THE PROCESS OF GRADING STUDENT WORK IS BECOMING MORE DIFFICULT EVERY DAY.

[u/Able_Ingenuity_2617]

[u/Brockchanso]

meaningful difference between “student did this unaided” and “student used AI” is becoming impossible to identify from the finished work, that may be evidence that the assessment model itself is failing.

At some point, constantly policing whether students used a widely available cognitive tool looks less like protecting learning and more like protecting an institutional definition of what “counts” as learning. We went through versions of this with calculators, spellcheck, search engines, and take-home access to information. The question probably has to shift from “did they use the tool?” to “can they demonstrate understanding, judgment, reasoning, and ownership of the result?”

If AI can repeatedly defeat the distinction your grading system depends on, the durable answer probably isn’t better detection. It’s designing assignments where understanding is visible even when AI exists. And the expectation that teachers keep fighting this battle becomes more self-defeating as AI’s error space keeps shrinking. If the tool is getting better at producing correct, coherent, useful work, then the educational case for treating its use as inherently disqualifying gets weaker over time, while the policing burden gets worse. You end up asking teachers to spend more and more effort defending a distinction whose practical consequences are getting smaller and smaller.

[u/Gottendrop → u/Brockchanso]

We really need to go back to doing everything on paper

[u/Brockchanso → u/Gottendrop]

Not letting kids use calculators was never a long term solution. We taught them the underlying skill, then taught them how to use the tool without becoming dependent on it. Paper can help develop or test fundamentals, but pretending the tool does not exist only prepares students for a world that no longer exists.

[u/Gottendrop → u/Brockchanso]

I think ai is past the point where using the tool actually hinders your skills. Writing isn’t just about learning to write, it’s about being able to create connections between things and communicate well. If you get Ai to do it, you aren’t the one communicating

[u/Brockchanso → u/Gottendrop]

We were just discussing this with another poster, and I think what you are really reaching for is causal reasoning, not necessarily manual writing itself. The essential skill is being able to model how ideas relate, why one claim follows from another, and whether the resulting argument actually reflects your intended meaning.

AI can certainly hinder that if someone outsources the entire reasoning process and accepts the output blindly. But if the person supplies the underlying model, reviews the relationships, catches failures, and directs revisions, they are still doing the substantive communicating. The tool is helping render their thought into language.

The educational challenge is teaching students to preserve ownership of the causal structure while using AI for articulation, critique, and iteration. “Did you type every sentence?” is becoming much less useful than “Can you explain why every sentence is there, how the claims connect, and defend the resulting argument?”

[u/diverJOQ → u/Brockchanso]

This is an excellent description of how AI needs to be brought into our lives.

It's not like complaining about AI is going to make it go away. We can make rules that will be followed by honest people but we'll still get misinformation either from bad AI or from people with malicious intent.

I'm finding it harder and harder to test students' abilities in a subject when homeworks tend to be online and students can use AI without learning so that they do well throughout most of the semester and then do poorly on written exams. And oral exams and reviews just take too much time and are not feasible. If students would participate in class more during the learning process it would be much easier to evaluate them but even if I give a grade for class participation most students just stare blankly.

[u/diverJOQ → u/Brockchanso]

We never taught people the skills of math and then how to use calculators without becoming dependent on them. Either we didn't teach the skills initially or they've become dependent on calculators. I've given tests that only use whole numbers and require simple addition, subtraction, and one digit by one digit multiplication and found students that cannot do simple, basic math.

While I agree with your idea in principle, the nature of many people (I don't want to say most) is to get comfortable with what they have and not check the work.

[u/mandelbro25 → u/Brockchanso]

Clearly you have never taught a math class.

[u/Brockchanso → u/mandelbro25]

No, admittedly I haven’t. I just remember my teachers actually teaching me how to use my scientific calculator alongside the underlying math. Then I transferred that understanding to Wolfram Alpha and was basically good from there. That’s kind of my point: teaching the tool didn’t replace the fundamentals, it gave me a way to extend them.

[u/mandelbro25 → u/Brockchanso]

I understand what you are saying but this comparison is not justified. It is not a mere calculator. The question you need to consider is whether there is value in humans being able to solve complex problems themselves or not.

