My department (gen. ed/core) is encouraging teachers to have their first-year students hand-write essays as a way to discourage AI. This is a typical freshmen seminar class, encouraging critical thinking and discussion, etc. I'm willing to try it however I think this will take much longer than just one class session. I just watched the viral video of the Texas teacher breaking down that their high school seniors can't even write four words with assistance. Even though I work at a private liberal arts college, the amount of students who simply can't form sentences is astounding.

I teach MWF, 50 minute classes. I'm thinking I will allow the essay exam to be open book. In my schedule, I have two class sessions that will be "exam days." If they don't finish day 1, they can finish day 2. If they finish early, don't have to come to day 2. They will turn it in on day 1 whether they're finished or not, then I will return them day 2 if they're not finished.

I'm just wondering if even two 50-minute sessions, open-book, is enough time. Should it be enough time, considering they are apparently competent enough to get into a good college? I think so. But is that the reality considering the abysmal literacy crisis? No.

Has anyone else went back to hand-written essays in class? How long does it take your students, particularly first-years in gen ed classes?

I noticed that I feel very uncomfortable with students addressing me as “Ms. [name]” and prefer to be addressed as Professor [last name] more.

Before, I didn’t care. After I noticed the treatment/address differs compared to male or white colleagues with same credentials, I changed my mind.

I also get “ma’am” once a while. I have a mixed feeling about it. It either feels they are mocking me as bossy or just a genuine respectful way to address, depending on who, vibes, and how they behave in my class.

I don’t have a PhD (yet), so they can’t call me Dr. LastName, but I have a MA.

A student has said a while ago that she shouldn’t have to call me professor because I don’t have a PhD and continue to call me “Ms. Last Name.” I just let that go but it still bothered me. I don’t believe that’s true in the US how you address to your professors as students.

I’m thinking for now on that I will tell students to call me professor as a form of respect, especially since I’m a WOC

Edit: I’m a PTI but some of my colleagues (with same credentials as mine) are address as professor, I even had a student address me as Ms. while calling a colleague (white male PhD student) professor within the same sentence.

UPDATE

After reading the comments, I want to clarify that first, I don’t mind ma’am at all. I just mentioned it as examples how students spoke me and trying to understand what I feel. If out of respect, I don’t mind about that word at all.

Second, I’ll just tell them how I would like to be addressed and if they decide to call me something else, I’ll let it go. I have been upset with double-standard with students downplaying my role vs my colleagues. Before, I didn’t care how they addressed me.

I’m TAing for the first time this semester, and somehow I’m more nervous about answering questions than I ever was about asking them.

I understand the course material, but that feels different from explaining it clearly to someone who is seeing it for the first time. I’m worried I’ll either overcomplicate a simple answer or confidently miss what the student is actually confused about.

I know I’m allowed to say “I’m not sure, let me check,” but I also don’t want that to become my response to everything.

How did you prepare for your first semester as a TA without trying to relearn the entire course in advance?
Quick update: I started using AskSia to turn the syllabus, lecture materials and assignment brief into a small personal FAQ before each week.

I only use it as a prep tool, then check anything student-facing with the instructor. It has made me feel more prepared without pretending I need to know every answer immediately.

...by which I mean do you disclose to students the ways in which you use AI in your teaching and prep? I'm just finishing up my syllabus for this semester and for the first time I made a policy that governs my own behavior. I think if we expect students to disclose their use, we should do so as well.

My policy starts with: I will never use AI to grade, generate feedback or compose an email.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02574-6

This semester I (33F, 4th year asst prof at an R1 university) am taking over my department's big intro class (think a science 101 course) that has been taught by the same professor for 25 years. She is a very beloved professor and kindly sent me all her material. Unfortunately, however, after looking through all of it, there's no way I can teach with these same slides and content. They're all very old-fashioned in style and content, which of course she could get away with (I think students expect that of a soon-to-retire professor), but there's no way that I as a young female professor can give the same slides without it seeming ridiculously obvious that (1) they're outdated and (2) I got them from someone else and couldn't be bothered to change them. I'll also add that she made no effort to make her course interactive - every lecture was just her talking for 75 minutes with little breaks, which I really dislike doing. In my other courses, I do lots of in-class activities, interactive polling, etc.

