Those shitbot LLMs don’t produce comparable work to humans, imo, but there are methods the instructors can use to mess with them so if a student does submit AI papers it’s more a skill issue for the instructor.
I hope everyone who is proven to submit such papers is immediately kicked out of school with no refund. And I hope any federal aid they received is taken back forcing them to pay it.
EDIT: Looks like I struck a nerve because this comment’s score fluctuates from positive to negative. Those shitbot enthusiasts must be in here shilling.
I agree with the sentiment except for the last bit, which is a bit harsh. LLMs didn’t exist when I was in uni, but academic dishonesty did happen from time-to-time. It’d usually result in that assignment getting a 0 (sometimes enough to fail the whole module), although repeated offences beget more drastic consequences. LLM use is just a new form of academic dishonesty IMHO, albeit one that is more difficult to detect definitively.
There are a lot of idiots in university who do dumb things but then learn from the experience. Being too punitive would likely be a net negative, especially when talking about pulling their funding…
Really the broader point is nobody should have to take out life-ruining loans for a chance at education in the first place.
In the USA, “contract cheating” or outsourcing work, now and previously, was punishable by expulsion.
Outsourcing work is bad enough, but if students learn to do academics by relying on lying chatbots then eventually they’re going to dump that slop into the open world and it will be a net negative for the entire human race. It’s a whole new type of harm they’re committing incomparable to anything in the past.
And yet being able to shows that a student can follow simple.instructions, review formatting and their own output, and not need to consult a slop machine that’s contributing to techbro oligarchy and environmental destruction.
Why are we concerned about university students’ ability to follow simple instructions? Was that not taught and tested at some point during the 13 years of public school they had to complete to be here?
If you want to follow instructions, enlist in the army and go to boot camp. If you want to think for yourself, go to college. Or so I was told.
Essay writing is supposed to be an exercise in research; the critical skills are supposed to be finding sources for information, validating their credibility, and drawing supportable conclusions. That takes critical thinking and logic skills. Which is not part of the curriculum. Go take a college English class, turn in an essay, get your grade back, your teacher will have graded you on punctuation, spelling, grammar, MLA formatting. Name of the periodical should be in italics, not underlined -5 pts.
And…I get it. It’s harder to teach critical thinking. It’s WAY harder to grade critical thinking. So they don’t try; they give tests designed to test rote memorization and essays that if we’re honest are busywork, assigned by English majors who have no other career prospects.
I could also go into how defining “credible scientific research” as “rigidly formatted per this published style guide” is a recipe for manufacturing bullshit; you want people to believe the Earth is flat? Write about it in MLA.
Based on that description of an essay, I don’t think you’ve been to college.
Writing an essay isn’t supposed to be a test of what the student has learned; it’s a test of what the student has found out.
Essay writing is (theoretically) an exercise in research. Maybe you’ll do primary research via the scientific method, conducting and reporting on experiments, but vastly more likely you’re supposed to find essays written by other researchers and cite their work, drawing conclusions based on their data.
Doing this properly requires critical thinking and logic skills…which they don’t bother to teach. Instead, they focus mainly on the clerical aspects of the assignment; focusing more on font selection and document formatting than the actual content of the ideas.
What is a take-home open-book test other than busywork? I’m a flight instructor, I teach people how to fly airplanes. I don’t care how much or how little time a student studies, they’ve got to show me they can fly the airplane before I send them to the examiner. College professors seem to approach their job as “How can I make this hard on my students?” I’ve always seen my job as “How can I make this easier for my students?” Because my job is to teach a skill, not gatekeep a decent living.
With respect, it sounds like you have no idea about the range of nonsense human students are capable of submitting even without AI.
I used to teach Software Dev at a university, and even at MSc level some of the submissions would have paled in comparison to even GPT3 output. That said, I didn’t have to deal with the AI problem myself. I taught just before LLMs came into their own - Textsynth had just come out, and I used to use it as an example of how unintentional bias in training data shapes the outputs.
While I no longer teach, I do still work in that space. Ironically the best way to catch AI papers these days is with another AI. This is included in the plagiarism-checking software, and breaks down where it detects suspicious passages and why it thinks they’re suspicious.
With respect, it sounds like you have no idea about the range of nonsense human students are capable of submitting even without AI.
Human students, and non-students, were the training data set. The LLMs will never reach 94% accuracy to that even with infinite resources. The AI is always always always always going to be worse.
