Comment by mvkel

> Combined with a TikTok account of a person who is clearly participating in the attention economy, I am skeptical.

Yep, from the context, 100% this is fake. Also, while this Jason Gibson claims to be a history professor at Alcorn State University, it seems to me that Alcorn State doesn't have a history department, and no "Jason Gibson" appears anywhere in the faculty list of Alcorn's College of Arts and Sciences. https://www.alcorn.edu/academics/schools-and-departments/col...

Maybe I'm sheltered, but I've never seen a university professor without a departmental web page and a list of publications. Or a RateMyProfessors.com listing.

I have no opinion on the validity of this claim, but I do know that many students do not read things. I taught university level computer science for over 30 years. On midterms, I would embed phrases such as “print OKAPI on the top of page 2 for an extra mark” in the exam instructions. About 40% of students followed this instruction, even though I did this for years, and you'd have thought students would tell their friends. But they didn't.

I could go on about cheating rings that encompassed entire classes (I never saw this myself, but have read authenticated reports of it.) I know of a case where a class writing an exam had teaching assistants writing the exam answers on the blackboard at the front of the room.

The CS students I taught were a highly motivated group overall. But perhaps these students were in a course they didn't want to take, resentful of being made to study things they weren't interested in, because it was a program requirement. (I taught service courses, I know that mentality.) Then it is entirely plausible to me that they might cut and paste an answer without even looking at it, or an executive summary that appears there.

I first discovered that not all students are fussy about the work they hand in, back in the late 1960s, when I was a marker for a course that taught some Cobol. The lab was a payroll program, and I saw several students hand in programs that computed pay as $2.00/hour times 40 hours equals something like $-123456.78. I asked them, when I gave them their work back, if they had looked at their output. They were all surprised that I'd expect that.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I taught many highly motivated students who worked hard and cared very much about their work. But I did deal with many incidents of cheating in my career too.

I am also skeptical this is true. I made few typical exam essay questions and inserted the requisite clause about adding nonsense about Madagascar, and then had chatGPT answer the questions. In almost every case the output included a little executive summary at the bottom below the essay content, clearly calling out the nonsense it had added. I could believe a few students missing this, but over 90% of the class?

For what it's worth, this is anecdotal as well, but a close friend of mine teaches math at a community college in NM and he routinely catches most of his students cheating on online multiple choice tests like this. He adds a sentence in white and tiny, tiny, text to the questions that either flip their meaning entirely or simply make one of the wrong answers seem correct. When I was visiting him at the end of last semester he was quite depressed when ALL of the students in one of his classes were caught cheating like this.

as an educator, does match my experience though. I do something similar, tho a little more sophisticated than white text for some assignments so that students not cheating have a way to standout from the pack. in my most recent class of 48 students, maybe 5 actually engaged properly. I dont know if those students used AI or not, and frankly I don't really care, but i do care if students think critically and engage with the content.

I see some improvements in class where we discuss short-comings of AI etc. but realisitclaly life for students now is much harder than it was when I went through. A majority are holding a fulltime job just to keep food in mouth / roof overheadc they simply dont have time to do things properly for the most part as far as I can tell.

From what insight i could gather, both average mark and AI abuse vs us correlate strongly with financial security.

The problem is much deeper than AI abuse, it's a symptom and a useful indicator, not the problem itself.

It can be difficult for intelligent, curious, and motivated people to imagine the minds of lazy, stupid children.

I see adults at the job who do not even bother reading a single word from the AI slop they shove down everyone else's throat literally daily. They will copy/paste a question, and just copy/paste the answer with 0 proofreading or checking or anything.

I can so easily believe that kids do the exact same thing.