'I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats' (thewalrus.ca) 227
Philosophy/ethics professor Troy Jollimore looks at the implications of a world where many students are submitting AI-generated essays. ("Sometimes they will provide quotations, giving page numbers that, as often as not, do not seem to correspond to anything in the actual world...") Ideally if the students write the essays themselves, "some of them start to feel it. They begin to grasp that thinking well, and in an informed manner, really is different from thinking poorly and from a position of ignorance. That moment, when you start to understand the power of clear thinking, is crucial.
"The trouble with generative AI is that it short-circuits that process entirely." One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all. I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It's not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course...
It's other things too... The students who beg you to reconsider the zero you gave them in order not to lose their scholarship. (I want to say to them: Shouldn't that scholarship be going to ChatGPT?â) It's also, and especially, the students who look at you mystified. The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don't we instructors understand that today's students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do in order to get a job.
Or so, at any rate, a number of them have told me. Which is why, they argue, forcing them to write in college makes no sense. That mystified look does not vanish — indeed, it sometimes intensifies — when I respond by saying: Look, even if that were true, you have to understand that I don't equate education with job training.
What do you mean? they might then ask.
And I say: I'm not really concerned with your future job. I want to prepare you for life...
My students have been shaped by a culture that has long doubted the value of being able to think and write for oneself — and that is increasingly convinced of the power of a machine to do both for us. As a result, when it comes to writing their own papers, they simply disregard it. They look at instructors who levy such prohibitions as irritating anachronisms, relics of a bygone, pre-ChatGPT age.... As I go on, I find that more of the time, energy, and resources I have for teaching are dedicated to dealing with this issue. I am doing less and less actual teaching, more and more policing. Sometimes I try to remember the last time I actually looked forward to walking into a classroom. It's been a while.
"The trouble with generative AI is that it short-circuits that process entirely." One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all. I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It's not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course...
It's other things too... The students who beg you to reconsider the zero you gave them in order not to lose their scholarship. (I want to say to them: Shouldn't that scholarship be going to ChatGPT?â) It's also, and especially, the students who look at you mystified. The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don't we instructors understand that today's students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do in order to get a job.
Or so, at any rate, a number of them have told me. Which is why, they argue, forcing them to write in college makes no sense. That mystified look does not vanish — indeed, it sometimes intensifies — when I respond by saying: Look, even if that were true, you have to understand that I don't equate education with job training.
What do you mean? they might then ask.
And I say: I'm not really concerned with your future job. I want to prepare you for life...
My students have been shaped by a culture that has long doubted the value of being able to think and write for oneself — and that is increasingly convinced of the power of a machine to do both for us. As a result, when it comes to writing their own papers, they simply disregard it. They look at instructors who levy such prohibitions as irritating anachronisms, relics of a bygone, pre-ChatGPT age.... As I go on, I find that more of the time, energy, and resources I have for teaching are dedicated to dealing with this issue. I am doing less and less actual teaching, more and more policing. Sometimes I try to remember the last time I actually looked forward to walking into a classroom. It's been a while.
Expel them... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd prefer to cheat in college, something you're presumably paying for, then you should be expelled. Make a spot for someone who's serious about learning. You get one warning.
Re:Expel them... [with extreme prejudice!] (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting FP, but what if the most valuable skills to learn these years are how to use software tools of various types?
I actually wonder if there should be two testing tracks, one for people who want to do it in their heads and a separate kind of tests for people who want to use computers to help them work. Should be able to ask much more interesting questions to the students in the second category. But have to use "extreme" AI to grade their tests?
The tools remain morally neutral. It's what you do with t
Re:Expel them... [with extreme prejudice!] (Score:5, Insightful)
If they need to teach a class on how to use AI tools, then let them. If your professor (and/or TA) state clearly at the beginning of the class that AI tools are not allowed for final submissions and that AI submissions will result in a 0, then the student should not be surprised to receive a failing grade.
Re: Expel them... [with extreme prejudice!] (Score:5, Informative)
But university isnâ(TM)t for teaching skills. Thatâ(TM)s what a vocational college is for. University is for teaching you how to think, and come up with new ideas. The goal of getting you to write an essay isnâ(TM)t to teach you how to write, or how to use a tool. Itâ(TM)s to teach you to research a topic, to think about the things youâ(TM)ve researched, and to then communicate that idea. Itâ(TM)s one thing to write down the ideas youâ(TM)ve had, as then have AI proof read what you write. Itâ(TM)s quite another to have ai come up with all the âoeideasâ.
