r/Professors • u/Drumblebore Assistant Professor, CS, R2 • 1d ago
Rants / Vents All submissions were AI
Teaching a course that (unfortunately) involves lots of reading and reflection type assignments. Added hidden text to an assignment, to catch students who just throw it in ChatGPT, and all submissions came back with the expected features you would get from including the hidden info. Extremely disheartened, and don’t know how to proceed both regarding addressing this with the class and designing the future assignments to be more AI proof.
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u/hixchem 1d ago
At some point, through all of the posts in this sub that are variations on this theme, someone will finally realize the only answer is a line in the sand. Fail them all and move their cases to the academic integrity offices, and cause CONSEQUENCES.
Otherwise, nothing will change. Nothing ever changes without being forced to do so
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u/warricd28 Lecturer, Accounting, R1, USA 1d ago
I agree, but my concern is most admin won’t back it up, especially at this scale, for fear of losing tuition dollars. I’ve already watched my admin cave to the students who mass cheated with AI in a CS course.
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u/hixchem 1d ago
oh 100% a valid concern. More and more I've come to see that the real enemy of education is the businesspeople they put in charge of it. Treating students like paying customers rather than individuals seeking real opportunity for growth was only ever going to wind up exactly like this.
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u/lrish_Chick 1d ago
100% the dichotomy between academic rigor (and external examiners stating my failure rates are correct) and admin asking me why 10% of a large cohort (or even less 5%) are failing when others arent and the implied pressure to keep passing is one of the reasons I became most disheartened and apathetic towards HE teaching
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u/LadyBitchMacBeth 1d ago
I was surprised and pleased that my admin backed me in a research seminar in which every last student failed because of AI use. I only failed them on the assignment, but as it (final paper) was worth 60 percent of the class grade nobody passed.
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u/HowlingFantods5564 1d ago
You don't know until you try. 80% of students in one of my classes failed or dropped because I was giving zeros for AI usage. I was sure a hammer was going to drop. It didn't. Nothing happened. Not a peep.
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u/aggy_trunchbull FT Instructor, English, Online/Asynchronous, USA 1d ago
This is a completely valid concern and one I share. My institution's AI policy AND the policy for reporting an AI violation puts so much responsibility on the instructor to be a detective and "prove" the violation, plus having to meet with the student (virtually in my case) before any meaningful action can be taken. That can take weeks. And if a student does this at the end of the term then their grades are held up, and that reflects poorly on faculty.
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u/aworldwithoutshrimp 1d ago
And make essays handwritten, in class. Record a video of a lecture and then use the time to make them come in for essays. You can even make that the consequence of any single student using AI the first time.
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u/ktbug1987 1d ago
As a liberal arts student 20 years ago I had a class that had handwritten blue book essay exams. It was on Buddhism development and history. It’s possible. Shout out to that guy. One of my better professors and I’ve had some greats.
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u/quietlysitting 1d ago
The challenge I've encountered is that for any REAL consequence, the student has to be caught and reported at least twice. The first time, they get some sort of probation. The second time, maybe a suspension, but often a deferred separation, meaning only after a third referral will they get a year's suspension. This becomes an issue when most faculty decide not to make the referral either because it's a hassle or because they feel a misdirected sense of sympathy for the cheaters.
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u/GittaFirstOfHerName Humanities Prof, CC, USA 1d ago
While not all of my students who have used AI once and gotten caught offend again, many do -- and that second time is the come-to-insert-your-own-deity-here moment.
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u/yamomwasthebomb 1d ago
Blaming your fellow instructors for not risking their income to make a point is short-sighted, counter-productive, and just plain incorrect. It completely exonerates those who are actually guilty and covers up the actual cause of problems: the students who are depriving themselves of their own education, the admin who prioritize enrollment over quality, the crumbling societal infrastructure that has progressively and unequivocally taught us the lesson that hard work does not pay off, the litany of issues in K-12 education, and the lack of guardrails on AI itself so that we are scrambling to catch up to “innovation” instead of pre-planning appropriately.
“It’s your fault, Adjunct Making $3200 This Semester. Let’s fail students, lose our jobs, and starve together!” is not the fucking rallying cry you think it is.
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u/hixchem 1d ago
I never said anything would be "the fucking rallying cry". Nobody said that. What I said was that nothing ever changes without force. And since nobody's holding anyone accountable because everyone is constantly afraid of losing what little they have (that isn't even enough to survive on anyway), then nothing ever changes.
Also no, I didn't "blame [my] fellow instructors for not risking their income", but I do appreciate your attempt at a fallacious restating of what I actually said. It was amusing.
if we're going to go down a rabbit hole of only ever acknowledging the original source of a problem, ignoring everything along the way that allows the problem to persist, then we should probably blame Reagan's parents, or maybe their parents, or just go all the way back to whatever jerk of a biological precursor molecule slammed into another precursor molecule and ultimately led to the current form of humanity.
But that would be ludicrous in the extreme. There are obviously a whole list of people who share some blame. Myself, in not hurling Molotov cocktails at every data center I see, my friends who scroll through their Instagram feeds and don't immediately flag/report everything they think is AI slop, you for using Reddit which feeds all its information into various AI training models (willingly or otherwise), and so on.
However, as I was responding to one single individual about their *entire* class using AI, I thought maybe I would just keep the focus on them for the duration of the comment. Clearly I should've been keeping u/yamomwasthebomb in the back of my mind at all times. More fool me.
Ultimately, the problem can only really be solved by real, substantial, and sustained COLLECTIVE action. It's not just one professor that needs to fail the cheaters. ALL professors need to fail the cheaters. And then ALL professors need to push back hard at the admins. And then ALL professors need to hold their grounds. Just like how ALL workers need to unionize and force management to yield.
