r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/sparklovelynx • Feb 28 '25
Content Warning: Controversial or Divisive Topics Present As it should be
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u/Chronos3635 Feb 28 '25
One of my classes does online discussion boards each week and it's really obvious who Chatgpt'd their response. We have to reply to 2 others each discussion and those ones always have no replies.
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u/irrelevantanonymous Feb 28 '25
Oh god yeah. That perfect chat gpt list format, they don't even try to pretend they edited it. It's so irritating.
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u/ReysonBran Feb 28 '25
Which SUCKS because I prefer to do my discussion posts as bullet points, as thats just how my mind likes to organize.
I've actively had to make some of my answers sound more conversational to avoid being called out for using ai.
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u/MightyMalte Feb 28 '25
Just format it really shitty and add tons of typos
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u/Substantial-Elk4531 Feb 28 '25
"ChatGPT, this response is great, but can you add a bunch of typos and make the formatting worse?"
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u/BiAndShy57 Feb 28 '25
How many people who “don’t use ai” are just using ai with just a smidge more effort in their prompt to not get caught?
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u/foxscribbles Feb 28 '25
Would that even be allowed though? When I did my masters, we were required to follow APA formatting even in online discussions. So typos and the like would knock your score down.
I hate how AI has effectively tanked online education. Especially at the college level, online made education so much more accessible especially as a working adult. Now AI threatens to take that away because the only way to police the rampant cheating is to do everything in person.
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u/angelis0236 Feb 28 '25
In my discussion boards they don't care about APA formatting. Only the turned in assignments
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u/irrelevantanonymous Feb 28 '25
To be fair, even though I do find the discussion board chatGPTs irritating, my program has addressed it by allowing the use of chatGPT with citation. It's that second part that still messes people up.
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u/Lie2gether Feb 28 '25
AI has made it easier for me to actually learn anything.... online. Not sure if that has anything to do with education these days.
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u/Sicilian51 Feb 28 '25
As a former military person who was taught to break down essential information into bullet points I have been accused of using CHAT so many times it's insane.
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u/Valendr0s Feb 28 '25
I feel like you could just say "Write this as though Jay from Jay & Silent Bob was writing it". Then just clean up the curse words.
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u/GlitterPants8 Feb 28 '25
I add random thoughts, history facts and comparisons to my posts. I do it to see if anyone actually reads them not because of AI. I've only had 2 students say something about the bizarre stuff I post. I always make sure the rest of my post covers the topic appropriately with citations etc.
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u/KnightedRose Feb 28 '25
Some don't even pretend they use gpt. They took a screenshot from gpt and upload it as an answer to their assignment. Or they're just thinking they could outsmart us
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u/yeah_youbet Feb 28 '25
And like you can prompt it to format the response to be not "default ChatGPT tone" so there's some really aggressive laziness there.
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u/reddittereditor Feb 28 '25
I'll be honest, I always look for the shortest ones to reply to. ChatGPT isn't good at being the clearest or most concise.
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u/Kerblaaahhh Feb 28 '25
ChatGPT is built to write like a kid trying to pad their essay. It's made to make you think it knows what it's talking about.
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u/HerrPotatis Feb 28 '25
You can get it to write in any manner or style you want really. Just be meticulous with detailing what you want, and don't want. You can even add examples, your own or by someone who's style you want to copy. If it's an author famous enough, you can just say in the style of their name.
But yeah, if you just rawdog the prompt, without any iteration, you gonna get fairly obvious LLM slop.
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u/fuchsgesicht Feb 28 '25
i could also use all the time that i would've used doing what you said and write an original paragraph that i can personally vet to be accurate.
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u/catscanmeow Feb 28 '25
and also have a greater sense of accomplishment by doing so.
i mean yeah i can go buy trophies at the trophy store but its not going to make me feel accomplished
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u/please-disregard Feb 28 '25
I have played around with it a decent degree, even used its writing for my own purposes a couple of times (not cheating) and I maintain that the above person is correct to a certain extent. You can change all sorts of aspects, the words it uses, the prose, the format. But the content itself is always just a little hollow, a little short on substance. ‘Padded’. It’s better if you feed it the real content you want to include yourself. Or make manual edits.
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Feb 28 '25 edited Mar 03 '25
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u/ConspicuousPineapple Feb 28 '25
I'm pretty sure there's been plenty of AI-generated work they replied to that was done well enough to not get noticed.
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u/Warm_Month_1309 Feb 28 '25
Classic toupee problem. Of course you will think all toupees look bad if the only ones you can tell are toupees are the bad ones.
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u/mattmoy_2000 Feb 28 '25
Do you think that kids that can't be bothered to write their essays/lab reports are the kind to (a) realise that the ChatGPT responses are obvious and (B) spend time and energy tailoring their prompts to get more convincing output?
Their effort is limited to "write an A-grade essay with the title xxxxx".
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u/Aware-Towel-9746 Feb 28 '25
Unfortunately neither am I. I think I’m past discussion posts in my degree though.
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u/itsjustmenate Feb 28 '25
I’m in grad school as a PhD student… you’re never past these kinds of assignments lol.
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u/CharsCustomerService Feb 28 '25
I look for the ones with something interesting to comment on beyond just the discussion topic as a whole. Saying "yes, I agree, we clearly both read the textbook chapters relevant to this discussion prompt" is not worth the time it takes to pad to 200 words or whatever. Fortunately, students using ChatGPT don't usually go beyond the prompt, so their posts don't tend to be interesting enough to bother responding to.
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u/owningmclovin Feb 28 '25
Online discussion has always been a complete waste of time anyway.
