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Generative AI models, specifically large language models (LLMs), have made strides towards the long-standing goal of text-to-code generation. This progress has invited numerous studies of user interaction. However, less is known about the struggles and strategies of non-experts, for whom each step of the text-to-code problem presents challenges: describing their intent in natural language, evaluating the correctness of generated code, and editing prompts when the generated code is incorrect. This paper presents a large-scale controlled study of how 120 beginning coders across three academic institutions approach writing and editing prompts. A novel experimental design allows us to target specific steps in the text-to-code process and reveals that beginners struggle with writ- ing and editing prompts, even for problems at their skill level and when correctness is automatically determined. Our mixed-methods evaluation provides insight into student processes and perceptions with key implications for non-expert Code LLM use within and outside of education. 

Code LLMs have the potential to make it easier for non-experts to understand and write code. However, current CodeLLM benchmarks rely on a single expert-written prompt per problem, making it hard to generalize their success to non-expert users. In this paper, we present a new natural-language-to-code benchmark of prompts written by a key population of non-experts: beginning programmers. StudentEval contains 1,749 prompts written by 80 students who have only completed one introductory Python course. StudentEval contains numerous non-expert prompts describing the same problem, enabling exploration of key factors in prompt success. We use StudentEval to evaluate 12 Code LLMs and find that StudentEval is a better discriminator of model performance than existing benchmarks. Our analysis of student prompting strategies reveals that nondeterministic LLM sampling can mislead students about the quality of their descriptions, a finding with key implications for Code LLMs in education.