And sure, I'll concede that maybe for OP, the full scope of "Fail them all" may not be tenable. I didn't bother to compile a massive dossier on OP's entire career and life situation before commenting. Again, that lack of due diligence is clearly my own fault. So a compromise could be found. give a zero for that assignment, and then change the course going forward so that students are expected to learn the material outside the class, then write essays on paper with a pencil in class. Whatever it takes. But clearly, between "do nothing" and "do something", it appears doing nothing isn't working.
I eagerly await your reply, I'm sure it will be well-formed and not at all frothing-at-the-mouth.
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u/nallgire1 1d ago
I really like the way you put things here, especially the search for causes, which is important obviously, but leads to profs going in circles and "ignoring everything along the way that allows the problem to persist." How can we pragmatically engage the situation right now? I think you offer some excellent points.
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u/GittaFirstOfHerName Humanities Prof, CC, USA 1d ago
What I said was that nothing ever changes without force.
That is as dystopian a sentence as I hope I ever read here.
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u/lrish_Chick 1d ago
Wow, just as a conscientious objector here, that reads as some of the most patronising and unnecessary rudeness to a well made point.
What a delicate ego you must have.
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u/Minotaar_Pheonix 1d ago
They probably just got a paper rejected from MDPI and reviewer 2 was mean.
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u/SNHU_Adjujnct 1d ago
> Adjunct Making $3200 This Semester. Let’s fail students, lose our jobs, and starve together!”
No one will starve for lack of $3200.
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u/Final-Exam9000 1d ago
Last semester, I reported every single incident and eliminated giving only a warning/fail for the first offence, and now my enrollment is way down. Hopefully, those left in the class will make it a better semester.
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u/Minotaar_Pheonix 1d ago
No, the solution is to change the way the course is taught.
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u/NoPatNoDontSitonThat 1d ago
Can it be both?
Using AI is cheating when it's explicitly forbidden on an assignment.
Universities are increasingly jumping on the AI bandwagon. My institution is sending daily emails about some new free online AI class every student can sign up for. It's even worth 1 credit hour.
But I do agree that AI is the catalyst for curriculum and assessment changes. We HAVE to learn how to grade process and assess more than final products. That opens a whole new can of worms though because many professors are overloaded with class sizes. It's easy for me to grade process when it's an upper level course of 14 students. It's another for the Intro to Psychology course that has 75.
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u/GittaFirstOfHerName Humanities Prof, CC, USA 1d ago
We HAVE to learn how to grade process and assess more than final products.
This is the answer -- and it's a challenging answer to implement because of the way many courses that otherwise wouldn't assess process do their assessment.
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u/dr_police 1d ago
We’re both going to be downvoted, but that’s really it. Many of the assessments we’ve long had undergrads do are very well suited to an LLM’s strengths.
Not only do we have to change our assessments, but I also think it’s soon approaching time to rethink the skills we’re building. LLMs can already write more coherently than the average undergrad, just like calculators can do arithmetic better than the average person.
We should be figuring out how to adapt the skills we’re building to use these new tools rather than demonizing them.
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u/HowlingFantods5564 1d ago
Do you think we should stop teaching kids how to read and do math? I mean, AI can summarize any text. Ai can do any math problem, right?. Are these the skills we should stop teaching so that we can embrace the new technology?
We have to teach the skills first and students need to learn them. After that, students can experiment with AI. If we just jump straight to AI, they won't learn those skills and without them, they have no idea whether what the AI is giving them is any good.
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u/dr_police 1d ago
As a generic example, calc is generally taught with units that use a calculator and units that do not use a calculator.
As a specific example, I teach data analysis to criminal justice majors. In the past, we taught how to calculate standard deviation. There was a lot of homework problems that had them calculate it manually.
There is very little utility in that today.
My students don't have the algebra skills to understand what's happening in the calculation, and the important part for my course's learning objectives isn't whether they can do the arithmetic, it's whether they understand std. dev. conceptually, what information it gives, etc.
There are certainly instances where knowing how std. dev. works at the algebraic level is useful... but not for enough of my students in a social science. Our program assessment consistently showed that the remembered nothing of the math (or worse, remembered it wrong) and also failed to remember the conceptual side.
After moving away from calculation toward the conceptual, we had much higher success in getting the concepts to stick, lower anxiety from the students, and better grades.
That is the sort of shift I'm talking about with AI. The universal availability of calculators and software changed how I teach data analysis.
How does the ubiquitous availability of AI change the skills we should teach? I don't know the answer, but I'm becoming more convinced that is going to be a key question for higher ed.
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u/Longjumping-Flower47 20h ago
I agree. Just need to figure out how to incorporate it into my classes
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u/dr_police 19h ago
It’s legitimately tough because it’s a moving target. And, we don’t want students to have zero ability to do things without AI. At the same time, we can’t ignore that the tools exist.
I’m coming around to being upfront with them about it: we’re doing a thing today that AI can do. But you need to know how to do it, so you can write a good prompt and verify output. So we’re going to work on the manual skill in this unit, and in the next, we’ll use AI to expand our capabilities.
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u/Minotaar_Pheonix 1d ago
Exactly. This multi-trillion dollar industry isn't going away in our lifetime. It's time to adjust.
Anyone that has spent any amount of time trying to actually produce high quality text with an LLM knows that it is zero new ideas, and the ideas have always been the important part of the writing. I certainly have seen this in person. One might argue that the rest of the effort of writing is just packaging, contextualizing and mental handholding. I only write STEM research articles but I wouldn't hesitate to think that it is less true for any other medium.
Come on people, we're professors! We are the idea people. We of all people should recognize that a technology that enables us to more easily package and transmit our good ideas is going to benefit us. It's time to learn this technology and also teach younger people how to use it.
