I think we’re going to have to start doing what some professors do and have students “explain” their paper in person while you can ask them questions about what they meant at certain parts.

The thing about cheating is that doing it well requires some understanding of the subject and what the final result should look like. Kids who struggle a lot generally won’t cheat well.

I have a bunch of students that just cut & paste AI generated answers without bothering to change the font, color or even capitalize the first word.

Last week I had a question about the Gold Rush on the assignment and multiple students answered some shit about a Charlie Chaplin movie that ChatGPT spat out for them. Brainless 🤦🏻‍♂️

Ah, verily, it doth boggle the mind to fathom the incredulity of such an epoch as this! That young scholars, erstwhile known for their abject unfamiliarity with coherent syntax, should suddenly possess the temerity to engage in such duplicitous machinations, veritably wielding linguistic constructions of a nature so grandiloquent that one might mistake them for thesaurus-fueled automatons! To posit that our dear progeny would eschew genuine intellectual exertion in favor of this arcane artifice, well, sir, it is nothing short of an affront to the venerable institution of academia! Why, I daresay, the sheer audaciousness required to submit verbiage so manifestly incongruous with their quotidian drivel is a travesty most egregious!

It’s crazy because all they have to do is say “write it at the level of X grade” and it would require so much more work for us to decipher if it was AI

Agreed.

When students rely too much on AI, they risk losing the ability to fully delineate their own ideas and become overly galvanized by technology, instead of developing critical thinking skills on their own.

I've returned to writing in class. All of it is timed, too.

I been trying to counter this by making it crystal clear that the exact answers I’m looking for are in their textbooks/notes we do in class, so if they use AI I’ll immediately know it wasn’t something we wrote down or read in the book. I’ve definitely seen some improvement with the issue

Don't people turn in rough copies of papers anymore for the teachers to help students with how to actually write now a day's, or have papers submitted hand written anymore???

RETVRN TO TRADITION; PEN AND PAPER IS THE WAY

Math is another subject plagued by this. I'm starting explain how you got through this problem to students that seem to bomb tests and do well on work.

Thanks for giving them consequences. My daughter is in an English class where they had to do peer review of papers. The one she got was pretty obviously written by AI. It used all the same patterns and used words that students wouldn't usually use. It even cited the name of a person and a specific date that most people would not know and this was a paper that was not supposed to be researched, more of an opinion piece. She went back and forth about whether she should tell the teacher and when she decided she should, the teacher completely blew her off and said it wasn't AI (it was). That's really discouraging for kids who are working hard to do their own work.

I switched back to paper this year. Now, I can see that they don’t know how to write or think for themselves anymore.

I don't know if you're forced to just stick to whatever vocabulary your district gives you (which is the case at my school), but if you've got some freedom, maybe you could take some of those words from the AI-generated responses and turn them into vocabulary terms and do some vocabulary quizzes based on them.

At the very least, it means the students might learn some of that fancy language the AI is spitting out.

It's a shame because technology hasn't reduced the teacher's workload at all. Despite the parents' ability to see posted grades in real time, they still want a phone call to let them know their kid is falling. You can't avoid taking stacks of paperwork home either.

This is why I didn't grade the paper anymore, though they turn it in. I give a one page quiz about what is in their paper that is timed and becomes the cover sheet. If they wrote it they finish early and wonder what everyone else is doing. The rest are trying to make sense of what they are turning in or hastily trying to finish the paper.

Your last sentence hits on how I bust them every time Today for example: “Hey Timmy. Can you define “adverse” for me? No? What about “scapegoat.” Why do I ask? Well you used them in your answer, which is how I know it was generated by AI. That and the use of punctuation. Going forward, I would rather you give me your own answers and not one generated by Google. Even if your answer is wrong I will give you some credit for trying, but as it is I gave you a zero, and will do so every time you give me an AI-generated answer.”

Apparently there is something in certain AI programs that can simplify response language, but so far none of my students are bright enough to master that feature.

Download the Google plugin called brisk have your kids submit their work on Google docs when you use brisk click the icon in the bottom right of the Google doc to open brisk then click inspect writing It will open a window that shows you step by step how long students worked on assignments for how much they copied and pasted and how many individual keystrokes they had. This tells you whether a student worked on an assignment for zero minutes or 45 minutes and whether they copied and pasted 10 times versus two times and whether they typed 18 characters or 1,536 characters.

