debugging

Students valued AI coding help while exam evidence exposed difficulties in correcting generated code

Dan Kohen-Vacs, Maya Usher, Marc Jansen

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Two studies examined student attitudes to generative AI and performance on code-correction tasks. A survey found favorable perceptions, while exam analyses found lower performance on AI-generated debugging tasks in several cohorts. The studies involved different students and compared debugging with code construction, so they do not establish that positive attitudes caused weak verification or that AI origin alone made the tasks harder. They identify a specific skill worth teaching and assessing.