15 July 2025 · 2 min
« Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. As a puzzle-solving activity, normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. » Thomas Kuhn
The linear model of innovation is almost entirely backward. This model describes progress like so: University professors and their students develop the new ideas, these ideas are then taken up by industry which deploys them.
You can come up with stories that are supportive of this model… But on the ground, we are still fighting to get UML and the waterfall model off the curriculum. Major universities still forbid the use of LLMs in software courses (as if they could).
Universities are almost constantly behind. Not only are they behind, they often promote old, broken ideas. Schools still teach about the ‘Semantic Web’ in 2025.
Don’t get me wrong. The linear model can work, sometimes. It obviously can. But there are preconditions, and these preconditions are rarely met.
Part of the issue is ‘peer review’ which has grown to cover everything. ‘Peer review’ means ‘do whatever your peers are doing and you will be fine’. It is fundamentally reactionary.
Innovations still emerge from universities, but through people who are rebels. They either survive the pressure of peer review, or are just wired differently.
Regular professors are mostly conservative forces. To be clear, I do not mean ‘right wing’. I mean that they are anchored in old ideas and they resist new ones.
Want to see innovation on campus ? Look for the rebels.
Daniel Lemire, "Rebels on campus," in Daniel Lemire's blog, July 15, 2025, https://lemire.me/blog/2025/07/15/rebels-on-campus/.
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I would be very interested by your thoughts on LLM in CS education!
– what are the current good practices for learning?,
– how can LLM assist young student to become proficient?,
– perhaps even what it means to be proficient nowadays?,
– how should we evaluate students in this new paradigm?
As a university professor, I am open to new ideas, from rebel colleagues like you 🙂
I think we don’t have a consensus on how will we teach in the next years, but you may have thought more on this than I do.
You need to retire graded multiple-choice questions and basic graded questions at once. These can all be done by LLMs.
For the introduction to programming course, we are including ‘follow up orals’ where students have to meet with someone after the examination to discuss their answers. We hope that this will discourage over-reliance on LLMs.
My recent courses tend to be more project based. It is about solving real problems, using LLMs when it helps.
I don’t know where you teach, but the French system might be especially difficult to adapt, with its historically strong focus on theory at the expense of practice.
Thanks for those ideas!
Yes, I teach in Paris, now in a “theory-first” institution, after years in a lifelong-learning/practice-first institution.
I have discussed with colleagues substituting exams by orals, but not your idea of “follow-up orals”, which is interesting.
In France, we usually don’t have as much multiple-choice question exams, but still “basic graded” ones, which are rather rapidly disappearing due to LLM.
As for projects, I think the level is important: while after the first 3 years, students are capable of being assisted by the LLM, before they most often need to learn programming, to follow what’s generated.
So I teach a course that comes right after the first programming course and I have students do projects with LLMs, and it works.