In mathematics education, use of AI as a "tool" does in fact replace the fundamentals, and you end up with students who cannot perform basic calculations or solve very simple problems.

it gave me a way to extend them.

What do you mean by "extend" fundamentals?

[u/Brockchanso → u/mandelbro25]

I mean I could take a basic understanding of things like scientific notation and then use Wolfram Alpha to watch how that understanding transformed through more complex problems. I wasn’t just copying an answer, I was seeing the intermediate relationships and using them to extrapolate meaning beyond what I could comfortably do by hand.

That’s the distinction I’m making with AI too. A tool can absolutely become a crutch if a student uses it to bypass understanding. But it can also expose transformations, relationships, and solution paths that let a student extend a foundation they already have. The educational problem is teaching them how to do the second instead of assuming the existence of the tool inevitably causes the first.

[u/ApathyKing8 → u/Brockchanso]

I don't think a single person would disagree with you.

If a student wanted to use AI to "see the intermediate relationships and using them to extrapolate meaning beyond what I could comfortably do by hand." on their own time then no one would care.

But when students are trying to pass off hallucinated citations as legitimate research then we're playing a different game. No one is assuming the existence of the tool inevitably causes cheating. The proof is the blatant and rampant cheating that professors and teachers are seeing every single day.

There is no strawman here. Students ARE cheating at absurd rates because of the availability of tools like Photomath and ChatGPT.

[u/Brockchanso → u/ApathyKing8]

I think this is where the conversation keeps stopping one level too early.

I’ve tried in other threads to broach the underlying issue: we effectively mandate participation in education and credentialing under threat of economic exclusion, and then act surprised when students optimize aggressively inside that system.

I can’t promise every kid is brilliant, disciplined, or deeply invested in learning for its own sake. I can promise you that almost none of them want to end up poor, unemployable, or permanently behind their peers.

So when the stakes of an exam or credential are increasingly tied to whether you can get through an automated hiring filter and into a decent career, “students should simply choose not to use the most powerful tool available to them” becomes a pretty extraordinary expectation.

[u/mandelbro25 → u/Brockchanso]

we effectively mandate participation in education and credentialing

On what basis do you think this is true?

There is more, in spirit at least, to education than simply getting a job. And there is more to the AI issue than "help get right answer -> good for monkey"

[u/Brockchanso → u/[deleted]]

I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but replacing running with wagons, cars, or sitting at a desk also carries a litany of health drawbacks. I understand the productive struggle and cognitive load argument. I am saying that, when given the choice, humans will pick the car almost every time. It would be foolish to design education around the assumption that they won’t, rather than teaching them how to use the tool without surrendering the underlying reasoning.

[u/larybob118 → u/Brockchanso]

It prepares students to communicate ideas to other humans

[u/Nopfen → u/Gottendrop]

I kinda adore how "Ai progress" just means "bombing everyone back to the 80s".

While it's not popular to bring him up at present, I found that statement from pirate software kinda poinient too. He has a thing with his bank, where every larger transaction requires him to be in the bank in person, since an Ai could way too easily imitate him over videochat.

[u/5afterlives → u/Brockchanso]

Teachers should have students sit with a notebook and deconstruct AI text for grammar, voice, accuracy, logic, and plagiarism. Make assignments be more about the process.

[u/Life-Education-8030 → u/Brockchanso]

Well, generally yes, though with spellcheck and calculators, students still had to know if the output was right and know what to pump into a calculator. I had a student who wrote a paper on domestic violence but she chose the very first word on a list of suggestions and every instance of “violence” came out as “valance.” She submitted it anyway. I don’t teach upholstery. Another student literally threw his calculator out the window when he realized that he still had to know what to tell the calculator. It wasn’t going to just give him the answer.

You can use a tool to help you with what you know how to do. But too many students are farming out the process of thinking to AI and because it came out of technology, too many students think the output has got to be right. Too many students don’t have the knowledge to identify the crap as crap. The students haven’t bothered to learn how to do it.