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> But university isnâ(TM)t for teaching skills. Thatâ(TM)s what a vocational college is for. University is for teaching you how to think, and come up with new ideas
THINKING IS A SKILL.
Re: Expel them... [with extreme prejudice!] (Score:5, Insightful)
college grads rate FAR behind high IQ self taught individuals when it comes to the ability to think and form new ideas.
This sort of nonsense is just what the uneducated tell themselves to prevent feeling completely inferior to those of us with an actual education.
This one is my favorite: "Being an outsider gives mes a fresh perspective that lets me see things that experts can't!" You always hear that right before they throw out the same stupid ideas you hear from over-confident freshmen before they get through the first week's reading.
Now tell me about how you don't need fancy math because you "understand the concepts". You know you want to.
Re: Expel them... [with extreme prejudice!] (Score:4, Informative)
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Then why are you in college if Ai is the answer? Seems you should be out in the real world, using AI to generate answers in an interview”
Most people don't go to university to further their knowledge, they go because University give good job and $$$$$$$$$$ 2 buy shiny tings.
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someone went to a shitty college.
School was the only time in my life i had so much access to so many intelligent people and time to pick their brains and discuss whatever.
Re: Expel them... [with extreme prejudice!] (Score:2)
I'm fine with using the AI to brainstorm, make suggestions, or even help with grammar and spelling. But once you tell it "do the whole thing for me", then you aren't doing any work/learning and are just ch
We are just doing school wrong. (Score:3)
The teachers give homework, grade homework, and give the students a grade. By doing so, the teachers are also grading themselves. The student's grade is also a statement about how good a job the teacher is doing teaching the student. No student wants to take a class from the teacher that flunks most of them, and so on.
The incentives don't line up with the results we want. The same goes for students, most of whom are after a high grade for entirely practical reasons (it translates directly to scholarship
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By doing so, the teachers are also grading themselves. The student's grade is also a statement about how good a job the teacher is doing teaching the student.
And yet, students in the same class often perform very differently. And often this is not the fault of the teacher or professor, but rather, the student's decision not to engage honestly and put in the needed effort.
Re:Expel them... [with extreme prejudice!] (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting FP, but what if the most valuable skills to learn these years are how to use software tools of various types?
Then schools should have classes specifically about that.
In the meantime, unless you're claiming that's the only skill to be taught, it should be banned in classes where it is cheating, and like all cheating, its use should be punished.
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> but what if the most valuable skills to learn these years are how to use software tools of various types?
Then, cover that in a f***ing software tools course, not an ethics course.
Re: Expel them... (Score:3)
Persistent cheating should result in expulsion.
And reading the comments below, I now realize the average age of many of the commenters. I never realized that so many were still in highschool (judging from their defensiveness about cheating together with their choice of language).
They are so biased and think that pretending to know about something when you don't is not the problem. The problem is everyone else.
Well it's not. And sadly so many people don't even pretend to care about personal integrity.
I will
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We also won't need to pay those people much of anything because the only job will apparently be "AI prompter". That's until AI just replaces the person altogether. It doesn't really make sense to cheat yourself out of an education but many of these folks probably shouldn't even be in college to begin with. Unfortunately, it's essentially a high school to university pipeline and most kids will be directed through it. For a lot of careers, it's still the best move as well.
I'm currently taking a programming cl
Re: Expel them... (Score:2)
If everyone is cheating and you expel them all, there will be no one left.
A far better approach for this professor would be to use a tool like RevisionHistory.com
Itâ(TM)s a totally free chrome plugin that gives stats on how a document was constructed, by analyzing the revision history. It will tell you how many copy/pastes there were, the size of them, and will even let the user to do a âoereplayâ to watch the document being written at high speed to help understand the student process. The s
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Unless something has changed in recent years Google docs are garbage for writing papers with citations. MS desktop Word , for all of its limitations and quirkiness, at least has a citation manager built in. And can do all of the "common" styles. AND can have plugins for external citation managers that still lets you insert citations in the document on the fly.