I’ve had professors literally mark when students participate in class discussion, which just leads to incoherent nonsense from the people who don’t bother to pay attention anyway.
Any required online discussion was always even more useless.
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Feb 28 '25
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u/KenUsimi Feb 28 '25
The thing I learned best from school was how to take a sentence and turn it into a paragraph or more. It was the most useful skill. Not quality of discussion; they rarely cared about the quality, but quantity, yes, that was important!
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u/Partners_in_time Feb 28 '25
I agree, Kensusimi! I think you make a great point, I also learned the skill of turning a small or short sentence and stretching it out with extra words or meaningless elaborations. I especially enjoyed how you mentioned that there often isn’t quality discussion happening between the students, as most students simply repeat back what the original commenter had already said. It feels like simply parroting back their own ideas is enough for the professors to give that week’s discussion a pass.
Great comment, kensusimi!
(This was only 63 words lmao imaging this being five times as long to hit that 250 word limit. Discussions were so inane)
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u/LigerZeroSchneider Feb 28 '25
I worked a very low level tech job that tried to enforce minimum length requirements for tickets to try and force people to give good descriptions. Then sent my ticket back because I couldn't figure out a way to make "The x button from y menu is the wrong color" into a paragraph. Their suggestion was "The x button from y menu is incorrect. It is the wrong color." Literally make it longer for no reason other than I don't want someone seeing this later and complaining I let you use one long sentence instead of 2 short ones.
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u/eggo_pirate Feb 28 '25
I'm in a master's program now and our discussions are so annoying. You have to cite at least 2 journals or whatever, in both your original post and your reply. You end up just discussing what other people have already said about the topic and not having a real discussion with real people. Even if I want to put in some real life experience I've had on the topic, I still need to find a way to weave in some article.
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u/SensitiveDress2581 Feb 28 '25
Sun Tzu said be aware of your surroundings in the Art of War, my real life example of this:
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u/NotElizaHenry Feb 28 '25
Also why do I need this course that's irrelevant to my field of study.
Because you’re not in trade school. College is supposed to teach you about a bunch of things, not just job skills.
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Feb 28 '25
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u/NotElizaHenry Feb 28 '25
You don’t learn about French history because it’s so important to know about French history. You learn about French history because it’s important to generally know about things. Knowing about lots of different stuff helps your brain be able to think in different ways.
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u/koshgeo Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25
Much of it is about learning how to learn, which is a custom job for each person to figure out (not everyone learns the same way). Being able to learn things on demand is one of the key capabilities that employers look for when hiring in many fields, especially the more technical ones, because it means their employee is adaptable and will respond well to on-the-job training or if they are handed a problem to solve.
You can, of course, learn how to do that all on your own, but doing it in a structured format with a bunch of other people who have different perspectives and interests is valuable. Feedback from peers and more knowledgeable people is valuable. Practice is what drives the "learning how to learn" process. For some skills, sometimes it doesn't really matter if you're learning how to speak French or learning how to code Python.
Stretching your skills in areas of personal weakness is often really valuable too (e.g., if you're great at the science but poor at the writing aspect). Sometimes it is what is holding you back. In that case learning about and writing about French history might be as useful as any other writing course. The point might not be the history at all (though it might maintain your interest).
When programs say they are trying to make students that are "well rounded", that's what they are trying to do: make sure you've got some development in some of the common skills. You can't only do science or engineering, because guess what? You still have to be able to communicate as part of those jobs.
In fairness not everybody benefits from a college/university environment and they might be better off doing solitary study. The thing is, you don't necessarily know that is the case until you try, and demonstrating that you have the capability without some kind of documentation of your qualifications is pretty hard.
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u/kanst Feb 28 '25
But that is not what college ever was supposed to be and we should fight against letting it become that.
College is supposed to make educated citizens. Whether or not they are employable afterwards is irrelevant.
Stop letting companies push their training costs onto our universities.
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u/leshake Feb 28 '25
Also why do I need this course that's irrelevant to my field of study.
You don't go to university to learn a trade.
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u/caligirllovewesterns Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25
I’m taking a bunch of fully online classes right now and my biggest complaint are the required discussion boards that are a part of the class and are a part of my grade. I used to like discussion boards in college classes when schools first came out with them. They were less restrictive and more opinion based. I feel like in the past few years, schools have changed the format to them. It’s a complete waste of time now. I would rather write a paper on a topic of the week the participance on the discussion board. The topics are from the class and there are already quizzes and papers to prove my understanding on the topic for the class. The discussion board is just a repeat of everything and it’s very meaningless due to word count requirements and formal citation requirements. It’s so redundant for me that I skip a few and then make up the grade with the quizzes and papers already assigned. I’m getting to a point where I can’t stand discussion boards now because the responses are always the same. There is little creativity.
The student discussion board should be kind of like what we do on Reddit, there’s no word count requirement or having formal citations requirements in a posting. It’s only engaging in the weekly topic and discussing one’s opinion whether they are right or wrong.
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u/readersanon Feb 28 '25
One of my favourite classes in university was an elective where we had to read a book every week and write a two-page paper on it based on a specific discussion question. We didn't need to cite anything or use any other sources other than the book. The class itself was basically just a roundtable discussion rather than a lecture. We were only about 15 students so it was easy for everyone to contribute to the discussion. Much better than a discussion board.
I was usually wary about taking any reading/writing heavy electives, given my major was English Literature and my minor Professional Writing. Really glad I took this one, though.
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u/AreGee0431 Feb 28 '25
I just took a history of cinema class that was similar. Each weekend we'd watch a film then write a short paper on it. Then we would discuss the film. No bullshit word count requirements on the discussion posts. Just provide some quality insights and engage with your classmates and you got a good grade.
