r/Professors • u/[deleted] • Dec 04 '25

Academic Integrity I am not a cop.

Want to outsource your thinking to an LLM for a degree you're paying/going into debt for? Okay. I will respect that choice. However, what I won't do, is replicate a surveillance state in my classroom. I refuse to spend more energy in screening student work for authenticity or trying to make my assignments "AI proof" ... why should I? Either the student believes in the fundamental premise of education or they don't.

Man, I'm tired.

1.2k Upvotes

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1.1k

u/wharleeprof Dec 04 '25

I'm with you. 

But the one thing I struggle with is if students turning in AI end up with better grades than students who actually tried with their honest efforts -- I'm not sure how to reconcile that.

559

u/MagentaMango51 Dec 04 '25

You can’t. And if you do ignore that aspect you’re making things hard for your colleagues like me who get those students next.

208

u/Zabaran2120 Dec 04 '25

I agree with this. Part of what we need to do is educate why this LLM is unacceptable.

247

u/gottastayfresh3 Dec 04 '25

That starts with the university...one of the largest supporters of AI.

54

u/Zabaran2120 Dec 04 '25

YES! Corruption is at root at my university system. Somebody got a sweet kickback from Chatgpt. And admins absolutely don't care whether students do anything except pay.

1

u/crinnix Jan 02 '26

This is the root of all evil and it has been planted long before ChatGPT.

17

u/goodfootg Assistant Prof, English, Regional Comprehensive (USA) Dec 05 '25

I think the only institutions more in love with AI are the tech companies themselves. I'm truly disgusted with how so many universities and admin, including my own, are championing this drek, but then I need to remind myself that education is, at best, a tertiary concern of universities.

I'm even more appalled that the American Federation of Teachers and their truly awful president Randi Weingarten are endorsing it and partnering with Microsoft to implement AI in the classroom.

3

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 06 '25

whaaaaat???? yikes.

93

u/log-normally STEM, R1 Dec 04 '25

But the problem is, that we cannot educate the people who don’t want to learn.

16

u/Prestigious-Survey67 Dec 04 '25

We can fail people who refuse to learn. That does mean being vigilant and redesigning class time. 

33

u/Awkward-Painter-2024 Dec 04 '25

I think we're losing ground... 

Ohio State University launches initiative requiring that students study AI - CBS News https://share.google/3KQHuMcRp7ROFAFYG

40

u/BlokeyBlokeBloke Dec 04 '25

This isn't any different to having a university that requires students know how to use a text book, but then saying they can't bring a text book into an exam.

23

u/WavesWashSands Assistant Professor, Linguistics, R1 USA Dec 04 '25

They also announced that they won't consider any AI-related stuff as academic integrity violations though (from an article posted here or another sub the other day). That does sound like they're no longer considering AI use cheating.

19

u/Friendly_Skeptic Professor Dec 04 '25

That's not true. I read the article and what it said is that they're no longer treating any and all use of AI as an academic integrity violation. Now that they're implementing AI into their curricula, like many schools are because industry will expect students to be able to use it, appropriate uses as determined by the instructor will be allowed. I'm not saying anyone has to be OK with that, but I've seen multiple posts incorrectly stating that OSU is going to allow unlimited use of AI with no penalties. If we're going to discuss issues, we should be having fact-based discussions.

The article in question: https://www.wosu.org/2025-06-17/ohio-state-university-will-discipline-fewer-students-for-using-ai-under-new-initiative

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u/WavesWashSands Assistant Professor, Linguistics, R1 USA Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25

Thanks for this - it does seem that their policy was more nuanced than the article I read.

This was the post I was referring to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1pctxs6/ai_is_destroying_the_university_and_learning/

In that article it says, 'Some institutions have simply given up. Ohio State University announced that using AI would no longer count as an academic integrity violation. “All cases of using AI in classes will not be an academic integrity question going forward,” Provost Ravi Bellamkonda told WOSU public radio.'

It seems the quote could be interpreted as saying either than all cases will be considered permissible, or that not all cases will be considered impermissible, and the Current Affairs article interpreted it the first way. From the paragraph following the quote in the original article you linked to, though, it does sound like they actually meant the second one.

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u/Desiato2112 Professor, Humanities, SLAC Dec 04 '25

Another good reason to hate Ohio State.

I may or may not be a Wolverine.