Last I looked at Gdocs it had zero support for citation management, and no way to insert inline citations other than manually typing them out. Maybe i
Re: Expel them... (Score:2)
Yes, but the goal of the tool here is not (necessarily ) to give the student the optimal writing experience. Itâ(TM)s to give the lecturer a view into how they thought.
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If you'd prefer to cheat in college, something you're presumably paying for, then you should be expelled. Make a spot for someone who's serious about learning. You get one warning.
There was a news special several years ago, I think on ABC, about cheating in college and many students interviewed said all they cared about was getting good grades, so they could get a good job and make a lot of money. Actually learning things wasn't a big concern. Not sure how they thought that would work out in the long run, but they didn't seem to care. And in most cases, they weren't paying for college anyway, their parents were...
I agree with your sentiment. I worked and paid my own way throug
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I wonder if the experience of working your way through college gave us a different perspective on it.
OK, I'm kidding. I don't really wonder that. But I suppose I do wonder if the perspective is better or worse than that of a person who thinks it's just a step in "fake it until you make it".
Sure, you and I have knowledge and experience that we can use to further humanity as a whole- but the other cohort may be the better survivors overall... until they need us to st
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Consider the many submissions we get to Slashdot every day related to the "hard sciences". Landers touching down on the Moon, new developments in fusion power, grid-scale battery installations, etc. Every day we read articles written about engineers, chemists, physicists, etc. doing work that requires actual learning. Those people went to college to learn, and their degrees show the work they've accomplished. Those people absolutely can't afford to "phone it in" and let AI do all the work for them. Tho
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At a university the education is not the product, you are the product. No sense letting everyone pass because they paid.
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A piece of paper is the product. The value of that piece of paper is between those who paid money for it, and those who are accepting it as some form of qualification.
A good number of degrees from Ivy League schools have always been junk. Those schools were about connecting rich brats with intelligent skilled labor. Obviously they must let the rich brats through, but hold the intellient workers to high standards.
Re:Expel them... (Score:5, Insightful)
A piece of paper is the product. The value of that piece of paper is between those who paid money for it, and those who are accepting it as some form of qualification.
Precisely, and that's why letting cheaters graduate is bad for everyone involved. It lowers the value (acceptance as form of qualification) of the piece paper, as it gets quickly known that a number of graduates exhibiting the same piece of paper appear to know nothing about the matter of interest. The current students, the past students, all who have studied and paid to enjoy a well-reputed piece of paper, should be infuriated by the fact that cheaters can get it and threaten its value on the job market.
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A piece of paper is the product. The value of that piece of paper is between those who paid money for it, and those who are accepting it as some form of qualification.
Precisely, and that's why letting cheaters graduate is bad for everyone involved. It lowers the value (acceptance as form of qualification) of the piece paper, as it gets quickly known that a number of graduates exhibiting the same piece of paper appear to know nothing about the matter of interest. The current students, the past students, all who have studied and paid to enjoy a well-reputed piece of paper, should be infuriated by the fact that cheaters can get it and threaten its value on the job market.
Exactly. The problem with AI generation is that the person will end up with absolutely no idea about their major. So in a novel situation, or if they are away from their computer, they are worse than worthless. After all, say we follow this path for say 50 years, innovation and knowledge will halt, because no one knows what to write. We'll be AI'ing old stuff.
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Well, consider that cheaters are consuming space in an already expensive market, overcrowded by poor students who's only qualification is they have money. People think colleges are hard to get into... BS. You have money, you get in.. So letting in people who don't deserve to be there by their own laziness can go right to the curb. Get them out, college numbers drop, and in the process becomes smaller and cheaper. IDK, that's my idea anyway.
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1) Universities don't have infinite capacity.
2) The meaning of your degree becomes more confused than it already is.
The pay structure of universities is unfortunate, but in no way should it ever be construed that you are paying for a degree. You are paying for an opportunity to earn a degree.
All levels of society (Score:5, Insightful)
The process of writing an essay requires you to organize, turn over, comprehend, and contemplate ideas. I recall writing a comment to similar effect here a few months back, and the replies I got sounded a lot like the professor's students. They didn't comprehend that education isn't about the paper, it's about the process you go through to write it.
And in the business world it seems like "paper pushing" jobs are being taken to a whole new level. If your job involves writing BS, as lots of corporate jobs do, AI is perfectly suited to that. Some departments might be able to cut staff in half and double output with these tools.
