Meanwhile, an article about pervasive, AI-enabled cheating (free registration required):
https://www.chronicle.com/article/cheating-has-become-normal
Time to return to hand-written “blue book” exams.
Cheating has always been pretty pervasive (as the article notes, albeit way down into it). Plagiarism detectors have been around for a long time for a reason. And they’re being a bit alarmist by using Middlebury as their example, with its non-proctored exams.
Nonetheless, AI’s an issue because of the ease & quickness of coming up with an adequate answer to something. The challenge in dealing with it is that there simply aren’t reliable detectors. With a plagiarism detector, I can conclusively see from where the student has copied the work. AI detectors give me a probability likelihood that’s usually only moderately sure (70%, ie). That’s not enough to “convict.”
Blue books sound like a great idea until you realize many students can’t write quickly or enduringly enough to manage a good answer.
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We do a fair amount of presentations and collective work here, that cuts opportunities down as well. I’ve taken to only accepting films edited in front of me, class time extended longer, I dip in and out. I do have colleagues who only accept hand written work during class, particularly for creative writing assignments. It’s the academic tutors who face real issues but GPTZero seems to catch a fair bit. It would need to be in the 90s to directly confront but most cheaters crumble if you just ask if the work was all theirs.
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Well, that’s something they should be learning anyway. So that’s not the downside you may think it is, unless you’re one of those who think that standardized tests are actually a useful way of determining academic progress.
I do understand that that’s not the way curricula are structured these days, but that’s not the students’ fault, and it’s (usually) not the individual teachers’ fault, and it’s one of the biggest reasons that academic scores in the US are plummeting across the board.
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American academic scores have been stable or up for the last few decades.
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Well, yes, but this is a History course. I should be testing them on their handwriting rather than the course content? That seems like a bad idea.
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Handwriting is a skill that is relevant to all academic endeavors, so legibility should be a factor across the board. They should have learned how to write legibly in elementary school, so you’re not specifically testing them on this skill—it’s something that should be expectable. Basic communication skills should not and cannot be compartmentalized by subject matter.
Again, I know that’s not how the curricula are structured. The current structure is wrong. There is so much reliance on computerized everything because it makes certain things easier. But the trade-off is that students don’t gain valuable skills that they won’t be able to readily learn later. Education should be independent of technology.
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If you look at aggregates, yes. But scores are down in the biggest school systems: taxpayer-funded urban districts. Private and suburban schools with lots of money to throw at students bump the averages and obscure the divide. And I’m not going into the question of how useful those standardized measures are at showing the state of academic achievement.
Public schools used to be the cornerstone of education in the US. The urban and rural districts have been defunded into irrelevance, and those who can’t afford to go private or move into a wealthier district suffer. Charter schools haven’t been the panacea advocates claim, because they’re profit-driven off of public money, a double whammy to the public schools, and oversight is spotty. It’s basically segregation all over again, but that’s a discussion not suited for this venue.
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In a history course, I should be testing them on their acquisition of the historical content I’m teaching them, not whether they picked up handwriting well enough in elementary school to handle writing quickly. You test people on the content of the class they’re taking, not on a different skill you think they should have acquired at some time earlier.
Feel free to cite some evidence for a long-term (ie, not just pandemic related) achievement drop in taxpayer-funded urban districts and for your larger point about public schools failing while private schools do fine.*
*It’ll be interesting to see what you cite, given your earlier dismissal of standardized testing.
I live in one of those declining urban districts, in a state with several declining urban districts. Maybe your state does a better job of funding and managing school districts. Most are doing a poor job of it.
As for testing, I’m not saying that you should be testing their handwriting skills. I’m saying that it’s a skill you should reasonably be able to expect them to have already. The fact that you can’t expect that is part of the problem I’m trying to highlight here, and you keep trying to deflect back to just your specific class. I’m talking about the broad state of education, and you’re acting like I’m just giving pointers for your personal teaching.
Personal experience is not irrelevant, but it isn’t the big picture either.
At any rate, we’re done here.