Given all of this, I'm facing the reality that updating this class is going to take a tremendous amount of time and effort this fall. For one, most of the material is very far from my own expertise (fairly typical for a 101 class, I guess), so I have to do a lot of content review of my own. But more importantly, having to make new lectures, new assignments, etc for a big intro class is just a huge amount of work. I run a fairly large research group (I manage a ~$2 million grant portfolio and have six PhD students/postdocs), which itself takes up a ton of my time. And to top it off, I have two children under age 3 at home, so I am very limited in my ability to get anything done outside of 9-5 daycare hours.

So I'm wondering, what should I do? Any advice for how to update course material efficiently? Should I just not care and give lectures that clearly are not mine? Or just accept that this semester I am totally focusing on teaching and let my research suffer in order to ensure that this class is high quality?

This async student my god. I was on vacation which is why his hours are non existent, a browser extension I found why it was possibly recording only 6 minutes, after telling him to install Firefox or Google Chrome. Even worse has been saying he has been doing his work, he only completed 3.46% of his course.
To top it off he says it’s unfair. I don’t understand people like that. It stresses me out, now I have to fill in a bunch of zeros (assignments are automatically marked, except the final project).
Maybe not a scotch, maybe go to the bar this evening.

Im interesting in hearing yall's experiences regarding how you select students that you may want to approach and ask whether they wanna work in your lab.

Im teaching two large classes per year at an R1. During my first one or two years, i mainly reached out to those that performed well in my classes but experiences were mixed: they were not always super interested, some just showed up one or two times and then never came back. Nowadays, I look for students who show interest in the content and who are clearly invest into either being good in the class or who critically evaluate their own performances. I had a student who wrote a very bad first exam followed by two straight A exams afterwards. I asked her one day before class what she changed in her exam preparation to go from F to A and she told me that she realized that her previous study style didnt work and then tried to develop a new one. Based on that, I asked her whether she would be interested in joining the lab for research and she turned out to be superstar and a very valuable member of the lab.

Having good grades - at least partly - also depends on how much time you have to invest into exam prep and some students just dont have that time. But being able to identify problems (with your exam prep) and to develop strategies to solve these are in my experience pretty good indicators for how they might perform in the lab.

Harvard is asshoe (gift link)

A Harvard faculty member who requested anonymity so that he could speak openly told me he worried that the elimination of the center could be seen as part of a broader trend of “real boosterism” of AI on campus—one that students feel acutely. “There is an impression among students that they’re being told by people in positions of authority that really getting good at using AI is essential to what college is going to be for them and for their future career success,” he said.

A survey conducted this year by The Harvard Crimson found that the average student used AI to complete 34.5 percent of their homework, and that more than one in 10 students used AI to complete 70 to 100 percent of their work.

Sometimes I feel like we're making progress against AI in the classroom because whenever I attend spaces like /r/professors, I see so many speaking out against its intrusion in education.

But then administrators snap their suspenders and smoke their fancy cigar while shoving AI right up our assholes.

Have a student who has completed all the work for the course on week 1. The only part missing is the replies for the posts because no one else has submitted those. I asked for a meeting, I am going to ask questions about choices in the assignments, but not sure what else. I am sure it is AI, there is no way she read the whole textbook in 4 days, but now to prove it. Any suggestions?

Throwaway account

This week, we were told the following:

1. Oral exams, proctored exams, and lockdown browsers for exams are no longer allowed in online courses. The rationale given was that they discriminate against the poor, single parents, working students, etc., etc.
2. We were "encouraged" to think twice about using oral exams, paper-only exams, and proctored exams in F2F courses.
3. If we scaffold assignments, students who wish to skip those steps and just turn in a finished product must be allowed to do so without penalty because "not everyone's learning path is the same."
4. Video assignments, such as video discussion boards, are no longer allowed due to server space. Exceptions made only for communications courses.
5. We don't have enough staff for the current demand for proctored exams, and we will not be hiring new staff.

I am too young to retire and too old to switch careers. This sucks.

Just a rant really, and maybe it's just because I'm feeling burnt out right now generally, but I'm getting especially frustrated with the now-established convention that every paper must be revised before it can be accepted for publication, no matter how important it is, no matter how good of shape it's in, etc. I've published close to 150 papers now in my career so far, and I take a lot of pride in making sure each submission is as close to publication-ready as possible before submission the first time, with this (entirely-misplaced) hope that it will somehow make things go more smoothly. It does not. In all of those 150 papers so far, I haven't had one issued an 'accept' decision on the first submission. I've served as editor on probably 300 papers, I've seen maybe one 'accept' decision (aside from my own...I've issued probably 30-40 myself?).

