Why My College Student’s Programming Professor Requires AI Use (And What Parents Should Know)
The crumpled syllabus slid across our kitchen table halfway through spring break taco night, half under a plate of guacamole. My 20-year-old son Javi, a sophomore computer science major, pushed his sweating soda can aside and tapped the bold line that made my stomach drop: “All students will use AI coding tools for 40% of major assignments this semester.” “Wait,” I said, wiping lime juice off my hand. “Your prof is making you use AI? Isn’t that cheating?”
Javi rolled his eyes, the way 20-year-olds do when their mom says something out of touch, and pulled up his laptop to show me the full assignment rules. It wasn’t what I expected. He walked me through his first assignment of the semester: build a basic to-do app for student use. The prompt he gave GitHub Copilot was almost exactly what the prof gave the class. The output Copilot spat out looked good at first glance—it ran, it let you add and delete tasks. But it had three gaps that AI regularly misses: it didn’t save tasks between sessions, it allowed any user to edit another user’s to-do list, and it crashed if you added more than 12 tasks at once. Javi’s job wasn’t to turn in what Copilot gave him. He had to paste the full original AI output into his submission, highlight every line he changed, and write a 200-word explanation for each change of why AI got it wrong and what he did to fix it.
As a high school math teacher, I was curious enough to email his professor to ask for more context. I introduced myself as Javi’s mom and an educator, and asked him to explain why he’d made this a requirement instead of banning AI like most of my colleagues have tried to do. He wrote back the next day, plain and clear: when he started teaching 18 years ago, he made students memorize every syntax rule and write every line from scratch. Now, anyone can look up any syntax in 10 seconds, and AI will spit out a rough draft in 30. If he spends the whole semester making students write basic functions from zero, they graduate and get to their first job and realize every senior developer on their team uses AI daily, and they don’t know how to use it correctly.
I went to Javi’s campus for family weekend in April and sat in on one of his class periods to see this in action. The whole lesson was spent going over that to-do app assignment. One by one, students shared the mistakes AI made in their code, and the whole class talked through different ways to fix them. I saw a kid lose 15 points because he just turned in the unedited AI output—this wasn’t a free pass to let AI do all the work. The prof kept asking the same question over and over: “What made you decide that fix was better than the one AI gave you?” No one asked “did you write every line yourself.”
That’s when it clicked for me. The skill being taught and tested isn’t “can you write code from memory” anymore. It’s “can you tell when AI is wrong, can you adjust its output to fit your needs, can you explain your reasoning.” That’s a far more useful skill for almost any job right now, not just coding.
If your kid comes home and says their professor is requiring AI for class, the first thing I’d tell you is don’t panic and assume it’s cheating or lazy teaching. Instead of asking “is that allowed?” ask “what do you have to do with the AI output after you get it?” That one question tells you everything you need to know. If your kid says “we just turn it in,” that’s one thing. But if they say “we have to fix it and explain every change,” that’s actual learning. Another small thing I do now: when Javi talks about an AI assignment, I just ask him to show me one mistake AI made and how he fixed it. It takes five minutes, it doesn’t require me to understand anything about coding syntax, and it gives me a clear picture of what he’s actually learning. For teachers who want to test this out in their own classes, the low-effort change that works is just requiring documentation. You don’t need to buy fancy software or rewrite your whole syllabus. Just tell students they have to include the original AI output, mark every change they made, and explain why they made it. That’s it, and it stops people from just copying and pasting blankly.
Javi got an internship at a small tech company this summer. Last week he called me and said his manager asked him to review a block of code one of the senior developers got from AI, spot the bugs, and fix them. He said it was exactly what he’d been doing all semester in that programming class.
I still have moments of doubt, honestly. I learned math and basic coding the old way, where every step had to be done by hand, and it’s hard to unlearn that writing every line yourself is the only “real” way to learn. I don’t think this approach works for every class, or every student. Some kids need to write more lines from scratch early on to build that basic muscle memory, and it’s still important that they get that practice. But what I’ve stopped doing is assuming that requiring AI use is just lowering standards. It’s just shifting standards to match what the world actually needs right now. We’re all figuring this out as we go, professors and parents alike. Right now, what’s working for our family is trading panic for questions, and trusting that the people teaching our kids are trying to prepare them for the world they’ll actually graduate into, not the world we grew up in.
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