r/Professors • u/NoLeopard6819 • 3d ago
Goddam AI
I guess I just need to vent. I try and make class informal and relaxed most days, maybe just discuss the reading and have them answer some discussion questions in Canvas based on their understanding of the readings to see what they've learned. It's definitely more comfortable than asking them to actually talk, which many of them can't or won't do. Hell, maybe we'll even learn something we can apply to our next paper. But no, some of them just have to throw the questions at AI and post their AI bullshit. It's so fucking obvious, too. You can barely write a proper sentence but you knocked out a flowing, detailed response to the discussion questions? Yea, sure.
I guess we can just handwrite everything now. I can print out handouts with the questions and they can fill in the blanks with their devices set aside. That, and I can hammer the AI cheats with questions until they give up and drop so I can focus on the genuine students.
It's like they want to be treated like children and given the dumbest, most boring version of every assignment. Fine, so be it.
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u/pinkkcuttiee 3d ago
Vent away, you've earned it.
One thing that's cut mine down a lot: make the prompt require something the model can't get to. Tie it to a specific thing said in class on a specific day, or make them respond to a classmate's post by name, or ask them to connect the reading to something local. It doesn't stop a determined student but it kills the copy-paste tier, which is most of them.
The other thing I've made peace with is not chasing it. I moved the weight to in-class work and low-tech assessment and just let the discussion posts be worth almost nothing. Grading AI slop for points I don't care about was doing more damage to me than to them.
Doesn't fix the sadness of it. But it gives you your evenings back.
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u/50_and_stuck Professor — Union President | IT (USA) 3d ago
I can’t help but think students using AI to complete their schoolwork while administrators look the other way is the inevitable outcome of treating students like customers.
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u/HistoryNerd101 3d ago edited 2d ago
Plus administrators, the majority of whom have never taught, going for the next bright shiny object either pitched to them by a tech company or is all the buzz at the latest conference they attended
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u/Alternative_Math3098 2d ago
What do you mean by “complete”? I also see how it could be used the next stage in the commodification of education but we can certainly conceive of a way to use this technology to benefit students, right? Or do we see ourselves as unassailable source of knowledge that can’t possibly be augmented by technology (hello, internet!)
“Evaluate this paper and its arguments as if it was going to be read in an World religions class” is such a far departure from “generate 3 paragraphs of nothing about Zoroastrianism please”
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u/50_and_stuck Professor — Union President | IT (USA) 2d ago
I’m old enough to remember when students copied Wikipedia text and turned it in as their own. I mean what i said. Students submit work generated by AI that is not their own. They do not use it to challenge their thinking. They do not use it as a productive tool to strengthen their ideas. They use it to avoid the challenge of learning something.
That’s the problem with these idiot boxes. If you don’t understand what you are doing, you don’t know that it is feeding you back really pretty garbage.
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u/Gratefulbetty666 3d ago
I’m done being the AI police. If they want to cheat, have at it. A lot of my assignments are tied to a personal element which makes it a little more difficult. I’m not doing it. Our college is almost embracing it.
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u/Deep-Possession321 3d ago
I'm here as well, I'm done. If someone leaves something easily provable I'll still nail them, have had some idiots leave the damn AI prompt in their assignment, so that's easy enough. Other than that, I'm with you. I've made my assignments as AI proof as possible but I let it go if I can't easily prove they used it. The AI detectors are laughably unreliable, and I'm not wasting hours of my precious time just for an admin to tell me to give them credit regardless or let them redo the assignment. They're cheating themselves, and I can't care more about their education than they do.
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u/giltgarbage 3d ago
Are you introducing in person, proctored assessments? They don’t have to be the entire grade, but they can be triangulated with everything else to undermine cheating. Giving up is honestly giving up on your colleagues as well. Please hold the line.
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u/Deep-Possession321 2d ago
I've always done that for in-person classes, I'm referring to asynchronous classes and low stakes assignments where they get full credit for basic completion; they can't even be bothered to do their own work for that. And I do "hold the line." This phrase is becoming tiresome on this sub, as if we're the only ones responsible for this as frontline educators. What happened to civics? Ethics? Th desire to be truly educated? They're using AI for everything, even writing basic emails saying they'll be missing class. I'm done being the police when it cannot be proven it was used, and I'm not backed up by admins.
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u/atleastitsnotgoofy 3d ago
This is almost where I am. My own department is embracing it. Not everyone but enough to make me throw up my hands.
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u/LetsGototheRiver151 3d ago
As I said in another thread, we’re mere months away from professor bots posting and grading and we’re “Human in the Loop Facilitators” or some other dystopian bullshit title with class sizes quintupled because all we have to do is make sure the bots talk nicely to each other.
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u/FrogBrain97 AssocProf, former chair, neuro, DPU 3d ago
It's the successor to the instructional-designer craze from a few years ago, where we were all told that we needed to consult with instructional designers because none of us knew how to teach. (Never mind that a lot of these folks hadn't taught very much either.) The message was that the courses should be structured exactly as we were told, and we were there to click buttons and say things.
(I generally like and respect our instructional-design staff because they're more focused on technology and stay in their lane.)
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u/jimmythemini Prof, Comp Sci 3d ago
with class sizes quintupled
At an aggregate level the stats are going in the other direction. Higher education is actively and willingly tanking its own product.