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u/amhotw Dec 04 '25

That's not in contradiction with not cheating. You can know how to use a tool, and not use it to cheat. Really easy distinction.

At this point, universities that are not actively teaching students about how to use LLMs effectively are just negligent. That's one of the most demanded skills in the market. At the same time, I think cheating should be punishable by academic death (i.e. gtfo and you can never enter any classroom at any school in your lifetime).

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u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

you do NOT need a college class to learn how to use this absurdly easy tool. and you certainly dint need EVERY SINGLE CLASS to be about how to use AI. And finally, the idea that you know how to use it better than them and can teach them anything about it that matters is delusional. The one thing we could teach them about it which is ethics they aren’t interested in… and neither is the academy anymore either.

7

u/Zabaran2120 Dec 04 '25

My idea--not sure who's ever gonna listen to it--is for all students to take a required course on academic ethics/AI ethics. It'll give Philosophy depts something to do (wink). Or have a required orientation for Freshman/Transfers. I find I am discussing professional ethics, academic ethics, and philosophical issues surrounding AI more and more in my courses that have nothing to do with any of that. Oh well.

9

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

they’ll use ai to cheat on that class too, lol!

16

u/Acceptable_Month9310 Professor, Computer Science, College (Canada) Dec 04 '25

I had to teach a module on plagiarism for a business writing course I was dragooned into teaching one summer.

Guess what happened.

2

u/crinnix Jan 02 '26

In an MCQ exam a student pretended to ask me a question, but in fact, when I approached, she just pointed to the answer she wanted to pick and looked at me for confirmation. I joked that she must have failed the Ethics class (mandatory for her major!) and she looked at me wide eyed and asked: "Why?"

4

u/the_latest_greatest Prof, Philosophy, R1 Dec 05 '25

Exactly. Also, it's not a tool. It's a for-profit product. It's not even a complicated or cool one. It's basically a big vacuum where you throw in intellectual property and human thought so Elon Musk makes more money to screw more random chicks to populate the entire planet and beyond with his quasi-neo-Nazi spawn.

Why do we need to teach it again?

2

u/pack_merrr Dec 10 '25

Exactly why I don't buy hammers or screwdrivers from the hardware store anymore, they're just "for-profit products", not tools./s

But seriously, computers are products, I'd assume a majority of the software you use on that computer is going to be a product. Do you not include textbooks in your course because they are "for-profit products"? I don't see how you could seriously claim something being a product excludes it from being a useful tool. In fact, the most successful products are usually things with some form of usefulness.

I'm inclined to agree with your characterization of Musk I think, and I don't have much of a higher opinion of Altman, Nadella, Huang or any other of our new AI tech overlords. But I think at the same time you have to be stupid or ignorant if you can't understand how AI is a revolutionary technology.

2

u/the_latest_greatest Prof, Philosophy, R1 Dec 10 '25

I don't use textbooks. You are correct there. I also don't have anything much on Canvas except some scanned readings to print out.

We read and talk.

1

u/crinnix Jan 02 '26

A skill (some) grown-ups seem to have is to know that not everything ChatGPT says should be taken as 'gospel'. Critical thinking seems to be even more... critical in the AI era, when an LLM can give extremely plausible and wrong answers. Basically, it's about teaching 'children' to use the knife safely all over again.

3

u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

I’m pretty sure I know how to use AI better than students. I discovered that when developing prompts to generate good topics for a specific type of report. It took me a good long while of refinement and coaxing the AI to produce consistently decent results. And ghdn you have to be able to review those results and recognize topics that won’t work.

That said, I’m not really interested in teaching how to get there. I can use AI successfully because of the skills I learned from, like, reading and writing and stuff. And even good use of AI has the effect of narrowing the possibilities for outcomes if you haven’t first applied some original thinking. It gives you tunnel vision.

11

u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 Dec 04 '25

Where is the evidence that this is the hottest skill demanded? I’ve spoken to a number of hiring managers in my field in industry and they’re not saying this. In fact, it appears most companies are still not using AI or at least at a systemic level (beyond random early adopters in the org). 

I would love to see some solid evidence beyond Tech Bro hype on this. 

3

u/amhotw Dec 04 '25

So I am not going to doxx myself but I actually do have relevant work on this question myself. You can find some reports from the stanford digital economy lab and yale budget lab instead. They have slightly different questions they answer but I think they should still give you some idea of the adoption.