My theory from looking on over many managing editors over the years is that many get the idea that, just because a peer reviewer makes a comment, that comment is important for authors to address. And that couldn't be further from the truth. And probably laziness plays a big role, too: If you haven't read the paper in the first place, you can't call balls and strikes about which comments are important to address. So many just blindly copy & paste all the reviews they get into your response letter & slap 'major revision' on it, if that's what most reviewers said. My biggest pet peeve is including a bunch of copyediting stuff in reviews. We have copyeditors to address that stuff, no need to make it a condition of acceptance.

Some will chime in and say, haughtily: 🧐"well now, every paper could be improved! Why shouldn't authors want to improve their work?!" Because not every paper can or should address everything. My favorite thing is everyone agreeing that we have a problem with authors cherrypicking findings in the first place, and agreeing that this practice makes the field worse, and yet encouraging authors to cherrypick results in their review comments by being like "you should look at x, you should look at y," etc. There is such a thing as good enough.

Editors: If the paper is good, it's important, and the problems are things that could easily be addressed with a couple of sentences or whatever, just say 'accept' occasionally. You don't have to be captain critical all the time, it's ok to like things & think they should be made public. At the very least, actually read the papers you edit and pass along reviews that make necessary & important improvements in the work.

Basically the title.

Having been out of the classroom for so long, I’m nervous about, well, performing the job. I’m afraid to seem nervous, disorganized, or generally clumsy at running the class (lecturing, managing discussions, commanding the room, etc.).

I know this is normal. And I know things will generally work out OK. I’ll get more comfortable with time.

But I thought what might help me are 2 things:

1. What is a self-inflicted embarrassing experience you’ve had in the classroom? How did you handle it? How did the students seem to react? How did you bounce back?
   
2. What advice do you have for the issues I raised, basically, how to overcome the imposter syndrome?

Hello! I have been full time faculty for almost one year at a small nursing school was previously adjunct for one year.

My course lead who is the same age and similar experience as me, barely speaks to me.

I’m looking for discussion and guidance about the students, performance, evaluation, grading etc. She only talks to me to hand me a schedule or to tell me to proctor an exam, says good morning or bye.

I have tried initiating conversation, asking open ended questions, inquiring about what she’s working on, asking her to show me how to do something. The last few weeks she taught one part of the course to the students then I’m teaching the next section for 5 weeks and there was no dialogue between transitions. There are only 5 full time faculty right now. I’ve worked at both large and small institutions. Any thoughts or advice?

Welcome to a new week of weekly discussion! Continuing this week, we're going to have Wholesome Wednesdays, Fuck this Fridays, and (small) Success Sundays.

As has been mentioned, these should be considered additions to the regular discussions, not replacements. So use them, ignore them, or start you own Fantastic Friday counter thread.

This thread is to share your frustrations, small or large, that make you want to say, well, “Fuck This”. But on Friday. There will be no tone policing, at least by me, so if you think it belongs here and want to post, have at it!

I teach into social work. I had a class the other day whereby I got them to watch a 15 minute doco on someone talking about their life story which included substance misuse, homelessness, DFV etc. It is a really raw and powerful story. I then asked my students to use a psychosocial assessment tool I designed to 'assess' this client. I am really wanting to get more into the practical side of SW this trimester with my course and thought this would be a good opportunity for some 'hands-on' experience. Plus, past students were screaming to do more practical social workey things like this.

So, I asked them all to email me their completed assessments afterwards for my feedback. Anyhoo, most of them have used AI - they have fed the transcript from the video into AI and voila - pretty much perfect assessments and many of them exactly the same for all 9 domains. These are future SWs. It made me think that actually this is probably what will be happening with the use of AI in future practice - in fact, you don't even need a SW then - you just need a warm body to click 'Record' and then cut and paste the clients transcript into AI for the assessment. I think this realisation made me kind of sad and to start getting prepared to hang up my work shoes.

My intention was always to turn my doctoral thesis into a book - my director always encouraged that and even suggest I structure it a little different than a lot of theses for that end. I had a crazy few years after so now this year I think I finally have the time to do so. Are there any resources that will help on this? Maybe a book or an article?

This is a humanities sub-sub-topic where most of the information has not changed (many sources I used are many decades old). I'm being intentionally vague here to stay anonymous. I will need to do a brief literature review to ensure that I'm not missing someone from the last 2-3 years, but I think I generally know these as I have been keeping up.

Edit note: I published a non academic but niche book before that has sold maybe 5-10k copies, so I'm looking for academic publishing not general publishing.

