Making Sure Students Understand the Code in the Age of AI
To address the challenges of artificial intelligence in the classroom, ECE Professor Hanumant Singh pairs homework assignments with corresponding in-person quizzes, using the lower of the two grades as the final score to ensure students truly understand the material even when utilizing AI tools.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cesareo Contreras. Main photo: Raj Harshit Srirangam said Singh’s autonomous class taught him to think more critically about he uses AI. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
This robotics professor has a new strategy for AI era homework
Northeastern professor Hanumant Singh pairs homework with in-person quizzes, counting the lower score of the two as the final grade.
As a Northeastern graduate student studying a subject as complex as robotics, Raj Harshit Srirangam understands the temptation to rely heavily on artificial intelligence to complete assignments.
“A student might just want to get the assignment over with and get a good score,” he said. “But the professor might want the student to have certain takeaways from the course that they’ll be able to use in their professional lives.”
Harshit Srirangam is of the mind that when used responsibly, AI can be a useful tool in helping students accomplish tasks faster and to learn new concepts. But it can certainly be a slippery slope if the technology is used with no guardrails.
So he was glad to participate in a robotics masters course taught by Northeastern University professor Hanumant Singh that allowed him to use AI tools but still encouraged him to think critically.
Singh, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, is deploying a new method in his class to ensure students still are learning course concepts in the AI age. For every homework assignment the students complete in his graduate level robotics courses, they must also take an in-person quiz. The lower grade of the two tasks is the student’s final score. That way they are encouraged to perform well on both to avoid receiving a poor final grade, he said. It means they must actually study and comprehend what they produced for their homework assignment in order to ace the quiz.
Hanumant Singh has incorporated the approach in multiple of graduate courses. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
“It forced me to add an extra layer of asking myself if I really understand this at a level that I’ll be able to answer any questions if I’m tested on it,” Srirangam noted.
Singh said that he modeled that teaching approach based on the mobile robotics course taught by his colleague Michael Everet, a fellow professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News