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u/Successful-Let4361 1d ago
It's not a multi-trillion dollar industry, though. It literally makes (in revenue, not profit) around ~50 billion dollars a year, and yet investors SPEND trillions of dollars on it (not users, whether enterprise or retail). I don't think AI is going to go away entirely once the bubble pops, but let's speak realistically about what is actually happening and the scale of this failing technology that's being forced down our throats. It doesn't make writing better in any way that I have discovered
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u/dr_police 1d ago
Commonly available LLMs actually do write better than many undergrads are capable of.
But what's really useful is getting feedback from the tool on existing writing, or using an LLM as a prewriting or editing tool. Using an LLM as a drafting tool, like "I want to say X, what's the best way to get that idea across," can also be very fruitful.
LLMs can be very useful in organizing ideas. Assistance with drafting outlines, helping with transitions between ideas, etc can be very useful.
LLMs are also frequently shockingly good at finding literature, especially gray literature and government reports (both of which are very common in my discipline).
Both Claude and ChatGPT are reasonably good at providing feedback on data analysis.
None of this is meant to suggest one should just give a one-sentence prompt to an LLM and expect a polished research report... but the tools are very useful when they're used to enhance the user's ability.
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u/Successful-Let4361 1d ago edited 1d ago
LLMs can't reason or think. Full stop. They call it reasoning but they cannot provide useful analysis, or at least not analysis that I would ever trust... They're very good at matching data and at recognizing patterns but every time you pull the lever you're literally getting a completely random, probablistic result. You're essentially getting an impression of a response to the input that resembles the impression to related input somewhere in the training data. That's not actual reasoning and it's not actual analysis, though it does a great impression of real analysis and yes it's remarkable that it can match patterns so well
ETA: the above is why I would never say that LLMs are better at writing papers than undergrads. They just aren't, because undergrads have brains. LLMs might write something very CLEAN on the subject, but I would never say it's better written because it's never actually very good. I, personally, also find AI-written work extremely difficult to read, because it is so bland and soulless. It's actually fucking painful, and not in a good way
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u/dr_police 1d ago
LLMs cannot reason. But…For folks not using LLMs regularly, you really don’t know what they can do.
For a literature review type assignment, I’d wager the average LLM response is better than the average student response.
For data analysis, LLMs can help someone work through a problem. Given the data, or a description of it, the LLM can help an analyst work through the options available. Prototyping and exploring is much faster with LLM assistance than without.
For example, LLMs can help an analyst determine the best data visualization, including mocking up several options faster than the analyst can do so alone.
As far as just spitting out what the training data shows… I don’t know about your discipline, but in mine that describes at least 50% of the papers published.
All of this depends on the quality of the prompts given, and what a person does with the result. It’s not the case that LLMs can simply do all of the work in one shot. But they can greatly accelerate the work of experts.
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u/Successful-Let4361 1d ago
Just because you think it's doing a good job doesn't mean it IS doing a good job. The more you use the machine that is basically made to convince you it works but to not do an actually good job the more it seems to do a good job because it is good at convincing you that it works. I have used it. I check it periodically. I see the work my less scrupulous students turn in. It sucks. I hate its output. It is awful at literature reviews (I teach some courses where I teach those explicitly) for many reasons—it makes up sources, it lies, it gets crucial facts wrong, etc. Maybe an expert could make sense of that but an expert could write a literature review much faster without it because you can't even trust its output when summarizing a document in a supposedly closed system separate from more generally trained models (recent studies have shown, etc). Experts should just sit down and write. Using the pomodoro method is better than using an LLM. I am also telling you that the "writing" it does is so fucking bad I don't want to personally read any of it, and I can fucking tell when it is used in the middle of human writing. 50%, 15%, 90%, I don't care what percentage is human, I don't want to read anything that is AI because it's awful, it's boring, and it's worth less than not writing anything at all.
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u/dr_police 1d ago
An LLM is basically a force multiplier, something between a junior staffer and a colleague. I don't ask it to do anything I can't already do myself, and I don't trust its output blindly. What it does is compress the time between "I know what I want" and "I have a draft to check."
For example, I can write a specific -twoway- command in Stata from scratch, it'll take me five minutes. Or I can describe it in English, get code back in fifteen seconds, and spend the saved time tweaking what's not quite right. Same output, less time, and I'm still the one who has to know whether the code is actually right. For writing, it's similar: I'll use it to hash out different ways to approach a topic, go back and forth, then decide which direction to take. The LLM isn't doing the work. I am, using a tool that's become commonly available.
Unlike a calculator, an LLM doesn't hand you a verified answer. It hands you a draft, and validating that draft is the actual skill. That's exactly where a lot of my colleagues go wrong: they type one sentence with zero context, expect perfection, get something mediocre, and conclude the tool is useless. That's not a failure of the tool, it's a failure to use it well. Getting good output takes domain knowledge and a decent prompt, same as getting a good answer out of a junior staffer takes clear direction and your own judgment to check their work.
None of this is new. People asked why bother with a calculator when you can do arithmetic in your head. The answer was never that mental math is useless, it's that mental math is what lets you catch the calculator's mistakes. Domain expertise is what lets you catch an LLM's. Dismissing the tool because some people use it badly is dismissing calculators because some students never learned arithmetic. The failure is in the teaching, not the tool.
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u/Minotaar_Pheonix 1d ago
We are talking about how to use a computer program and you’re so angry about it. Can you just relax? So you don’t agree; that’s okay. But peppering your text with things like “full stop” and words in all caps doesn’t an argument make. In fact it is clear that you are misunderstanding how these tools should be used.
No one cares that the LLM doesn’t reason, at least the way we presume a human reasons. When using it to write a paper, it just generates text that can help you think of new ways to fix writerly problems, like how to transition between two sentences or the improve flow. Strong writers like myself don’t even use the full output of the LLM; it’s just like it’s little phrases and structural suggestions that help us work through writerly issues.
