Category: Teaching

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Four Rules For Discouraging Cheating with AI in Writing Classes

An indirect but positive review of Mollick’s “Co-Intelligence”

This semester, I’m teaching two sections of first year writing (aka freshman comp) and an advanced writing course called Digital Writing, and both have AI elements and themes. In first year writing, the research theme is “Your Career and AI.” In the Digital Writing course, the last two writing projects are going to be waist-deep in writing with AI. Maybe one day I will better understand/make use of Substack’s newsletter function to chronicle these classes in more detail, but that’s later.

For Digital Writing, we’re reading and discussing Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. If you’re reading posts like this because you too are trying to make sense out of the what AI is about, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of Mollick’s book and his Substack, One Useful Thing. If you haven’t heard of Mollick and you want to know more about AI but you’re overwhelmed with the firehose of news and information, then his book is for you. Co-Intelligence is a well-written, accessible, and a thoroughly researched 30,000 foot overview in less than 250 pages printed in a big font. It’s enough to get the “AI curious” up to speed on the current state of things (it was published in April 2024), while also pointing readers to ideas for further reading and research.

Mollick is a business professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, so he is primarily interested in how AI will impact productivity and innovation. I think we conceptualize teaching a bit differently, and like everything I’ve read about AI, Mollick is making some claims I doubt. But we’re mostly on the same page.

One of the most cited/mentioned chapters in Mollick’s book is “Four Rules for Co-Intelligence.” In brief, those rules are:

  • Always invite AI to the table, meaning you have to experiment and try to use AI (or really, different platforms, so AIs) for lots and lots of different things in order to discover what it/they can and can’t do.

  • Be the human in the loop: it’s a bad idea to completely turn over a task to AI, both because AI makes a lot of mistakes (aka hallucinations) and humans ought to be in charge rather than the other way around.

  • Treat AI like a person (but tell it what kind of person it is). AI doesn’t behave same way as other computer applications, so Mollick says we need to be conversational with it as if it were a human. Mostly he’s talking about creating context and scenarios in AI prompts, as in “You are an experienced teacher speaking to skeptical students about the value of group work. What advice would you give those students?”

  • Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use, which is perhaps the most accurate of these AI rules.

So, in that spirit, here are four more rules about teaching writing and AI— specifically, what teachers can do to discourage students from using AI to cheat.

Of course, I’m far from the first person to come up with four more rules for AI— I’m not even the first person to come up with four more rules for AI and writing! For example, there’s this fine post from Jane Rosenzweig at her site Writing Hacks “Four Rules for Writing in the Age of AI,” and also this guest post at John Warner’s Substack site by high school teacher and writer Brett Vogelsinger, “Artificial Intelligence and Writing: Four Things I Learned Listening to my High School Students.” Both great posts and great thoughts.

The most common concern about AI I read on Facebook (though not so much on Substack) from other professors and teachers is students using it to cheat on writing assignments. So this post isn’t about how to use AI to teach writing— maybe I’ll write more about that when I have a better sense of the answer. This is about how teachers can create an environment that discourages students from cheating with AI. It’s not foolproof. Sometimes, usually when they are desperate to try anything to pass the class, students cheat.

Teach writing as a process; don’t assign writing as a product.

I kicked off my writing about AI in this blog post from December 2022 “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay.’” It’s the most frequently read post on the old blog. I wrote it in response to two different articles published in The Atlantic at the time arguing that the new ChatGPT had made writing assignments impossible and irrelevant.

Teaching writing as a process has been the mantra in composition and rhetoric since the late 1970s. Scholars debate the details about what this means, but in a nutshell, teaching writing as a process means setting up a series of assignments that begin with pre-writing invention exercises (freewriting and other brainstorming techniques, for example), activities that lead to rough drafts which are shared with other students through peer review. When students hand this work in, the instructor’s feedback is geared toward revision and (hopefully) improvement on future projects. My first year writing course is typical in that it is about research and students complete a research essay project. But long before we get to that assignment, students complete a series of smaller scaffolded assignments that build up to the larger essay. Again, none of this is new and it is how I was taught to teach writing back in the late 1980s when I started as a graduate teaching assistant.

I teach writing this way because there is good evidence that it works better than merely assigning writing. I also think teaching writing as a process deters plagiarism and other forms of cheating (including with AI). I require students to build their research writing projects through a series of smaller and specialized assignments, and to share their work in progress with other students in peer review. It’s awfully hard to fake this. Also, as I wrote back in July, I now make the process more visible by requiring students to complete their essays from beginning through final revisions on a Google Doc they share with me so I can view the document history and see what it is they did to put their writing together.

In contrast, assigned writing projects have always been much easier to cheat on. Before AI, students cheated with the internet, paper mills, by getting others doing the writing, or (at least according to my father who went to college in the early 1960s) with the library of papers that fraternities kept on hand.

There’s also the issue of the purpose of writing assignments in the first place. Teaching writing as a process is especially important in a course where the subject itself is writing and there is a lot of attention to how students craft their sentences and paragraphs. I realize that’s different from a class where the subject is literature or political science or business administration. But besides the fact that we should teach (not just assign) writing across the curriculum, writing assignments should ask students what they think about something. In research-based courses like freshman comp, students write about the research they did to persuade and inform both me and their classmates about something. It’s one of the reasons why I like teaching this class: my students are always teaching me new things. In my classes that are not as research-based (like Digital Writing), students write and reflect on the assigned readings and other projects of the class in order to share with readers what they think.

Assigned writing tasks tend to seek specific answers based on the content of the course— write about the theme of madness in Hamlet, about the balance of power between the three parts of the federal government, about they key causes of the great recession, etc. In evaluating assigned writing, teachers are less interested in what students think and are more in seeing if students correctly repeated the content of the course the teacher delivered through lectures, activities, and readings. In other words, assigned writing is an assessment tool, like an exam— and in most cases, it probably would be a more effective to use an exam.

Now, teaching writing as a process is A LOT more work for everyone because it means more reading, more teacher commenting, and more checking in with students’ writing as they progress through these assignments. This is why at the vast majority of colleges in the U.S., first year writing courses have 25 or fewer students. Some colleagues who teach lecture courses with 100 or so students who also assign papers have asked me how they’re supposed to teach writing as a process in these courses. My answer is I wouldn’t. Instead, I’d rely on short written responses to readings, quizzes, and exams.

Any course assignment that could be completed without being present in that course is a bad assignment.

