#ai in academia

[competitioneddie]

Yes to everything. I've gone back for my master's after a few years out of school. In a field where a master's has very little relevance unless you're going into research and academia, like none of these people did it for a higher paying job they supposedly want to learn and it's still so prevalent.

Another side effect is that not all teachers are made equal, so while some try to overcome AI usage with different teaching strategies like on-site debate, some others very candidly believe we are so prolific that they keep upping the workload because what do you know, we deliver.

Over Christmas break the two weeks of Christmas break I was expected to deliver three academic essays, a book review (have you tried to read philosophers on a tight timeline it's gruelling work) and detailed design plans for two research projects, which will be poorly graded because our teachers also had to grade about 100 papers during that time. I'm supposed to be working on my master's thesis too and at some point this year I'm going in for a three month long apprenticeship which also requires an academic report.

I'm trying. At some point it's going to become unsustainable. I'm begging. You can be mediocre and still get your degree if that's what you want or need, I promise. Just don't make it harder for those of us who are trying.

We're also based in Europe where tuition is cheap and scholarships cover most people (it covered me and I'm considered a high income household so there's that). Which makes it even worse because student debt is not a real worry. You can drop out if it's really not for you and at most you'll be out a grand or two but most likely you'll be able to get a refund for courses not taken and that'll even out the debt.

Also, AI/LLMs are absolute environmental terrorists. We can do better than this. I'm not saying be perfect, never use it for anything. I'm saying, if you feel like you absolutely need to, do it responsibly.

I just started grad school this fall after a few years away from school and man I did not realize how dire the AI/LLM situation is in universities now. In the past few weeks:

I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us"

One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."

I asked one of my TAs in a math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"

A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When I asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He still insisted he was right when I pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.

A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the "computational" version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often". He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.

There's a lot more, but it's really making me feel crazy. Even if it was right 100% of the time, why are you paying thousands of dollars to go to school and learn if you're just going to plug everything into a computer whenever you're asked to think??

[vanalex]

[spill-the-wine]

by: midnight_mortuary - ig

[cottagecoreangryqueer]

I am feeling very pessimistic about people's researching, reading and writing abilities at high levels of education. I'm currently at university to study Translation and absolutely everyone I've met uses AI for everything. Yes, even the teachers. Every week there's people I see using AI to write their essays, to translate things, to explain the difference between x and y, to see if they should use x term or y term, teachers asking for the students to tell them what does AI say about x... Every fucking week. It's tiresome. Instead of learning how to do things properly, how to look for texts that exemplify what you want, how to use dictionaries from a bilingual approach, how to organize your thoughts into a well-formed and comprehensive essay, instead of any of that, it's just AI. And these are all skills that need to be learnt to know how to do these things properly, so if you always depend on AI for them, you'll never know how to do them by yourself. This is an awful situatiom without even taking into account the enviromental consequences that AI has. I fucking hate it here, I hate knowing that I'm the modern equivalent of a luddite just because I don't use this shit, but you know what? Maybe the luddites were fucking right.

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[porcupine-girl]

An important message to college students: Why you shouldn't use ChatGPT or other "AI" to write papers.

Here's the thing: Unlike plagiarism, where I can always find the exact source a student used, it's difficult to impossible to prove that a student used ChatGPT to write their paper. Which means I have to grade it as though the student wrote it.

So if your professor can't prove it, why shouldn't you use it?

Well, first off, it doesn't write good papers. Grading them as if the student did write it themself, so far I've given GPT-enhanced papers two Ds and an F.

If you're unlucky enough to get a professor like me, they've designed their assignments to be hard to plagiarize, which means they'll also be hard to get "AI" to write well. To get a good paper out of ChatGPT for my class, you'd have to write a prompt that's so long, with so many specifics, that you might as well just write the paper yourself.

ChatGPT absolutely loves to make broad, vague statements about, for example, what topics a book covers. Sadly for my students, I ask for specific examples from the book, and it's not so good at that. Nor is it good at explaining exactly why that example is connected to a concept from class. To get a good paper out of it, you'd have to have already identified the concepts you want to discuss and the relevant examples, and quite honestly if you can do that it'll be easier to write your own paper than to coax ChatGPT to write a decent paper.

The second reason you shouldn't do it?

IT WILL PUT YOUR PROFESSOR IN A REALLY FUCKING BAD MOOD. WHEN I'M IN A BAD MOOD I AM NOT GOING TO BE GENEROUS WITH MY GRADING.

I can't prove it's written by ChatGPT, but I can tell. It does not write like a college freshman. It writes like a professional copywriter churning out articles for a content farm. And much like a large language model, the more papers written by it I see, the better I get at identifying it, because it turns out there are certain phrases it really, really likes using.

Once I think you're using ChatGPT I will be extremely annoyed while I grade your paper. I will grade it as if you wrote it, but I will not grade it generously. I will not give you the benefit of the doubt if I'm not sure whether you understood a concept or not. I will not squint and try to understand how you thought two things are connected that I do not think are connected.

Moreover, I will continue to not feel generous when calculating your final grade for the class. Usually, if someone has been coming to class regularly all semester, turned things in on time, etc, then I might be willing to give them a tiny bit of help - round a 79.3% up to a B-, say. If you get a 79.3%, you will get your C+ and you'd better be thankful for it, because if you try to complain or claim you weren't using AI, I'll be letting the college's academic disciplinary committee decide what grade you should get.

Eventually my school will probably write actual guidelines for me to follow when I suspect use of AI, but for now, it's the wild west and it is in your best interest to avoid a showdown with me.

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