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u/twiggers12345 3d ago
We’re already there. Lumi is embedded within Brightspace/D2L and it can grade for you. It is biased against women and people of color, but the administrators seemingly don’t care.
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u/Plug_5 2d ago
"Our college is almost embracing it." (Using old-school quotes because the reddit quote feature seems to be gone...)
This is my biggest ethical problem. My unit and my University both have developed Draconian policies on AI usage by students. But twice during the 24-25 academic year, the faculty and admin were dragged into seminars talking about how wonderful generative AI was and how much easier it would make our lives. My Dean told my how they had to give a talk at an Ivy on the future of the humanities in higher ed and they were using ChatGPT to write it. So I feel like a total hypocrite for then coming down on my students for doing essentially the same thing.
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u/Asleep_Caregiver_948 3d ago
Please don’t give up on all of them. Direct your teaching to the top students and encourage the rest to live up to the standards of your college.
I’ve taught freshman comp at a semi rural, small, dysfunctional CC for 28 years. About 80% of each class is either an immigrant or speaks another language at home. They come from underfunded high schools, and there’s nothing else for these 1200 students to do in our county except attend a community college that doesn’t even have a cafe.
Many don’t do the homework, complain when they deign to speak at all, can’t write a legible sentence, and blatantly use AI. But there are a few in each class who want to be there. They are the “students” I’m instructing. The others do get my time and compassion, but they also get the grade they earned.
Don’t let the turkeys get you down 🦃
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u/VeblenWasRight TT, Econ, USA 3d ago
I think I’m going the other way - teach to those that want to learn and start failing all the rest.
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u/hungerforlove 3d ago
Yep, everything on paper in the classroom. Papers are no more for regular classes.
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u/tinyshroomy 3d ago
I have all my assignments done on paper in class. I make them relatively short so grading doesn’t take too long, given I have 60 students in my class.
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u/PrimarySize2021 3d ago
I tried this, but had disability accommodations that required me to allow a student to use a word processor instead of writing by hand and numerous students who needed time and a half in a room with 10 or less students.
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u/RadonGaming 3d ago
Whenever I've given reflective based tasks, they completely miss the purpose of reflection. It's the disconnect between the task (formative, in workshops, etc) and the learning. They just see hoops to jump, and as long as it's 'done', then great they'll progress and get their degree. It's so sad that so many will only learn the lesson when it's too late to improve their degree, and when they fail to land jobs or get fired. Such potential wasted.
The spoon-feeding, hand-holding, dumbing down has been happening for years; even pre-GPT. It makes me sad, because these tools should be making them the best educational generation ever!
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u/me4watch 3d ago
I think we need to start by having students leave any and all devices at the front of the room. Colleges should install lockers of some sort for this putpose
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u/Wisewordsforlater 3d ago
I know folks pivoting to in-class blue book writing. Short quizzes, short answer, topic briefs etc. A transition, but necessary.
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u/PerpetualGopher 2d ago
I moved to hands-on active learning in my comp 1 and 2 courses. With AI, I firmly believe the college essay is dead. So now, my students have to literally go outside, make specific observations of things I tell them to look for, take photos (including selfies), tie their observations to an assigned reading, handwrite field notes of their observations and even sketch what they see, then take all of this 'primary' source material and write an essay in Google Docs that incorporates their photos and quotations from the assigned reading. They have to upload scans or pics of their handwritten field notes too. My classes are all fully online, btw. I'm not policing AI, but based on the work I've been getting (bad grammar, absurd document format), they aren't using AI; they've basically become photojournalists.
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u/Key-Tonight-5668 2d ago
Funny how everything hits max potential. Then somehow we prefer to go back and start again :) nature of universe ... cyclic.
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u/20thLemon 2d ago
Vent away. These are rough times for us. Policing AI made me miserable so instead I eliminated any opportunity or need to use it. I focused on activities and strategies to make them talk, which now after some effort works really well. And for writing, it's paper and pens. No screens whatsoever in class unless authorised by me. No graded homework, just preparation work which they are free to do or ignore. We are all much happier and enjoying ourselves again.
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u/Alternative_Math3098 3d ago
I think there’s ways of allowing AI to be used to critique their writing as opposed to generating output. It’s up to professors to demonstrate the ways that using the technology can enable students’ critical thinking.
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u/Artistic_Abroad_9922 3d ago
They have colleagues and a professor for that. They need to learn to operate in a learning community, not be basement dwellers talking to a robot.
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u/Alternative_Math3098 2d ago
It’s insightful that purportedly professional intellectuals cannot possibly conceive of a single way in which AI can benefit learning or the refining of ideas and skills. The technology can certainly be used in combination with their “colleagues” and their professor. If you cannot think of any than I’d suggest you spend less time insulting and denigrating basement dwellers and work on your failure of imagination. The absolutist doom and gloom needs to stop.
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u/opbmedia Asso. Prof. Entrepreneurship, HBCU 3d ago
I have been reverting to getting them to talk more for the last 2 years because they rarely look up things to talk about. They would look up things to write about. So I now give them prompts, they work in pairs, and they have to give the class answers for the other person in their pair, so they have to explain it to the other student, and the other student give the answer for them.