A lot of the hype around AI is about how great it is at passing tests— LSAT, GRE, SAT, etc. etc.— and how that is supposed to mean something. But besides the issue of whether AI can pass these tests because it “knows” or because the test questions were part of the content used to create the AI, I think we all know this is not how school works. I mean, if on the first day of a course I introduced all the writing assignments, and then a student showed up on the second day and said “I finished everything— can I get my A now?” the answer, obviously, is no.

Which brings me to this second rule: if a teacher gives students an exam or an assignment that could be successfully completed without ever being in the class, then that’s a bad assignment. This is something I never thought about before AI. In the old old days, I don’t think it made much difference. When I went to college in the mid 1980s, if someone could pass an intro to chemistry exam or a history 101 exam without ever attending the class, what’s the problem? They already had enough mastery of the subject to pass the class anyway. That started to end with students doing Google searches to pass exams, and now that AI can answer all those questions in that history 101 class final in real time, it’s completely over.

AI isn’t attending classes with our students (at least not yet), and so it is not as useful to cheat on exams or assignments that have specific connections to the course. That’s easy enough to do in the kinds of courses I teach, though I have to assume this is more complicated in a subject like calculus where the concepts and methods transcend classroom boundaries. But perhaps an even easier way to address this problem is for the teacher to make participation count as part of the grade. As I discussed in this post, my classes have a participation grade component that counts for about 30% of the grade.

AI detection software doesn’t work and it never will.

A lot of teachers want to skip these first two rules and instead just rely on some kind of app that can detect what parts of a student’s paper were written by an AI. Essentially, they want something like the plagiarism detection software Turnitin many of these teachers have used for years. Though as a quick glance at the Turnitin website reveals, they are shifting from plagiarism detection along with AI detection as well.

Plagiarism detection software has been a divisive topic in writing studies for years. While I know lots of teachers routinely require their students to run their papers through Turnitin for a plagiarism check, I never have done this because I don’t think it’s necessary and I don’t think Turnitin is as good of a tool as many users seem to think. This is especially true with AI detection. According to Turnitin, the false-positive rate for “fully human-written text” is less than 1%, but up to 20% for AI writing. And that is just for the very common and very dumb way people use to cheat with AI: writing a simple prompt and copying and pasting the answer with few changes. I have to assume the ineffectiveness in detecting AI goes down if the human using the AI effectively: for brainstorming, proofreading/editing, chatting with it about revision ideas, and so forth.

It’s a futile effort, especially as the AIs improve and as all of us (including our students) learn more about how to use them for not just cheating. Which leads me to my last point:

Teachers at all levels need to learn more about AI.

Colleges and universities are certainly trying. The two talk things I did last year about AI were both faculty development events, and the attendance at both was pretty good. I know folks here at EMU have held similar events, and I get the impression this is pretty common at most colleges and universities. And faculty have heard of AI at this point, of course.

The problem is I’m not sure any of the faculty development or the oodles of news stories about AI has resulted in any differences in teaching. This is mostly just based on my own sense of things, but I did informally poll my current students (I have about 70 this semester) the other day about AI in other classes they were taking. A few students mentioned classes where they are using AI for various assignments. A few other students mentioned instructors who expressly forbid the use of AI. I asked these students if they thought the instructor had any way of enforcing that; “no.” But the majority of my students said that the topic has not come up at all. That’s a problem.

I’m not saying every teacher now needs to embrace AI and incorporate it into their teaching. Not at all. Besides experimenting with AI in my teaching, I’ve been doing a lot of writing and reading about AI that is (hopefully) going to turn into a research project. I think my teaching with AI experiments are going well, but I honestly don’t know if this is something I’ll continue to do in the future. I feel the same way about AI generally: it probably is going to “change everything,” but it also might end up being another one of those things (like MOOCs, which was the subject of my last major research project) that never lives up to the hype.

What I am saying though is AI is here now and it looks like it’s going to be (probably) a big deal for some time to come. It is not just going to “go away” and it cannot be ignored. A professor or teacher can continue to refuse to engage with AI for valid ethical or personal reasons, but that is not going to stop everyone else from using it. That includes some of our students who are using AI simplistically to cheat, perhaps by feeding the teacher’s writing assignment into ChatGPT and copying/pasting whatever the AI comes up with. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to spot that sort of AI use. But what teachers cannot easily recognize or stop is a student who uses AI more in the way that it is really meant to be used: as a tool to help/improve what humans do, not replace it.

So start learning about AI, even if you hate it. Mollick’s book is a good place to start.

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Classroom Cell Phone Bans, Before and After Covid

It’s a good idea, though I didn’t used to think so.

When cell phones first showed up 25-20 years ago, I didn’t think much about a policy in my classes because there wasn’t much you could do with those flip phones besides talk to someone, and students knew they couldn’t do that. The main issue back then was students would forget to silence their phone and they’d go off in the middle of class. I’m not proud to admit this, but if a student’s cell phone rang during a discussion, I would make them sing a song for the group. I had heard this was the common practice in Norway and Sweden; the goal was to have a slightly embarrassing but also funny way of reminding students to turn off their phones. There’s no way I would do anything like this nowadays, of course— though it did work pretty well back then.

When smartphones came along, I continued my kind of non-policy policy: don’t let it be a distraction, and if you need to use it for taking notes or looking something up, feel free. A lot college instructors instituted strict bans on both phones and laptops, but these policies always struck me as reactionary and unnecessary. I didn’t want to be that sage on the stage who insists on complete attention from every student for every minute of class. And I didn’t want to be a hypocrite either. In faculty meetings, especially the larger ones, most of my colleagues have their laptops open and they are clearly multitasking. That’s what I do. Anyway, I always had a few students who could not resist the distraction and fondled their devices constantly, but I usually let it go, figuring that these students were mostly hurting themselves and that the overall benefits of these devices outweighed the harms.

In fact, as I blogged about back in June and September 2019, I was on a research release in the fall 2019 semester to work on a project officially called “Investigating Classroom Technology Bans Through the Lens of Writing Studies,” but which I more informally called the “Classroom Tech Bans Are Bullshit” project. I was studying the quantitative/experimental research that had been done about students using laptops and devices in classrooms, most of which was done by folks in education and/or psychology, to try to connect it to the practices and qualitative/observational sorts of research on this in writing studies. I gave a talk about starting this project at the Corridors 2019 conference at Oakland University (and I repurposed this for the online version of the CCCCs in 2020) called “Laptop/Cell Phone Bans are Bullshit (or Maybe Not).” The very short version for now is a lot of the scholarship argued it was better for students to take notes by hand rather than with a device, and that (IMO) was and is bullshit. But the “Maybe Not” part of the talk was about the problems of multitasking, how devices themselves are distracting to others, and the ways in which social media applications are designed to be as addictive as slot machines.