It seems to be coming to a point where people are just trained to nod their heads while ChatGPT writes something that sounds really cool and professional. That's how it's going in school, that's how it's going in business, and in government. All levels of society.
Having large parts of the population dumb and essentially worthless is very concerning to me. They're liable to end up in a foreign (or domestic) meat grinder. That eventuality may be closer than we believe. Call it the singularity.
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LLMs don't spit out quality papers without good prompts and refinement. They can regurgitate facts and references extremely well but to get a well reasoned argument you have to provide some reas
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But the LLM is not the best tool for the task, which is to develop the skill to collect, collate, absorb and distill information, then present it coherently. Even IF you think letting the LLM writing the rough draft and you'll just polish it is "the wave of the future" because it saves time or whatever, you cannot actually do that if you are not familiar with the material, or how to present an argument!
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I wouldn't be in any way against a "class for the responsible and effective use of LLMs", but teaching someone that an LLM is a "tool with which you can demonstrate your knowledge on a topic" is analogous to cheering on the ingenuity of someone who has Stockfish running on their phone at a chess match.
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All the other tools you've named are "source of data", or "checking text errors". LLMs are being used to substitute for actual THOUGHT AND TEXT GENERATION.
And make the "prompt engineering" argument as much as you like; the race for the next LLM is taking care of that as well.
If you think "processing the knowledge with your own brain" is an "obsolete educational need", then you're demonstrating you haven't got an education or much of a brain.
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I guess I'm just an unreconstructed intellectual, because I can't understand how anyone could fail to see that teachers/professors give assignments so that you go through a process of learning.
The learning happens inside of your own brain, and if you don't do the learning your brain won't have either the knowledge in the assignment or the experience of having figured out how to gain and use that knowledge. When you know how to learn things that makes you useful for learning things as needed.
I guess people r
High school teacher perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
I started teaching computer science and engineering classes in a large, public high school a few years ago. There is a significant fraction of students who regularly rely on ChatGPT (or similar tools) to do their work for them. Never mind the private group chats they use to share their work and tips for cheating. They talk about it openly with each other during class or in the hallways, on a regular basis.
I've had some students who cheated in similar fashion in my class. Whenever I notice it (so far), I take it seriously and go through the normal (and very time consuming) process to document and report it. Then the parents get involved.
About half the time, the parents challenge the report, based solely on their child's word. I try to make sure they understand the documented evidence, but in the end I always go with whatever the parent prefers, which is usually to rescind the report. Never mind the significant hassle and legal liability doing otherwise would create for myself and administration. I can make mistakes, and it's not always completely obvious whether something constitutes an academic integrity violation. I imagine that if I were the child's parent, I would want their teacher to listen to me and prioritize what I prefer for my own child. I'm not always happy about it, but I'm okay with that.
Because of all this, I can understand why I hear so many students regularly talking about cheating. It's probably because their teachers don't even try to detect or correct the issue. It's not worth the hassle to them, and its far, far easier to just let it go unaddressed. I think the result is that many high school students learn to normalize various degrees of cheating, cunning tactics, and learn to become rather convincing actors. It's only later in college or on the job that they learn about the real world consequences.
Re:High school teacher perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
The book "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn addresses this issue. Kohn argues that when we emphasize external rewards like grades and test scores, we often undermine students' intrinsic motivation to learn and create consequences like cheating.
The educational system has made the reward (the grade or score) more important than the actual learning:
* The grade becomes the goal rather than a measurement of learning
* Students learn to value performance over mastery
* The extrinsic reward (grade) crowds out intrinsic motivation to understand the material
Kohn would view cheating as a predictable outcome of reward-based educational approaches. When schools emphasize test performance, rankings, and grades, they inadvertently teach students that the number matters more than the knowledge. Students rationally respond to these incentives by finding the easiest path to the reward - through cheating.
This doesn't excuse cheating, but it helps explain why reward-focused systems tend to produce it. Restructuring educational approaches to emphasize curiosity, meaningful engagement with material, and learning for understanding rather than for performance metrics could happen, but that would take... effort. Too hard basket? Heh
Re: High school teacher perspective (Score:3)
It takes more than effort. There needs to be an evidence-based methodology.
