“AI gives students the illusion of mastery,” said Professor Ellie Lovellette, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at AUBG as a Fulbright Scholar.
Teaching computer science since 2013, Professor Lovellette has witnessed the dawn, acceleration, and current pinnacle of technological development. Now serving as both Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director in Computer Science at College of Charleston, she brings a long-term perspective to the evolving role of AI in learning and education.
Rather than dismissing AI entirely, Professor Lovellette believes it has a certain place, particularly in upper-level courses, but can act like a mirage for novice programmers and early-stage learners.
Building artificial confidence
AI often provides students with false confidence that they can code flawlessly, simply because they’re offloading coding and many other skills to AI. “Some of these students think they already know everything, so they start skipping classes,” Professor Lovellette says. But how durable is knowledge produced by reproducing AI-generated code?
“The rude awakening comes when they have to sit down in front of a paper exam and write or trace code by hand, and they can’t,” she explains. “These shortcuts that they are taking now, which weren’t available ten years ago, they give them the illusion of being better than they already are.”
Offloading learning
Students aren’t just offloading technical skills. “They’re offloading learning in general,” Professor Lovellette notes, and that’s a trend that applies across disciplines. The shortcuts allow students to find a mend for the pressure they feel from their school load and free up time for their social lives. But this raises a fundamental question: doesn’t education exist precisely to create space for struggle, exploration, critical thinking, and problem-solving?
“If people are looking for the path of least resistance, they’ll find it, and later they’ll regret it,” she says.
At the start of each course, Professor Lovellette delivers a lecture warning students not to jeopardize their learning through shortcuts. “It sticks for some, and it doesn’t stick for others.”
How AI can belong in the classroom
In education, AI is often framed in two polarities: either it should be banned completely or embraced without restriction. Educators, leadership, and students are still navigating the murky waters of AI in the classroom. While some universities have introduced policies, each discipline, course, and assignment requires its own approach in order to be effective.
Professor Ellie Lovellette supports the use of AI in upper-level courses where it clearly adds value. “Students shouldn’t feel like you’re keeping them away from it when they very well know it could be a useful tool”, she explains. At the same time, she stresses that professors need to very astutely pick and choose where AI is permitted and where is it off-limits. “These tools are for professionals; they’re not for students,” she claims.
In foundation courses, Professor Lovellette allows very limited AI use, and only in contexts where it makes pedagogical sense. In upper-level courses, however, she sees AI as an opportunity for students to develop more ambitious projects, provided there is accountability and transparency. “Students are free to use it, but they have to show their prompts and attribute it like you would cite the source,” she says.
“We’re trying to strike a balance where some of the busy work that needs to be done on a project could be assisted by AI,” she explains.
In her software engineering senior capstone course, students have already learned the core concepts from instructors and are now applying them in practice. “If they can accelerate their product with AI, we let them do it.”
Still, she cautions, “You also have to be literate enough to be able to tell what is a good piece of code and what isn’t. If you don’t learn that in the core courses, you’re not going to thrive in your career.”
AI as a conversation dominator
The rise of AI didn’t come as a complete surprise for Professor Lovellette and others in the computer science field. “We knew it was coming,” she says. “We just didn’t think it would arrive this soon and this fast, and that it would be so widely accessible, and so unregulated.”
“Ever since ChatGPT dropped, we’ve been in panic mode in education,” she notes. “There are, on the opposite end, the evangelists who frame AI as a revolutionary thing in education. Neither extreme is true. The truth is somewhere in the middle,” she explains.
Today, dialogues around computer science and computer science education inevitably circle back to AI. “You cannot have a conversation anymore without involving it in some way,” Professor Lovellette observes. “Even at conferences, reviewers now expect you to include an AI chapter in your research paper.”