The next semester was the start of Covid. I and almost all my EMU colleagues taught online from the middle of that Winter 2020 semester through Winter 2022, and most high schools in Michigan were all online for those two years as well. That time online changed everyone in higher ed, but especially the students. I blogged about this in more detail here at the end of the 2022-23 school year and after being back to teaching f2f. In brief, two years of online courses was enough for a lot of students to forget they couldn’t behave the same way in person and in a classroom as they did when they were online and alone at home and often still in bed. After all, if you’re a student in a Zoom class with the camera off or in an asynchronous online class, no one cares if you’re texting or watching cat videos as the same time as you’re doing online class stuff. The freshmen had more problems with distraction then the juniors and seniors, but even some of the better students in the upper-division classes could not stop staring at their phone right in the middle of discussions.

In other words, I went from a few students not paying attention to most of them not paying attention. This was obviously bad for students, but it was also bad for me. Like I said, I don’t need to be the at the center when I’m teaching. But when a lot of students are ignoring everything and everyone around them, including me, it’s hard to not take that personally. And at the end of the day, my students’ behavior was just rude.

So in Fall 2023, I started doing something I never thought I’d do: I began class by asking students to place their cell phones on a table in the front of the room. Their phones are in sight, but out of reach. I’ve had a few students resist this by giving some reason (kids, ill relatives, etc.) why they must be in contact at all times. I tell them to leave their phones on, and if it rings, take the call in the hall. (No one has had to take a call). Also worth mentioning: I explain why I do all this by sharing a version of what I just wrote here, including the reality that learning how to participate in a f2f conversation with other humans without staring at your cell phone is a good adulting skill to have.

The class discussions improved immediately. Sure, some students grumbled about it, but no one complained on the end of the semester course evaluations where students tend to complain about all sorts of things. Now, I only do this for the first three weeks or so of the semester. After they get the idea, I tell them they can keep their phones— as long as they remain face down on the desk or otherwise stowed away. There is often a backsliding moment where I once again collect their phones, but that too is a teachable moment.

This semester when I first asked students to put their phones on the table in the front of the room, none of them hesitated or seemed surprised. I suspect I was not the first teacher they have had since Covid with a similar policy. The other day was the first class meeting in my more advanced class where I told students they could keep their phones, and one student went ahead and put their phone on the table I had previously set up anyway. “I think this helps,” she said.

For what its worth, I think this bad behavior with cell phones is fading, at least at the college level. A lot of my students have heard about and thought about cell phone addiction and the problems of various social media platforms, so I do think that there is a lot more awareness of the problem of staring at the phone too much. I think we’re soon returning to before Covid times with cell phones— and lots of other things, too.

I used to be against these bans, but not anymore

Cell phone bans in K-12 schools have been in the news at the start of this school year. Several states have instituted measures to ban cell phones in elementary and secondary schools, and bans are happening in prestigious private schools as well. The research suggests these policies help students to pay attention in class and also to socialize and interact with their peers in real time. Interestingly enough, a lot of the objections to these policies are coming from parents who are used to being in contact with their children at all times.

It’s a good idea, though I didn’t used to think so.

When cell phones first showed up 25-20 years ago, I didn’t think much about a policy in my classes because there wasn’t much you could do with those flip phones besides talk to someone, and students knew they couldn’t do that. The main issue back then was students would forget to silence their phone and they’d go off in the middle of class. I’m not proud to admit this, but if a student’s cell phone rang during a discussion, I would make them sing a song for the group. I had heard this was the common practice in Norway and Sweden; the goal was to have a slightly embarrassing but also funny way of reminding students to turn off their phones. There’s no way I would do anything like this nowadays, of course— though it did work pretty well back then.

When smartphones came along, I continued my kind of non-policy policy: don’t let it be a distraction, and if you need to use it for taking notes or looking something up, feel free. A lot college instructors instituted strict bans on both phones and laptops, but these policies always struck me as reactionary and unnecessary. I didn’t want to be that sage on the stage who insists on complete attention from every student for every minute of class. And I didn’t want to be a hypocrite either. In faculty meetings, especially the larger ones, most of my colleagues have their laptops open and they are clearly multitasking. That’s what I do. Anyway, I always had a few students who could not resist the distraction and fondled their devices constantly, but I usually let it go, figuring that these students were mostly hurting themselves and that the overall benefits of these devices outweighed the harms.

In fact, as I blogged about back in June and September 2019, I was on a research release in the fall 2019 semester to work on a project officially called “Investigating Classroom Technology Bans Through the Lens of Writing Studies,” but which I more informally called the “Classroom Tech Bans Are Bullshit” project. I was studying the quantitative/experimental research that had been done about students using laptops and devices in classrooms, most of which was done by folks in education and/or psychology, to try to connect it to the practices and qualitative/observational sorts of research on this in writing studies. I gave a talk about starting this project at the Corridors 2019 conference at Oakland University (and I repurposed this for the online version of the CCCCs in 2020) called “Laptop/Cell Phone Bans are Bullshit (or Maybe Not).” The very short version for now is a lot of the scholarship argued it was better for students to take notes by hand rather than with a device, and that (IMO) was and is bullshit. But the “Maybe Not” part of the talk was about the problems of multitasking, how devices themselves are distracting to others, and the ways in which social media applications are designed to be as addictive as slot machines.

The next semester was the start of Covid. I and almost all my EMU colleagues taught online from the middle of that Winter 2020 semester through Winter 2022, and most high schools in Michigan were all online for those two years as well. That time online changed everyone in higher ed, but especially the students. I blogged about this in more detail here at the end of the 2022-23 school year and after being back to teaching f2f. In brief, two years of online courses was enough for a lot of students to forget they couldn’t behave the same way in person and in a classroom as they did when they were online and alone at home and often still in bed. After all, if you’re a student in a Zoom class with the camera off or in an asynchronous online class, no one cares if you’re texting or watching cat videos as the same time as you’re doing online class stuff. The freshmen had more problems with distraction then the juniors and seniors, but even some of the better students in the upper-division classes could not stop staring at their phone right in the middle of discussions.

In other words, I went from a few students not paying attention to most of them not paying attention. This was obviously bad for students, but it was also bad for me. Like I said, I don’t need to be the at the center when I’m teaching. But when a lot of students are ignoring everything and everyone around them, including me, it’s hard to not take that personally. And at the end of the day, my students’ behavior was just rude.