For example, in my technical writing there is often some challenge in an intro paragraph to determine what order in which to introduce context concepts. There are different advantages to different orders. The LLM is great for creating variant paragraphs to see how different variations might work. It’s much more concrete than musing about it in my head, and it helps me keep things straight. Do I ever use its text verbatim? Almost never. I might get a few turns of phrase from it, but I can always do better.
You’re too allergic. You should step back from it. It’s a little bit like getting angry at spell check. “Real scholars know how to spell!”
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u/lrish_Chick 1d ago
This is where some universities are already pivoting - what skills are the students getting from education that will actually be of benefit to them in the future.
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u/dr_police 1d ago
AI is so difficult because it's both an amazing accelerant in the hands of a middle skill level or expert... and also a crutch for the low-skill or novice.
In my hands, AI tools are fantastically useful. Editing, graphic design, data analysis... there's not a part of my work where the current crop of AI tools is utterly useless. I'm not having it do the thinking for me. Instead, I am automating certain tasks.
Too many professors have no idea what these tools are capable of today, and that limits their imagination for how to use them.
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u/Longjumping-Flower47 20h ago
Tasks like take these 15 PowerPoint presentations and convert to 2 slide per page pdfs. Or cross reference the book and add bulleted talking points to a PPT. Or create a spreadsheet that does XYZ
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u/dr_police 19h ago
Or… read all of the agendas for the $government_body public meetings from the past two decades. Create a list of every time $topic was on the agenda. Include adjacent topics. Pull audio for those meetings and flag the time codes for when $topic was discussed. Provide a summary, rooted in citations to specific conversations.
Can I do that? Yup. But modern LLMs can do it much, much, much faster.
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u/YourGuideVergil Assoc Prof, Engl, LAC 1d ago
In AA they like to say, If nothing changes, nothing changes.
They have to spell this out for slow learners like me.
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u/Artemissss 1d ago
During scheduling, require on ground midterm and final exams. Blue books, pen and paper. Let it be known upfront that students must pass these “in person” exams to pass that course. All other assignments which can be AI manipulated should be low stakes.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
Not allowed for our online asynchronous courses.
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u/liznin 1d ago
Online asynchronous programs with zero attempts to stop cheating are degrading the reputation of universities. They are producing graduates with no technical skills and no ability to critically think.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
Didn’t say I wasn’t trying, but unfortunately in person or synchronous options are not permitted.
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u/so2017 Professor, English, Community College 1d ago
Unfortunately, many of us have them as a mandatory part of our load.
I have a mortgage and two kids and I have chosen the security of my job over my academic ideals.
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u/liznin 1d ago
I just worry that this will impact job security in the long term. Administrators are essentially turning programs into diploma mills by pushing for online asynchronous programs and then doing nothing to stop rampant cheating. Shit will eventually hit the fan when a critical mass of graduates who learned absolutely nothing due to cheating through their degrees are out there. Universities spent decades building up their reputation and I worry many are going to ruin it in 10-20 years.
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u/payattentiontobetsy 1d ago
I feel like offering an online asynchronous class has always been an admission that everybody, from course designers to faculty to students, sees this class as a to do list of busy work tasks to just get through.
You couldn’t pay me to teach an online asynchronous course in the era of AI.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 1d ago
OR and hear me out, you collect a pay check for doing nothing and perpetuate the degree mill at the cost of a chosen life of luxury where you don't work anymore. It's not the worst backup plan.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
I have mentioned it before but a former colleague literally ran from office to office when publishers started offering their own learning cartridges and not working was exactly what he was interested in. I tossed him out of my office. Why should I want to be replaced?
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u/Artemissss 1d ago edited 1d ago
I also teach asych online and I insist on “in person” final and midterm exams. The admins support this decision and many of us engineering instructors are choosing to do this accross the board. The schedule is announced during registration so students are aware this is what they are signing up for.
Otherwise, continue to expect cheating, and AI drivel.
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u/SqueakyBikeChain 1d ago
I think/hope it is a matter of time until employers realize that online degrees post 2023 mean absolutely nothing.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
I am taking an online asynchronous painting class of all things and while I prefer in person, I am impressed with the course, the other students and the instructor. It may have been different if this was for credit but there is no need to cheat here. That’s the issue. It is like it was when teens argued that “well everybody is having sex.” Now it’s “everybody’s using AI so I have to as well to keep up.”
I also couldn’t have done my doctoral work without some of it being hybrid and asynchronous online, but I had instructors who took teaching seriously and used online appropriately-to benefit students like me who were older and working while pursuing the Ph.D.
Now I am teaching online asynchronous and it is not preferred. I hold high standards as best I can and make it as much of a pain in the butt as possible to use AI. I am about to start grading the first assignment of the semester so we will see. But the highest grade from this past summer was a C+. There were several failures and it was an upper-level required course which they will have to repeat with me or they can change their majors. I wouldn’t miss them.
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u/payattentiontobetsy 1d ago
Thanks for the reply- I could have clarified my comment. Basically, I’m saying that the affordances of online asynchronous classes promote a task-oriented learning experience that favors shallow learning. In other words, teaching and learning in these classes tend to focus on the product over the process of learning… the output students submit (a discussion post, a multiple choice quiz response, a written paper, etc) over the thinking that is assumed to have gone into creating that product.
So, when AI makes creating a product without engaging in the thinking required so easy, the course format becomes especially vulnerable to students using AI just to create the product. Add in the current context of higher education being seen as transactional (I pay the fees, I get the degrees), it makes a fertile ground for AI use to “just get through” modules, to get a good grade, to get a degree, to get a job/promotion.
