Feasibility Study of Augmenting Teaching Assistants with AI for CS1 Programming Feedback
Umair Z. Ahmed, Shubham Sahai, Ben Leong, Amey Karkare · 2025
With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), there are proposals to replace human Teaching Assistants (TAs) with LLM-based AI agents for providing feedback to students. In this paper, we explore a new hybrid model where human TAs receive AI-generated feedback for CS1 programming exercises, which they can then review and modify as needed. We conducted a large-scale randomized intervention with 185 CS1 undergraduate students, comparing the efficacy of this hybrid approach against manual feedback and direct AI-generated feedback.