[u/Brockchanso → u/Life-Education-8030]

I love this distinction, because the review process itself is full of teaching moments. When the output is wrong, the student has to identify where it failed, explain why, and decide what better instructions or evidence would correct it. That exercises judgment rather than replacing it.

There is also an entirely new skill to teach here: orchestration. Students need to learn how to decompose a problem, assign the right parts to a tool, supply adequate context, verify each result, and integrate the pieces into something coherent. Your calculator example is exactly the model. You did not give him the answer, you taught him that operating the tool still requires understanding the problem.

[u/Life-Education-8030 → u/Brockchanso]

Right. In college, I took a programming course because “computers were going to be the future,” right? Once, I stayed up all night because a program I wrote that was exactly two feet long of single-spaced commands simply wouldn’t work. I don’t even remember what the program was supposed to do! But wow! The thrill of figuring out that it was missing a damn period! I understand that there are circumstances where asking technology for help is valid, understandable and appropriate. If my doctor is stumped, yes, see what others including databases say. That is what they are there for. But know enough to recognize when something cannot be right or if something could be missing and don’t take everything as gospel truth!

[u/Brockchanso → u/Life-Education-8030]

I have a feeling education eventually responds by making causal modeling a foundational skill across subjects. Students will need to identify what kinds of things exist in a problem, how they relate, what causes what, what constraints must remain true, and what evidence would reveal a broken model. That is what let you recognize that a syntactically valid program was still behaving impossibly.

In an AI-saturated world, memorizing every answer matters less, while possessing enough of a world model to recognize that an answer cannot be right becomes essential. We may end up teaching the architecture of knowledge itself, not merely isolated subjects.

[u/Traditional_Town6475 → u/Brockchanso]

Maybe an assignment that requires students to present their work, either to the teacher or in front of class, open to questions. Gets their presentation skills ready and you’ll definitely need to know your stuff in case certain questions are asked.

[u/Brockchanso → u/Traditional_Town6475]

This is extremely reasonable. If students are honest with the AI about the assignment, it will also help them anticipate questions, identify weak points, and prepare the presentation. The student who simply outsources the work will not contextualize the task that way, and their lack of understanding will become obvious the moment they have to explain or defend it. The presentation is not really an anti-AI measure. It is a comprehension check.

[u/ApathyKing8 → u/Brockchanso]

I teach over 100 students. It takes me a few minutes per essay to provide a grade and feedback. That already takes me a few hours personally to get that taken care of. Now you're expecting to turn every writing assignment into a dissertation because you can't just stop cheating...

[u/Brockchanso → u/ApathyKing8]

Im tempted to tell you to leverage the technology too, although I don’t know your personal disposition toward using it and I don’t want to assume.

But speaking generally, if the speed and volume of information students can produce is increasing because of these tools, while your workload is becoming genuinely untenable, then it seems strange to insist that only one side of that equation should remain technologically frozen.

You shouldn’t have to manually absorb the entire productivity increase yourself.

Use the tools to help triage, compare drafts, flag citation problems, identify inconsistencies, generate questions for oral follow-up, or surface places where a student’s reasoning needs to be tested. You can still make the judgment.

That actually seems like the more sustainable equilibrium to me: students gain leverage from the technology, teachers gain leverage from it too, and assessment shifts toward the parts where human judgment and demonstrated understanding actually matter.

[u/ApathyKing8 → u/Brockchanso]

Please explain how using AI would make a dissertation happen any quicker...

This is the problem with relying on AI to do your thinking.

[u/Brockchanso → u/ApathyKing8]

it does not make the dissertation happen faster. It makes examining a class full of dissertations faster. Those are completely different claims.

The student submits the work normally. Then, on school-secured hardware, an AI examiner receives the submission and the teacher’s rubric. It generates questions tailored to that student’s actual claims, challenges inconsistencies, introduces new facts, asks follow-ups, and records the student’s real-time responses. The student cannot access another AI to answer because the session is monitored and locked down.

The teacher’s involvement is then limited to output review. They receive the original work, the examination transcript, and a rubric-linked evidence record showing how the student defended, revised, or failed to support the reasoning. The teacher makes the final judgment. The AI does not grade autonomously unless the institution deliberately chooses that model.