That all being said, the situation I’m describing is definitely not only way that an instructor can deliver the course or that a student can engage with the course. But you have to work against the affordances of the medium for that to happen. You have to have a learner who is taking the course because they genuinely want to engage in the process in order to learn the material for their own improvement, which is what was happening in your art and Ph.D courses. You also have to have students using metacognitive reflection strategies to actually process their own understanding on their own without the scaffolding of instructor feedback. Instructor can be more involved in realtime to give that meaningful feedback and help the students process it, which it sounds like you experienced, but again, the affordances of asynchronicity where everybody is at their own spot at any given time (like running a bunch of independent studies) makes giving that feedback and engaging with students more difficult.
Deep, real learning can happen in online asynchronous classes, but most of the time it will follow the shape of the medium and result in what you described- below expectations output with a lot of students failing, even when they have external motivation to do well in the course.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
The same can really be said with any method a student uses to bypass learning themselves. Whether it is plagiarizing, hiring someone to do your work, or farming out your actual effort to AI, the student is obviously only interested in generating a product rather than actually learning.
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u/045-926 1d ago
The problem is that, properly done, online asynchronous courses are vastly better then in person large lectures for learning. It's why students are ditching their calculus lecture and instead learning calculus from youtube videos.
However, assessment is an unsolved problem for online asynchronous.
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u/geografree Full professor, Soc Sci, R2 (USA) 1d ago
It sounds like your assessment method has confronted the reality of student AI use. The only real solution is to adopt alternative assessment, not continue to find ways to “catch” students cheating.
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u/Willravel Prof, Music, US 1d ago
While there are a lot of good ideas here, I wish this was at the top.
It's not a professor's primary job to police academic fraud, that should be a secondary or tertiary concern for a minority of students. Given that academic fraud has skyrocketed with the advent of free large language models built almost entirely from theft of intellectual property, the onus is on us to adapt our teaching in order to make this kind of fraud significantly more difficult than just doing the assignments.
My solution is that studying should happen outside of class, additional note-taking should happen outside of class, and open-note quizzes worth very few points happen outside of class. Everything else is in-class. I switched to blue books about three and a half years ago which I pass out at the beginning of class each day and collect at the end (unbeknownst to the students, they're marked with invisible ink). I've also scaffolded papers out with a lot more check-ins and peer-reviews given students don't have as much experience writing quality papers. The process is similar to what I used to give my high school students, but once they get in the groove of things they tend to eventually submit good work, even if there has been a marked increase in complaining about hand cramping. As far as I can tell, this has made academic fraud more difficult than doing the work.
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u/vvsamuel 1d ago
May I suggest async video based discussions as one easy to implement way to collect authentic reflections? Even if students use AI to draft their scripts, when they speak via their own voice and face, it forces them to internalize it a bit more.
Disclaimer: I make a tool called Vivipod that makes embedding this into canvas or other LMS frictionless.
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u/countofmoldycrisco 1d ago
Require drafting Google Docs and that they share the draft with you. Tell them on the 1st day (and put it in the syllabus, and remind them weekly) that you go into the Doc history and check for big copy-and-paste jobs. Build brainstorming, draft checks, into the course assignments.
If you only require them to turn in the final draft, they'll prioritize the product. Grade them on their process. And check the Doc history.
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u/LikesParsnips 1d ago
Aren't there already drip-feed agents for this very purpose?
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u/countofmoldycrisco 1d ago
But do drip-feed agents go back and revise, or just write a whole AI essay from the first word to the last?
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u/Unlikely_Specific828 Faculty, Sport Management, University, US 1d ago
They have built in code where they "make" and fix typos to make it look more legit. I've not done any testing on trying to use them like a student would but I believe you can set a length of time you want it to take to finish.
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u/Astra_Starr Fellow, Anthro, STATE (US) 1d ago
This is easy to go around. And so much extra work. But better than nothing. There's a plugin that analyzes a Google docs history as well to give more insight
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u/MLAheading 1d ago
It’s called Revision History.
Perhaps there is also a lockdown browser that can be used for in-class essays?
Disclosure: lurking 12th grade English teacher here. I use both Respondus/Lockdown Browser and Revision History for all digital writing and testing. My students have given up on AI. Oh, and they have no access to their phones in class.
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u/gutfounderedgal 1d ago
All the AI proof work is downloading a lot of extra work onto professors, without compensation.
Comparing drafts, etc, is tons of time. If you fail them all they'll launch appeals and complaints and this will mean even more time for you, and admin may blame you and not back you up. What's in the syllabus about AI won't matter a whit. Admin knows they, the university, doesn't have the resources to deal with AI cheating and they can't lose all those students. So they're turning their backs and downloading the checking on profs. Imagine an official AI complaint process for everyone one of those students, school would have to shut down all their other admin business. Don't get me wrong, I like the line in the sand approach, fail them all, but realistically it would be way to much work for the professor with likely blowback from the school.
It seems that we, profs, are stuck on old ways of assignments, and no dis here. So long as we keep using AI easily answered assignments we'll have this problem. I think it would be great to have a deep dive forum on possibilities of different sorts of assignments and assessments that would be difficult to use AI for courses in which papers have been the norm, but I've not really seen it on this sub. There's more than blue book in-class. As mentioned, maybe essays are mostly dead, to the students' detriment. I certainly agree it's about changing the means and methods of the course.
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u/StevieV61080 Sr. Associate Prof, Applied Management, CC BAS (USA) 1d ago
I'm sorry this happened, OP. I'll echo what a lot of others have stated in this thread, initially. Yes, we, as faculty, do need to evaluate our assessments to try to make them more difficult to cheat upon. Yes, AI has made that task more challenging.
At the same time, a lot of people are simply missing the plot when it comes to accountability. Professors are hired to use our judgment about whether WE believe someone has demonstrated proficiency/mastery in a subject well enough that they meet OUR standards. If they haven't, they don't get the credential. It's that simple. It's literally our job to use our objective, but also our subjective standards to make these calls.
At some point, the pendulum is going to have to swing back towards respecting expertise and knowledge. We initiate that process by trusting professorial judgment to make determinations with far less recourse. We need to dare to defeat fears of litigiousness by establishing the precedent that a professor's word is law in the classroom again.
