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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'd like to go back to the days of these complaints.  Many of my students are having grammarly essentially write their work, and they don't even realize it because they think that using grammarly is just a "help," and, therefore, not even question whether this is their writing. They all sound like generic scholarly essays that are full of hot air because they don't really read the assignments well enough either! I've had to contact so many, freak them out with AI plagiarism talk and get them to roll it back. Almost grateful to see misspellings because they are an indication that the work is authentic.

As for content, I make it clear from the beginning that points are earned by utilizing info from the readings.  It's in the prompt and the rubric. So, no need to chide there.

I think with today's students,  this email will just antagonize them, sadly. And some will catch that possessive/plural error.[/quote]

Do you think Grammarly is cheating?  My DS uses it.  She has dyslexia, dysgraphia and ADHD.  It doesn’t write the work for her.  It basically tells her when she has made a grammatical or spelling error.  I find it akin to a proof reader.  She does not use Chat GPT to write work (although many of her friends do) because she finds the writing horrible.

I’m just interested in if Grammarly is considered cheating and why.[/quote]

Firstly, as someone who teaches, I would never want someone with genuine learning disabilities to be deprived of necessary tools that help them succeed.  If a student in my class with documentation has Grammarly (or things like it) as a learning accommodation, then I'm not going to push back. But if it's not being used for that reason, I'd love to help everyone get away from it if I could.  Here's why.

Grammarly is different from the grammar-check and spellcheck functions built into things like Google Docs: its rewriting functions are far more robust. I don't want to grade Grammarly's cooked-up (or even just new and improved) version of a paper or essay: I want to grade my students' own work, flaws and all, so that my students can improve their own abilities to think and write for themselves. Telling them what _Grammarly_ can improve is utterly useless.

So yes, fine, use spellcheck to eliminate the basic typos. But don't substitute spellcheck for careful reading. And don't turn in massively corrected, totally polished grammar that didn't come from you, because then I can't tell that you need help learning how to write, and I'll never be able to assist you in improving. Objectively, that ultimately wastes your time, your effort, and your tuition money.

And for all the folks who say that grammar isn't important, there were quite a few comments on the errors in the post that started this thread in the first place.  Words matter in many situations, to many people.  And AI isn't the answer to not knowing how to express yourself clearly and accurately.[/quote]

You are clearly not a college professor. We are talking about college, not middle school. Of course middle schoolers, even early high schoolers, should not be using Grammarly to learn actual grammar (though it's actual quite a useful learning tool). No college professor at a decent college in America considers it their job to teach college students grammar. By then, they are teaching them how build strong arguments, etc. Getting AI to fix basic spelling and grammatical errors to help that professor see through the stupid mistakes to the meat of the paper, especially when you have two other papers and a mid-term in the same week is, I promise you, perfectly acceptable to college professors at decent and elite universities.[/quote]

PP to whom you are replying here.  Actually, I am a college professor, and a department chair.  And I do consider it my job both to expect largely correct grammar coming directly from my students (not coming from AI) and to require students to attempt to filter out their own mistakes. Productive self-evaluation is part of being a professional, and even just part of being a functioning adult.

My students running their writing through generative AI tools prevents me from understanding not only their objective skills and their general abilities, but also their thought processes.  It is not in fact acceptable to me, but even if it were, it would be a lazy way for me to pretend that my students do not need to improve and that I do not, in fact, need to help them.[/quote]

Agreed.  I taught a writing course at a top 25 professional school for many years.  I finally did a “grammar tip of the day” because while I expected a certain level of grammatical excellence, the reality was that it didn’t exist.  I found it shocking and disturbing.  This was before AI![/quote]

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