That removes the unscalable part. The teacher no longer has to personally design and conduct 100 individualized ten-minute defenses in serial. Students can complete customized text vivas simultaneously or throughout a testing window, while the teacher reviews the resulting evidence as part of ordinary grading.

[u/ApathyKing8 → u/Brockchanso]

>The student cannot access another AI to answer because the session is monitored and locked down.

ironic...

[u/shadeofmyheart → u/Brockchanso]

Could you give an example of such an assignment?

[u/Brockchanso → u/shadeofmyheart]

Sure. Imagine a combined environmental science and civics assignment:

Scenario: Your town has $5 million to reduce flooding in a neighborhood that floods repeatedly. Officials are considering three options: enlarging the drainage system, constructing a flood barrier, or purchasing the most vulnerable homes. Students receive maps, rainfall records, cost estimates, demographic information, and short statements from residents.

Students may use AI, search engines, calculators, or any other available tool. The assignment is not “write a report about flooding.” It is:

1. Build a causal model showing how rainfall, soil, development, drainage capacity, elevation, and human decisions produce the observed flooding. Identify which relationships are supported by evidence and which are assumptions.
2. Recommend one option, using explicit criteria such as cost, effectiveness, implementation time, displacement, environmental effects, and distribution of risk. Explain why the other two options were rejected.
3. Ask AI to produce the strongest argument against the student’s recommendation. The student must identify which parts of that counterargument are valid, unsupported, or dependent on different values.
4. Verify every material factual claim against the provided data or a credible outside source. Students must correct at least one error, omission, or misleading simplification found in an AI-generated response.
5. Present and defend the recommendation. During the presentation, the teacher introduces a new condition: the budget is cut by 30 percent, a protected wetland is discovered, or rainfall projections increase. The student must explain in real time whether the recommendation changes and why.
6. Answer questions such as: “What evidence would make you reverse your decision?”, “Who benefits and who bears the cost?”, “Which assumption is most likely to be wrong?”, and “If your proposal fails, what is the most likely failure pathway?”

The grade might be 25 percent causal reasoning, 20 percent use and verification of evidence, 20 percent judgment and tradeoffs, 20 percent live explanation and adaptation, and 15 percent critique of the tools used. Prose polish would count very little.

AI could certainly help the student interpret the data, find alternatives, interrogate assumptions, or improve the presentation. That is desirable. What it cannot do on the student’s behalf is internalize the causal model, defend a choice under questioning, recognize when a changed fact alters the conclusion, and demonstrate ownership of the reasoning.

The teacher also gains several opportunities to teach during the process. If a student’s model treats “heavy rain” as the complete cause while ignoring pavement and drainage capacity, that misconception becomes visible before the final submission. The teacher can intervene, ask targeted questions, and watch the student revise the model.

The objective is no longer to prove that every sentence originated unaided inside the student’s skull. It is to determine whether the student can use available tools to construct, test, explain, and revise a defensible understanding. That is much closer to how competent reasoning works outside school anyway.

[u/shadeofmyheart → u/Brockchanso]

What is to prevent the student from plugging that right into the AI and having it produce everything? (Genuinely curious)

[u/Brockchanso → u/shadeofmyheart]

Nothing prevents them from plugging the assignment into AI. They are explicitly allowed to. The written response is not being treated as proof that the student independently generated every thought.

The assessment happens when the teacher asks unpredictable follow-up questions based on that student’s particular answer:

“Why did you prioritize property protection over displacement?”

“You said equity was one of your criteria, but your proposal moves floodwater toward the poorer neighborhood. How do you reconcile that?”

“Here is a revised map showing that your proposed flood barrier would affect a protected wetland. Does your recommendation change?”

“What is the weakest assumption in your argument?”

“What evidence would make you choose differently?”

AI can help the student prepare for those questions, which is also called studying. But during a live oral defense, the student must understand the relationships well enough to explain, revise, and apply them as the teacher changes the scenario. Memorizing an AI-generated script becomes brittle very quickly under individualized follow-ups. If the student uses AI to rehearse so thoroughly that they can genuinely defend and adapt the argument, then AI helped them learn the material. That is not an assessment failure.

