This article was written under my anger, so I apologize for any illogical and immature thoughts. Actually, forget that, because I value true feelings.

It all started this August... I'm starting my Junior year at this college. Last year, I failed my computer class because I skipped classes and exams -- I deserved it for sure. So, I decided to retake this CIS 2300 class this semester. Why? Because goddamn it is a prerequisite of literally every major class I have.

This CIS 2300 is titled "Programming and Computational Thinking." Sounds super fundamental right? It is actually just a Intro to Python class worth 3 credits, which needs $1,860 out of your pocket because each credit costs $620, and worse than the free Intro to Python videos on YouTube.

By the way, this is an online course, so I don't have to move myself to that tiny building, with some people that I hate, which is nice!

Okay back to the points. The first few weeks seemed okay. The professor was a bit strict, but I thought it's okay, so I just let them deduct my points for not having the perfect and most-efficient codes.

Everything went wrong in November.

We had just finished learning dictionary and tuple. If you have watched any Intro to Python tutorials, or other object-oriented languages tutorials, you had expect "ah ha here we go the class/object."

Nope. This course never even mentioned them, not a single concept. Instead, we were suddenly expected to use BeautifulSoup to scrape web pages.

Why? Just why?

Maybe many of you know how to scrape web contents. Well yes one of the tasks that Python masters in is web scraping. I was a web scraper myself before, so I presumed I would do super well at this.

Haha, nope again. I got a big fat F at my in-class group assignment.

I wrote an article in Chinese explaining why this is happening. If you hate reading the prerequisite to this article (the one that you are reading right now), or don't want to translate that article, I can give you a TL;DR: The professor didn't teach the students much about web scraping, and didn't expect the students to know HTML and other things, so they want us to use AI in this assignment while disclosing any AI usage, and show step-by-step work.

Step-by-step work meant leaving every iteration of your code inside the .ipynb file, which feels weird to me.

I, and my team members, got a F because "we did not disclose AI usage and did not show step-by-step work."

I emailed the professor, telling them: okay first of all I did not use AI for something I already knew, second of all I showed everything I could show. I can literally tell what to extract when reading the source code of the web page -- what are you even expecting?

Of course I did not say all these in this rude tone.

The professor responded one week after, saying they had consulted the course coordinator and the department chair. They all agreed that we had not provided enough step-by-step explanation, and decided not to go further with AI disclosure issue.

Okay, so I was punished for actually knowing the material, I believe?

Fortunately, they were happy to give us partial credits, if this assignment is big enough to change our final grade from one letter to another, like B to A.

But this assignment weighs only 2% of the grade.

As it turns out, the entire department seems fine with professors assigning work that was never taught. Great. What's the point of a class if we are just told to "go ask AI?"

The following week, we were suddenly thrust into pandas. This is out of no where as well. How can students understand data structures without a solid foundation, especially when you are forced to use AI for topics not covered in class?

They don't understand these things. What's the point of having API? Why we have to use pagination when requesting data? How is requesting data even work? What do you mean by getting data from a server? What's the point of doing all these? Programming is so hard!

Because I learned about computer and programming before, so I can tell how ridiculous this is.

Programming should not be taught like this. Students should be learning what a computer is, how a computer works, how a computer communicates with us, how we talk to computer using languages that look more like natural languages. Not throwing a bunch of knowledge from no where without context to their face.

In addition, isn't this class titled "Programming and Computational Thinking?" Programming and Computational Thinking where? Isn't programming and computational thinking something that teaches students to understand logics, data structures, and how to build systems? This course so far, only teaches students how to use libraries, like random low-budget bootcamps.

Well, a bootcamp does not cost $1,860 for 10 weeks of "just ask AI."

Today I finished the final exam of this course. I was exhausted from many things from my life, and found half of the exam is about writing code on paper.

Using a pen.

Seems like the department can't decide if we are supposed to be AI prompters or 1970s scribes, huh?