acknowledges that early versions of AI programs like ChatGPT may have occasionally underperformed or made errors, he remains optimistic that his own AI teaching assistant will reduce busy work. However, he emphasizes that evaluating student code designs still requires a significant amount of human labor for qualitative assessment. Malan hopes that through AI, the time spent on evaluation can be reduced, allowing teaching fellows to allocate more meaningful, interpersonal time with their students, resembling an apprenticeship model.
In his closing remarks on the new CS50 bot, Professor Malan emphasizes the importance of teaching students how to think rather than simply imparting knowledge. He adds that students should always exercise critical thought when consuming material as input, whether it originates from humans or software.
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