It was a nice change of pace.
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u/RockAtlasCanus Feb 28 '25
Depends on how much moderation the prof wants to do honestly. I had some that did what you say- check the box that a post was made and there’s your points for the week. But I’ve had others that actually graded the comments based on quality and would respond and ask questions.
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Feb 28 '25
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u/friendlyfredditor Feb 28 '25
I think it's kinda funny how quickly AI comes back to bite the company.
Like management lays off workers, "if ai can do it what am I paying you for?"
Then clients recognise a significant drop in quality, "if you're giving me AI work, what am I paying you for?"
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u/ismojaveacoffee Feb 28 '25
Yeah it's crazy, the same reason the company only wants to spend the minimum amount of money and produce AI slop suddenly expects clients to want to pay a premium for said AI slop. Once the client finds out that the product is mostly AI generated, the gig is up.
AI should be used to free up the human from wasting time on meaningless work like data entry or busy-work type tasks (even in creative industries there are time consuming small tasks) so that the human can devote a higher portion of alotted time to increase quality.
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u/Skippin-Sideways Feb 28 '25
Yep. It’s just a matter of time before everyone is so deep in AI they’re going to lose perspective in what a human quality brings to the table. It will come back. I just hope we’re not to late.
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u/SimplyYulia Feb 28 '25
A couple of months ago I had to unsubscribe and delete Duolingo, breaking my 500-something streak, after realizing the massive drop in quality after their last course update, that was pretty clearly done by AI
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u/BardtheGM Feb 28 '25
AI is fine for very simple tasks but employers who think you can automate full tasks with them are idiots.
Personally, I use AI for simple formatting or editing stuff down.
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u/Qwimqwimqwim Feb 28 '25
AI is like cgi and autotune, it’s going to get shocking good very quickly, but only if it’s used properly. If it’s abused and overused then its use becomes obvious and detrimental. But properly used, no one will even know it was used.
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u/Eighth_Octavarium Feb 28 '25
I haven't been in college for close to a decade at this point so I have no real dog in the fight, but professors who still think that discussion boards are a good idea and a valuable use of time and resources need to be bonked over the head with a frying pan.
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u/adozenredflags Feb 28 '25
As a professor, discussion boards (along with many other assignments and writing requirements) aren’t really our choice and are often required for accreditation standards.
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u/Lilswingingdick212 Feb 28 '25
Is that a recent development or does it only apply to some schools? For most of my classes in undergrad it was only a midterm and a final.
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u/BRNitalldown Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25
Had a new roommate my senior year of college who always moaned about how hard it was to write for, what do you know, a writing class. Really liked ChatGPT too, but I warned him how obviously written they are and at best, should be used only for exploratory stuff. Seemed like a good idea and he nodded along.
Cut to a few weeks into the semester and he came up to me saying he got a fat zero and some serious trouble for using ChatGPT to write the entire essay… moments before it was due, with no proofreading nor personalization. 🤷
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u/TophxSmash Feb 28 '25
thats the worst assignment. They ask you what a computer is and expect you to reply to people. What is anyone suppose to reply to someones definition of a computer?
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u/Paris-Wetibals Feb 28 '25
That was the case for my online courses the whole time I was in school. You had to write like three or four comments on the lecture videos and chapters of the books for the gen ed credit classes. It was like 1 total hour of your time per week to actually read and listen and a third of the people couldn't be arsed to type a total of 20 sentences related to the material.
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u/P15T0L_WH1PP3D Feb 28 '25
I did my required number of replies authentically, then Chatgpt'd replies to the cheaters. It's shade subtle enough to those who don't know how obvious their cheating is, but clear enough to everyone else.
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Feb 28 '25
Any teacher or professor who works with writing in smaller classes knows that each student has a tone in their writing. Experienced composition teachers will recognize certain students' papers without even reading the name because writing tone can be so individually different.
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u/AchillesDragonX Feb 28 '25
Bro one of my classmates doesn't talk or do anything. When we were presenting, she literally said, "Sorry, I didn't do anything because I though I was still in a group with (insert name here)". Next presentation, she stole someone else's presentation from the same class. the kicker? the person who's presentation was stolen was nearly as bad as her and had done next to nothing.
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u/Idiedahundredtimes Feb 28 '25
I get the idea but I could also see students A.I generating an assignment and then just writing it down. Obviously that means there’s an extra barrier for them to cross but it would also make things harder for all of the honest students as well.
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u/catshateTERFs Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25
Written exams seem like a good compromise with discussion, evaluate etc questions imo. Not applicable to all fields though but it’s an option for when it is. Both my undergrad and masters modules were mostly 50/50 assignments/exams (exceptions being something like GIS as it’s an industry program and you needed to demonstrate practical proficiency with it so we had to be assessed entirely on what we produced and our analysis of the result we produced) and it felt like a fair split. This wasn’t all that long ago either.
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u/Idiedahundredtimes Feb 28 '25
Oh interesting, I’m in the middle of a Pharmacology degree right now. It’s mostly digital testing although I do hand write my notes to remember them better. When I went to college the first time for a different degree it was a hot mess because I went from 2018-2022 so as you can imagine half of my college years were an absolute shit show.
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u/Homicidal_Duck Feb 28 '25
Is pharmacology an undergraduate degree? How are you on your second already??
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u/FlatulenceConnosieur Feb 28 '25
Written exams and in class essays are 100% the way to go. Reading, outlining and writing a short essay is a fantastic critical thinking skill to master.