How do we remove grades from the equation? How do we ensure that teachers can effectively adopt this new teaching method? How do we ensure this teaching method does not show preference to higher-income students? How do we make sure we do not fail an entire generation of students by making them guinea pigs for a wildly new pedagogy?
I wholeheartedly agree that we need to shift the educational paradigm. I just think that if we are going
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You can't have both compulsory education [wikipedia.org] and an intrinsic-only reward system.
The implication of expecting both is that everyone must want to learn and think deeply. That's clearly not the case. Ultimately nations use education certificates as verification for some kind of higher-end work positions. That's inherently an extrinsic reward, and something people will try to cheat at.
So pick one.
Goodhart's law (Score:3)
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
When the number of commits or SLOC changed is the primary metric management uses to measure a programmer's worth, then you get low-quality commits.
When your top students have to bribe teachers for bonus points above their already better-than-perfect grades to even be in the running for valedictorian, education isn't their goal.
Solved problem... (Score:2)
The same services that scan for plagiarism also scan for AI. No need to play AI detective when this has been already done and part of most school's mechanisms now.
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They don't work. Look it up. It's practically a halting problem.
Why grade homework at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
Let them use their out of class time for reading and dedicate more in classroom time for graded work, with a ban on electronic devices, problem solved. It requires balancing the course around grading less hours work, but it's not like out of class time is 10x longer than in class time.
Or he could continue fighting windmills, but I don't think that constitutes clear thinking.
Re:Why grade homework at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's totally backwards. You get, what, 3-4 hours a week to have a lecture and in-class discussion with a PhD level educator and you think that time would be better spent having him watch them take quizzes? They don't use in-class time for reading, they use it for a structured explanation and discussion of the material that they just read or will just read, and if you're reading multiple sources, a demonstration of how you can take aspects of both and combine them, or how one informs the other, or even how two diametrically opposed sources can teach you better than two that have the same method or viewpoint.
The professor can throw in random references, historical context, and insights that simplify material or explanations that break down a complicated subject into something easier to comprehend as part of a structured plan that will build up a particular area of understanding over dozens of classes, as opposed to an AI that will spit out a one-page explanation of a concept pulled from who knows what sources that might be completely hallucinating a key point that students aren't equipped to notice, and in any case might generate "insights" that are totally irrelevant and unhelpful to the overall educational program while deluding the student that they've done "enough" of the learning to get by.
It's also hard if not impossible to adequately judge learning based on in-class hand-written finals with no electronic devices. Especially once you get out of 101 level classes with 500 students. It's a tremendous waste of time and money to make a professor do the job of a teaching assistant and sit around watching a bunch of teenagers write in blue books.
We don't need to ruin students' educational prospects for the sake of their own convenience. They need to learn how to learn, because if they don't, they're gonna in be in trouble later on.
Well yeah, you cheat... (Score:2)
ChatGPT like all LLM's is only a probability mirror of you.
It is like an advanced universal translator with a probability statistics engine, it will basically try to predict your next sentence and words.
It will try to get whatever you are searching for, right. And what is right isn't always right, that depends on you and the probability it has been trained on.
It's really just as simple as that.
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ChatGPT like all LLM's is only a probability mirror of you.
No.
It is like an advanced universal translator with a probability statistics engine, it will basically try to predict your next sentence and words.
Yours? No.
It is not trained to predict your next word, though the idea if you being locked in a room, grading completions of seemingly infinite sets of data serving as a human error function for several hundred million years is amusing as hell.
It will try to get whatever you are searching for, right. And what is right isn't always right, that depends on you and the probability it has been trained on.
I guess this is true-ish, being the context window and prompts are certainly part of the weighting, but it's still not nearly as straight forward as "it tries to predict your next sentence and words".
The test is quite simple.
Find your favorite LLM, prompt it t
The ability to write (Score:3)
I'm sorry, but the ability to write a good essay is a distinct skill independent of whatever it is the student is supposed to be writing about. By default this means that the subject material itself is not the only metric being measured and graded. It's one thing if we're talking graduate level students in a very specific field of study where the generation of research papers becomes a thing, but for many undergraduate courses the essay format is not optimal and is overused.
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Some good highschools give their students composition classes, either as part of their English curriculum or as a separate course. Those who don't have that background from highschool (or junior high) can/should take remedial courses in college to correct that shortcoming. If someone is taking a philosophy/ethics course, being able to compose a simple essay should be a prerequisite.