So in Fall 2023, I started doing something I never thought I’d do: I began class by asking students to place their cell phones on a table in the front of the room. Their phones are in sight, but out of reach. I’ve had a few students resist this by giving some reason (kids, ill relatives, etc.) why they must be in contact at all times. I tell them to leave their phones on, and if it rings, take the call in the hall. (No one has had to take a call). Also worth mentioning: I explain why I do all this by sharing a version of what I just wrote here, including the reality that learning how to participate in a f2f conversation with other humans without staring at your cell phone is a good adulting skill to have.

The class discussions improved immediately. Sure, some students grumbled about it, but no one complained on the end of the semester course evaluations where students tend to complain about all sorts of things. Now, I only do this for the first three weeks or so of the semester. After they get the idea, I tell them they can keep their phones— as long as they remain face down on the desk or otherwise stowed away. There is often a backsliding moment where I once again collect their phones, but that too is a teachable moment.

This semester when I first asked students to put their phones on the table in the front of the room, none of them hesitated or seemed surprised. I suspect I was not the first teacher they have had since Covid with a similar policy. The other day was the first class meeting in my more advanced class where I told students they could keep their phones, and one student went ahead and put their phone on the table I had previously set up anyway. “I think this helps,” she said.

For what its worth, I think this bad behavior with cell phones is fading, at least at the college level. A lot of my students have heard about and thought about cell phone addiction and the problems of various social media platforms, so I do think that there is a lot more awareness of the problem of staring at the phone too much. I think we’re soon returning to before Covid times with cell phones— and lots of other things, too.

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A Small Example of the Jagged Frontier and Discovering What ChatGPT Can’t Do

Or, the case of the penless writing logo

One of the things about AI I find most fascinating (and I read about this in other commentaries about ChatGPT and other AIs all the time) is it is really good at lots of things and weirdly bad at lots of other things, and that seems especially true with a lot of things humans do very well. In his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Ethan Mollick describes this as the “jagged technological frontier.” He describes a large study he and some colleagues did (I will probably need to read this and possibly it assign this fall), and in the abstract of that study, they write that AI creates a jagged technological frontier “where some tasks are easily done by AI, while others, though seemingly similar in difficulty level, are outside the current capability of AI.” ChatGPT can easily make a pretty good looking (to me) logo, but it cannot separate writing from the word/image/concept of “pen.”

This is going to find its way into my courses this semester; as one of a series of exercises, I want to ask students to discover for themselves something the AI can’t do, and, if possible, make a guess as to why. I guess this would be my example of some of that assignment. I had a “conversation” with ChatGPT the other day to create a logo for the Canvas site for my Digital Writing class this fall. This is using the “not free” version which allows me to generate lots of images (I think the free version limits users to just two a day.). ChatGPT won’t let me just share the conversation, so I’ll reproduce/paraphrase it here.

I started with this prompt:

“Draw me a logo for the top of a website for a college class I’m teaching called digital writing. The class examines writing as a technology. Since the course number is 354, incorporate the number somewhere into the design. The university’s colors are green and white, but it is okay to incorporate other colors if you want.”

ChatGPT made this:

Then I asked it to make a JSON script that describes what this image looks like. I’m going to skip that in this post in part because I don’t know enough about JSON, and in part that’s not the point I’m trying to make. That’s maybe a future post.

Anyway, here’s an image it made with the JSON script:

And here’s another one it made when I asked it to repeat what it did before:

FWIW, this was my favorite and the one I went with— after some minor editing.

Then I wrote: “Now forget the json script. Instead, draw me a logo for the top of a website for a college class I’m teaching called digital writing. The class examines writing as a technology. Since the course number is 354, incorporate the number somewhere into the design. The university’s colors are green and white, but it is okay to incorporate other colors if you want.” Here’s what it drew:

To me, I think the the reproduction of the logo by ChatGPT is getting a little worse in some ways. I mean, “Nourse?”

Then I wrote: “I noticed you added a pen even though that wasn’t in the prompt. There are a lot of other kinds of writing implements and tools. Why did you decide on using a fountain pen?”

ChatGPT responded: “I chose to include a fountain pen because it’s a classic symbol of writing, representing the traditional side of the writing process. The contrast between the fountain pen and digital elements (like circuits or binary code) visually communicates the course’s theme of examining writing as a technology.

“Fountain pens are often seen as timeless and elegant, bridging the gap between old and new, which fits the idea of exploring writing in both traditional and technological contexts. It also has a distinctive and recognizable shape, which makes it effective in a logo.

“If you’d prefer a different writing tool or symbol, I can certainly create a version with an alternative element!”

I wrote: “How do you think it might look if instead of a fountain pen you used a typewriter instead?”

ChatGPT responded: “Using a typewriter in the logo could create a strong visual connection to the history of writing technology, emphasizing the transition from traditional mechanical tools to digital ones. The typewriter could be depicted with keys or as a whole, evoking a sense of retro charm while still aligning with the theme of writing as technology. This could give the logo a more nostalgic feel, yet still relevant to the course’s examination of the evolution of writing tools.

“If you’d like, I can create a version of the logo with a typewriter instead of the fountain pen to see how it looks. Would you like me to do that?”

“Sure, create a version like that” I wrote back. Here’s what it made:

ChatGPT also wrote with this image “Here is the logo with a typewriter element instead of a fountain pen. This version emphasizes the traditional aspect of writing through the typewriter while maintaining a connection to digital technology. If you have any further requests or adjustments, feel free to let me know!” Oh, the mansplaining confidence of ChatGPT, trying to convince me there was no pen anymore!

I responded “That’s interesting, but there is still a pen in the logo. can you eliminate that and the three smaller versions of the logo on the left side and in the right corner?” It produced this:

And ChatGPT wrote “Here is the revised logo, with the pen removed and only the typewriter elements included. The smaller versions of the logo have also been eliminated. Let me know if this version meets your needs or if you would like any further adjustments!” Again, it seems to be glitching more on some of the words and such.

I responded “Nope, the pen is still there and there are still three smaller logos, this time across the bottom of the page. Can you get rid of the pen and the smaller logos?” ChatGPT made this:

I find the inclusion of a photo-realistic pen/mechanical pencil particularly amusing, like ChatGPT is just trying to sneak it in there. You can also see where it’s getting more confused with “W- – +—33ING” or whatever that is. I responded “The small logos are gone, but there is still a writing implement– a pen or a mechanical pencil, I can’t tell. Also you the writing for digital writing and university at the bottom of the logo shouldn’t be there. Can you eliminate these things?” It made this:

It also wrote back “This version removes the pen or pencil, as well as the additional text at the bottom of the logo. The design now focuses entirely on the typewriter and digital elements, with the course number 354 subtly incorporated. If this meets your expectations or if further adjustments are needed, just let me know!” It’s almost as if it is admitting that yeah, the pencil/pen is still there, but at least the typewriter is what is being emphasized.

Here’s the punchline for me. I asked again “Can you delete the pencil, the pen, and the word University from this logo?” ChatGPT’s response surprised me:

“It seems that the tools available to me do not allow direct editing of existing images to remove specific elements like the pencil, pen, or text. Instead, I can generate a new logo without those elements, as I attempted to do in the previous steps. However, if those elements persist in the new generation, it’s due to the constraints of the image generation process.

“If you have access to image editing software, you might be able to manually remove the undesired elements. Alternatively, I can keep trying to refine the prompt to produce a version that meets your specifications. Would you like me to attempt another version or provide instructions for editing the image manually?”

I asked “Can you tell me more in simple layman terms what you mean by the constraints of the image generation process?”

ChatGPT answered “Sure! When I generate images, I’m using a process that interprets a text description to create a visual design. The tool I use is powerful but not perfect—it tries to match the description as closely as possible, but sometimes it includes extra elements or doesn’t fully understand specific requests, like leaving out certain objects or text.

“These ‘constraints’ mean that even when I specify not to include a pen or extra text, the tool might still add them because it’s interpreting the description in a way that makes sense to it, based on patterns it has learned from millions of images.

“So, while I can describe what you want very precisely, the image might still include some unwanted elements because the generation process doesn’t always get it exactly right. This is why there might be some back-and-forth to refine the result, but it’s not always guaranteed to be perfect due to these limitations.”

If I am understanding this correctly, I think what I am running into here is a bit of that jagged frontier and the limits of the AI’s training data. Essentially, I think ChatGPT’s association between images of writing and pens/pencils are so connected that it can’t make a picture of writing that does not include a pen or a pencil.

When you think about it for a second, this isn’t too surprising. Try doing a Google image search for just the word “writing” to see what I mean. Here’s a screenshot of what I came up with from such a search:

It’s no wonder that ChatGPT thinks that the idea/word/concept “writing” goes with pen or pencil because of the rest of the data it’s been trained on does the same thing. Which is to say I think when you ask a human to create an image of the process of writing, they default to a pen.

Though I will say ChatGPT’s advice for me the human in this loop: why don’t you just use some image editing software and fix it yourself?

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Grading Participation Helps Students

But no, not this. In my experience, attendance (participation, actually) needs to be a part of a student’s grade.

Dyer’s argument against grading attendance is based on compassion for students and their complicated lives. I get that, and I hear a lot of similar things from many of my fellow writing teachers as well. I teach at an opportunity granting institution where my students are probably similar to hers (she teaches at a community college). We do have “traditional” students who are 18-21 and living on or near campus, the kind of student more typical at a place like U of Michigan (which is about 7 miles away from where I work, EMU). But we also have students who commute and some from quite a distance away, and that creates a variety of attendance problems. We also have a lot of students who have significant work and family obligations— and that isn’t just the older returning students, either.

Dyer mentions a “secret project” she’s working on that includes reviewing syllabi from dozens of other gen ed biology classes, and she highlights a couple of draconian policies where missing two or three classes could drop a student’s grade by a full letter. That seems crazy and unreasonable to me too.

That said, I don’t think it takes a lot of research for me to claim that students who miss too much class tend to fail. Sure, teachers need to have some compassion and understanding, and they need to remember students have lives where stuff happens sometimes. But to me, a reasonable attendance policy is just like all kinds of rules and laws for things people should do anyway, even if it is arguably a “personal choice.” Take seat belt laws, for example. I’m old enough to remember riding in a car and learning to drive myself before seat belt laws, and I rarely bothered to buckle up. The law requiring it (and the possible ticket, of course) gave me and many other drivers the nudge we needed.

At Eastern, legend has it that the Board of Regents once passed a policy that declared no student could fail a class based on attendance alone. I’ve never found evidence that this policy exists (though I haven’t looked very hard), but whatever. I don’t grade students on attendance; I grade students’ participation, and the first thing a student needs to do to successfully participate is to show up.

Now, Dyer and I are working in different disciplines. I teach writing and all of the classes I teach have 25 or fewer students. It’s obviously easier to take attendance with 25 students than in a lecture hall with 250, and it’s a lot easier for students in a small class to understand why they need to show up. I have no idea how many students Dyer is working with in her courses, but since she teaches biology, I assume it’s more than me.

I think also think we have different assumptions about what class meetings are for. Dyer writes:

Think about it this way – if a student misses a class, makes up what they missed and performs well on the assessment, should their grade really be lower than a student who attended class and performed equally as well on the assessment?

I think she thinks that the point of a class meeting is for an instructor to deliver content to students, and the measurement of a student’s success in the course is an exam. And I get that— as far as I can tell, this has been the STEM assumption about pedagogy and assessment forever.

In the courses I teach (and I think this is true in most courses in the humanities), we value the stuff students do in these class meetings. The new-ish innovation of the “flipped classroom” is how most people I know have been teaching writing forever. My courses involve a lot of discussion of readings, discussions and brainstorming about the writing assignments, and peer review of those assignments. So “being there” is part of process, and there’s no way to cram on an exam at the end of the semester to try to make up for not being there.

The other thing is that now that we have AIs that easily answer any question that might pop up on a gen ed intro to biology exam, it seems to me that this approach to assessing students’ success is going to have to change and change very soon. One of the many things AI has made me rethink about teaching and learning is if someone can successfully complete an assignment without attending the course, then that’s not a very good assignment. But that’s a slightly different conversation for a different time.

Anyway, here’s what I do:

Participation in my classes is 30% of the overall grade and it includes activities like reading responses, small group work, and peer reviews. I don’t have a good way of keeping track of the details of these things in f2f classes, so to figure out a grade for participation, I have students email and tell me what grade they think they have earned, I respond, and then I base the grade on that. I think this is a surprisingly accurate and effective way of doing this, but that too might be a different post.

Students can’t participate if they aren’t there, so I tell my students they shouldn’t miss any class at all. However, the reality is there are of course legitimate reasons why students have to miss. So my policy is students can miss up to four class meetings— or the equivalent of two weeks in a 15 week semester— for any reason whatsoever. Students can always tell me why they need to miss class, but that’s up to them and I do not ask for any sort of “note” from someone.

Students who miss five classes fail— or at least they usually fail. Since the age of Covid, I have lightened up on this a bit and I’ve made a handful of acceptions with a few students. I also recently started giving students with perfect attendance a very small bonus, often enough to make a half-letter grade difference.

