Reply to Are college students using AI to write papers?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Are college students using AI to write papers?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, and they study for exams by having AI fill in their study guides (no need to take notes or pay attention in class! and it's quite amusing to read some of the AI 'hallucinations'!). I've already moved to in-class essay exams, which I try to make AI-proof. And this coming term I'm implementing a quasi-tutorial system wherein students write papers but then have to explain and defend them to me and one or two other students, in small group discussions.

If profs continued to assess as if it were 2022 many if not most students would be getting As for literally zero work, having learned absolutely nothing in the course.[/quote]

Another prof here. PLEASE WARN YOUR KIDS ABOUT USING AI TO GENERATE A STUDY GUIDE. I see nothing wrong with it ethically, but in my experience, AI does a bad job of distilling what I emphasized on my slides, or the bigger picture, and at times it feeds the students blatantly incorrect information. One of my students sent me the AI study guide he got from asking AI to do it off of my slides / lecture notes (I try to make the slides have a lot of info on them so students CAN use them as a study guide). About 50% of it was helpful, and about 30% of it was wildly irrelevant (student now spending time studying stupid little sidebar notes) [b]and about 20% was explicitly wrong[/b]. For example, I went over a specific theory, and the name of the specific theory was on the slides. It gave a similar-sounding name for the theory - a name that an outsider would think sounds pretty similar but it was completely different in meaning. And then described the theory in a way that was really wrong - almost like a smart outsider guessing what the theory meant based on the name. And being wrong.

And it also missed really really big important concepts. Ones that had several slides. So the student would have failed to study those.

The thing is, developing your own study guide is actually a big part of the learning. I told my student that he would have been so much better off going through the lecture notes and making his own study guide.  Luckily the student emailed the guide ahead of time and I emailed him back and told him to throw it away and that he'd do terrible on the exam if he used it!

So it'd be helpful to warn your student not to do this - they won't do as well on exams.[/quote]

Thanks to the prof above for saying this.

Over in the "Jobs" forum, the AI posts have so much fearmongering.  And yet, the AI work I've seen is frankly pretty crappy or off-target.  My corporation has been experimenting with AI and there are lots of failures and areas where it can't be used yet.

It seems to me that the people who like AI work the best are unable to perceive quality differences, just like the student above.  This makes me question how they can use AI to quickly make excellent work.  Of course, sometimes completing an assignment is just about handing something in.  But we should expect more of ourselves and of education.

I think education is going through a tough adaptation period right now.  But I believe it will all work out, and that students will benefit from AI as a tool and still learn and internalize concepts.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics