What if it's a math boot-camp meant to increase your arithmetic proficiency?
When I was in elementary school, I fully believed that calculators made memorizing arithmetic facts obsolete, so I didn't do it and just muddled through. I did the same for algebra (relying on my calculator's solver as soon as I could get away with it). That's hobbled me for the rest of my life, because I'm so calculator dependent that I'm was always too distracted by operating it to fully engage with more advanced math material. I can't think about math in my head because I get stuck on arithmetic problems.
> Now if your boot camp can be solved by ChatGPT is it really worth it?
Yes, for the reasons I outlined above. It's not about getting the answer, it's about getting the toolbox that will get you that answer and understand it.
Do you want to be a Calculator Operator, Second Class or an Engineer?
The calculator comparison is interesting - calculators can't be wrong. And if they can be, we're kind of screwed. Like NASA screwed when someone mixed up imperial and metric measurements. ChatGPT can and will be wrong because it doesn't actually know what its giving back to you. Until its code can be 100% correct, which I don't think is possible, it cannot be used as a simple tool that any one can use to generate code without actually knowing how the code it generates works.
So yes - ultimately these students are cheating. Maybe it feels to them like they've just found a shortcut to being a developer, they haven't.
Sure they can. There are numerous discussions around the net about this fact, but here is a reasonable high-level overview.
Generative AI is doing much more.
But I agree that copy-pasting ChatGPT output without remotely understanding it is cheating. Yes ChatGPT can do the exercise, but the output produced in the exercise is not the point, the point is assimilating knowledge which helps you move on to tasks AI cannot do. In this regard these students are cheating themselves (and the ones who tried not to cheat).
The other side of this is that calculators are a much more powerful tool for someone who is already skilled in math, and those skills are best learned by actually doing problems by hand and thinking through them. So even if these tools end up being the de facto way to solve problems, we're still much better off training ourselves how to do things the hard way, and we do ourselves a disservice by skipping that step altogether. Which is a similar disservice we do ourselves by cheating in school. The difference is that someone who is dependent on the tool can get away with hiding their lack of skills for longer, and those lack of skills only show up in subtle but possibly critical ways.
It's a bit akin to how calculators were cheating but yet in the real world everybody is fine (and probably expects) you to do math using a calculator. I don't think Kroger would be happy if the clerks starts adding up your shopping cart by pen and paper.
Would people call VFX cheaters since they aren't hand drawing each frame?
Using a tool (AI) to do a job (Websites?) is fine. The problem of course is that the students are only learning that specific tool so the second a problem occurs that isn't easily solved with that tool they're a fish out of water. This is a weakness of the boot camp not the student per-say; although obviously somebody that can use ChatGPT + < any other skill > will be a more productive employee than somebody that can _just_ use ChatGPT.
If your boot camp could be done solely using the plus button of a calculator; people would think it's not worth it. Now if your boot camp can be solved by ChatGPT is it really worth it?