I’ve had a version of a policy like this for my entire teaching career, and I am comfortable in asserting that students who miss two weeks of a 15 week semester are essentially fail themselves anyway. These students aren’t just absent a lot; they also don’t turn stuff in. So just like seat belt laws incentivized wearing a seat belt (and undoubtedly saved countless numbers of people), an attendance policy incentivizes the positive behavior of showing up. And I guarantee you that I have had students in classes who grumbled about being required to show up who would have otherwise failed themselves.

And the first step to participating is attendance

In my new (mis)adventures on Substack, I stumbled across “Grading attendance hurts students” from Jayme Dyer in the Threads feed. Dyer teaches biology and based on my very brief browsing of her site (stack? sub? newsletter? what the hell is this called again?), I am pretty sure we’d agree about most things.

But no, not this. In my experience, attendance (participation, actually) needs to be a part of a student’s grade.

Dyer’s argument against grading attendance is based on compassion for students and their complicated lives. I get that, and I hear a lot of similar things from many of my fellow writing teachers as well. I teach at an opportunity granting institution where my students are probably similar to hers (she teaches at a community college). We do have “traditional” students who are 18-21 and living on or near campus, the kind of student more typical at a place like U of Michigan (which is about 7 miles away from where I work, EMU). But we also have students who commute and some from quite a distance away, and that creates a variety of attendance problems. We also have a lot of students who have significant work and family obligations— and that isn’t just the older returning students, either.

Dyer mentions a “secret project” she’s working on that includes reviewing syllabi from dozens of other gen ed biology classes, and she highlights a couple of draconian policies where missing two or three classes could drop a student’s grade by a full letter. That seems crazy and unreasonable to me too.

That said, I don’t think it takes a lot of research for me to claim that students who miss too much class tend to fail. Sure, teachers need to have some compassion and understanding, and they need to remember students have lives where stuff happens sometimes. But to me, a reasonable attendance policy is just like all kinds of rules and laws for things people should do anyway, even if it is arguably a “personal choice.” Take seat belt laws, for example. I’m old enough to remember riding in a car and learning to drive myself before seat belt laws, and I rarely bothered to buckle up. The law requiring it (and the possible ticket, of course) gave me and many other drivers the nudge we needed.

At Eastern, legend has it that the Board of Regents once passed a policy that declared no student could fail a class based on attendance alone. I’ve never found evidence that this policy exists (though I haven’t looked very hard), but whatever. I don’t grade students on attendance; I grade students’ participation, and the first thing a student needs to do to successfully participate is to show up.

Now, Dyer and I are working in different disciplines. I teach writing and all of the classes I teach have 25 or fewer students. It’s obviously easier to take attendance with 25 students than in a lecture hall with 250, and it’s a lot easier for students in a small class to understand why they need to show up. I have no idea how many students Dyer is working with in her courses, but since she teaches biology, I assume it’s more than me.

I think also think we have different assumptions about what class meetings are for. Dyer writes:

Think about it this way – if a student misses a class, makes up what they missed and performs well on the assessment, should their grade really be lower than a student who attended class and performed equally as well on the assessment?

I think she thinks that the point of a class meeting is for an instructor to deliver content to students, and the measurement of a student’s success in the course is an exam. And I get that— as far as I can tell, this has been the STEM assumption about pedagogy and assessment forever.

In the courses I teach (and I think this is true in most courses in the humanities), we value the stuff students do in these class meetings. The new-ish innovation of the “flipped classroom” is how most people I know have been teaching writing forever. My courses involve a lot of discussion of readings, discussions and brainstorming about the writing assignments, and peer review of those assignments. So “being there” is part of process, and there’s no way to cram on an exam at the end of the semester to try to make up for not being there.

The other thing is that now that we have AIs that easily answer any question that might pop up on a gen ed intro to biology exam, it seems to me that this approach to assessing students’ success is going to have to change and change very soon. One of the many things AI has made me rethink about teaching and learning is if someone can successfully complete an assignment without attending the course, then that’s not a very good assignment. But that’s a slightly different conversation for a different time.

Anyway, here’s what I do:

Participation in my classes is 30% of the overall grade and it includes activities like reading responses, small group work, and peer reviews. I don’t have a good way of keeping track of the details of these things in f2f classes, so to figure out a grade for participation, I have students email and tell me what grade they think they have earned, I respond, and then I base the grade on that. I think this is a surprisingly accurate and effective way of doing this, but that too might be a different post.

Students can’t participate if they aren’t there, so I tell my students they shouldn’t miss any class at all. However, the reality is there are of course legitimate reasons why students have to miss. So my policy is students can miss up to four class meetings— or the equivalent of two weeks in a 15 week semester— for any reason whatsoever. Students can always tell me why they need to miss class, but that’s up to them and I do not ask for any sort of “note” from someone.

Students who miss five classes fail— or at least they usually fail. Since the age of Covid, I have lightened up on this a bit and I’ve made a handful of acceptions with a few students. I also recently started giving students with perfect attendance a very small bonus, often enough to make a half-letter grade difference.

I’ve had a version of a policy like this for my entire teaching career, and I am comfortable in asserting that students who miss two weeks of a 15 week semester are essentially fail themselves anyway. These students aren’t just absent a lot; they also don’t turn stuff in. So just like seat belt laws incentivized wearing a seat belt (and undoubtedly saved countless numbers of people), an attendance policy incentivizes the positive behavior of showing up. And I guarantee you that I have had students in classes who grumbled about being required to show up who would have otherwise failed themselves.

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Why Teaching Citation Practices (yes, I’m talking MLA/APA style) is Even More Important with AI

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about why I use Google docs to teach writing at all levels. I’ve been using it for years–long before AI was a thing–in part because being able to see the history of a student’s Google doc is a teachable moment on the importance of the writing and revision process. This also has the added bonus of making it obvious if a student is skipping that work (by using AI, by copying/pasting from the internet, by stealing a paper from someone else, etc.) because the document history goes from nothing to a complete document in one step. I’m not saying that automatically means the student cheated, but it does prompt me to have a chat with that student.

In a similar vein and while I’m thinking about putting together my classes for the fall term, I thought I’d write about why I think teaching citation practices is increasingly important in research writing courses, particularly first year composition.

TL;DR version: None of this is new or innovative; rather, this is standard “teaching writing as a process” pedagogy and I’ve been teaching research writing like this for decades. But I do think it is even more important to teach citation skills now to help my students distinguish between the different types of sources, almost all of which are digital rather than on paper. Plus this is an assignment where AI might help, but I don’t think it’d help much.

Continue reading “Why Teaching Citation Practices (yes, I’m talking MLA/APA style) is Even More Important with AI”

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Why I Use Google Docs to Teach Writing, Especially in the Age of AI

I follow a couple different Facebook groups about AI, each of which have become a firehose of posts lately, a mix of cool new things and brand new freakouts. A while back, someone in one of these groups posted about an app to track the writing process in a student’s document as a way of proving that the text was not AI. My response to this was “why not just use Google docs?”