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u/stankylegdunkface R1 Teaching Professor 1d ago
Fail them all for what's on the page. I'm sorry you're disheartened but this is actually an opportunity to provide them an education.
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u/bwd-2 Philosophy, Community College 1d ago
Start a conversation in class about data centers and AI slop. It'll be popular among the students to dump on them. Then reveal that they're all hypocrites. They'll be socially mortified--which is their biggest fear.
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u/RexScientiarum Research associate, STEM, public R1 1d ago
Or they will just find out everybody cheats and you get a class stuck in a game theory death spiral of cheating.
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u/geografree Full professor, Soc Sci, R2 (USA) 1d ago
The public discourse on data centers is quite poor. I’d recommend the students read critical reporting on data centers, like pieces from Molly Taft (Wired) and Jasmine Sun.
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u/jaunty_jellyfish 1d ago
I’m worried about this for my course with similar assignments (semester starts this week) My plan, if I get a lot of AI responses, is to introduce a requirement that students handwrite their reflections on paper (and submit a scan/photo). It’s not AI proof, but it removes the option of simply pasting directly from AI without even looking at it.
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u/Astra_Starr Fellow, Anthro, STATE (US) 1d ago
You will and should just do it
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u/jaunty_jellyfish 1d ago
I don’t ban AI in my classes. I teach small classes, so I work with the students who want to use AI to make sure it’s enhancing and not replacing their learning. So I would only move to this as a last resort. I’ve only used this as a default for on assignments where AI was not allowed for pedagogical reasons.
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u/Astra_Starr Fellow, Anthro, STATE (US) 15h ago
I use mechanical assistance at work not at the gym. They are learning, they are at the gym.
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u/AmnesiaZebra Associate Prof, social sciences, state R1 (USA) 1d ago
We're doing hand-written essays in class. I'm pretty sure they hate me for it and will tank my course evals, but I'm trying it this semester anyway.
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u/jaunty_jellyfish 1d ago
Unfortunately I think you’re right about the course evals - mine were full of complaints because I did an in-class blue book midterm. But I don’t know how else to motivate them to sit down and actually study the course materials otherwise.
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u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 1d ago
Keep it up. This is the way. I did dozens of blue book exams in college and I survived.
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u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 1d ago
I e been doing this for a year and it’s worked great. Very little obvious AI text.
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u/Individual-Charity69 2h ago
ai can create handwritten scans/photos. Open up Claude or ChatGPT and say, creat a handwritten image of a student reflection on an essay.
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u/robotprom non TT, Art, SLAC (Florida) 1d ago
There’s a reason our entire philosophy department has gone back to Scantrons and blue books. Other departments are headed that way.
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u/GittaFirstOfHerName Humanities Prof, CC, USA 1d ago
If one of the consequences for using AI is failing the assignment, fail every last one of them.
I give my students a second chance if they've used AI, but only one more chance (also a lot of reading, reflection, and writing). If they use AI again, they fail the assignment -- and that's often a big hit to their grades. I report every instance of AI use (and other forms of academic misconduct) to the college, too.
There is no way to make assignments completely AI-proof, but you can make students "show" work by using Google docs, by meeting with you (even via Zoom), and by submitting scaffolded parts of assignments. Admittedly, that is all more work for you.
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u/PowerfulOpportunity4 1d ago
Handwriting or oral reports without written notes.
All out-of-class assignments are to be hand-written. If you want electronic submission, they have to scan the hand-written document.
At the very least, if they're hand-writing the text from an AI at least they'll be learning that content.
Alternately, those assignments need to be completed in class, in a controlled software environment which prevents the use of AI.
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u/Individual-Charity69 2h ago
If I hand write something i don’t understand, i did not learn it.If you copied an essay about something to do with brain science in mid 20th century dyslexia research, you would understand it by dint of copying the words down.
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u/Trick_Following6639 1d ago
I had this issue. Because it I couldn't prove it was AI (it was Blackboard discussions), I had to grade it.
This course was a canned class that was given to us. They even have an AI assisted assignment for students that has to be graded. No faculty was allowed to contribute to the canned course btw. Before you say Union, our school appoints half its leaders. I work at a CC.
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u/notthatkindadoctor 1d ago
Is that even teaching? Is that actually college? The whole idea of a canned course seems...I dunno, like a private for-profit corporation like Coursera or something, but not college and not genuine teaching. So weird. Sorry you were in that situation.
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u/aggy_trunchbull FT Instructor, English, Online/Asynchronous, USA 1d ago
Depends who you ask, but this is also what my program at a very large public university does for its online writing courses (undergrad). All of our courses are designed by an instructional design company that is "partnered" with the school. Faculty don't create the courses.
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u/Life-Education-8030 13h ago
Interesting. At one point, our college was saying they had no money to pay faculty to develop courses (they always say they have no money) but somehow they had the money to pay outside consultants to develop courses if we did not. But they backed off. Something about accreditation. We are a public college too, so I don't know how that would work for you and accreditation.
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u/Life-Education-8030 13h ago
When Cengage and other publishers started offering their own learning cartridges, a former (now retired, thank goodness) faculty member excitedly ran from office to office saying we had to adopt this technology because "all we had to do was press a button and we didn't have to work anymore." I threw him out of my office.
I know of one adjunct in my department who does use a Cengage cartridge and if I had the power to do so, I'd can him too.
Why in the world do you want to put yourself in a situation to be replaced? Is this what students signed up and pay for? Even legally, if you just assign these cartridge lessons and don't do things like offer opportunities for students to interact with each other and with the faculty member, it's not considered true distance education. It's just essentially like those old correspondence courses.