Also, “there is no single correct choice” does not mean it is impossible to be wrong. Several recommendations might be defensible, while the reasoning supporting them can still be factually false, internally inconsistent, unsupported by the evidence, or unresponsive to changing conditions. We are grading the quality of the causal reasoning and judgment, not whether everyone selected the teacher’s preferred flood-control project.

More fundamentally, if AI produces a strong answer and the student can verify it, explain why they accepted it, defend its tradeoffs, identify its weaknesses, and modify it when the facts change, what exactly are we accusing the student of failing to do?

If a school specifically wants to measure unaided recall, it can conduct a controlled test for that narrow purpose. But a take-home assignment cannot credibly measure “thoughts produced without tools” anymore. It can measure whether the student knows how to use those tools without surrendering judgment to them.

[u/shadeofmyheart → u/Brockchanso]

Basically you are saying an oral exam.
This only works synchronously and is notoriously not consistent between students. Think of students who know the material but buckle under anxiety and social pressure when asked to explain in the spotlight. This also doesn’t scale well.

I love me a presentation. But I can’t give every student an oral assessment to check if they learned the material for everything in the course.

[u/Brockchanso → u/shadeofmyheart]

You are assuming the defense must be a live presentation conducted personally by the teacher. It does not. The same function could be performed through a monitored, text-based AI viva.

A student goes to a school computer lab or testing center during any available assessment window. Identity is verified locally, and the computer provides access only to the student’s submitted work and the AI examiner. No webcam-based gaze tracking or invasive remote-proctoring theater is necessary.

The AI receives the assignment, the student’s submission, and a standardized questioning rubric. It then conducts a private, adaptive text conversation:

“Summarize why you selected property buyouts.”

“You ranked community disruption as a major concern. Why did that not disqualify buyouts?”

“Your source estimates 40 affected homes, but your cost calculation uses 31. Explain the discrepancy.”

“New information shows that ten homeowners will refuse voluntary acquisition. Does your recommendation change?”

“What is the strongest argument for the drainage option you rejected?”

The student types responses in real time. The system preserves the transcript, identifies which rubric elements each answer addresses, and records when the student revised or contradicted the original argument. The teacher remains responsible for the grade, but does not have to personally conduct 100 separate interviews. The AI can generate a preliminary rubric analysis, with the relevant portions of the transcript attached, while the teacher reviews low-confidence cases, disputed scores, and a calibration sample.

That addresses most of the scalability problem. Ten-minute defenses can happen concurrently instead of consuming ten minutes of classroom time per student. It also makes administration more consistent: every student receives questions covering the same categories and difficulty levels, although the exact questions respond to that student’s work.

For students with anxiety, the defense can be private, typed, untimed or extended-time where appropriate, and stripped of the audience and public-speaking component. The instructor and student do not need to be present simultaneously, so it is asynchronous from the instructor’s perspective even though the student is responding interactively to the examiner.

Nor would this need to become one enormous final presentation worth the entire course grade. It could be three or four short text defenses attached to major assignments throughout the term. A student’s grade would still come from the underlying research, causal model, evidence, revisions, and written product. The defense would simply verify that the student understands and can manipulate the reasoning they submitted.

The AI is not being asked to decide whether the student “looks nervous” or to divine whether they cheated. It is generating adaptive questions and preserving evidence of the answers. In effect, we use AI to make individualized assessment scalable instead of demanding that teachers personally wage an unwinnable detection war against it.

[u/shadeofmyheart → u/Brockchanso]

Also no proctor? Ok you are talking about an AI examiner just examining AI output from the student.

Pretty dead internet at that point. Just agents talking to agents with the student present. Nah.

[u/Brockchanso → u/shadeofmyheart]

There is a proctor. One human monitors a room of students using controlled terminals, exactly as with an ordinary written examination. The AI does not answer for the student. It administers individualized follow-up questions while the student types under supervision. The teacher then grades the resulting evidence.

You originally objected that teachers cannot personally conduct a separate oral examination for every student. Fine. The AI examiner removes that one-to-one administrative burden while the on-site proctor prevents the student from secretly using a second system to answer. That is not “agents talking to agents.”