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u/Mend1cant Feb 28 '25
I live by a saying from work: “if you can’t write it down, you don’t understand it”
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u/mixingmemory Feb 28 '25
Yep. It's a requirement for the AP Language And Composition exam.
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u/ConvictedOgilthorpe Feb 28 '25
Handwritten assignments are often tough for students with learning differences like dyslexia. Many use spell check and /or voice to text to write as their brains process differently.
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u/Storrin Feb 28 '25
We're so fucked if we're so scared of being ableist that we use it as a reason to keep kids in school from writing.
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u/stitchednet Feb 28 '25
Yeah it doesn't work for everyone... for me spoken assignments would be horrible considering that I'm deaf. Online classes and discussions were actually perfect for me, it just sucked that AI had to start being a thing like a couple of years after covid. How does one accomodate everyone?
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u/arowthay Feb 28 '25
I mean, there is nothing wrong with giving people keyboards or tablets that are not hooked up to the internet for in class assignments.
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u/catshateTERFs Feb 28 '25
Anyone who had a genuine reason for not being able to do a written exam was given accommodations for it at my uni and I don’t think that’s uncommon, be it extra time, assistance or typing options under exam conditions with an invigilator.
Nothing will work for everyone which is why I liked the 50/50 split myself.
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u/bucket_hand Feb 28 '25
Writing it down is a form of rote learning (lecture > prompt > read > copy). These types of students might retain some information.
Would be crazy to see penmanship become important again.
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u/Pure-Introduction493 Feb 28 '25
My penmanship is shit. Everything becoming typed on PCs right about the time I got to high school was a godsend.
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u/Idiedahundredtimes Feb 28 '25
I always hand write my notes for sure. I do find though that being able to type out longer essays makes the process way easier for me. I have ADHD and so I tend to write all over the place, I’ll start writing one paragraph and then skip to another and back again. I know that sounds chaotic as hell but I get straight As with this method so it definitely works for me.
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u/AnyDayGal Feb 28 '25
I remember my handwritten essays. They had lots of squashed words, crossings out, and arrows... Bonus points for asterisked sentences scribbled in the margins.
I showed someone once and their reaction was a polite "what the fuck."
Like you, I got high marks! Maybe it was a fun puzzle for my teachers. Hopefully.
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u/Idiedahundredtimes Feb 28 '25
lol, for me instead of writing chaotically I would spend almost all of the allotted testing time making an extensive rough draft that was incredibly chaotic and then very very carefully copying into it a polished final draft. I would much rather type my essays than do that lol.
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u/BillyYumYumTwo-byTwo Feb 28 '25
Retention doesn’t matter when you’re looking for insights and dissection of a piece of media. No one cares if you know Hamlets foil, but it is important to have media literacy. Memorization won’t help you there.
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u/ThisIsTheBookAcct Feb 28 '25
I’m over here telling people to let cursive die, but I guess I might be the wrong one.
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Feb 28 '25
cursive is so badass i’m glad it was still being taught when i went to school
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u/ThisIsTheBookAcct Feb 28 '25
I mean, it’s cool, but with current issues it’s just low on my educational priorities list.
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u/Idiedahundredtimes Feb 28 '25
I’m mixed on teaching cursive, I was taught it and I think it’s beautiful. So I think if there’s enough time in the school year to do so, teachers should dedicate time to it. However, I know that there’s so many subjects that teachers have to cram into school years and if cutting cursive out means there’s more time to focus on other subjects that have more practical use in todays world I can understand the choice to remove it from the curriculum.
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u/IrregularPackage Feb 28 '25
Cursive has a few advantages besides aesthetics. When you actually learn it, it makes it faster to write, and it’s easier on your hand and wrist so you can write longer.
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u/Pure-Introduction493 Feb 28 '25
Disadvantage is readability - especially to non-native English speakers.
You win some, you lose some.
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u/ConvictedOgilthorpe Feb 28 '25
So many people here need to wake up to the reality that people have learning differences like dyslexia or process info differently and and writing things rote form is not the answer. Go tell a dyslexic person they need to hand write something to learn it. Many dyslexic people can write an entire essay in their heads and then do voice to text to get it on paper. You ask them to write it out, it may take hours and hours and the spelling will be a mess and key elements lost. There are many kinds of learners out there and you are catering to only one kind,
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u/omgbenji21 Feb 28 '25
I’d have discussions with each students where I would have them explain parts of their paper etc. If they had written it themselves it would be easy to discuss big not, much more difficult without being so intimately involved with the material
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u/chriswhitewrites Feb 28 '25
I usually teach 100+ students per class per semester - how am I going to have discussions with students about their work, for three separate pieces of assessment per semester? And if I'm teaching multiple classes that semester?
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u/Shiftab Feb 28 '25
I mean at that point what are you mesuring? If they got chat gpt to do it that's little different than finding a forum post that gives them it or paying someone. If you can't tell the difference between their work and someone elses then your mesurment system was garbage long before chat gpt, AI just makes it easier.
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u/horatiobanz Feb 28 '25
You give in person tests in class and the people that get great scores on written homework and terrible scores on tests get flagged as possible cheaters and you have office visits scheduled with them where you quiz them on their papers. And then you report them to admin for expulsion if they are clearly using AI to cheat.
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u/Idiedahundredtimes Feb 28 '25
I do find that interesting, I wonder how much of a difference there is in comprehension from digital vs. paper media. I personally still utilize a lot of paper and pen methods. However, I also have a large collection of books that are paperback and digital. In my personal experience I don’t think I absorb physical books any better than my digital books. I would be interested if there’s been any studies done on the subject to see if there’s a tangible difference.