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It’s easy to say that students “should” have a certain skill when you don’t actually have to deal with the situation where they do or don’t.
The turn this thread has taken reminded me of this recent article:
Or they write way too much. I took a final once where there were two essay questions. The professor repeatedly stressed before the exam that our response to each prompt should take only one page in the blue book. Despite that I noticed the other students furiously writing page after page. My essays were rough, but they were only one page apiece. When I got the exam back, there was a note from the TA thanking me for getting to the point right away.
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Heheh. Yes, indeed. There’s always that moment when the student comes up, asks for another blue book, and gets the side-eye from me.
I used a lot of blue books, but one reason was that I wrote on every other line to make it slightly easier for the professor to decipher my scrawl.
Dave
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Tonya has been taking “Intro to Cognitive Science” for fun (but with a grade) at Cornell this semester, and it has been fascinating to see how things have changed since we were undergrads in the mid-80s. Getting the slides (well, that there are slides at all) beforehand changes notetaking, and she’s chosen to write on the PDF of the slides using an Apple Pencil with an iPad Air. There are also a LOT of slides—sometimes as many as 120 per 70-minute lecture—which is radically different from what we remember of lectures that weren’t as information-dense because they relied on a structured textbook.
Her tests are all in person, with a mix of multiple choice and essays, so there’s no room for AI there. She has found Perplexity quite helpful in learning more about topics that were touched on only very briefly in class.
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That is a worthy reason.
There are good uses for sure, my students use Perplexity as we might have used Wikipedia in the past, a starting point with references to follow through.
One prompt we work with develops solid reading lists, adaptable to other humanities I would say:
Roles: You are a librarian at a world leading research university who specializes in humanities research. I am a Masters student.
Task: Create a reading list which will give me a grounding in the most important and influential research in contemporary Irish literature, specifically work by women authors.
Instruction: Provide a list of most-cited, peer reviewed articles that will help me to understand the topic. Cite your sources and provide links. Only include references & URLS from Google Scholar. If you are unable to find a citation on Google scholar, exclude the resource from the reading list. State how many citations each resource has. Only include resources which have 500 or more citations. For each recommended reading, provide a 2-3 line summary of its content and contribution to the discipline.
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My strength and conditioning coach, who’s a professor at Ithaca College, was asking about how to deal with AI as well, since his students have to create workout programs as part of their instruction. ChatGPT et al are actually pretty good at this already since there are a finite number of exercises and they’re well-documented online.
I suggested that one thing he could do is have them use ChatGPT to generate the program and then assess them on their critique of what it returned or how they would coach a particular person through the workouts. Often, online workout information is quite shallow, and it’s likely that would come through in the AI-generated results, so asking them to go deeper might prove useful for seeing what they really know.
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I’ve been retired from teaching since 2015 and have often thought what I’d do in the face of AI. A few ideas:
A clear policy on the syllabus about plagiarism (which I always had anyway in the before times). “Your own ideas in your words” as the byword for work in the course. A spoken reminder that plagiarism is likely as obvious to an English prof as a counterfeit bill is to an experienced cashier. (In all my years of teaching, I was wrong just once, and even then, I’m not sure I was wrong.)
Perhaps a brief demonstration of how AI hallucinates. A saxophone instead of a piano in “Sonny’s Blues” (really). Laura returning to her husband, played by Trevor Howard, in Brief Encounter (really). Made-up lines in ridiculously well-known poems (Yeats, for instance.)
Short, frequent writing assignments in class. Easy if you’ve done the reading, impossible if not. Longer assignments on matters for which AI is likely useless. (A blogging friend suggested, say, an art exhibit in a campus museum.) Short oral exams in office hours too (or with a class meeting or two cancelled). These can be open book, with the text under discussion right there.
One way to address suspected plagiarism if you can’t find the source: give the student a chunk of text from their essay with every fifth word removed. See how they do filling in the words. Or ask what particular words mean.
A reminder about the point of doing the work. I’d use this passage from Ted Chiang:
As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.
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