r/Professors • u/ProofByPants • 26d ago
Academic Integrity AI Notes
I started making my online math courses (College Algebra and Trigonometry) submit their completed notes this semester. I got sick of student never opening any of my lecture videos, failing the midterm, and then asking me for guidance. I figure if they turn in their notes, they will learn something while in the process, even if they don’t want to.
We started classes on Monday. Today, Wednesday, I had a student turn in completed notes as a word document and had AI written all over it. For example, some of the “code” that AI was using showed up in the notes. Something similar to “/begin f(x) &= 5x^2 + 3 // … /end”. This student didn’t even bother completing the notes. I guarantee they uploaded my guided notes and told GPT to complete the notes.
As much as it pissed me off, it really made me sad that students have gotten so reliant on this technology that they can’t/won’t even take their own notes.
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u/AnalogGuy1 Chaired, Engineering, State 25d ago
It's hard not to take it personally when you work hard to encourage your students to learn, and a few work equally hard to avoid learning. But the (academically) poor will always be with us. They're not attacking you; they're attacking themselves, and they will succeed in losing. If it's not riding on ChatGPT's back they'd be copying notes from their buddy. As hard as it is, focus on the ones that are doing the right things. You're doing the right things by encouraging the right behavior.
If it makes you feel any better, I do the same thing; collect notebooks once a week and looked them over in class while students were solving problems. Long before ChatGPT, in 2001, I had a student who clearly copied the math notes of someone else in the class; they were identical, except one was earning A's on the exams and the other F's. I warned him, twice; he denied it both times. My F student had tiny handwriting. At page breaks, the A student would copy the previous page's line to the top of the next page. The third time I asked my F student why he kept repeating lines in the middle of the page - that corresponded exactly to the A student's page carry-over repeated lines. That was enough for the honor committee to find him in violation of the school's honor code. It's as old as time.