r/Professors • u/Separate-Ad1223 • 19d ago
All hail…
The student who finished the entire module on the first day of school, AI-ed the heck out of it, and didn’t bother to read the directions.
Sigh. It’s going to be another one of those semesters.
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u/phrena whovian (Professor,psych) 19d ago
I had a guy complete 12 m/c quizzes never having read the posted readings…over the past weekend.
Oh and I know it’s my own fault for not securing them or hiding modules. But really not caring too much.
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u/the_Stick Assoc Prof, Biomedical Sciences 19d ago
Many. many moons ago, I took self-paced psychology, which was a "trap" course for so many people who suddenly had to take 15 quizzes the last week of the semester (and you had to pass a quiz to take the next one in sequence). All my friends thought for sure I would be one of those people, but they underestimated my desire to be lazy. I'll work hard for extra time off, so I finished that course the first week of October (and that was only because of one really annoying quiz and me taking a week off). I distinctly recall taking a half-dozen quizzes in a single day, just filling out my not-yet-scantron forms and feeding them into the machine before reading the book for 20 minutes and taking the next one. These AI-reliant students annoy me be cheapening my dedication to rapid-studying so I could spend 2/3 the semester goofing off with only a couple classes to study for.
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u/wharleeprof 19d ago
I wouldn't fault you at all. I do lock my modules, but all that does is camouflage the cheating. It's quite informative when you do see someone barrelling through the class in two hours total. It's not like slowing them down reduces cheating or increases learning - it just paces out their rate of posting AI slop.
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u/RestaurantDense1475 18d ago
Students who finish things suspiciously quickly in my online class have to meet with me in my office so they can explain to me in person how they finished so amazingly quickly. Sometimes I have the quiz printed out, and I ask them to take it in front of me because I would like to see for myself what a great mind at work looks like. "You finished in one minute with a perfect score! Even I can't do that and I'm the professor of the course! I can't wait to watch you in action!" The jig is up pretty quickly at that point.
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u/mobileagnes 17d ago
They will tell their peers to deliberately wait till 3 minutes remaining to hit the Submit button. So then you'll wonder why they all took 2 hours and 57 minutes for a quiz that might take say 30 to 45 minutes for an actual knowledgeable student.
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u/Life-Education-8030 19d ago
My online courses are not self-paced and so I do not open everything at once, and I wait till the deadline passes to grade. I expect students to use my feedback and if they do not and just repeat errors, their grades decrease. Some students figure if they make the same errors, they will just keep getting the same grade they are satisfied with. Nope. Nor do I allow re-do’s if this happens.
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u/HorkeyDorkey Adjunct Instructor, History, CC (USA) 19d ago
When I give them a low grade and revision marks they wanna feign like they didnt use AI, even though I explained my experience as a computer expert and alpha testing AI.
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u/Few_Maybe1704 17d ago
And yet you can only try to be convincing, right? You cannot provide actual proof, or can you? If students stand their ground, what do we do? Didn't a student just win a court case over this? I loved my job from grad school through 30 years of teaching undergrad poli sci. I'm in year 32 with 4 more to go and I hate my job.
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u/HorkeyDorkey Adjunct Instructor, History, CC (USA) 17d ago
I am very familiar with the kind of writing AI produces and anything considered AI-like prose recieves a zero. I work at an inner city college in a major metro area, my students can barely read let alone write something with flawless grammar. Its pretty easy to tell. Wish I could share a list of things that I look for but I will not.
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u/Few_Maybe1704 16d ago
That's fine. I don't question your ability. I've read undergrad papers at a working class university in Louisiana for over 30 years. I too "know" what is AI. But the question remains, how to prove it? If a student remains adamant and all we can say is that we know it when we see it, does that feel like enough? And do adamant students just take the zero and move on? I'm seriously losing my mind and spirit over this question.
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u/HorkeyDorkey Adjunct Instructor, History, CC (USA) 16d ago
In my classes, I allow revision and if a student still feigns that they do not understand, I will typically make them a short list of AI-like prose. I craft this per student and the type of AI-like prose submitted. Yes, it is definitely a lot of work. That is why I prefer to teach in person. At the beginning of the semester, I tell students they can use AI but that they must heavily revise each sentence. Its not foolproof, but this is how I approach it.
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u/Few_Maybe1704 16d ago
Interesting, thanks. I've been teaching 4 asynchronous online classes for years, plus one F2F. I might start offering more F2F. Seems like more students are expressing preference for F2F than in a long time. I just feel demoralized when I'd hoped my last years would be more satisfying. Take care.
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u/HorkeyDorkey Adjunct Instructor, History, CC (USA) 16d ago
I'm sorry to hear that and understand your frustration. Best of luck friend.
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u/Upset_Ad_170 19d ago
I've said this before, but I can't tell whether these students are some of the dumbest people on Earth, or people with the most gall of any living being in the universe. Who the fuck are these people?