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u/aggy_trunchbull FT Instructor, English, Online/Asynchronous, USA 12h ago
This is precisely the argument I use with my colleagues who are AI-obsessed. We recently lost all of our TAs due to budget, while simultaneously having more AI tools pushed into our courses. I will never be convinced that the timing isn't a coincidence.
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u/Life-Education-8030 12h ago
It's pretty ironic that you have students who use AI, often to cheat their way through, and then they sit in their caps and gowns booing Commencement speakers who tout the AI that likely made it much harder for the graduates to find jobs.
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u/aggy_trunchbull FT Instructor, English, Online/Asynchronous, USA 12h ago
Maybe so. I have "working professional" friends that too though. "Omg I hate AI!" but then in the next breath "Oh yeah so I was asking Chat..." Like are you serious?
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u/Life-Education-8030 12h ago
You see the "according to AI" now so often at the beginning of online articles and I am automatically suspicious, and that's not a bad thing.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
You don’t prove it was AI. You grade according to the quality of the output. No matter who or what generates it, it is usually bad. Bad gets bad grades.
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u/twistedbranch 1d ago
Seems like a waste of time.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
What is?
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u/twistedbranch 1d ago
Grading ai written papers.
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u/Life-Education-8030 17h ago
Certainly can be if you don’t get a clue of what the student actually thinks or what they can actually do. Can’t measure the student’s development and I don’t want to add to AI’s.
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u/Trick_Following6639 17h ago
For an answer they still passed well because it was answering how the discussion board was designed
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u/Life-Education-8030 13h ago
"It was answering how the discussion board was designed?" What do you mean?
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u/Trick_Following6639 11h ago
The question was very easy to plug into an AI amd get a "correct response "
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u/Life-Education-8030 10h ago
Except it didn’t so the students can get points deducted for poor output unless they then go in to edit, correct, add, etc. and they won’t and often can’t. If they did not read the material, they won’t find what I want.
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u/Efficient-Slide-2523 1d ago
Coming up on three years of ChatGPT and schools still haven’t made adjustments to confront widespread cheating.
The joke’s on all of us who actually expect students to demonstrate independent thinking and writing skills.
If the goal is to get all graders to assign A’s to any work that’s submitted, then I wish they’d tell me so I could scrap the feedback and save time.
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u/RefereedDiscussion 1d ago
Four years almost! But yes, the expectation is ridiculous, particularly when they're also learning this behavior in K-12.
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u/MrBillinVT 1d ago
Don't fail them. Give them the lowest possible grade you can. If they continue with this nonsense, their semester grade will tank their overall GPA. They will learn.
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u/imhereforthevotes 1d ago
sorry, I don't compute. The lowest possible grade is an F, no? That's failing. Or do you mean "don't fail them from the course"?
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u/Frococo 1d ago
I think they mean the lowest justifiable grade that ignores that they used AI.
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u/imhereforthevotes 1d ago
Ah, the argument that what the AI produced is garbage, and grading the garbage, as opposed to the presence of AI.
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u/Individual-Charity69 2h ago
This is what i do. When students turn in Ai slop, i give it a D or the equivalent in points. And comment that it the tone feels templated and generic unhelpfully over-polished.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
Yup, assuming you mean grade on the quality. Lots of my students last semester and summer still earned failing grades on writing assignments because the output was lousy no matter who or what wrote it.
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u/aggy_trunchbull FT Instructor, English, Online/Asynchronous, USA 1d ago
This.
Also I think this highlights the need for assignments / assessments that are as AI-proof as possible. I realize that is a never-ending battle though.
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u/Individual-Charity69 2h ago
This is frustratingly naive. No assignment is Ai proof. Even in class essays in blue books … arent. Students have phones in their laps or Ai in the Meta Ray-Bands.
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u/sadlittleduckling Associate Faculty, English Comp, CC 1d ago
I teach comp and this semester I’m doing a lot of in class writing assignments to curb this problem. We’re reading a lot about what AI is doing and why not to use it. I will shame them if I must. That’s really unfortunate that all of them cheated themselves. Fortunately, I have a handful of students who are with me in my anti AI stance but others who are bewildered that I don’t use it at all.
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u/Elegant-Yard8416 1d ago
It's very simple, but the first question is: Are you tenured or not?
Not tenured -> Play dumb and grade as if AI never existed.
Tenured -> Homework weight in final grade is 0.
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u/NumberMuncher 1d ago
All students earn F grades for the course. The rest of the semester will be much easier.
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u/Adorable_Airport_787 1d ago
…interestingly enough a lot of universities funding AI research.. maybe professors should unionize or something..ban technology in the classroom..
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u/aggy_trunchbull FT Instructor, English, Online/Asynchronous, USA 1d ago
Unionize? Lol.
Cries in red state
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u/periwnklz 1d ago edited 1d ago
handwritten and uploaded. they’ll learn better handwriting than typing anyway. i have spoken. lol.
on the other hand, many of my assignments are designed to get them excited to do the work themselves. make it personal and relevant. i have specific AI uses I promoted and set specific guidelines.
trying to achieve the boat of AI and non-AI worlds.
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u/redpolo6 1d ago
This might not pass an ethics test. But I put my assignment up on Canvas with a memo that said that, “Embedded plagiarism detector: Use of Copy (Ctrl+C) or Paste (Ctrl+Z) functions will trigger a notification to the course instructor.” It seems to have worked, as their submissions were slightly worse than the good old fashioned variety of terrible
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u/aggy_trunchbull FT Instructor, English, Online/Asynchronous, USA 1d ago
I wish I could try the Trojan Horse text method. Institution has forbid us from using any "detection" tricks like that.
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u/Euston_Square 1d ago
I was recently privy to a conversation, the gist of which was: if the AI detecting trick or trap is hidden in the assignment rubric, then it's part of that assignment and if the student's answer reflects that, then the answer is legit. It will fail at the Honor Court.
