11–20 of 113 posts
I am enormously glad I went to college before these tools existed. I don't know how I would handle myself with access to them.
This is absolutely the problem here. The work is done, the answers are right, the report is the best anyone has seen, but oh no a fancy new tool was involved so its CHEATING! This is so friggin stupid. When i get my work done I am responsible that it comes out right. When its right, thats just it. - it's right. No matter how i got there it's fine. But wait, what if i used some freelance platform to farm out my job to another person then turn in their work? Well that's breach of NDA and my terms of employment. So what, are the student over here committing wage theft of some kind even though they are the ones paying for tuition? Make this make sense to me, you can't. School is a job you pay to do so you can learn to get good at a job you get paid to do. Somehow school ends up being a bad investment and we get mad at the students? Schools are broken and useless and at this point i would prefer my doctor was great at using chatgpt and checking the results carefully over being taught at an educational institution.
We’ve built a solution in conjunction with a university to this problem that is pretty low effort to implement, but very few professors can be bothered to even try it out (the apathy and red tape is unreal). Honestly, it has been disheartening that distribution is so tough, as the results have been great for those who are using it.
Do you happen to know if there is some overlap between these professors and professors who also refuse AI-detectors? Apathy could be the reason but I wonder how much of it is driven by cynicism encouraged by the inefficacy of AI-detecting tools.
TurnitIn's cheating detection tools have always been garbage - and I say that as an ex-academic who was 'forced' to use those tools extensively (the PDFs submitted by students are only visible in the Turnitin portal with the 'flags' to the right). Even before the 'AI detection' tool (IMHO snake-oil) the features around copy-pasting/plagiarism were so bad I always ignored them. The tool would flag things like commonly…
I was surprised at the level of effort
> “What if I’m doing an MA, or in a job, and everyone got there just by cheating…” This is absolutely the problem here. The work is done, the answers are right, the report is the best anyone has seen, but oh no a fancy new tool was involved so its CHEATING! This is so friggin stupid. When i get my work done I am responsible that it comes out right. When its right, thats just it. - it's right. No matter how i got ther…
> “What if I’m doing an MA, or in a job, and everyone got there just by cheating…” This is absolutely the problem here. The work is done, the answers are right, the report is the best anyone has seen, but oh no a fancy new tool was involved so its CHEATING! This is so friggin stupid. When i get my work done I am responsible that it comes out right. When its right, thats just it. - it's right. No matter how i got ther…
The purpose of most educational productions is not to produce some correct thing but to undergo a process of learning required to produce the thing.
> “What if I’m doing an MA, or in a job, and everyone got there just by cheating…” This is absolutely the problem here. The work is done, the answers are right, the report is the best anyone has seen, but oh no a fancy new tool was involved so its CHEATING! This is so friggin stupid. When i get my work done I am responsible that it comes out right. When its right, thats just it. - it's right. No matter how i got ther…
The reason is because doing arithmetic by hand teaches kids how math actually works, while using a calculator just teaches them how to find the answer. This base-level understanding is crucial for understanding more advanced math. But it's also important for making mental estimations, or just having a basic grasp on how the world works.
This is why students using ChatGPT is a problem. If you never put in the actual work in the first place, you never gain any actual understanding. A doctor "great at using ChatGPT" won't know how to check the results carefully if they've relied on ChatGPT for their entire education. Having a baseline skill set is crucial for evaluating LLM output, and for handling situations that LLMs can't handle. And there will always be situations LLMs can't handle, regardless of how advanced genAI becomes.
This is an easy to solve problem: oral exams / interview exams.
TurnitIn's cheating detection tools have always been garbage - and I say that as an ex-academic who was 'forced' to use those tools extensively (the PDFs submitted by students are only visible in the Turnitin portal with the 'flags' to the right). Even before the 'AI detection' tool (IMHO snake-oil) the features around copy-pasting/plagiarism were so bad I always ignored them. The tool would flag things like commonly…
The one student who got caught for plagiarism when I was a TA was busted by turnitin. Maybe the tool isn't perfect but it caught this student who had painstakingly replaced every single word in a copied paper with a synonym. I'm talking "perhaps the utility is not flawless, but the use of this utility allowed for the apprehension of a pupil who..." etc. I was surprised at the level of effort