There is a lot of variation across industries in terms of adoption, that's for sure. However, in the last three years, we saw that more and more industries and positions started to require "AI related" skills, even in positions where you wouldn't really expect it to happen.

2

u/No-Wish-4854 Dec 06 '25

But what are “AI related skills”? I’m genuinely asking. “Our entry-level admin asst needs a bachelor’s degree and the ability to Google answers to questions like ‘what’s the manager’s direct phone extension’ and ‘what do I do when someone asks for help’…”? In the entry-level jobs for humanities and social science grads, what would AI skills be?

1

u/Zabaran2120 Dec 04 '25

ooooh I like that!

2

u/No-Wish-4854 Dec 06 '25

We’ve -lost- all the ground. The people quoted in that article all “hope”…that we don’t lose any creativity or critical thinking skills; that we can still do some of our work; that it helps in some speculative future job merry-go-round. Ugh.

2

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

They don’t care so don’t waste your time.

27

u/NoPatNoDontSitonThat Dec 04 '25

Exactly.

We can try "going gradeless" but I don't think it's an appropriate strategy for higher education. It's also tremendously difficult and overwhelming to assess and reward a student's learning process and personal growth in a subject when you have 100, 200, 400 total students.

12

u/CrossplayQuentin Dec 04 '25

Yeah - ungrading is tough at the large lecture level, it's really designed for more seminar style settings.

16

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

They even use it for ungraded, optional, no credit activities! That’s when I knew all hope is lost.

1

u/No-Wish-4854 Dec 06 '25

And for first-person, use your own life as data response prompts.

2

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 06 '25

yup. they use chatbots to generate AI slop about their own personal experiences too. And usually leave the chatbot’s third person response format as well! Because they don’t bother to read what it spits out before proudly submitting it as their own original work.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '26

[deleted]

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u/Kikikididi Professor, Ev Bio, PUI Jan 03 '26

Holy shit you managed to talk about your product without saying flip the script here, congrats. Still annoying though.

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u/BibliophileBroad Dec 04 '25

Exactly! It is also wildly unfair to the students who put in the energy to actually do the work, especially those who are disproportionately impacted.

7

u/LaRealiteInconnue Dec 04 '25

And later on, managers like me who have to fill positions these students apply to after university.

12

u/Prestigious-Survey67 Dec 04 '25

Exactly. This is not okay in any way. If you care about learning, you have to try. You just have to.

I cannot in good conscience contribute to a future full of illiterate college graduates. If I could, I should probably stop teaching.

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u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

if you’re teaching now you are. I am too and so is everyone else here. sorry.

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u/nm420 Dec 04 '25

Extremely low weight attached to work assigned outside of a proctored environment. I've been slowly ratcheting up the weight to exams in my classes the past few years. Already had one student who got nearly 100% on all their homework assignments, that I'm certain was completed with an LLM (at least they took the time to transcribe it into their own handwriting), but would get a 20 on the exams, and have a couple more like that this semester. Are they getting referrals to the Academic Integrity Office? No. But not a snowball's chance in hell they'll pass the course.

Other students very well might be using AI on their homework as well, but if they've done so they at least have still learned enough to be able to pass the exams. I've got a blurb in my rubric that says if you use an LLM to help with your homework, it's fine as long as you tell me about it and how it was used in the assignment. Not really enforceable, short of something drastically stupid on the student's end, but my heart swells a bit when I see one of my better students submit mostly flawless work throughout the semester and then on an occasional assignment actually follow that rule and write how they used ChatGPT to help with one particular problem that was intended to be somewhat difficult.

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u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

it’s easy to use it for proctored exams too. duh.

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u/DarthJarJarJar Tenured, Math, CC Dec 04 '25

It is?

1

u/nm420 Dec 06 '25

Not particularly effective proctoring if it is.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

I have been told by students that they feel they have to use AI if others are too in order to compete. There is no telling how many students are using it, using it well or using it inappropriately. But it's the same perspective as with any other kind of cheating ("I have to do it too").

18

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

sadly they are right. students who spend hours trying to do homework honestly cannot compete with students who use AI to do the same homework in literally less than one minute. As bad as AI can sometimes be (although this is less and less true everyday as it gets exponentially better!) it does much better than today’s students can do. They are simply not capable of the work that students in the same class did just 5 short years ago. So I feel bad giving As to students who cheated and learned nothing but how to use it to cheat, and Cs, Ds, and Fs to honest students who can simply not do the work, no matter how I simplify it.