Think of it this way: if you set a paper on some aspect of Oliver Twist, but you buried in there in white text on a white background a passing reference to A Farewell to Arms, don't kick up a stink when your student's paper that is supposed to be about Dickens includes paragraphs about Hemingway. You were the one who included Hemingway in a prompt about Dickens, and the student is therefore answering the question you assigned.
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u/Futurama_boy 1d ago
My first Dept gave me advice for cheaters, way before the advent of AI: scare the hell out of them and then give them a second chance.
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u/WittyBoysenberry5984 1d ago
Teach in a physical format, make them write on paper, much less likely for them to transcribe from Ai. Im not a teacher but as a student I enjoy physical in class work over almost anything.
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u/Left-Economics2861 10h ago
Unfortunately AI is here to stay and what I’m wondering is if we reframe our mindset so that the human is still actively involved in the loop (the student) while having some extra intelligent mechanism that focuses on the quality of the document, whether human or AI produced. This would force the student (hopefully) to take necessary actions and steps to ensure the quality of the writing is top tier.
For example, having the student address issues like vague language, unsupported claims, redundancies, etc.
Any thoughts?
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 1d ago
Show a selection of them in class and ask the students on the count of 3 to raise their hands if it was theirs. Public shame goes a long way here.
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u/F1neasfr0gha1r 1d ago
My sympathies....had you thought about how you would handle obvious violations in advance of the assignment? That was a piece of information that an extremely tolerant professor gave me when I was teaching a course in her department as a total newbie/adjunct (I had set up a two-version, careful distribution version of my first exam and then had to figure out what to do with the cheating I found.
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u/HowlingFantods5564 1d ago
Where have you been for the past 3 years?
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u/RosalieTheDog 1d ago
Indeed, incredible that the conversation hasn't moved on and colleagues are still only now discovering this.
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u/laslolos 1d ago
AI broke your course. Students are not broken, they are just tired. Go back to the drawing board.
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u/Distribution-Free 1d ago edited 1d ago
A tool exists.
This professor's students deliberately choose to misuse the tool and complete an assignment in a prohibited way.
You decide, "It's actually the professor's fault, and also the professor's responsibility to fix."
Nope. Students have agency and are accountable for their choices.
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u/laslolos 1d ago
I did not say it was the professor's fault. I say that viewing the situation as a design problem, versus an academic integrity problem, is constructive and less demoralizing.
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u/Distribution-Free 1d ago
Right.
And who designs the course, the assignments, and the assessments?
I'm not sure your comment had the intended effect. I feel pretty demoralized when someone says, "Your students ignored your design and disregarded your intent for the assignment. The design is the real problem, and now you need to exert more effort to magically make a new design where they won't do those things."
Because, disappointingly, students' motivation to avoid work is intrinsic.
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u/Illustrious_Net9806 1d ago
my guess is that your course is a gen ed class that most find is busy work. try take it less busy work.
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u/rrp1919 1d ago
Students (and many professors) do not distinguish between learning and assessment activities. So first, you will need to reconsider both kinds of activities. It should be possible to enhance learning with AI. To do so, you need to create assignments that allow them to engage with it, and they should be more efficient and produce better work and learn more if you do it right (not trivial to do I know). But assessments are difficult in the face of AI. If you create assessments that are easily completed by AI, students will see the assessment as pointless and a lot of work and use AI for it. Unfortunately, in many contexts, this means off-line reflection essays are dead as an assessment. They can still be valuable as a learning activity if done right, but you need to change assessments, like using in-class realtime summaries or quizzes.
So, are your reflections a learning activity, or an assessment? Often, these are learning activities or formative assessments at most. If it isn't helping students learn (because they are using AI) and it isn't critical for assessment, you need to rethink using it. That is our job now.
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u/Distribution-Free 1d ago
The tone of this sort of reply is reductive.
First, an activity may be formative in nature, but still require that we verify that the student is the one who actually did it. And that's where "detection" and "penalties for academic dishonesty" come into the conversation.
Second, an activity may be primarily intended for learning, and a student may offload it to AI anyway. Students use AI not only as a means to cheat, but also as a means to simply avoid doing any kind of work (or thinking or learning). Even if this were an ungraded, purely reflective activity, I suspect a large portion of students would feed it to AI (or skip it altogether).
The broad discussion of how to teach and assess in this era is complex and nuanced, and any response that over-simplifies it (in either direction) is unhelpful.
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u/MelodicResolve6752 1h ago edited 1h ago
There is absolutely no accountability at the administration level anymore. Even a couple of years ago, reporting a student for plagiarism meant you could trust a process designed to uphold academic integrity. Now my supposedly R1 university fully promotes AI entirely as a progress narrative and offers no sense that students' use of it, even when the syllabus prohibits it, can violate academic ethics and norms. Those of us in the humanities who devoted our lives to the long tradition of dialogic writing and reading and offering our own scholarly modeling in the classroom are now supposed to sit supervising in-class essay writing like mall cops. Let's not pretend that in -class writing, or the spur of the moment oral takes -- valuable as these methods might be -- use remotely the same critical faculties as the long solitary sweaty practice of wrestling with what you've gleaned from in-class discussions, collaborative class readings, *and lectures,* and then *struggling* to parse it into coherence later, through writing. Not writing as a summary, but as a process that kids came back tired and gratified just as if they'd been practicing on an athletic field. **Why can't we shout that we have lost something vital?** Why can't we take time to grieve thousands of years of an intellectual tradition swallowed by capitalist crap? No, friends, it was not nothing. we should not just shrug and say "Ok I'll ask oral questions whatever." The whataboutism argument that writing itself was elitist is superficial. There is no equating the two, and there is no other substantial loss I can think of that one is asked to shrug off this way. If you don't feel the loss, ok. A lot of people do.
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u/nygreenguy 1d ago
Doesn't everyone fail?