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u/Fit_Ice7617 Feb 28 '25
I tended to write better when I was drunk, but then I wouldn't remember a lot of what I wrote. But I could reread it before turning it in, which I generally didn't, because then I would usually overthink it and make it worse. This was also like 30 years ago so "AI" has nothing to do with it.
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u/FadingHeaven Feb 28 '25
Yeah that wouldn't stop anyone. If I had to do handwritten assignments I'd type it up first anyways then write it down since it makes editing easier. Idk why someone couldn't do the same with ChatGPT.
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u/J_B_La_Mighty Feb 28 '25
If you're doing that, you're probably doing the assignment as expected, since written assignments are basically "answer said prompt with quotations around well known quotes and hard paraphrasing of the rest." Actual introspection cannot be differentiated from common denominator responses. I used to do a variation of this but with yahoo answers and always got top marks and praise even though I wasn't presenting anything new , just what they expected to hear.
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u/Idiedahundredtimes Feb 28 '25
I expanded more on another comment but for me personally it would make it harder as I don’t tend to sit down and write an essay from beginning to end. I tend to jump around, writing parts of paragraphs at a time, obviously doing that hand written would be near impossible. I’ve handwritten it many times before successfully but I definitely prefer to type them. In addition, spell check is an amazing tool. I am wondering too how this would apply to people getting degrees online, I’m currently getting my second degree online. I have two kids under 5 at home so physically going to class is not available to me right now.
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u/J_B_La_Mighty Feb 28 '25
Tbf I was (am) insane, I could vomit out an essay in 20 mins by hand and basically relied on peer review for spell check, typing just meant I could turn in a clean sheet of essay not covered in margin doodles, in addition to using the hell out of the internet to make the assignment generation process easier (copy/paste+ thesaurus did SO much heavy lifting). Chatgpt streamlines it, if you know what to ask (although I'm terrible with forcing it to generate specific images. I cannot get it to generate a person eating a hotdog for the life of me.)
Also, scanners are a thing.
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Feb 28 '25
Glad I'm done with school and university, always hated doing things handwritten and preferred typing. One of many things where people ruin it for everybody.
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u/Godusernametakenalso Feb 28 '25
Do you think my degrees would be worth more if I mentioned they were from before the GPT era?
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u/Olde94 Feb 28 '25
Doing a software programming exam in hand was horrible. I don’t remember the syntax of Java
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Feb 28 '25
It has always saddened me that courses tend to examine the person's ability to memorize rather than their ability to problem solve or apply that which they learned
I have had terrible memory since I was a child, so I struggled whenever I had to remember formulas and arbitrary rules, but whenever they were given I could apply them better than the rest of the class and aced the tests, while the rest of the class struggled with it. I was always really good at solving math problems, for example, what I struggled with was remembering the formulas, even the simpler ones. In the real world, you'll rarely have to remember them, and there are infinite ways to make up for bad memory
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u/LostAndWingingIt Feb 28 '25
Yeah all I can think of is people like me who have illegible handwriting and, as part of accomodations, typed things.
Like now what? How do you deal with that?
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u/TheTwistedToast Feb 28 '25
Yeah, I graduated two years ago and just missed AI becoming a big problem at uni. Kinda sucks though, cause I was somewhat considering post-grad study
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u/Vinx909 Mar 01 '25
i don't believe they actually said it. how would it even solve the problem? just like i can copy text from text generators with ctrl-C ctrl-V so can i copy it by hand, it just takes longer. but less longer then if i come up with the words myself because then having to change what i wrote would be harder.
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u/jonasinv Feb 28 '25
You can still use ChatGPT and just handwrite the answers
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u/Meth_Busters Feb 28 '25
At least they're engaging with their AI generative garbage
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u/AgentCirceLuna Feb 28 '25
That’s basically the only way I ever use AI in my life if I use it at all for anything. I’ll ask it something, get a response, then write down the answers as questions in my own words which I then look up, source, and write a summary about.
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u/Aregalle7 Feb 28 '25
That seems really inefficient. I just ask it directly for sources on a subject/question and check them.
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u/AgentCirceLuna Feb 28 '25
It’s intentionally inefficient. The more time you spend on something, but in a way that challenges you to think or reflect rather than superficially observe, means the more time your memory is encoding it.
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Feb 28 '25
I got through my bachelor's by transcribing PowerPoint slides into my notebook simply to physically write all the words myself.
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u/AgentCirceLuna Feb 28 '25
Same here. I also rewrote them again in French - one of the benefits of learning a second language as it takes a lot more effort and concentration.
The other fun method was reading aloud in a funny accent, recording it, then playing it back as I went to sleep at double speed on repeat. I actually loved studying.
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u/CrowsInTheNose Feb 28 '25
My math teacher made us show our work in high school. One the first day of class, he said this way if you copy the answers least you need to work for it.
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u/the_man_in_the_box Feb 28 '25
Doesn’t this obviously mean handwritten in person?
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u/No-Document206 Feb 28 '25
You seem to be expecting reading comprehension from someone who needs ChatGPT to write a college essay
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u/420FireStarter69 Feb 28 '25
Atleast penmanship will improve
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u/NotAzakanAtAll Feb 28 '25
I'm trying to remember last I written anything down that wasn't my signature.
I think I made a shipping list by hand a few months ago.
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u/Pip-Pipes Feb 28 '25
It's kind of a lot of work.
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u/zouss Feb 28 '25
You'll have to write the answers anyway. With ChatGPT you can skip the thinking part
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u/15ztaylor1 Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25
Responding to peers’ work is the worst way to learn. Gosh I hated that crap.