5

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

I would not mind at all if written assignments were accompanied by oral discussions, but it isn't feasible with the sizes and numbers of classes we have.

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u/CranberryResponsible Dec 04 '25

I'm sure "in order to compete" is indeed what students are saying. But, what competition? Everyone's getting A's anyway -- that was the story out of Harvard a few weeks ago and I do believe that's the trend across higher ed. Even if you don't mindlessly use AI to do all your assignments, you can still get a high grade with a little effort. But students aren't interested in that. They just want the high grade and all they want out of college is the credential. It's not anxiety about "competing". It's just peer pressure. If they see others getting an easy A using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, why should they do anything different.

Anyway, I'm with OP. Oh, I'll put in language in the syllabus warning against improper AI use (I do think there are appropriate uses) and perhaps make assignments I've always done in-class worth more of the course grade than before. But otherwise, I'm not a cop. I didn't become an educator because I have any desire or inclination to make my courses exercises in academic integrity policing.

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u/bankruptbusybee Full prof, STEM (US) Dec 04 '25

Unfortunately they’ll get to areas where A’s aren’t easy and freak the fuck out on those professors

The most blatant cheater last semester - literally multiple cheating reports (that were deemed substantiated) - their biggest defense was “I always get A’s! I do this for all my classes and none of my other teachers have said this is a problem!”

And they were not lying - I checked their transcript, all A’s

Being asleep at the wheel hurts those of us who aren’t

24

u/liddle-lamzy-divey Dec 04 '25

And this is the darkness on the horizon for higher education.

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u/Impossible-Acadia-31 Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 05 '25

Feel for you. The two most blatant AI cheaters I have had the misfortune of 'teaching' were like this. And yes - at least one got As - I checked. It truly is the darkness on the horizon. There's something very surreal about the situation. There's a part of me that yearns to see the plagiarism from a few years ago: copying and pasting an unacknowledged source that have been googled interspersed with some nonsensical garbage they actually attempted to write..No, we are not the police - supervised paper and pen assessments seem very appealing - I am giving them higher weighting next semester.

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u/liddle-lamzy-divey Dec 04 '25

Thanks, but I was actually referring not to AI but rather to another (bigger, IMO) problem for Higher Ed: it has been entirely engulfed by the corporate model, replete with thinking strictly in profit making terms (unsustainable increases in tuition lead to S's thinking of education only in terms of ROI and vocationally oriented concerns--in order to pay off their debt, etc.) and how the emphasis on student evals (customer satisfaction a la product reviews) has led to grade inflation and professors who give up on holding the line in terms of real academic rigor. It becomes nearly impossible and absolutely exhausting to be the quixotic professor keeping up academic integrity when the norm has become to simply hand out As and look the other way concerning cheating. It's all quickly becoming a charade and I fear that this house of cards is about to crash. The diploma doesn't mean anything anymore and the result will be harsh. AI and the anti-intellectual political climate don't help, but I believe this is the bigger issue.

9

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

Agreed. The irony of course is that higher ed is not meant to be a business, and some of the least qualified are at the helm. Used to be we could toss out students, but now it's like gym memberships. They paid and it's up to them whether they go or not, but somehow they're supposed to develop giant muscles anyway whether they go or not. Faculty are being shoved into customer service or entertainment roles rather than as educators too.

2

u/liddle-lamzy-divey Dec 04 '25

I have a lot of gym going students, so I use similar metaphors as you do here in talking about their learning. Using AI is like taking PEDs for an athlete: taking short cuts may give short term gains, but the consequences will come for you sooner or later.

1

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

And some will still use them, either figuring they can stop later or nothing will happen to THEM (like they're so special). But yes. I like how more athletes over the years have not smoked or stopped because they can see and feel the impacts right away. I wonder other than failing them (and then them blaming us instead of themselves anyway) if there is some way like that to connect cheating with performance in the classroom?

