Again, I am restating my thought on the assumption of cheating made by the professor.
One way to handle cases of suspected unauthorized use of AI to produce an out-of-class written assignment, would be to critique the papers without assigning grades, then use an in-class final exam that should reveal which students have learned the material and can use it in a thoughtful, analytical manner.
Accusing students of cheating without proof should result in serious discipline for the accuser.
Professors and other professionals need to learn how to integrate AI into their work–teaching or otherwise–rather than to simply view use of AI as cheating. AI is simply an advancement in technology. The truth is that students as well as professionals can learn by using AI; use of AI makes work more efficient and can facilitate analytical thinking.
P.S. AI was not used to generate the above response.
P.P.S. In addition to the professor’s unethical charge of cheating by students without proof, the professor cheated both his students and his employer by awarding the same grade for all papers due to an unfounded generalized assumption.
I’ve read hundreds of student essay over the past few years and I can confidently state that it’s still easy to identify essays that were written by AI. My D was a course grader while in school. Also very easy to detect (and prove) cheating and the IT department was helpful in catching people.
I trust this professor to not have gone public with this unless he was sure of the use of AI. Just because he doesn’t offer the proof in this article doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have it.
Maybe your guess is correct and maybe it isn’t; still need proof beyond one’s intuition.
Assumptions are not proof.
Do you think that the professor was doing his job by making assumptions of cheating by use of AI, yet awarding the same grade to all students whether or not suspected of unauthorized use of AI ? If the professor had proof of students’ unauthorized use of AI, then those students should have been penalized, yet the professor chose to ignore his duties as a teacher and just reward all students with the highest grade. This is both lazy & a dereliction of duty by the professor, as well as an example of unethical grading.
How this professor handled the grades isn’t the point. (Although I would have given zeros). IMO, the point of this article is that when you cheat, you are cheating yourself out of learning. That’s why it went viral.
The theme of the article was that use of AI cheats the student of learning. However, this is short-sighted thinking made by a lazy and derelict professor who cheated his students out of learning about writing. Wonder what the author of the article would have asserted when the horseless-carriage was introduced, calculators and computers invented, not to mention Al Gore’s invention of the internet.
I would not assume the professor went public. Upworthy.com is a digital media platform that generates articles that ironically read like what I’d expect from AI. In this case the upworthy.com article summarizes a Reddit post from 3 months ago. 3 months after the original Reddit post, there is still no professor named and no university named. The author of the Reddit post was previously active on the FanFiction sub and may (or may not) have written a fictional story to get upvotes/responses/karma.
The Reddit post did receive an enormous amounts of upvotes and comments because it sounds like something that could happen and raises strong feelings. What is more verifiable, is that many students do use AI to assist with and/or write their assignments, leading to increasing challenges for professors grading the assignments. There are numerous verifiable news stories involve professors failing students for using AI or coming up with a variety of different solutions for the problem, including some ideas that have been discussed in this thread, such as allowing support for AI with review of approach and correcting weaknesses/errors. There have been also many self-reported student surveys about using AI. All such surveys I have seen suggest it is quite common, including at the highly selective colleges that are regularly discussed on this forum. Example stats from Princeton’s senior survey are below:
Both my kids (Hs and college) have a lot of in-class assignments now. It is happening. One has an in-class essay for English today. One had an in-class computer science test (hand-written) the other day. Their hand was about to fall off and not sure how teacher will read it either but I guess they will sort it out..
My HS kid has oral exams for midterms or finals frequently, too.
My contention is only if they aren’t good at using AI (really LLMs)
HS kids aren’t very good at it; older students and adults who are better at it are another story. And if they are very good, you don’t know;) There is also use, and use entirely.
I once had a company where we made sure people did not cheat on online tests. Similar to these times and this situation, some professors stopped giving simple (true/false, abc) assessments online when they found cheating, some moved to more creative ways to assess a student, and many didn’t change anything at all - and policed it with our solution.