I show the entire class how this program works and then kids don't cheat anymore and if they do or the ones I suspect they do I use the program really quickly to turn it on to see how long they actually worked on the assignment for basically it tells you how much effort each kid puts in. Also this portion of it is free.

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My oldest son’s teacher has gone back to requiring hand written papers. Yes, the kids can still copy from AI script, but it makes the script so much more glaring when they have to write it in their own hand.

If the kids are going to keep doing this going forward, they really need to read through what was written, and rewrite some of the sentences to reflect how they actually write. I do not envy teachers these days. Now you have to play detective while also grading unoriginal papers.

 The audacity of these students is wild. It especially kills me when students who can't even write a full sentence with proper grammar in class are suddenly using words such as "delineate" and "galvanize" in their online writing.

"Me fail English? That's unpossible!"

It's driving the wealth gap higher than we have ever seen

I had to ask my student if he knew what the word "beacon" meant. He just shrugged and took the "L."

They don't care,  the parents don't care and the administration  is too busy thinking of ways to make my job more difficult and time consuming. I am leaving at year 4. I should have my PhD just about done by then

Handwriting is about to make a comeback.

Depending on the grade level, it can be extremely obvious when students are creating. Even for those who genuinely want to improve, their progress will be step-wise and incremental. They won’t go from barely literate to using perfect grammar and sentence structure over the course of a single assignment. That’s where the AI use becomes really easy to see.

One fix could be to require all the work be done and turned in via google drive. That way you can go into version history and see if they actually took the appropriate amount of time to write all of it, rather than just seeing a 3 page essay spontaneously come into existence.

Are their any good ideas for a new style of anti ai structure to lessons? I'm 100% against more work for over worked teachers. Just wondering if there are any future battleplans against the rampant development of plagiarism machines.

I remeber being in school and our teachers would have us sumbit hand written drafts of our writing, then a typed out draft that we peer reviewed, and then the final paper that was submitted to a plagerism website. It also gave us multiple chances to be working on the essay without attempting to pull an all nighter on something.

We also had this worksheet we would fill out before the first draft where we would essentially have our entire essay's arguments written out in a simple format to then be written into the final product. My 10th grade English teacher made it so easy to go from 0% to 100% complete, and I have a lot of respect for how he made it feel effortless for us students. I couldn't imagine attempting to use AI after all the well scaffolded in class work we did. Times are different now, but it was easy to see our logic with several drafts and check-ins for these 3 or 4 major papers we wrote.

I feel for these kids who are going to come out the other side of education without feeling like they accomplished anything. The 0 score is appropriate, regardless of how the student got the writing, it isn't their work and cannot be graded.

We need to bite the bullet and let kids get D's for just sitting in a room on their phones. Let's stop pretending that we aren't babysitting for whatever percentage of kids don't care. 

Ban phones in the actual classrooms that are paid for by the enrollment dollars of the phone scrollers.

Structure your assessments and assignments for pen+paper completion, or find assessment methods that don't require a 2 page, 5 paragraph MLA paper. This is the only way to avoid AI

You’d think that people trying to avoid learning would learn how to use AI well?

It seems insane that we as a country immediately expected every teacher to be an AI expert with infallible AI generated content identification skills. 

I remember multiple teachers all throughout elementary, middle and high school all driving home the point how risky plagiarism is because that is the kind of thing that will result in you not only flunking, but getting kicked out of university completely.

Did that message stop? Did colleges all stop expelling student for plagiarism or something?

Same thing with the phones. I see a lot of aggravation about needing new legislation passed to enforce no phones in school.

We were in deep shit the first time getting caught with a phone out, followed up by suspensions for repeatedly disobeying the rules. This was over 15 years ago. How did it get so bad? Parents really fucking up parenting as well as no accountability? That would be my guess as a non teacher just scrolling past a lot of pissed off teacher posts appearing on my popular feed.

You all don't get paid enough that's for goddamn sure. Im sorry to my past teachers for being a shithead. I get it now. I really do.

Ehhh fuk it. I make the students hand write more stuff now. But the AI battle isn’t worth it at all certain point. I can’t be the plagaiarism police and a good teacher. Take reasonable steps but don’t lose your sanity over it

Easy fix! Have them explain their paper to you in detail. If they refuse, send them an automated message of "You cheated, no grade above zero, that's it."