I wish I could be more specific than this, but I can’t find the original post or my comment to it; maybe it was deleted. Anyway, this person asked “what did I mean?” and I explained it briefly, but then I said I was thinking about writing a blog post about it. Here is that post.

For those interested in the tl;dr version: I think the best way to discourage students from handing in work they didn’t create (be that from a papermill, something copied and pasted from websites, or AI) is to teach writing rather than merely assigning writing. That’s not “my” idea; that’s been the mantra in writing studies for at least 50 years. Also not a new idea and one you already know if you use and/or teach with Google docs: it is a great tool for teaching writing because it helps with peer review and collaborative writing, and the version history feature helps me see a student’s writing process, from the beginning of the draft through revisions. And if a student’s draft goes from nothing to complete in one revision, well, then that student and I have a chat.

Continue reading “Why I Use Google Docs to Teach Writing, Especially in the Age of AI”

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TALIA? This is Not the AI Grading App I Was Searching For

(My friend Bill Hart-Davidson unexpectedly died last week. At some point, I’ll write more about Bill here, probably. In the meantime, I thought I’d finish this post I started a while ago about the webinar about Instructify’s AI grading app. Bill and I had been texting/talking more about AI lately, and I wish I would have had a chance to text/talk more about this. Or anything else).

In March 2023, I wrote a blog post titled “What Would an AI Grading App Look Like?” I was inspired by what I still think is one of the best episodes of South Park I have seen in years, “Deep Learning.”  Follow this link for a detailed summary or look at my post from last year, but in the nutshell, the kids start using ChatGPT to write a paper assignment and Mr. Garrison figures out how to use ChatGPT to grade those papers. Hijinks ensue.

Well, about a month ago and at a time when I was up to my eyeballs in grading, I saw a webinar presentation from Instructify about their AI product called TALIA. The title of the webinar was “How To Save Dozens of Hours Grading Essays Using AI.” I missed the live event, but I watched the recording– and you can too, if you want— or at least you could when I started writing this. Much more about it after the break, but the tl;dr version is this AI grading tool is not the one I am looking for (not surprisingly), and I think it would be a good idea for these tech startups to include people with actual experience with teaching writing on their development teams.

Continue reading “TALIA? This is Not the AI Grading App I Was Searching For”

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Workin’ 9 to 5 (sort of) and Other Adventures of All FY Writing/All the Time!

As I blogged about earlier this year, I’m doing something this semester that I have never done as a tenure-track professor: I’m teaching a full load (three sections) of first year writing. I’ve had semesters where I’ve taught multiple sections of the same class, but I think the last time I did that was in the early 2000s where I taught two sections of a 300-level course while also having a course release to  do quasi-administrative work. As I explained earlier, my current schedule is a fluke based on the circumstances this semester and I jumped at the chance to just teach first year writing. In other words, this was my idea: I wanted to have one prep for a change of pace, and I also like to teach first year writing.

(Incidentally, when I was hired at EMU in 1998, my primary teaching assignments were an earlier version of this 300-level course and a graduate course on teaching with computers. Times and curriculums have changed and I haven’t taught that 300 level class in eight years and that grad course in at least 15 years, maybe more).

Having only one course to prepare– as opposed to three different classes– has been nice, and it’s especially nice that it’s first year composition, a course that I have literally been teaching regularly in my dreams for most of my life at this point. I’ve been able to keep all three different classes on the same schedule, so with a bit of tweaking and customization for each section, it still is one prep. And not surprisingly, one prep is easier than three.

The downsides? Well, all three of sections are f2f (as is the case with all of the first year writing courses at EMU) and all three sections are on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Now, I haven’t taught three f2f classes since I started teaching online for part of my load, and that was almost 20 years ago. I also haven’t taught this early for a while (my first section is at 9:30 in the morning), and I haven’t taught back-to-back sections with no break between in a long time either. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I am in the office by 9 am and working pretty steadily until I’m done at 5 pm.

Because those days end up being nothing but teaching and preparing for teaching, I have also had to come into the office a lot more on other days during the week. I ran into an especially intense stretch in late January/early February when I had conferences with all 60 (or so) of my students– along with having a bunch of other “life” appointments and family stuff. I was on campus and mostly in my office for just about two weeks back then, and almost all day each of those days.

I realize this isn’t a work schedule most people would complain about– and I’m not complaining, at least not exactly. It’s just a very different rhythm from teaching a mix of f2f and online. The upside of teaching a mix of f2f and online is it gives me a lot more scheduling flexibility for when I do things. I do most of my online teaching while at home and in pajamas or sweats, plus I can take a break once in a while to do laundry or something else that needs to be done around the house.

But if I’m not disciplined about scheduling myself about when I do the work– planning, grading, and interacting with the class discussion boards– teaching asynchronously online can become an all day/all night thing where I’m constantly working in a not so efficient multitasking kind of way. So while teaching f2f means I’m spending a lot more time on campus, it does create at least more separation between life and work. That’s a good thing.

And I do like teaching f2f– not really more than teaching online (I like doing that too), but I like it. I like the live performance of f2f teaching and after having taught a zillion sections of first year writing, I have a refined schtick. I like putting on the show three times a day right in a row.

I’ve also been struck by the differences in these three sections. It’s not news to me that different groups of students taking the same course can have very different personalities, dynamics, and responses to readings and assignments. But teaching the same thing to three different classes (back to back to back) makes this very visible. Without getting into any details, it’s pretty clear that these different sections are not equally capable.

It does get a little boring doing the same thing three times in a row. If I’m scheduled to teach three sections of first year writing again like this, I would probably be okay with it. But I think I’d prefer two preps with an online class in the mix. Get back with me when I’m at the end of the semester to see if I feel the same way.

 

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Starting 2024 With All First Year Writing/All the Time!

This coming winter term (what every other university calls spring term), I’m going to be doing something I have never done in my career as a tenure-track professor. I’m going to be teaching first year composition and only first year composition.  It’ll be quite a change.

When I came to EMU in 1998, my office was right next to a very senior colleague, Bob Kraft. Bob, who retired from EMU in 2004 and who passed away in December 2022, came back to the department to teach after having been in some administrative positions for quite a while. His office was right next to mine and we chatted with each other often about teaching, EMU politics, and other regular faculty chit-chat. He was a good guy; used to call me “Steve-O!”

