71–80 of 113 posts
there is no crisis. stop teaching students to write trash, using ai or not. if the essay is good, it should get an A.
My wife is an English prof at a local University. She is tired of being put in the position of being an AI cop. She is tired of 10% students whose work was flagged wasting 50% of her office hours trying to convince her that their work is real. For her literature classes - where the class grade is composed of a participation grade and a written work grade - she is strongly considering getting rid of all written homewo…
I've been saying for a couple of years now that academic essays are going to have to go back to being handwritten. It seems like possibly the only solution. The job of essays isn't to produce a Word document of text that can get a grade above 70 - it's to demonstrate and improve the student's writing and thinking. The computer seems to have now completely messed this up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been saying for a couple of years now that academic essays are going to have to go back to being handwritten. It seems like possibly the only solution. The job of essays isn't to produce a Word document of text that can get a grade above 70 - it's to demonstrate and improve the student's writing and thinking. The computer seems to have now completely messed this up.
I would add a twist to it, which is to give each student ten printed articles from which to accumulate material to handwrite the essay in class. Five or the ten would be totally unrelated, two would be strongly related, two would have a medium relation, and one would be mildly related. It's the student's job to figure out the useful sources and write the essay, all within 120 minutes. In this way, the students don't…
How do students that cheat with AI pass the exams?
A lot of university courses don’t have exams. Rather, the students are graded based on projects, papers, or presentations. I’ve been teaching at a university for more than 20 years, and only a few times have I given students a final exam. I used to assign final papers, but I stopped doing that in the spring of 2023, when ChatGPT was becoming widely known and I couldn’t decide how to deal with its use by students. The…
My wife is an English prof at a local University. She is tired of being put in the position of being an AI cop. She is tired of 10% students whose work was flagged wasting 50% of her office hours trying to convince her that their work is real. For her literature classes - where the class grade is composed of a participation grade and a written work grade - she is strongly considering getting rid of all written homewo…
I've been saying for a couple of years now that academic essays are going to have to go back to being handwritten. It seems like possibly the only solution. The job of essays isn't to produce a Word document of text that can get a grade above 70 - it's to demonstrate and improve the student's writing and thinking. The computer seems to have now completely messed this up.
When you attach a literal degree to something being done "right" and not "demonstrated considerable improvement" you're going to get people that game the system. When you then make me pay $30,000 or more for a piece of paper you will get people that seek an edge. I did my fair share of underhanded tricks in school because I didnt want to pay another $1200 because I had to maintain a certain GPA to get where I wanted. This was over 15 years ago. Focus in the classes you care about, game the classes you don't. Its a tale as old as education itself.
Blame the OP's wife and the faculty and most universities for not only supporting but encouraging this behavior. If universities are for learning and improving the weight of grades shouldn't be career-determining and the cost should be commensurate to the expectation - both from the professor and the students.
Maybe this will finally liberate humanity from educational prestige dominating life outcomes.
What about education?
Ergo, if you have some students who use AI tools (and accept that those tools produce better papers and/or produce them with less effort) then those students will be ranked higher than students who study equally hard, are equally smart, and don't use AI tools.
Which then collapses simply down to more $ = better grades and higher class rank.
That's bullshit.
There have always been tutors, study groups, etc. that offer varying degrees of academic aid, but the broad accessibility of AI writing aids is novel.
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…
As a current academic who uses Turnitin regularly, I find it works fairly well. There are a lot of false positives, but it also regularly identifies actual plagiarism for me.
Maybe this is okay when we're talking about plagiarism and you can review manually, but humans can't reliably identify LLM written text