Faculty at the college I work for are kicking and screaming about AI and students using AI. They don't want to use new tools so they're just trying to outright ban students from using them.
One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard. You just look for dashes in their writing."
I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use those, right?"
The writing is a mandatory part of the learning process. Outsourcing it to tools is skipping and cheating. Nothing new here. It was the same when the tool was your buddy or upwork before LLMs.
Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.
Sure but there's also a continuum of practice between banning outright and letting the students use llm's to just write for them.
Use it as a peer review. Use it during brainstorming. Use it to clarify ambiguous thoughts. Use it to challenge your arguments and poke holes in your assumptions.
The sad difference that makes a difference is that banning graphing calculators from proctored exams is enforceable in practice.
Appealing to honor is a partial solution at best. Cheating is a problem at West Point, let alone the majority of places with a less disciplined culture. It's sad, but true. The fact that you and I would never cheat on exams simply does not generalize.
edit: good on West Point for actually following up on the cheating. I've witnessed another institution sweeping it under the rug even when properly documented and passed up two or three levels of reporting. As an academic director and thus manager of professors this was infuriating and demoralizing for all concerned.
Faculty at the college I work for are kicking and screaming about AI and students using AI. They don't want to use new tools so they're just trying to outright ban students from using them.
One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard. You just look for dashes in their writing."
I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use those, right?"
Blank stares.
I hate it.
The writing is a mandatory part of the learning process. Outsourcing it to tools is skipping and cheating. Nothing new here. It was the same when the tool was your buddy or upwork before LLMs.
Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.
Sure but there's also a continuum of practice between banning outright and letting the students use llm's to just write for them.
Use it as a peer review. Use it during brainstorming. Use it to clarify ambiguous thoughts. Use it to challenge your arguments and poke holes in your assumptions.
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The sad difference that makes a difference is that banning graphing calculators from proctored exams is enforceable in practice.
Appealing to honor is a partial solution at best. Cheating is a problem at West Point, let alone the majority of places with a less disciplined culture. It's sad, but true. The fact that you and I would never cheat on exams simply does not generalize.
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/18/51-west-...
edit: good on West Point for actually following up on the cheating. I've witnessed another institution sweeping it under the rug even when properly documented and passed up two or three levels of reporting. As an academic director and thus manager of professors this was infuriating and demoralizing for all concerned.
2 replies →
It's sad. I use dashes in my writing all the time. I've had to consciously pause and make an effort not to use them in my emails now.
Indeed, the very dashes the English teacher taught me to use.
If you didn't write it, you don't deserve credit for it. You don't learn by outsourcing your work to a piece of software.