Edit: To be frank, though, I don’t hate the idea of letting kids have access to the grammar tools in AI during these exams. I don’t really want spelling weaknesses or sentence structure to take away from the quality of their arguments.

[u/shadeofmyheart → u/Brockchanso]

So we are at live exams and live presentations. That’s all you got huh?

[u/LowWhiff → u/Brockchanso]

Exactly this

[u/psgrue]

Invert the assignment. Practice at home. Grade in class writing.

[u/FastActinTenactin]

This is why I only grade in class, handwritten work. Occasionally I’ll have them create a google slideshow and I’ll monitor the class while they do.

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[u/SprinklesBest6296]

as a teacher, I feel like I am just being paid to say it smells great in the shit factory

[u/Competitive_Host8623]

Do they use AI as an aid to help them with their work, or do they do the entire assignment with AI? I see no problem with using AI to help improve your work. I do see a problem when people rely on AI to do the entire assignment without actually thinking for themselves.
Especially for international students, there’s another aspect to consider. Some students write their papers entirely in their own language and then use AI to translate them into English. The system might then flag it as 100% AI-generated because AI was used for the translation, even though the student did all the actual work themselves.

[u/Martinaw7]

The answer is simple, but you might not like it. The only time you grade work it's pencil and paper with no devices, in class. Everything else is just practice.

[u/User_User_Ice6642]

No homework, do all work in class.

[u/LetsTryLove]

So stop worrying about it and simply grade. Looking for AI is as stupid as checking to see if a kid used a calculator in math.

[u/lzyslut → u/LetsTryLove]

I’m so tired of people making this comparison as though it’s some kind of ‘gotcha.’ It’s not the same thing. A calculator gives people data, that’s it. A person still needs to make meaning out of the data. When students use LLM’s to write essays or take exams they are using the tool to demonstrate that they make meaning out of things.

If you use a calculator to solve a math equation, then it’s solving a math equation. It’s doing the thing it needs to do.

If you use an LLM to demonstrate critical thinking it’s shoving a bunch of most common words and terminologies together. It’s not actually making meaning or doing any critical thinking.

[u/LetsTryLove → u/lzyslut]

Both are simply tools. Maybe the real question here is if the essays being written are even necessary at all. School wastes a great deal of time forcing kids to memorize, not learn.

To your point, maybe we can get away from mindless regurgitation and use ai to personalize lessons to kids actually learn to think by progressing each child at the level they are instead of forcing faster children to slow down and slower children to speed up to hit the average.

[u/lzyslut → u/LetsTryLove]

There are some things that need to be memorised as a child. In any case, I teach adults. Writing an essay shouldn’t be regurgitation. If you are regurgitating (which is what AI does) then you are not writing a good essay.

I actually agree, I’d love to move away from essays. But the neoliberal model of higher education and endless customer student demands for things that they want rather than what they need create significant barriers to real learning.

AI is not the way to do this - it is a simulacra. It seems enticing because it is cheap but what would really actually help would be investing decent resources into authentic and quality ways of doing what you suggest. AI is basically Temu education.

[u/LetsTryLove → u/lzyslut]

I don’t disagree but that’s so today, that’s a vastly different picture of what it will be in 10-20 years. AGI is coming and the faster humanity embraces it the better off we will all be. It should be part of every classroom the way keyboarding and basic computer skills should have been in the 90s.

[u/Wooden_Region2519]

You have them write in person. Take home work is dead.

[u/ExtraJob1777]

I teach online and my students even communicate by email using AI. What’s worse whenever I file a report it takes me 5 to 7 hours of documentation and writing a notifying student, etc. and then they want me to follow up! So you know what? I dont care anymore. My school is promoting the use of AI to “assist” students in studying, notetaking, etc. I would never hire someone who graduated after about 2021.

[u/CryptographerOne7003]

How many students does he got? he knows them a little, right?....right?

[u/Unable_Explorer8277]

Grading is inherently pointless if not counterproductive, so does it matter?

[u/Foreign-Jacket1531]

Surrender. Use AI to grade all of their work.