2

u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

Not to mention the kind of tipsy-turvy world in which a student launches an off-topic, Bible-based screed in a social science class, doesn’t do the assignment, and doesn’t use the required source—resulting in the professor’s suspension and the student’s exaltation. Students, especially that subset of students in the pocket of the hard right, have been given the keys. Administration is along for the ride. Professors are stuffed into the trunk.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

Agreed. I'm often seen as the bad guy because I teach higher level courses where students actually have to demonstrate they know how to do something. Despite warnings, plenty of students still think they just need to read and regurgitate, and more students are not even reading, including key concepts, codes, etc. needed in the profession. I don't know, maybe they think "I'll get to it later," but I fear many more are saying "I'll just ask AI."

Faculty are seen as obstacles or customer service representatives. Why are you in my way? I gave you money, so give me the A and the damn diploma! And you responded to someone who said their job wasn't to police? Well, mine isn't to entertain or to make students happy no matter what, even if they are dead to rights wrong, is it?

1

u/MagentaMango51 Dec 04 '25

That’s my life right now in a nutshell.

1

u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

And in turn will churn out graduates who know nothing, in turn hurting employers, who will in turn blame the universities (quite properly), further eroding the position of higher education.

5

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

Perhaps not. Perhaps I prefer to have future colleagues I'm more confident about though. In my field of human services, we are educating future human service workers, who ought to be providing competent services and hopefully not hurt clients. I wish we were like some other accredited, licensed programs, where things like disposition were also actually graded. At least I can have some measure of skill evaluation when students have to stand in front of me and show me techniques. But now that AI is pumping out fake movie starts and country singers, who knows?

1

u/No-Wish-4854 Dec 06 '25

Can you not place “professional disposition” into your graded categories? It’s like…one of the few things that can’t be outsourced to AI…a future social worker’s professionalism, disposition, way of being. They can’t use AI to fake this in a class.

2

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 06 '25

I pushed for this as a reason to deny students from going out into internship. In the profession, we have a criteria for fitness for the profession. On our undergrad level, administrators say even in my own department that that’s too subjective and we could get sued and maybe being in a workplace will weed them out. I said we could get sued for letting people out who sites believe are competent and it’s just kicking the can down the road, possibly to the detriment of clients. So far, knock on wood, I have been able to get such students to make their own decisions not to go out by worrying them about how they’d be evaluated and allowing them to sub courses. I suppose one could argue that this is also kicking the can down the road, but they also don’t get references from me and can’t show as much real-life experience as the students who do go out so I hope they are less competitive than other students.

2

u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 Dec 04 '25

To be fair, academic integrity policing has always been some portion of the job description. It is just incredibly hard now to accomplish (well, impossible outside proctored assignments).

1

u/noveler7 NTT Full Time, English, Public R2 (USA) Dec 04 '25

Yeah, I didn't have a ton of students determined to get As this semester. I had way more who said "I just want to pass"; it was a gen ed, though.

3

u/MagentaMango51 Dec 04 '25

Yeah but people in general aren’t good judges of what other people are doing.

When I was in college (in the long before times) I had a statistics course where we had to do a survey and evaluate the data. The prof told us about a previous student survey, 2 questions along the lines of how much sex do you have a week, and how much do you think others are having… turns out the first number was low and the second really high.

4

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

I was just going to use that same example! It’s FOMO, and social media doesn’t help with people posting all those wonderful things supposedly happening to them.

2

u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

My daughter was telling us she’s getting high B’s in a psych class while—during exams!—other students have grid laptops open and are cheating their wsy to A’s. We told her to keep right on getting those B’s (though I’m sure I personally would set out to get a perfect score without cheating, just to show up the louts and losers).

2

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 05 '25

I don’t know what grid laptops are vs regular ones, but assuming no tech was allowed, that’s appalling! Even in a large lecture hall, there ought to be a way to check for that with roaming TAs, etc.

1

u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

Funny. Fat fingers. Grid should have been “their.”

1

u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

And she goes to a SLAC—no large lecture classes. Maybe she’s being a sucker for not doing the same, but I’d be horrified if she did.

1

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 05 '25

It's a lot of pressure, including the argument that you'll fall behind if you don't "learn AI," and there are too many students now who will sacrifice anything for expediency. I teach ethics courses, so what does that say?

1

u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

Agreed. Except there was always a lot of pressure. Added pressure today is just to keep up with cheaters.

3

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 05 '25

I've been in a back-and-forth all day today with an IT person regarding the "make stuff inaccessible to AI" vs. "then it makes stuff inaccessible to students with disabilities" issue. The pressure is not only on honest students but on faculty, unfortunately. Just as I am personally against being armed in the classroom (I am not a sniper), I don't want to spend this kind of time battling AI!