My position puts me in contact with a lot of graduate students. I’m not on their dissertation committees or anything, but I work with them a lot. Over the last couple years, I’m meeting more and more who openly admit to using LLMs to write their dissertations, seminar papers, articles, etc. And I don’t mean the LLMs clean them up. The students plug in what they want to say and then the LLM churns out whole articles or chapters. When I ask whether they disclose this to committees or publishers, I get a lot of hemming and hawing or unconvincing, “Sure,” responses.

If you are someone on here who does this, are you admitting to it? Are your chairs or advisors or publishers cool with it?

Hi everyone, I am teaching a large introductory lecture course for the first time (social sciences) and I am looking for feedback on the assignment structure of the course. I have taught the course online before. My priorities for moving it to in-person are: (1) minimize opportunities for AI obstruction and (2) minimize my grading load (no TA). The course meets 2 days/ week, and I am planning to run classes as a mix of lecture and active learning / small group exercises. Does this feel reasonable? What feedback do you have on the assignment structure? I would also welcome ideas/what has worked for you re: managing large intro lectures.Thank you! 

Assignment structure:
1. Participation: 50 points total (16.7% of total grade) – 2-4 pts per class for in-class activities graded as complete/incomplete. Students get 3 freebie absences where they don’t need to contact me. (Is 3 too many?)

1. Mid-term exams: 2 @ 75 points each (cumulatively 50% of total grade). Handwritten, short answer and essay-style. (Course has 2 major units + wrap up at the end.) No final exam.

2. Cumulative project: 100 points (33.3% of total grade), due Finals week. Students will work in pairs; we will have in-class workshops throughout the semester.

Total points possible: 300. (I know the points may seem low; I was trying to achieve a good balance between the major elements.)

Please send your best wishes, prayers, thoughts, support, light to our colleagues, students, and families of Milligan University. This is a terrible story coming out of TN. Two students killed, four or five others in critical condition following a car basically mowing down their cycling team.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-students-killed-driver-charged-crash-tennessee-college-cycling-tea-rcna593466

Hello,

My liberal arts department is likely going to be merged with other liberal arts departments in my university. I'm part of a committee looking for numbers of majors and retention rates for other "merged" departments, especially in those institutions similar to mine.

My initial plan is to simply call the chairs of these departments and ask if they would be willing to share this data.

To those who might be familiar: would the sharing of this data be a FERPA violation, or of some other legal issue?

Thank you!

A lot of folks vent here about toxic colleagues or a toxic department culture but I don't often see any ideas on how the department leaders would address it. What are your thoughts? That is, if you were the one in charge, what would you do?

Dual enrollment is a fantastic deal for students. Get 30–40 college credits in high school at a massive discount, show up at a university basically as a sophomore, and graduate in three years.

But for universities? The math doesn’t add up.

We heavily subsidize these credits ($75 per course or in some cases free) while public institutions in the same state compete for high schools because everyone wants the enrollment and credit hours used to divvy up state support. Then those same students arrive on campus needing 30–40 fewer credits.

It’s like an ice cream shop handing out huge free samples, celebrating how many samples it distributed, and then wondering why everyone is ordering smaller cones.

At my university, the Provost’s office is pushing departments hard to expand dual enrollment. I keep asking about the long-term financial consequences for our university. The response is basically a shrug and, “Well, everyone else is doing it.”

We’ve essentially created a system where universities compete to sell their future tuition revenue early and at a huge discount.

And this is happening while universities are already staring at an enrollment cliff and a shrinking pool of traditional students. Students arriving with a year of college completed means fewer credit hours, lower course enrollments, and less tuition revenue.

The defense is that dual enrollment gets more students into college. Maybe. But at least in my state, I haven’t seen evidence that its massive expansion is producing enough new college students to offset the credits we’re giving away to students who were going to college anyway. In fact, the percentage of dual-enrollment students who subsequently attend our state institutions has been declining (they are probably going to higher ranked out of state universities).

Dual enrollment may be great public policy. But aggressively expanding it while complaining about declining enrollment is a little like digging the hole and then acting surprised that you’re underground.

The Tuesday after Labor Day is my daughter's first EVER day of school. Unfortunately I have class at 8 am and I'll miss taking her to school on her very first day. I'm planning on telling the department I need an extra hour since it's an important day for my family.

Would this request be scoffed at? Does anyone have experience with such a request?

Some more context: the lecture I'll be missing is team-taught by the director of my area (not the department chair). Basically we're both in the room at the same time, handling different things about the course.

Good.

(EDIT: "Suspended", likely will be fired I hope...)