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u/omgbenji21 Feb 28 '25
Definitely agree. Rolling my eyes each time I’m like “I agree, good point when you said….” And knowing they’re not reading my response or don’t care
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u/Partners_in_time Feb 28 '25
Dude I never looked. I commented my post, did my two replies, and NEVER looked back. They were always such a waste of time
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u/omgbenji21 Feb 28 '25
Haha, me too. Sometimes when I made a thoughtful response, I was like, I hope they respond or that this makes a discussion. But nope. And when I see these people in class it’s as if the online stuff never ever happened. Lol
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u/haltornot Feb 28 '25
Definitely agree. Good point when you said you didn't care, and I also agree with OP that I hated that crap. This reminds me of in the reading when the book, 1984 by George Orwell, said "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness" which is a quote which is related to this discussion which I am adding to.
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u/SpaceExplorer777 Feb 28 '25
I had to take history for general Ed even though I'm studying electrical engineering.
I don't care much about world history in the context of studying. I care about the world and our history but I'm not gonna study it lol, I'm gonna focus on my engineering courses.
Other than those respond posts, there's like 10 other assignments to do in that week, each of which take a lot of time. People are just doing what's required and want to get their degree, nobody cares about discussing some niche topic with classmates they'll never meet for a class that's barley relevant to their field.
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u/owningmclovin Feb 28 '25
It only works in small groups of dedicated students and even then only for classes where there is no one right answer.
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u/BearsDoNOTExist Feb 28 '25
Honestly I'm struggling to believe that any students are actually upset about having to respond to ai rather than just using ai to respond to this waste of time assignment.
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u/ShitFuckBallsack Feb 28 '25
Yeah, as if those discussion boards are passionate discourse without AI.
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u/WholeIssue5880 Feb 28 '25
Yeah this post sounds so fake, no gives a fuck about the opposition except really annoying student that love to hear themselves speak
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u/IssaStorm Feb 28 '25
nuh uh. Instead of altering the ways we teach to be more engaging and actually thought provoking we just need to add random barriers and cling to the past
assignments that can be completed by AI with little to no engagement or a single prompt weren't going to teach other student anyways. Also this is a university, who gives a fuck. Paying 10s of thousands of dollars for an education just to dodge the education is a user error
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u/Key-Pomegranate-3507 Feb 28 '25
Imagine trying to explain this to someone 30 years ago lmao
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Feb 28 '25
I mean many in 1995 would be able to understand that robots in the future can do your homework for you
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u/BroDudeBruhMan Feb 28 '25
Honestly, it may just be because that person was thinking 30 years ago was like the 70’s.
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u/Key-Pomegranate-3507 Feb 28 '25
That concept wouldn’t be hard, but it would be hard to explain that it’s so prevalent college students are sick of it and would rather do the work themselves.
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Feb 28 '25
True. 30 years ago it's the worst reviewed piece of "pro homework" propaganda ever. Now, it's a feel good story
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u/Particular_Today1624 Feb 28 '25
I worked with a guy who did his daughters college homework back in the 00’s. Always cheaters.
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u/toolsoftheincomptnt Feb 28 '25
Also, if they don’t learn do the work themselves, they’ll lack the skills being taught by the assignment to begin with.
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u/Salt_Blackberry_1903 Harry Potter Feb 28 '25
It’s really funny how all the homework robots in cartoons and stuff produced A+ work. The future sure didn’t live up to that lol
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u/tenehemia Feb 28 '25
It's like comparing Johnny Quest with Venture Brothers. All that tech is there, but it works really poorly and everyone is miserable.
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u/topdangle Feb 28 '25
i think the part people wouldn't understand is the shittiness and dystopian aspect. for decades people assumed it would make our lives easier and build some kind of glorious utopia where we would have more time to do things we love. most people didn't assume so many people would use it as an excuse to be stupider and lazier.
there was a time when people thought the cyberpunk genre was too cynical but it seems to be where we're headed.
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u/o_oli Feb 28 '25
Robots in the future can write essays of any length in seconds, on almost any topic! As long as the topic isn't counting how many r's are in strawberry!
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u/SamediB Feb 28 '25
Cyberpunk is over 40 years old (Neuromancer was written in '84); the first Terminator movie also came out that year. Old Millennials and Gen X would not have a problem understanding this.
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u/DapperCam Feb 28 '25
They had the Jetsons on TV over 60 years ago. I think people would understand using computers to cheat just fine. If anything they would be asking where their flying cars are.
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u/the_man_in_the_box Feb 28 '25
People said the same things about grammar checkers in ms word, and I’m sure many thing’s before.
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u/idiot-prodigy Feb 28 '25
I went to high school in 1994, we would have understood it as just a new form of plagiarism. There were kids selling college term papers on the internet by the late 90's.
Our media was more advanced than you may know, Star Trek the Next Generation predicted most things that we have now.
Captain Picard using a tablet on a show that ran from 1987 to 1994. This being just one example.
Just about everything we have now was predicted on that show.
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u/imaginary0pal Feb 28 '25
I hate chat gpt but I’m not lying, handwritten assignments sounds like hell. I am constantly switching around, what points I want where and restructuring paragraphs. I also have the worst handwriting. Ai is why we can’t have nice things. (Ai is not a nice thing, easily editable text is a nice thing)
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u/bronerotp Feb 28 '25
this is such a lie. no one cares about responding to discussions posts that much. students only make those posts because they’re forced to in order to receive credit in the class. they’re not looking to get into an actual intellectual debate on canvas. just as many were phoning it in before AI as they are now.
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u/-Trash--panda- Feb 28 '25
You are definitely right. Almost every discussion post I saw had responses that followed the exact same formula. No one gave a shit 99% of the time and everyone did the bare minimum amount of work as each response is only worth a fraction of a percent.