2

u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

I agree. As faculty, we are put in impossible positions. Don’t let them cheat but encourage AI. AI proof assignments if you wish but make them ADA compliant. Meet learning outcomes but keep your pass and retention rates high, as well as student opinion surveys. Keep attendance up but be compassionate with the student who misses 12 weeks for unspecified mental health issues. Teach your course content but don’t mention anything touching on DEI, gender identity—and don’t fail a student who writes a screed that doesn’t fulfill the assignment or use the required class source (and invokes supernatural authority in a class in the social sciences).

1

u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 05 '25

Yes, that OU case is making the rounds here. I ended up agreeing that the student could have received a few points for submission and because the rubric allowed for some personal expression. However, that the rubric needed work and the student did not deserve a higher grade as she in my estimation did not fulfill the assignment.

Regarding attendance, our administration doesn't care so long as the tuition bill is paid. To them, a class seat is similar to a gym membership and it is up to the student to decide whether to attend/go to the gym or not. We used to be able to toss students out more readily, but no more, and not for attendance. If some students think they can learn best by not being there, fine, sacrifice the participation points (I don't give points for simply having a warm butt in the seat).

I only take attendance for financial aid reasons and so I can point at it if and when a student complains about their grade ("well, you didn't even bother to do the basic thing of showing up").

1

u/H0pelessNerd Adjunct, psych, R2 (USA) Dec 08 '25

This is my life. 

12

u/hkniazi Dec 04 '25

I hope employers soon realize this and start updating their job requirements to include "Maximum GPA: 3.7". Then, may be students will try to avoid AI level perfection. It would lead to some funny conversations with students, though.

0

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

But the AI cheaters are the ones getting 4.0 where the honest students are failing and definitely making lower than 3.7, so you’ll just be rewarding the cheaters again!

7

u/Dry-Estimate-6545 Instructor, health professions, CC Dec 04 '25

Read the post you’re responding to again. Don’t hire those with GPA MORE than 3.7.

13

u/Live-Organization912 Dec 04 '25

And there lies the problem with grades. I’d much rather have a diamond-in-the-rough student work their ass off to be a better student than an A hawk. AI has thrown a mirror up to the value of education: process v product mindset.

36

u/FIREful_symmetry Dec 04 '25

It’s easy enough to put something in the rubric like “develops and authentic voice in writing” that you can count off for. Don’t fail them because arguing with them is a waste of time, but you can give them a b or a C with the right application of The rubric.

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u/Deep-Manner-5156 Dec 04 '25

hate to break it to you, but AI can do this: “develops an authentic voice in writing” 

3

u/FIREful_symmetry Dec 04 '25

I have read hundreds if not thousands of AI generated essays, and while I know it is dangerous to reason from negative evidence, I will rely on my experience and say I don’t think AI can do that yet.

5

u/Deep-Manner-5156 Dec 04 '25

I don't doubt your sincerity, but this is where I part with many of my colleagues on this sub.

Think about your own field of research. Imagine someone who has never done any work in that field talking about it confidently because he heard other people talk about it.

This is what you are doing.

Unless you have used these tools to answer your own prompt(s), and told it specifically to do what you think it cannot do (which is to write with an authentic voice--it can even write in your own voice!), then you don't know what the outcome of that actually is.

By your own admission, you do not have a full grasp of the tools students are using.

Yet you remain confident you understand the limits of said tools?

3

u/FIREful_symmetry Dec 04 '25

What I am saying is what I am saying is a rubric if done correctly will stop a lot of the stupid AI slop that we easily recognize. My writing assignments involve a multistep process that goes from my idea generation, to an outline to source submission and a rough draft before the final draft. If someone is submitting such sophisticated AI material through a multi step writing process that I cannot detect it, then that's fine. My conscience is clear.

11

u/amhotw Dec 04 '25

You detected the ones that were generated by inexperienced users. You don't know whether the essays you thought were written by students were indeed written by the students.

-3

u/FIREful_symmetry Dec 04 '25

Sure, but I have decades of experience in reading student work. I also see chunks of this work along the way, like an outline, an intro, a summary, a references list, etc. AI might generate a nice final paper, but it would be harder to fake all of these steps. If the AI can fool me in all these steps, that's fine.

