I can't be the only one that is concerned by the title of this post?
Why is copilot being used by students? That seems... like that should be against every school's policy?
With a calculator you still had to have enough knowledge to properly input any formulas. In school you were also still forced to learn the fundamentals with less featured calculators.
Also a calculator was an accepted tool once you are out of school. AI tools like copilot are still controversial within the industry and have no business being in education.
The problems were usually designed to emphasize the thing you were trying to learn at the time, so once you were beyond simple arithmetic then "I think I'll need a calculator for this step" was a clue that you were on the wrong track anyway.
First off, this tool is still a new tool so "properly" does not exist yet and even if it did it likely won't be the same in a few years.
Second, we should be actually teaching programming and how to solve problems (and how to search for them, even if you do just copy and paste from stack overflow you had to understand enough to find it in the first place).
This is a shortcut that you should be using once you understand what you are actually writing.
Edit: Or are you prepared to make the same argument that using something like chatGPT is perfectly fine for any papers students turn in because they are "learning to use AI tools properly"
The dumbest part about this whole thing is I would happily pay $10/month for Copilot if given the option. However, GitHub won't even let me switch to a paid plan! The setting in the admin panel simply says that it's already paid for and won't allow me to switch.
As a copilot skeptic this is the first compelling use case I've seen. Love it!
Free alternatives to try: Codeium, Tabnine (trial), Replit (trial)
Another super long discussion of students having issues: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/43634
[edit] I'm aware this is just a maintenance window, but still a >1 week severe degradation to the point of unusable without any warning whatsoever isn't a great reflection on how Github Copilot views their free tier users.
> This week, we've had to take down some of our Copilot resources for maintenance. While we did our best to source extra capacity elsewhere, we've been forced to limit some free users for the period of time where one of our busiest models is out of commission. We expect that this will cease to impact your use of Copilot after the 16th.
This is also temporary based on a maintenance window and should return to normal on Monday.
Not sure if this is still the case, but last time I checked Microsoft Office had student discount, but was not generally free. This seems like a similar situation.
