3 ms·

A couple of years ago, one of the GE English courses I took was 100% oriented toward producing exactly one research paper. The class, therefore, involved layin

A couple of years ago, one of the GE English courses I took was 100% oriented toward producing exactly one research paper. The class, therefore, involved laying the foundations, doing the research, constructing footnotes and a bibliography, producing a couple of drafts, and finally submitting a finished work. And so the instructor was there to shepherd us the entire way through the whole process, with oversight and feedback at every step. This was not simply, "OK you took a class on <X> and it's time to spew out a paper of <N> pages on it." This was learning how to correctly do a research paper from start to finish. It was fantastic because it really made cheating stupid. Whether you were going to purchase a paper online, or have an LLM write it, or pay a friend to do your work, every cheating method was profoundly irrelevant and useless in the face of this process. At the end, either you've learned something about writing a good college paper, or you haven't. I took other classes that taught about rhetoric, evaluation of sources, and extra credit was to read and analyze a novel. The instructors were top-notch and highly credentialed, at the top of their game. Especially for community college where I was taking on a FAFSA grant, I thought that the whole process was absolutely rigorous, educational, and extremely edifying even at my advanced age.

AStonesThrow 2y ago
I will say that in other classes, we had very short research papers to do in a brief time frame, and the most difficult aspect of those, for me, was paraphrasing. I could easily look things up in primary/secondary sources and know exactly what I wanted to put into the paper. But because it often involved technical, precise jargon to express my thoughts, I struggled to paraphrase, or put it in layman's terms or something, without losing the essential gist of it all. Paraphrasing from a source, I believe, may be a very strong suit of an LLM, where you could just paste in a block and say "rewrite it so I'm not plagiarizing", and that's powerfully dangerous.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

I will say that in other classes, we had very short research papers to do in a brief time frame, and the most difficult aspect of those, for me, was paraphrasing. I could easily look things up in primary/secondary sources and know exactly what I wanted to put into the paper. But because it often involved technical, precise jargon to express my thoughts, I struggled to paraphrase, or put it in layman's terms or something, without losing the essential gist of it all. Paraphrasing from a source, I believe, may be a very strong suit of an LLM, where you could just paste in a block and say "rewrite it so I'm not plagiarizing", and that's powerfully dangerous.