20 years ago it was wikicheats. (Score:2)
Existential regret (Score:2)
As the saying goes, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink; you can teach a man some knowledge but you can't make him think..."
I understand where he's coming from, but even in college, a fair portion don't want to be academics, and even fewer want to be intellectuals. They want to be taught what to think, not how.
It's a classic catch-22 type of problem; professors want to transform students into intellectuals, but intellectuals don't need to be taught (they are self-teaching) Consequ
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This prof is teaching a philosophy course. It's probably a humanities requirement or an "easy A" elective. Most of his students likely aren't pursuing degrees in philosophy. At least let's hope not! The world can only shoulder so many of them. The rest become bartenders.
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So I have a funny story about filling this requirement.
Here I was, 17, picking out my classes based on the reqs sheet, etc. I see psychology 120. Sign up. I go find the book at the book store matching numbers and the title. I find the psychology book I need. I get to class. The teacher proceeds to write "Welcome to Philosophy 120".
I just sat there dumbfounded for a minute. Then I go back and look at the book (I hadn't opened it yet..) and sure as shit, says Philosophy on the cover. I look at the registratio
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Not surprising. At least you got something out of it.
So glad (Score:2)
there has long been a debate on higher education (Score:3)
Are you there to develop skills or to build a network of connections?
In a Cambridge-style debate, I heard on NPR 20 years ago the proponents of the later proposition carried the debate.
This seems to show that this has become the majority view.
The problem is that the students and the instructors don't agree on the goals
Calculator (Score:2)
I want to prepare you for life... (Score:3)
College professors have always had this conceit. But it's a way of thinking that is long out of date with modern education. No one really goes to college by choice, that died in the 90's. Almost everyone is there because they feel like they have to in order to find a well paying job. I'm old enough to remember math teachers in grade school banning the use of calculators and English teachers demanding all our papers be handwritten. Educators always seem to the the last ones to adopt to newer technologies. I'm not saying that students using AI is a good thing. Frankly I think it's going to make most people more stupid. But it's up to the educators to adapt and find new ways to get students to actually learn.
As a teacher (Score:2)
In fact, I had to teach math at some point (not my specialty), and the course admin would give us these weekly homework sheets to give out to students. I noticed a few of them do the work and the rest just copies. I told them there is this thing called AI. You can ask it to solve the homework and you don't have to copy from your buddies (I don't care, it's not my course). The nex
Require it be hand written (Score:2)
And of good enough quality for OCR.
Now, if they cheat, well, they have the benefit of having written it down manually (which has considerable benefit).
This also forces legible handwriting.
For the record, so far in high school, all of my kid's writing has been hand written (without the OCR requirement).
The inevitable end of the liberal arts degree (Score:3)
My colleagues and I in academia talk about this all the time. Everyone can see the ChatGPT freight train heading straight towards liberal arts programs. Anyone who thinks that there is any hope of survival for the educational process in its current form is in denial of what is happening.
Cheating with ChatGPT is becoming pervasive at the junior-high school level and above. Teachers and professors won't be able to adapt fast enough, and in many cases will themselves be replaced by AIs within a decade. And shortly after people realize that your typical liberal arts degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on, with students who cannot read, write, or reason beyond the level of a 12-year-old, then the educational edifice collapses.
Ultimately the joke will be on the students themselves once employers realize that they aren't worth paying a penny to hire - just use an infinitely more capable AI for the job. Interesting times are ahead for all of us. I'll be retiring just in the nick of time to avoid the worst of the academic mayhem.
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I think what you're essentially saying is that the teacher is being interesting or innovative enough to overcome the students' desire to use an internet service to shortcut their entire learning process. That's nice in theory, but pretty damn hard in reality.
Sure, plenty of teachers in secondary and post-secondary education could stand to broader their suite of teaching techniques. But actually doing that is very hard, and that's before all the students who do the least work come and do the most complainin
Easy as pie (Score:2)
Give them weekly assignments, tell them to take no more than 3 hours for the week on it, not too bad for a class.
Tell them under no circumstances to use the Internet, ChatGPT, or anything. Just the source materials and classes and whatever insights they have.
Do this every week
Grade as normal every week.
