3 ms·

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 fla

by krunck 2y ago

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 homework. Instead all writing work will be hand written in class.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gizajob 2y ago
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.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  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 have to hallucinate content for the essay.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    this is an overkill... the universities need to simply do what is done in many other countries - oral final exams. let them study all semester (as is done in many other countries) and then come to the oral exam and defend your knowledge in person.
- zer8k 2y ago
  If the goal is to improve something don't make it worth 50% of your grade. 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.
  - krunck 2y ago
    No one said anything about things 'being done "right" and not "demonstrated considerable improvement"'. Improvement and meeting the rubric is all that is expected in my wife's class. My wife has significantly dropped expectations over the years she has taught. And some students still think they can just whine, cheat, and play victim to get whatever grade they want rather than just working hard.
- Ancalagon 2y ago
  youll have to take away their phones/computers in this case too. ChatGPT can write an excellent essay in less than a minute
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  I think we're looking at a symptom not a cause. Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations. Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking". If we were to write an essay, we would use an LLM to do the actual writing, and feed it a set of bullet points for the points we want to make. Same as our parents moved from handwriting to word processing, we're moving to LLMs as a writing tool. We're also seeing (that the article didn't mention) that LLMs are being used by staff to grade student essays. Getting to that ridiculous point of an LLM writing content that only an LLM will ever read. So why not just abandon the essay as a teaching tool? I realise that academia is slow to change, but this might force them to. Replace it with student presentations, or whatever the actual industry the students are heading for uses to communicate. As for academia moving away from publishing papers (which are also increasingly being written by LLMs) into journals... that will need to happen too. What replaces that is going to be interesting.
  - patrick451 2y ago
    >Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking". This is patently false, with many counter examples to count. Editorials, blogs, substacks entries, long posts on twitter are all essays.
    - marcus_holmes 2y ago
      I don't consider a video to be an essay, and yet it is perfectly capable of improving someone's writing and thinking.
      - patrick451 2y ago
        I quoted the wrong part. I intended to respond to this claim "Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations."
  - 2y ago
nomat 2y ago
the authors of this paper[0] were able to use AI to figure out if a block of text was written by AI, so hopefully this becomes a tool available to educators very soon. [0] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.16107v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.16107v1

by krunck 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gizajob 2y ago

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.

OutOfHere 2y ago
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 have to hallucinate content for the essay.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  this is an overkill... the universities need to simply do what is done in many other countries - oral final exams. let them study all semester (as is done in many other countries) and then come to the oral exam and defend your knowledge in person.
zer8k 2y ago
If the goal is to improve something don't make it worth 50% of your grade. 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.
- krunck 2y ago
  No one said anything about things 'being done "right" and not "demonstrated considerable improvement"'. Improvement and meeting the rubric is all that is expected in my wife's class. My wife has significantly dropped expectations over the years she has taught. And some students still think they can just whine, cheat, and play victim to get whatever grade they want rather than just working hard.
Ancalagon 2y ago
youll have to take away their phones/computers in this case too. ChatGPT can write an excellent essay in less than a minute
marcus_holmes 2y ago
I think we're looking at a symptom not a cause. Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations. Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking". If we were to write an essay, we would use an LLM to do the actual writing, and feed it a set of bullet points for the points we want to make. Same as our parents moved from handwriting to word processing, we're moving to LLMs as a writing tool. We're also seeing (that the article didn't mention) that LLMs are being used by staff to grade student essays. Getting to that ridiculous point of an LLM writing content that only an LLM will ever read. So why not just abandon the essay as a teaching tool? I realise that academia is slow to change, but this might force them to. Replace it with student presentations, or whatever the actual industry the students are heading for uses to communicate. As for academia moving away from publishing papers (which are also increasingly being written by LLMs) into journals... that will need to happen too. What replaces that is going to be interesting.
- patrick451 2y ago
  >Essays are obviously not the only method of "demonstrating and improving the student's writing and thinking". This is patently false, with many counter examples to count. Editorials, blogs, substacks entries, long posts on twitter are all essays.
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    I don't consider a video to be an essay, and yet it is perfectly capable of improving someone's writing and thinking.
    - patrick451 2y ago
      I quoted the wrong part. I intended to respond to this claim "Essays are only ever used in an academic context. No-one outside of academia writes an essay. This use-case has been replaced by Powerpoint presentations."
- 2y ago

nomat 2y ago

the authors of this paper[0] were able to use AI to figure out if a block of text was written by AI, so hopefully this becomes a tool available to educators very soon. [0] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.16107v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2410.16107v1