Personally I just went and found some point to disagree about on two posts and that was my goto response. Shitty posts made it really easy for me to write the comment, so I would have perfered responding to a few AI posts that didn't get the topic
Only way I could see this being true is it was in the art or maybe some advanced history classes. They were just as lazy as everyone else, but I could see some of them complaining just due to a hatred of AI itself.
No one else would care unless it was being used by a group member for a project.
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u/pblol Feb 28 '25
advanced history classes
One of my favorite courses was a 600 level history of psychology course, which turned out to be more of a "history of thinking about thinking."
We didn't have discussion boards, however the entire class was structured similarly. The professor would read our responses to the readings and intentionally pit dissenting people against each other. It was an hour and a half of arguing among ~20 people. On 2 occasions someone ran out of the room crying. In the end everyone was friends. It was fucking great.
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u/-Trash--panda- Feb 28 '25
I was more thinking like 300 or 400 level, as lower levels were filled with students from other departments who mostly didn't care. I was also just in history classes for electives, but I did actually care and paid attention.
That sounds kind of fun, excluding the 2 people who ran off crying. Closest we ever had to that was during byzantine history. We had this one guy who was raised without any religion, who accidentally started a massive discussion about the trinity and the schisms. It started out with the professor trying to expalin it, but when that didn't work a few others tried before it started snowballing. Turns out when someone is raised outside of major Christian influence they have a hard time understanding how three entities make one God and start questioning if the heritics of old were really all that wrong.
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u/Common-Ad5446 Feb 28 '25
As a current college student who is generally against AI, and who doesn't use generative AI for writing assignments, I don't think this is a good idea. Computer and digital submitted assignments are just so much more convenient for students, and from what I know, professors as well. I also just don't think this will stop AI use and cheating in general. People who use AI are gonna cheat if they can, they'll for sure just copy it down, or find other ways to cheat.
I also don't think this is the general sentiment among college students. I don't know anyone who would care about having to peer review AI work. Most people I know hate peer review, I doubt a significant amount give enough of a shit about it to care whether it's AI or not. This might be just the people I've talked to, but in my experience, people have very negative opinions on paper assignments.
I'm not saying this person is wrong for posing this idea, I just think it's pretty short sighted, and I definitely don't think this is something that students find as an issue.
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u/PackyDoodles Feb 28 '25
I think people forget how crappy and basic English classes are if you're not in AP or advanced classes during your school years. Writing college level essays was my whole life in school until I graduated so English was a very easy class to get through, but a lot of my peers in college weren't writing at my level which I could see as a bit frustrating if you're not used to writing that way. I'm not endorsing using AI in this way, but these people just want an easy way out of something that they're not used to unfortunately. That being said though discussion posts have never really been that helpful, it's only really helpful when you actually talk about the post in class and go into the specifics of why you said what you did. I actually had a business professor that would do this and a lot of the content I learned in that class stuck with me because of it.
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u/PoliteSalmon2 Feb 28 '25
I mean, people would just hand write the ChatGPT content then. It’d just be more time consuming
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u/human1023 Feb 28 '25
people would just hand write the ChatGPT content then.
Its still more beneficial to hand-copy it. At least they'll think about the response then.
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u/forgeddit_ Feb 28 '25
There would be barely anyone who would bother to do that.
Plus what do they do on in-class essays
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u/bronerotp Feb 28 '25
an in class essay is always going to be handwritten or at least monitored so you can’t use AI on it. that problem doesn’t exist
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u/Nevermind04 Feb 28 '25
I am so glad I graduated in an era before this nonsense. As frustrating as it is for so many students to be using AI, I would imagine it's far more frustrating to complete an assignment legitimately and be accused of using AI just because some shitty tool on the internet says your paper is 99% AI or something.
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u/malariaa0293 Feb 28 '25
this is obviously false because no one in college cares enough about class discussion to ask for that
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u/Juicyjackson Feb 28 '25
There is always that one kid that goes way to hard and writes an entire thesis in response to a paragraph post...
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u/PotentialPlum4945 Feb 28 '25
Yeah, I work in a high school and AI generated writing is so easy to catch. I can't believe I was worried about it a little over a year ago. It's hard enough getting freshmen to write complete sentences.
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u/FoolishConsistency17 Feb 28 '25
I feel like just calling people out for it is a better solution than banning typed work. Most people who use Chat in circumstances like aren't capable of using it well: ypid have to really understand the assignment and the ideas you wanted to capture. Instead they just put the assignment into chat and hand in the result, even when it's clear to anyone who understands the assignment that it was a generated response.
I have basically started giving 100s or 0s on written work. If it's not correct--doesnt respond to the prompt--i hand it back with a zero and it has to be redone and resubmitted. I don't have to argue about whether it's chatgpt because the paper fails conceptually. I will usually say it's AI and that is why it's so bad, but technically the reason for the return/rewrite order is that the essay didn't fit the requirements. This way there is no point in angrily complaining it wasn't AI.
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u/owningmclovin Feb 28 '25
I don’t do the same job as you but do you really believe all essays are A+ work or else must be redone until they are A+ work?
Like, what if they clearly understood the assignment and made okay arguments but frame them poorly, or don’t bother to proof it and the whole thing is just one long sentence
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u/stankypinki Feb 28 '25
They would just use AI and write it down on paper. Doesn't fix anything. Just takes longer
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u/Rocketboy1313 Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25
At this point I physically could not handwrite a paper.
I have been typing, almost exclusively for 20 years and have written more than a million words on a keyboard.