Those shitbot LLMs don’t produce comparable work to humans, imo, but there are methods the instructors can use to mess with them so if a student does submit AI papers it’s more a skill issue for the instructor.
I hope everyone who is proven to submit such papers is immediately kicked out of school with no refund. And I hope any federal aid they received is taken back forcing them to pay it.
EDIT: Looks like I struck a nerve because this comment’s score fluctuates from positive to negative. Those shitbot enthusiasts must be in here shilling.
I agree with the sentiment except for the last bit, which is a bit harsh. LLMs didn’t exist when I was in uni, but academic dishonesty did happen from time-to-time. It’d usually result in that assignment getting a 0 (sometimes enough to fail the whole module), although repeated offences beget more drastic consequences. LLM use is just a new form of academic dishonesty IMHO, albeit one that is more difficult to detect definitively.
There are a lot of idiots in university who do dumb things but then learn from the experience. Being too punitive would likely be a net negative, especially when talking about pulling their funding…
Really the broader point is nobody should have to take out life-ruining loans for a chance at education in the first place.
In the USA, “contract cheating” or outsourcing work, now and previously, was punishable by expulsion.
Outsourcing work is bad enough, but if students learn to do academics by relying on lying chatbots then eventually they’re going to dump that slop into the open world and it will be a net negative for the entire human race. It’s a whole new type of harm they’re committing incomparable to anything in the past.
If LLMs are going to improve society in any way, it’ll be killing the delusion that writing MLA formatted essays has anything to do with education.
And yet being able to shows that a student can follow simple.instructions, review formatting and their own output, and not need to consult a slop machine that’s contributing to techbro oligarchy and environmental destruction.
Why are we concerned about university students’ ability to follow simple instructions? Was that not taught and tested at some point during the 13 years of public school they had to complete to be here?
If you want to follow instructions, enlist in the army and go to boot camp. If you want to think for yourself, go to college. Or so I was told.
Essay writing is supposed to be an exercise in research; the critical skills are supposed to be finding sources for information, validating their credibility, and drawing supportable conclusions. That takes critical thinking and logic skills. Which is not part of the curriculum. Go take a college English class, turn in an essay, get your grade back, your teacher will have graded you on punctuation, spelling, grammar, MLA formatting. Name of the periodical should be in italics, not underlined -5 pts.
And…I get it. It’s harder to teach critical thinking. It’s WAY harder to grade critical thinking. So they don’t try; they give tests designed to test rote memorization and essays that if we’re honest are busywork, assigned by English majors who have no other career prospects.
I could also go into how defining “credible scientific research” as “rigidly formatted per this published style guide” is a recipe for manufacturing bullshit; you want people to believe the Earth is flat? Write about it in MLA.
Woe is you, being asked to prove you learned anything, open book and at a time and place you decide on. Skill issue.
Based on that description of an essay, I don’t think you’ve been to college.
Writing an essay isn’t supposed to be a test of what the student has learned; it’s a test of what the student has found out.
Essay writing is (theoretically) an exercise in research. Maybe you’ll do primary research via the scientific method, conducting and reporting on experiments, but vastly more likely you’re supposed to find essays written by other researchers and cite their work, drawing conclusions based on their data.
Doing this properly requires critical thinking and logic skills…which they don’t bother to teach. Instead, they focus mainly on the clerical aspects of the assignment; focusing more on font selection and document formatting than the actual content of the ideas.
What is a take-home open-book test other than busywork? I’m a flight instructor, I teach people how to fly airplanes. I don’t care how much or how little time a student studies, they’ve got to show me they can fly the airplane before I send them to the examiner. College professors seem to approach their job as “How can I make this hard on my students?” I’ve always seen my job as “How can I make this easier for my students?” Because my job is to teach a skill, not gatekeep a decent living.
With respect, it sounds like you have no idea about the range of nonsense human students are capable of submitting even without AI.
I used to teach Software Dev at a university, and even at MSc level some of the submissions would have paled in comparison to even GPT3 output. That said, I didn’t have to deal with the AI problem myself. I taught just before LLMs came into their own - Textsynth had just come out, and I used to use it as an example of how unintentional bias in training data shapes the outputs.
While I no longer teach, I do still work in that space. Ironically the best way to catch AI papers these days is with another AI. This is included in the plagiarism-checking software, and breaks down where it detects suspicious passages and why it thinks they’re suspicious.
Human students, and non-students, were the training data set. The LLMs will never reach 94% accuracy to that even with infinite resources. The AI is always always always always going to be worse.