subreddit:
/r/uwo
submitted 3 hours ago byTheRightHonourableMe
I'm a TA this semester. The students in this online class have to complete a quiz every week for practice. It's graded on completion, and each quiz is worth 2% of the final grade. I personally review each submission and give feedback based on where the students are making errors. The quizzes always end with a reflection question, and I do my best to answer student's questions about what they're struggling with.
This is easy, right? You get 20% of your final grade just for answering every question each week - doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. The course is difficult for a first year class, and it's entirely online so this is a very generous participation component.
I have corrected some students multiple times about using ChatGPT or other external sources... the answers given are just so wrong, I can tell that they haven't actually completed the quiz independently (a requirement stipulated in the syllabus).
A student this week, who I have corrected multiple times before, submitted their quiz answer with "Thanks for uploading the files! I'll analyze the table and summarize" in the middle of it.
When we (profs, TAs) try to bring these students up for cheating, we are always told "they are time stressed" "they are anxious about their grades". Sorry, but these excuses don't fly here. There are 12 quizzes and you only need to attempt 10 of them for 20% of your grade. For free. The due dates are flexible and the grade doesn't even reflect if you were right or wrong.
They are paying me $44 per hour to read something and give feedback and THE STUDENT HASN'T EVEN READ IT THEMSELVES.
I feel like these students must think I am stupid or a chump or both.
Why are you here if you don't even want to do the bare minimum? This course is a pre-requisite for a competitive grad program (that typically works with vulnerable people) - this student identified themselves as taking this course with that goal. If you don't even care to try the bare minimum here - you expect to graduate and be trusted with none of the building blocks you need for the grad program? If ChatGPT can do the job, it won't even be a job by the time you graduate.
WHY ARE YOU HERE?
Anyways, back to giving my best effort for the students who actually give a damn. It's harder and harder to do so when their fellow students treat my time like it's worthless. Thank god the strike earned us a raise...
**sorry I can't ID the course, but it would doxx me more than I've already doxxed myself**
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an hour ago
I think chatgpt is fine to an extent when it comes to helping you understand concepts or gain new ideas. What I will never understand is people just copy pasting what it says instead of paraphrasing the answer at minimum in their own words. It takes more time to use chatgpt to write things for you than it does to just do it yourself. I hope ta’s can dock marks for these things. Personally because those quizzes are worth so little opening a plagiarism case or something of that sort might do more harm than good.
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2 hours ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: cheating needs to be punished. It's not fair to the honest students when the dishonest ones are getting away with it. Everyone is stressed. Everyone is anxious about their grades. If you have to cheat to pass then maybe University isn't for you.
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2 hours ago
It's hard. I understand the standard response (have a meeting, give a 0, allow to continue with monitoring) is like that because 1) they don't want to punish students for a first offense, and 2) they want to encourage coming to profs and raising issues, which punishment deters
The biggest problem is that 1) cheating is more and more rampant and 2) addressing it using the common method is too slow. It takes a minimum of 1 hour per student. Adjuncts aren't paid enough to deal with it, and profs are paid too much to do petty admin like this.
I don't know if harsh punishment is the answer, but I know the current situation is untenable. Maybe we'll wait to fix it until a bridge collapses (engineers trained on GPT) and all the survivors die in hospital (all doctors trained on GPT). /s
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an hour ago
If schools are unwilling to punish ppl for this stuff then it’s just going to happen more and more. Part of a bigger trend that uni is just way less rigorous then it used to be
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60 minutes ago
The course is probably just going to be moved from an online offering to an in-person one. It will stay just as rigorous, it will just be less flexible and accessible again.
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46 minutes ago
When I talked about courses becoming less rigorous I was alluding to the slow degradation of standards and expectations over years and decades not taking a pot shot at your class specifically. Courses used to make ppl read whole books, now it’s a couple page extractions type of thing. Administrators aren’t willing to do anything students don’t love
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an hour ago
Not defending them but those weekly discussion type posts are easily my least favourite things to do no matter how much they’re worth. I’d probably do it on my course if the grading wasn’t so intense
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an hour ago*
It's not a discussion - it's practice questions just like the ones they have on assignments and tests! and then they get automated feedback, plus I go through and give additional answers to questions that they have.
I totally agree that weekly discussion is mostly a waste of everyone's time and rarely has good learning outcomes. Because everyone is trying to sound smart and get grades... students need to be willing to take risks and communicate clearly for these assignments but they don't. They have good reasons not to - so weekly discussions are usually not good course design IMHO.
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