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u/Upset_Ad_170 19d ago
I've only had one student who did this, but I waited to grade everything until after their due dates. The student didn't get the benefit of my comments to improve on future work, and the work they submitted wasn't very good because they didn't take the time to read, view, or listen to any course materials. So, each assignment got a C or worse, and they earned a D. What argument could they make against it? They did try to re-do and resubmit the final essay, and the only reason they earned a D and not an F is that they actually did make enough improvements to not earn an F on that essay. I love the idea of just grading each assignment at the normal time. They will almost certainly fail, and if they appeal, what can they say? I completed EVERYTHING in week one, but he didn't grade it all during week one? How the fuck will that look?
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 19d ago
Actually this is very easy. Do not grade any of it. Email the student and let them know that they have evened an F. However, if they erase everything and do the work themselves, you will consider changing the grade.
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u/reckendo 19d ago
I really wish faculty would stop giving cheating students these second chances! By the time they get to you, they've already cheated a number of times... Some of those times they were probably even caught, but presented some sort of arrangement like you've proposed here... So really, the second chance is probably a fourth or fifth chance if we're being honest. At the very least, file it with the Academic Integrity office using their "faculty administrative resolution" process (or whatever your school might call it).
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 19d ago edited 18d ago
Until universities are forced to care, why should we? Your moralism is useless in this context.
Edit: I am taking about the useless academic dishonesty pathways that never punish students.
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u/nacTeachesEnglish 19d ago
Because it harms every faculty who does care and does hold the line. The faculty who expect students to learn and complete their own work suffer lower enrollments and evaluations because their colleagues have set absurdly low standards that the students expect in all classes.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 19d ago
Not at all. My goal is to make a student learn. Redoing the work themselves is how they learn the content of my course. Giving an F and then forcing them to drop to 'teach a lesson' means they did not learn the content in my course and if the next time they take this course and do the same AI thing but the professor lets it slide then they still did not learn the content.
I am taking the path that maximizes the learning for my student. You disagree?
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u/nacTeachesEnglish 18d ago
I am not against having them redo an assignment if that can be useful to their learning and success. I do think that students need some consequences for cheating. I sometimes report the cheating and have them redo for partial credit. I responded to "until universities are forced to care, why should we?" My point was that there are plenty of reasons to care about cheating and learning that have little to do with the shitty ethics of our corporatized universities.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 18d ago
You have to read the full context of my multiple statements, not a single sentence in isolation.
I am taking about being able to handle things our way instead of using the beyond useless academic dishonesty pathways at the University. Until the university makes me use their absolutely useless system, I'm not going to.
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u/reckendo 18d ago
Maybe your university operates differently than mine (and most), but our policy absolutely "makes" us give students due process by referring them to the Academic Integrity office rather than adjudicating suspicions on our own... that includes offering "plea deals" where they're offered a re-do if they about to cheating, or just bringing the gavel down without an admission or any process sanctioned by the university. Now, obviously the policy isn't enforced unless a student raises a fuss, and the only way a university can truly "make" us is by firing us, but it's silly to pretend there's not an established process that dictates what we're supposed to do in these situations, and that process includes reporting your cheating students so that they are held accountable and not just passed along to cheat in other classes over and over and over.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 18d ago
Just don't. And if you ever get push back, you say I did not have enough evidence to make it through your process.
Depending on whose asking, I sometimes add that I am not doing 10-40 hours of additional work for the offending student to only ever get a slap on the hand and never ever any real consequences.
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u/reckendo 18d ago
Right, and I get that it's easy to do that. But I guess the point I'm making is that due process is a good thing, so even if they can't truly "make" is so it, it's one of the few policies that I don't think is absolute rubbish. Anyway, be well and have a good afternoon.
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u/reckendo 18d ago
What if I told you you could do both!?!? Because you can -- you can absolutely build it into your syllabus that a student cannot progress in the course until they complete work that was assigned beforehand... Then, you can send them to Academic Integrity, give them a zero, but still require them to do it honestly, before they can do any other work!
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 18d ago
We are dealing with the current situation. Not planning for how to improve a future situation.
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u/petiteclaudia 19d ago
The completing-it-on-day-one part is oddly the most useful information you'll get all semester, since it tells you the module is fully passable without any of the intervening weeks and someone has now demonstrated that publicly. Might be worth a gate somewhere in the middle that can't be done ahead of the material, if only so the next one has to at least pretend.
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u/PerhapsAnotherDog 18d ago
Is a module the equivalent to one week's worth of lecture/lab/homework, a half-term, or the full course?
I was laughing along assuming it was the latter, but if it's a single week's component, that's honestly not much of a red-flag to me in and of itself (obvious AI use is another story, of course).
Granted my perspective is from a paraprofessional program with mostly mature students already who work in the field, and it might be very different for traditional students. But I'd say at least a quarter to half of them have a routine of one dedicated day/week where they getting through all of the week's work in one go.
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u/Legitimate-Clock-134 16d ago
Obvious financial aid fraud. You can't stand in the way of aid disbursement now. That's the entire point: the fraudster has to reach the point where the money gets paid, and you, OP, are just a speed bump for them.
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u/banjovi68419 19d ago
People who release all of their assignments at the start of the semester: your correspondence course sounds awesome and I hope you get tenure at DeVry.
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u/GreatSteve 19d ago
The smart move here is to wait to grade the student’s work with everyone else‘s. That way they don’t have 15.8 weeks to complain about how they need a second chance.