Generative AI and large language models hold great promise in enhancing
\nprogramming education by automatically generating individualized feedback for
\nstudents. We investigate the role of generative AI models in providing human
\ntutor-style programming hints to help students resolve errors in their buggy
\nprograms. Recent works have benchmarked state-of-the-art models for various
\nfeedback generation scenarios; however, their overall quality is still inferior
\nto human tutors and not yet ready for real-world deployment. In this paper, we
\nseek to push the limits of generative AI models toward providing high-quality
\nprogramming hints and develop a novel technique, GPT4Hints-GPT3.5Val. As a first
\nstep, our technique leverages GPT-4 as a \u201ctutor\u201d model to generate hints \u2013 it
\nboosts the generative quality by using symbolic information of failing test
\ncases and fixes in prompts. As a next step, our technique leverages GPT-3.5, a
\nweaker model, as a \u201cstudent\u201d model to further validate the hint quality \u2013 it
\nperforms an automatic quality validation by simulating the potential utility of
\nproviding this feedback. We show the efficacy of our technique via extensive
\nevaluation using three real-world datasets of Python programs covering a variety
\nof concepts ranging from basic algorithms to regular expressions and data
\nanalysis using pandas library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Generative AI and large language models hold great promise in enhancing programming education by automatically generating individualized feedback for students. We investigate the role of generative AI models in providing human tutor-style programming hints to help students resolve errors in their buggy programs. Recent works have benchmarked state-of-the-art models for various feedback generation scenarios; however, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"International Learning Analytics and Knowledge 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