For the mid term, have them come in with the books, and have computers with no access to the internet or phones. They type up and submit a 3 hour essay on one of the 5 topics you give them (or whatever).
Compa
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I don't think there's a school anywhere that has a (academic integrity) policy that would permit removing students based on that state of affairs.
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This is the way my intro physics classes often end up.
The ones who wipe out on the tests complain bitterly about being tested on things that weren't taught.
When, in reality, the same things are on the exams that were on the homeworks which they cheated their way past without thinking. Or in the in-class problem solving sessions where they waited for the people next to them to figure stuff out and just wrote it down to get it done.
Not that either of those things gets them a whole lot of points. They're wor
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and have computers with no access to the internet or phones.
This is the hard part. Universities don't have computer rooms anymore, or they only have for a small group not an exam day with everyone. You can't go BYOD because there are too many ways student will manage to connect to the internet (e.g. hide a 5G hotspot in the toilet).
We force students to buy a graphing calculator because it can be set in Exam Mode that prevents cheating. But there isn't comparable hardware for essay writing. We'd need a FreeWrite device without internet, but these days all devices fea
There is an elegantly simple solution: (Score:3)
Fuck it. Let them graduate. (Score:3)
Unless you're a school that lives or dies on the sterling reputation of its grads, just wave them through. Let them sink or swim post grad. Take their money and wave them through. But put a disclaimer on the result. "AI usage limits the value of education, and may leave you less useful and more vulnerable in the workforce". Then, when they find themselves cut first when AI encroaches because their value add is zero, it won't be a surprise. But stop trying to protect people from themselves.
*essays and soft work only.
Re:Change Teaching Methods (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with that is that you only have limited amount of contact hours. It takes more time for a student to learn that the amount of contact hours you have. The purpose of assignments is to make students engage with the content of the class outside of class time.
Overtime, we have conflated homework-for-practice and homework-for-assessment. But there is a lot of resistance to homework-for-practice.
I give terribly low-stakes assignments and almost everything I get is from stackoverflow and chatgpt. Then these students get slammed on exams. Which I think is fair, but university administrations don't like that.
Now if you have ideas for alternative strategies, I'm all ears!
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Less lectures, more in class assignments, no out of class assignments ... just deal with the fact you have less hours to give them assignments.
Don't compare your modern class to a decade ago, it's a whole new one. You can teach something within those restrictions, if it's less than a decade ago, so be it.
Re:Change Teaching Methods (Score:4, Insightful)
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You could take that one step further and have a zoom meeting for lecture time. If you already have in person class time, then make the lecture attendance optional but maybe give extra credit for attending. Then students will need to watch the lecture prior to in-person class. Then, as you said, class time can be used for doing stuff and answering questions.
I do like the idea of large exams for most the grade. In two of my classes I have mid terms and finals, both being 20% each of the grade. In some of my o
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That's not a large exam. I can't remember now whether my "finals" were worth 80% or 90%, but either way that's a large exam.
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You asked for an alternative strategy... there is a free tool for this: RevisionHistory.com
It's chrome plugin for Google Docs that analyzes the doc's revision history and gives stats about how it was constructed. For example, it will tell you how many copy/pastes, how many of them were big copy/pastes, how long the student spent on the assignment. You can even do a replay which shows the document being written at high-speed to help understand the student's writing / thinking process. The student does not ne
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That's seems pretty good for paper writing assignments.
I've tried something like that for programming assignment that leverages git. The problem is that often the student would just push to git at the end of the project. That does not leave much history to analyze.
I know colleagues in programming 1 are using a dedicated programming environment that essentially builds history of code. And they find it useful indeed.
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So I'm taking a programming class this semester. The platform they have us working on is ZYbooks. All the programming is done in the web browser and then is graded by an auto-grader. So far, it's done a good job all around. Even though I setup a my own environment locally and installed an IDE that was mentioned, I didn't really need to.
I will sometimes use my own IDE just to try a portion of my program before inserting it into the rest of it on the website, but it's minimal. I could see people cheating with
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I write in Emacs with LaTeX for typesetting. I suppose I could save every revision in Git. I'm sure a humanities professor would love that.
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In the case of TFA, it's a damn philosophy class. The "homework" should be doing the assigned reading. Then a lecture / discussion session or two covering the readings, with participation graded. Don't participate in a discussion based class? Don't get a good grade. Period.
