To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain

LLM use is the most demoralizing problem I’ve faced as a college instructor.

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[randomuser42]

"The friction is the point," is a great statement I'd never heard before, but certainly summarizes what education is supposed to be about. It's taking something one is unfamiliar with, wrestling with it, and coming away knowing more than before the interaction.

Yah but this is a hard thing to explain to a college-aged student because they've been told something else for much of their life: Succeed in college or your life is ruined forever. Good grades and a degree = better jobs, better life, better insurance, etc. etc. etc. Is that what we should be telling them? Is it even true, now or in the past? Doesn't matter, it's what a lot of students believe. So the risk of failure has been made into a very extreme thing, it's no wonder so many students will take any seemingly safe shortcut. Unless we re-contextualize the whole college experience the only solutions I foresee are ways to directly make it hard to use AI and severe penalties if you're caught. It's hard for a student to really understand the wrongness of something if no one gets in trouble for it.

But how do you catch and/or deter them, in a way that's fair and doesn't have false positives? Well that's the question, of course.

 

[randomuser42]

I operate under the rule that we can't require the use of such software - and most of my colleagues are in agreement that we wouldn't be comfortable doing so anyway, for the reasons mentioned.

So what do yall do about this problem? The current situation isn't equitable either because it puts the students who don't want to cheat at a disadvantage.

 

[randomuser42]

FWIW, the thoughts expressed by the author can be confirmed by one horrifying trip to the Teachers subreddit.

Weep for the future.

Between a covid generation and LLMs it's definitely been tough, but that subreddit is extreme. It rewards the more extreme stories with more engagement and upvotes so there's a feedback loop where you get the wildest stories.

I used to read that sub but it was just so divorced from the reality we were experiencing at our son's school, one of the lowest ranked, low-income area elementary schools in our county which nevertheless has altogether been a positive experience for our son. I've chaperoned plenty of field trips and events during his time there and the kids are regular kids.

 

[randomuser42]

One of them had a test bank that basically got the entire group through the first two years of the program at the top of the class. Was it wrong of them to use it? Probably. I consider it “more wrong” that the faculty was repeating the exams verbatim for years. They surely had to notice a disproportionate amount of 100% results!

I have to wonder about that, what if you had a friend who took the class and kept his copy of the test? No rule against that (assuming the teacher returns it). Surely just reviewing the prior year's copy of the test isn't in and of itself cheating? If you went to an upperclassman and asked for help and they pulled out their old copy of the test to review that would be fine.

So if reviewing the test is fine, but you knew the questions would be the literal same, what are you going to do? Study it but don't commit any details to memory?

The fact that the questions were unchanged and the professor surely knew what was happening seems like borderline malfeasance on their part.

 

[randomuser42]

There are plenty of non-extreme accounts of the rampant cheating; I have high school-age children who fit the mold of today's average teenager and, while I don't dispute your own experiences, they attend a great high school in a great area and it jives.

YMMV.

I was thinking less of cheating and more some of the other extreme social issues you see brought up there.

In middle and high school I was as lazy as I could be without incurring the ire of my parents, and then just a little lazier than that, so I'm not surprised about the cheating. I never cheated because I didn't need to to get good enough grades, but if that hadn't been the case I'm sure I would have been tempted. But cheating back then was hard work, so probably the lazier solution would be to recalibrate my parents' expectations on grades.

 

[randomuser42]

I've been a physics professor for about 25 years. In that time, I have seen homework scores gradually go up, while students coming to my office for help and average exam scores have gone down. The unfortunate consequence is that exams have become a larger percentage of the course grade. I try to pound it into them that physics is like weight training - watching someone lift weights on Instagram is not going to make you stronger. Those that don't listen fail the exam. As a remedy sometimes I make them explain to me how they did one of the homework problems they got 100% correct, and grade the explanation. That has helped a lot - more students come to my office before the homework is due now just in case. Plus, it makes them realize "Hey, I understand things better after talking with the prof! That actually helps! I might go more."
I'm fortunate enough to teach mostly in-person classes small enough for this to be practical in. And I teach at least some students who actually want to learn the material. I teach a lot of pre-meds who a) know its going to be on the secure MCAT, and b) know it will be of relevance when they actually get to med school and learn about torque in the limbs and conduction in the nervous system. God help us when someone gets an MD by having AI do all the work!. I'm also fortunate that LLM's still aren't that great (yet) at solving carefully worded physics problems. Even when they try to use AI for homework it's pretty likely to hallucinate an answer. There's no question its a problem, though. My exam scores on average are still not what they were 20 years ago. Even without LLM's some of them will just pay Chegg. And I have caught one student paying a person in Asia to do the online homework - they weren't smart enough to submit the answers themselves, so they all came from an Asian IP address. Students not doing the homework is not a new problem. AI has just made it much worse. Getting the students to understand that learning is the point of homework is the only partial solution.

Yah, one big difference is that in the before times cheating and not learning the material would eventually catch up to you. Those pre-med students still have to take the MCAT. Students in science and engineering would be learning more things that build off of what they learn in lower level courses and would fall further and further behind. You can find answers to physics 1 and 2 problems all over the place, but get to higher and higher levels and eventually they're screwed. And so you could say, well, tough luck guys, should have studied more in the earlier classes.

Do you think that's not true now? I bet an LLM could fart out some mostly ok answers for lower-level courses, but if I grab my old copy of Wangsness' EM Fields it will very quickly not be producing believable answers.

Of course I'm no longer smart enough to answer those questions either so it'll be hard for me to test it!