Bob taught the same three courses every semester: three sections of a 300-level course called Professional Writing. It was a class he was involved in developing back in the early 1980s and I believe he assigned a course pack that had the complete course in it– and I mean everything: all the readings, in-class worksheets, the assignments, rubrics, you name it. Back in those days and before a university shift to “Writing Intensive” courses within majors, this was a class that was a “restricted elective” in lots of different majors, and we offered plenty of sections of it and similar classes. (In retrospect, the shift away from courses like this one to a “writing in the disciplines” approach/philosophy was perhaps a mistake both because of the way these classes have subsequently been taught in different disciplines and because it dramatically reduced the credit hour production in the English department– but all this is a different topic).

Anyway, Bob essentially did exactly the same thing three times a semester every semester, the same discussions, the same assignments, and the same kinds of papers to grade. Nothing– or almost nothing– changed. I’m pretty sure the only prep Bob had to do was change the dates on the course schedule.

I thought “Jesus, that’d be so boring! I’d go crazy with that schedule.” I mean, he obviously liked the arrangement and I have every reason to believe it was a good class and all, but the idea of teaching the same class the same way every semester for years just gave me hives. Of course, I was quite literally in the opposite place in my career: rather than trying to make the transition into retirement, I was an almost freshly-minted PhD who was more than eager to develop and teach new classes and do new things.

For my first 20 years at EMU (give or take), my work load was a mix of advanced undergraduate writing classes, a graduate course almost every semester, and various quasi-administrative duties. I occasionally have had semesters where I taught two sections of the same course, but most semesters, I taught three different courses– or two different ones plus quasi-admin stuff. I rarely taught first year composition during the regular school year (though I taught it in the summer for extra money while our son Will was still at home) because I was needed to teach the advanced undergrad and MA-level writing classes we had. And this was all a good thing: I got to teach a lot of different courses, I got a chance to do things like help direct the first year writing program or to coordinate our major and grad program, and I had the opportunity to work closely with a lot of MA students who have gone on to successful careers of their own.

But around six or seven years ago, the department (the entire university, actually) started to change and I started to change as well. Our enrollments have fallen across the board, but especially for upper-level undergraduate and MA level courses, which means instead of a grad course every semester, I tend to teach one a school year, along with fewer advanced undergrad writing classes, and now I teach first year writing every semester. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about this arrangement is the students I work with in first year composition are different from the students I work with on their MA projects– but they’re really not that different, in the big picture of things.

And of course, as I move closer to thinking about retirement myself, Bob’s teaching arrangement seems like a better and better idea. So, scheduling circumstances being what they are, when it became clear I’d have a chance to just teach three sections of first year comp this coming winter, I took it.

We’ll see what happens. I’m looking forward to greatly reducing my prep time because this is the only course I’m teaching this semester (just three times), and also because first year writing is something I’ve taught and thought about A LOT. I’m also looking forward to experimenting with requiring students to use ChatGPT and other AI tools to at least brainstorm and copy-edit– maybe more. What I’m not looking forward to is kind of just repeating the same thing three times in a row each day I teach. Along these lines, I am not looking forward to teaching three classes all on the same days (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and all face to face. I haven’t done that in a long time (possibly never) because I’ve either taught two and been on reassigned time, or I have taught at least a third of my load online. And I’m also worried about keeping all three of these classes in synch. If one group falls behind for some reason, it’ll mess up my plans (this is perhaps inevitable).

What I’m not as worried about is all the essays I’ll have to read and grade. I’m well-aware that the biggest part of the work for anyone teaching first year writing is all the reading and commenting and grading student work, and I’ve figured out a lot over the years about how to do it. Of course, I might be kidding myself with this one….

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So, What About AI Now? (A talk and an update)

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk/lead a discussion called “So, What About AI Now?” That’s a link to my slides. The talk/discussion was for a faculty development program at Washtenaw Community College, a program organized by my friend, colleague, and former student, Hava Levitt-Phillips.

I covered some of the territory I’ve been writing about here for a while now and I thought both the talk and discussion went well. I think most of the people at this thing (it was over Zoom, so it was a little hard to read the room) had seen enough stories like this one on 60 Minutes the other night: Artificial Intelligence is going to at least be as transformative of a technology as “the internet,” and there is not a zero percent chance that it could end civilization as we know it. All of which is to say we probably need to put the dangers of a few college kids using AI (badly) to cheat on poorly designed assignments into perspective.

I also talked about how we really need to question some of the more dubious claims in the MSM about the powers of AI, such as the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this past summer, “GPT-4 Can Already Pass Freshman Year at Harvard.”  I blogged about that nonsense a couple months ago here, but the gist of what I wrote there is that all of these claims of AI being able to pass all these tests and freshman year at Harvard (etc.) are wrong. Besides the fact that the way a lot of these tests are run make the claims bogus (and that is definitely the case with this CHE piece), students in our classes still need to show up– and I mean that for both f2f and online courses.

And as we talked about at this session, if a teacher gives students some kind of assignment (an essay, an exam, whatever) that can be successfully completed without ever attending class, then that’s a bad assignment.

So the sense that I got from this group– folks teaching right now the kinds of classes where (according to a lot of the nonsense that’s been in MSM for months) the cheating with ChatGPT et al was going to just make it impossible to assign writing anymore, not in college and not in high school— is it hasn’t been that big of a deal. Sure, a few folks talked about students who tried to cheat with AI who were easily caught, but for the most part it hadn’t been much of a problem. The faculty in this group seemed more interested in trying to figure out a way to make use of AI in their teaching than they were in cheating.

I’m not trying to suggest there’s no reason to worry about what AI means for the future of… well, everything, including education. Any of us who are “knowledge workers”– that is, teachers, professors, lawyers, scientists, doctors, accountants, etc. etc.– needs to pay attention to AI because there’s no question this shit is going to change the way we do our jobs. But my sense from this group (and just the general vibe I get on campus and in social media) is that the freak-out about AI is over, which is good.

One last thing though:  just the other day (long after this talk), I saw what I believe to be my first case of a student trying to cheat with ChatGPT– sort of. I don’t want to go into too many details since this is a student in one of my classes right now. But basically, this student (who is struggling quite a bit) turned in a piece of writing that was first and foremost not the assignment I gave, and it also just happened this person used ChatGPT to generate a lot of the text. So as we met to talk about what the actual assignment was and how this student needed to do it again, etc., I also started asking about what they turned in.

“Did you actually write this?” I asked. “This kind of seems like ChatGPT or something.”

“Well, I did use it for some of it, yes.”

“But you didn’t actually read this book ChatGPT is citing here, did you?”

“Well, no…”

And so forth.  Once again, a good reminder that students who resort to cheating with things like AI are far from criminal masterminds.