I tutored philosophy for over 4 years. I also taught some of the classes when other faculty were away at conferences. Philosophy is an engagement based class. If the students can't, or won't, engage then they should be penalized. The only
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When I went to college, the whole endeavor was considered a "take-home assignment". You sat in class primarily to receive lecture, instruction, dialectic, feedback. Your work was done outside of class.
This wasn't even somewhere with dormitories, it was community college. Are you sure you're not remembering high school?
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Re: Change Teaching Methods (Score:2)
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Although this is often a pro-forma event it can be a real question and answer affair and this does not have to be limited to university studies.
Those that have used AI to write their work will almost certainly have trouble correctly answering questions about it.
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Clearly you didn't read the article. The professor was considering changing her classes / assignments in a way that students can't use AI, but that a) limits the number of topics severely, b) that list may be empty soon.So she decided against it. Second, in-class papers do not benefit everybody and are taking up a lot of time, including that of the professor (who could arguably be doing some work while the students are scribbling away).
So next time before you call someone lazy, do the work and read the arti
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How exactly would you phrase a very basic assignment (as in, one that would be assigned in a survey level undergraduate class) in a way that a chatbot wouldn't be able to shit out a convincing facsimile of an answer to it, and which doesn't require half a many grad students as students to sort out which is which? The best I can come up with on the spot is to say "embed white size 0 fo
Re: But Sarge, why bother writing when you can (Score:2)
I think you make very good points, but seeing as education is just a business, I don't see how that will make more money than the existing business model.
Who will offer a better way if it doesn't pay? What person, kid, student wants to do hard things (learn) ?
I have ALWAYS said, especially around here: people are lazy. I have no reason to believe otherwise. This article , this trend, seems to reinforce that POV.
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For this we use a standard list of questions but I have the freedom to add anything I believe would help sorting out the good from the bad.
The simplest of these additional questions is 'why?'
Because indeed some are smart enough to give the correct answer(s) but then fail when asked to explain the reason(s).
Re:SPELLCHECKER PLUS (Score:4, Funny)
We do NOT write without an automatic system to determine grammar and spalleing (auto-correct).
I think yours might be broken...
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It was deliberate.
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Other than graduating from kindergarten, you might consider that having a word processor check your spelling is fundamentally different that having a delusional AI write a poorly written paper for you.
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And now you don't write at all. So yay?
Question is why do you think you should get a qualification for the ten seconds of work out till you to shove some crap into chatgpt to generate an essay's worth of mine crushingly dull slop?
AI does not do the thinking for you and does not generate original ideas that's what you are at college to learn how to do.
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I read a novel recently, The Martian Time-Slip, that had a similar concept. The teachers were all robots programmed to sound like historical figures. It sounds "cool" in a sci-fi novel, and it might cause a few teenagers to say "Wow so cool" the first time they see it. And I'm certain there is a company somewhere that wants to harness that effect to make a sale.
Once that's all worn off I'm not convinced the robot would be better at teaching. Generally I see Philip K Dick as dystopian fiction, not an aspirat
Re: Education needs to evolve (Score:2)
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Learning what challenges you most often leads to the greatest growth.
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Bingo!
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The successes of "The Good Place" or "My Name is Earl" would seem to run counter to your claim. Granted, they are also probably funnier than your typical philosophy lecture.
Moreover, courses aren't randomly assigned to you. They chose to enroll.
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I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit.
I cannot process the notion that college/university instructors are delusional enough to believe that garbage.
Of course students are here because of improved job prospects (attaining the desired career level or getting paid more for the same career) but even in this case, students DID choose voluntarily their subjects. They did not choose at random, they did not necessarily take the easiest choices to get the same degree or the same amount of supposed paycheck increase. Some students may have chose Banking or Law because it (supposedly) pays the most; others have chosen "assembly language" despite being the lowest
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Your entire argument is "a university is a paper mill, so treat it like one".
And this is pitched against a PHILOSOPHY professor.
As if you were completely unaware that the idea of how an IQ gets developed into a "highest IQ" is to USE YOUR BRAIN INSTEAD OF GPT.
I mean, being stupid is one thing. But being stupid in the act of criticising others of being stupid when they're actually the ones being smart? That's a whole new level of stupid. Congratulations.