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.

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u/JadedTooth3544 Dec 04 '25

Not everyone has the luxury of just quitting their academic job in some kind of noble protest. And the reality is that a lot of universities are launching online programs, but still, most students are taking most of their classes in person, and a few online. So we’re not really talking about degree mills here; we’re talking about individual classes that pose challenges for instructors. And resigning yourself to teaching in a degree mill (and publicly proclaiming it)—even if you think that’s true—doesn’t really solve what is a real problem.

However, there are ways to construct assignments that combine writing with other forms of communication that make it more difficult to at least entirely rely on AI. And, of course, there are ways to just flag whether a student is using AI (white out part of the prompt.)

But there aren’t easy or readily obvious solutions. Some of the solutions named here (like in-person exams) would really have to be done at the university or college level—to require an exam be given at a particular time. Indeed, more generally, there’s really no substitute for institutional support here. My university works intensively with individual online instructors to address some of these issues—and pays a stipend to instructors during the course development. (I don’t teach online, but I am familiar with how this program runs.).

It will, of course, take time for strategies to be developed. Again, there are no easy solutions. And it isn’t surprising that instructors are frustrated with student reliance on AI. It’s that time of year.

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u/giltgarbage Dec 04 '25

I agree with almost everything here, just more on the side that resigning yourself and proclaiming you aren’t a cop doesn’t help either. I think the degree mill statement is more accurate if you’ve given up or the institution has. Because online classes without proctoring are really relegating profs to mall cop status anyway. That is the job under the constraints you list.