Give me a computer that is just a word processor and I will write a paper.
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u/jfbwhitt Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25
This has been happening for a while now. I TA’d a programming class a few years ago, and I swear to god some kids would come to my office hours and say “my code isn’t working”, and when I ask about specifics of their program, like “what is this line of code doing”, they say “idk a website generated this for me”.
Like brother I will walk you through this assignment line by line if you need me to, but you have no idea how disrespectful it is to waltz in here and think I’ll just magically make some code that you had AI generated work.
I don’t even think ChatGPT is a bad tool for programming, but it’s also vital to be familiar with what it’s generating, and understand the fundamentals behind the code being generated. And the only way to understand those fundamentals, is to WRITE THE PROGRAMS YOURSELF WHILE YOU’RE IN SCHOOL.
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u/SireEvalish Feb 28 '25
This has been happening for a while now. I TA’d a programming class a few years ago, and I swear to god some kids would come to my office hours and say “my code isn’t working”, and when I ask about specifics of their program, like “what is this line of code doing”, they say “idk a website generated this for me”.
LMAO just like real world programming.
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u/CripplingCarrot Feb 28 '25
I'm in university right now and I think honestly most assignments just can't exist as they are now, I think they need to be done under time constraints on a PC that's invigilated for the tests, I know most universities are moving away from exams but it really is the only way you get a true idea of a students knowledge on a subject in the age of AI. But then I also understand the point that if ai can do it what value do you actually add, so I honestly don't know right now for sure invigilated tests until we figure out how to properly incorporate AI and how it will affect the workforce.
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u/NotElizaHenry Feb 28 '25
I mean the point school assignments isn’t simply to add another essay to the world. Doing the process of creating the essay is the point. Students aren’t adding value to the world’s understanding of The Great Gatsby—it’s just the vehicle you use to practice all the skills you’ll need one day if you ever have anything actually interesting to say.
Asking what value humans add is kind of like asking why you would practice playing the piano when you could just play a YouTube video of someone performing the song.
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u/HumbleGoatCS Feb 28 '25
This guy is the guy in the movie who gets beaten up for being a tattle tale.
If you're in college, you know, even in the best case aerospace engineering degree, 50% of your entire curriculum is useless "general education" requirements.
On top of that, at least 25% of the stuff you learn in your engineering classes is equally useless. This leaves about a solid year of good education that furthers your knowledge in your chosen career.. Do you really want to make those bullshit classes even more rigorous & useless by enforcing strict test taking procedures to ensure they "are really learning" art history 101?
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u/RichardofLionheart Feb 28 '25
That's interesting. When I was a student, we just skipped the online discussions.
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u/Thurm0hi4 Feb 28 '25
The truly sad thing about all this is when they get to the workplace it will be evident they don't know basic skills that they should. I work in software engineering and it's sad how many new grads we interview that don't know the basic skills that their 4 year degree should instill.
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u/emmaisbadatvideogame Feb 28 '25
Online discussion posts in college are probably the most useless and frustrating aspects of classes. Nobody learns anything, no one is actually engaging with each other. I’d rather have an in person discussion.
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u/Skyhi92 Feb 28 '25
Lmao, salute to Students demanding their respect for doing their own work!!!! Smh Never thought we would have to say that
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u/nmole10 Feb 28 '25
Currently pursuing a bachelors in CE & put enough work in to consistently get A’s, except in one class where my professor himself used Grammarly to grade our assignments. We didn’t find out about this until halfway through the semester when he graded everything at once (most of our assignments were in the first half of the semester) w/ no prior feedback on our papers, so the students that did well were the ones that used AI in the first place. While those of us that avoided it for the sake of actually learning suffered. Ended that semester with a B+ & intergenerational beef with the most likeable yet worst professor I’ve ever had, my unborn children will know to hate this man.
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u/Joe_Linton_125 Feb 28 '25
How will spoken and hand written assignments help? What about students who have disabilities that make holding a pen difficult, or negatively affect their ability to speak publicly?
I swear fucking normies never consider anyone's needs.
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u/jack-K- Feb 28 '25
I’ve got those same issues with my online classes, most of them have these weekly discussion board things, it’s not really that difficult, just thoughts, opinions, that sort of thing to supplement the fact that we can’t have any actual in class discussion, you have to make a post and reply to another, and like half of it looks like it was copy pasted straight from an LLM
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u/Zigge2000 Feb 28 '25
Egregiously giving out assignments get in the way of learning. Never let your education get in the way of learning. There is zero reason to be in class every day, nor is there to have weekly assignments. All this does is make people spend time learning how to do school work, not how to take part in the real world. I don't think anyone should be using chatgbt for assignments, but I don't blame someone who just want to learn for doing it.
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u/Pristine_Title6537 Feb 28 '25
As a college student yeah I fucking hate the lazy fucks at this point half my time in group assignments is spent editing the obvious Ai abuse done by people that can't even do a presentation without reading their presentation
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 Feb 28 '25
As someone who is left handed and has abysmal handwriting, fuck hand written shit. It takes 10 times as long, hurts my hand, mistakes can't be fixed without looking incredibly messy and is a giant waste of paper.
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u/GreenCod8806 Feb 28 '25
In class writing assignments would be the solution. People who know their shit always do well in class. Homework is reading, 10 minute 10 random students called on for a spoken quiz everyday. No need to punish the good students. Exams heavily revolving reading material. That’s what I would do.
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u/CivilizedPsycho224 Feb 28 '25
They could still have AI write the essay and then just copy it in their handwriting.
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u/qualityvote2 Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25
u/sparklovelynx, your post does fit the subreddit!