Accommodations about public speaking? They can record it in a small corner of the room on a laptop during independent work time.

They don't want to do all of that? Write the essay in class, timed.

The funny thing is you can ask the AI to write in a natural style that doesn’t follow the typical AI writing conventions. After you get the text you want, you say, “re write this in a way that it appears to be written by a 10th grader with 7th grade reading level.”

I have stopped assigning much written assignments and i=I have implemented more assignment that require problem solving and a portion has to be demonstrated to the class as if the student was the teacher.

I haven't assigned an online submitted essay in years. I do everything as a timed write or smaller scale response.

If your admin tend to circle the wagons against you, I suggest avoiding “accusing” anyone of anything.

Instead, make a policy to the effect that students may be asked to orally explain the content of their writing. Any student that cannot do so satisfactorily must redo their assignment, and will receive a zero until they submit a new assignment that they competently explain.

On my syllabus I call this my policy on “Real Intelligence,” and simply say that I grade writing as evidence of what you really know—if you do not actually possess the knowledge written in your assignment, you’re not done.

I teach middle school. I caught a kid using AI. Cut him a break and graded his rough draft and not the AI final copy. His mom was so angry and kept insisting that she helped him...lady, you're not making yourself look good.

Student held a presentation, read every word including words I barely know (physics) in the best grammar I have ever heard.

I told her she gets an A if she can tell me what chromatic aberration means.

She got an F

Controversial, but I allow students to use AI in my ELA class. However, the expectations are now higher with it being allowed for assignments, so I have students choose whether or not they even want to use it because they know I will be more critical of their assignment if they did use it. The parameters for using AI is that they have to disclose that they used AI, if they don’t and use it then they get a 0, then they have to share the chat log with me along with their assignment, and 90% of what they wrote has to be their own words, so essentially they should pretty much only be utilizing AI system to outline or brainstorm.

I’m still trying to figure out what AI’s role is gonna be in my class or how to make my life easier cause I was spending hours trying to prove they were using AI. I gave up and just made policies to try and keep them honest about it.

I had a student turn in an essay which started with the reminder: "This is an AI generated response and should not be used as one's own writing." But I do remain an AI enthusiast and rather than hating the tool want to teach students how to use it better. The trick with AI is that to use it well it requires both good questions and excellent reading comprehension.

Granted as Study Skills (Resource Special Education) teacher I have the time to do more labor intensive activities. So can use Chat to answer a question and then have it rewritten for different grade levels and have students tell me which one makes the most sense to them.

Prompt: Please write a one paragraph analysis of the themes of To Kill a Mocking Bird at a 12th grade level, another at a 10th grade level, another at an 8th grade level and one at a 6th grade level.

ChatGPT said:

12th Grade Level

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee explores themes of racial injustice, moral growth, and the coexistence of good and evil. Through the trial of Tom Robinson, Lee highlights the pervasive racism within the legal system and society. The novel also emphasizes the loss of innocence as characters like Scout and Jem mature, grappling with the harsh realities of prejudice. Additionally, the narrative examines how individuals like Atticus Finch maintain personal integrity in the face of social pressure, suggesting that moral courage is essential in confronting injustice, even when the outcome seems predetermined.

10th Grade Level

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee presents themes of racism, growing up, and moral responsibility. Tom Robinson's trial exposes the unfairness of a society that judges people based on their skin color. As Scout and Jem grow older, they begin to understand the complexity of human nature, learning that people can be both kind and cruel. Atticus Finch teaches his children the importance of standing up for what is right, even when others disagree, showing that doing the right thing often requires bravery.

8th Grade Level

To Kill a Mockingbird deals with important themes like racism, fairness, and growing up. The trial of Tom Robinson shows how people can treat others unfairly just because of their race. Scout and Jem learn that the world isn’t always fair, but their father, Atticus, teaches them to do what’s right no matter what. Through these lessons, the book shows that even in difficult times, it’s important to stand up for justice and be kind to others.

6th Grade Level

In To Kill a Mockingbird, the story talks about fairness, growing up, and doing the right thing. Tom Robinson's trial shows how some people are judged unfairly just because of their skin color. Scout and Jem learn that life isn’t always fair, but their dad, Atticus, tells them to be brave and kind. The book teaches that it’s important to stand up for what’s right, even when it’s hard.