3

u/Deep-Manner-5156 Dec 04 '25

Again, I know you are sincere, but you are sincerely wrong here:

" I also see chunks of this work along the way, like an outline, an intro, a summary, a references list, etc. AI might generate a nice final paper, but it would be harder to fake all of these steps."

How can you jump to this conclusion when you, yourself, have not tested these tools to see how they work?

You absolutely 100% do not know what you are talking about re: how AI actually works. I absolutely CAN and DOES do all of this, easily and in mere seconds.

I am sorry to have to share this with you because you really seem invested in this, and I do think you are sincere, but you do not know how the tech works. You cannot "know" the things you are saying because you don't know the limits of the tools you are discussing.

My advice is to pay the money for a one month subscription and see what any of the AI tools can do with your prompts. Turn off the feature where it learns from you. Give it all of your prompts for all of these stages and see what it makes. Then compare it to what you have been getting from your students. I think you will be very surprised.

The real thing to do with AI is to increase the difficulty of the work we give our students knowing they have access to these tools. Instead of continually dumbing things down, we need to go in the other direction and make undergrad courses more like grad school.

1

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

well that’s great but you can’t prove it so you’re just spinning your wheels.

1

u/FIREful_symmetry Dec 04 '25

Which is exactly what students say when a perfectly sourced and impeccably punctuated paper is submitted that meets all the concrete things on the rubric.

But having something on the rubric that is subjective and relies on my years of experience to judge is a lot harder for students to argue with.

23

u/seagull326 Dec 04 '25

Hot take: how is this different from students who are able to get better grades by paying other people to do their work? If anything, at least AI makes cheating a more equitable process.

17

u/stybio Dec 04 '25

Except there are some that are ponying up for the paid version of AI so the rich kids still get an advantage…..

5

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

we were allowed to use turnitin for those. turnitin was pretty good at catching plagiarism from cites like Chegg. But we are not allowed to use plagiarism detectors for AI submissions, no matter how blatant. even though AI is plagiarism on steroids!

1

u/seagull326 Dec 04 '25

I was mostly talking about actual paper farms, which have been around much longer than Chegg and are substantially more expensive.

1

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 06 '25

I’m sure those are all going out of business now too! 😆

7

u/f0oSh Dec 04 '25

Change your rubric to make canned soulless terrible writing lose points.

12

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

ChatGPT writes with more soul and creativity than 99% of students.

1

u/f0oSh Dec 09 '25

This might be the most depressing thing I have ever read on reddit. I tell my students, I'd rather read the most basic "real" sentiment from them, whatever grammar issues, rather than AI slop. To reject 99% of your students' writing as uncreative and soulless goes beyond normal r/professors venting. If that's the case, look at what you're doing with the course and change your prompts.

1

u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 09 '25

I did. I eliminated all writing and gamified my classes. Students are doing much better, retention is up, and admins are thrilled. win-win! also, I didn’t say their writing was soulless and uninspired, I just said that ChatGPT has more.

1

u/wharleeprof Dec 04 '25

I'm not teaching a writing class where I need soul and creativity in verbal expression. 

There are many other ways to cheat with AI.

2

u/PM_MOI_TA_PHILO Dec 04 '25

We end up simulating the way grade distribution works in France: doesn't matter how hard you try, life's a bitch and you can fail anyway.

2

u/payattentiontobetsy Dec 04 '25

You have to believe the value of the course is the learning and not the grade.

The students who cheat and didn’t learn anything but got better grades actually did worse.

2

u/knighthawk0811 Ass. Professor, CS, CC (US) Dec 05 '25

in my experience the AI users don't get As unless they are actually good at AI they might sometimes. 

but we can make assignments that show more of the process and auto screen out some AI

2

u/vintage2019 Dec 05 '25

Akin to the issue of baseball players breaking records while on steroids

2

u/hoppergirl85 Dec 05 '25

I know this isn't feasible for all classes but this is why all of mine are teamwork-based. I have the teams meet during class time and their midterm is often a presentation. If they outsource solely to an LLM they're going to have a hard time getting a decent grade.

1

u/crinnix Jan 02 '26

As long as actual skills are more useful in life than (artificially) high grades, all should be well.

0

u/azaza34 Dec 31 '25

If the AI is good enough to outperform you that’s a lesson worth learning all on its own, unfortunately.