Why is all the talk and worry about students and not including the role of teachers increasingly being outsourced to AI? They are using chat to write assignments, tests, emails, letters of recommendation, sort and grade papers. (note this is based on teachers outwardly admitting this, not just on suspected incidents) Students are noticing and feeling very conflicted about the double standard, not to mention declining quality of interactions and learning experiences!

Seems like there was a good reason for oral exams and hand-written in-class essays.

So basically, AI will be grading other AI.🤦‍♀️

I think instruction will flip from spending class time in lecture with assignments completed after class to lectures online and using class time to complete assignments. This of course brings its own problems, but having an instructor available for feedback as one completes an assignment could be very helpful.

In class assignments, no advance notice, no phones, no computers, good old pencil and paper.

How do we incorporate AI without eliminating deeper thought? That's the threat, right? Maybe we treat AI as we would junk food.

My daughter’s in college. Even knowing the programs are often wrong, she uses AI to make sure her paper doesn’t come back as AI. She’s almost paranoid about it.

I do handwritten exams and have also done interviews… but I am still trying to figure out how to teach skills in what research papers used to teach: finding and reading sources, judging their quality, synthesizing info from them to find a conclusion and articulating how that fits together— without using research papers, which can be replicated with AI and even when I know they were, I cannot ironclad prove it. How does one teach THAT set of skills? Or is it just unnecessary to have them? I hope not; those are skills that I think ultimately make a wiser human.

I think it's interesting that the word "assess" comes from the Latin meaning "to sit beside." We really do have to "sit beside" our students to truly know where they are in their learning. Do you know what AI can't do? Sit in a seat in my classroom with a pencil in hand and write in a blue book. Sometimes the best way forward is to turn around... the only answer I have is to think about how my teachers and professors assessed me many years ago: in person.

One high school in my area has gone to pencil and paper for writing assignments. Done in class.

I spent this past year teaching composition courses and was talking with a friend and co-teacher about a common assignment we use, which is a scavenger hunt for finding sources and developing keywords. When we were discussing this, a student of hers came to our shared office to talk about an assigned paper and the scavenger hunt assignment came up; the student didn’t complete it because the university library had implemented an AI search bot that developed keywords, research questions, and source summaries for you. We just looked at each other - the skills that assignment was meant to teach were rendered useless by the university.

In the course of our daily homeschooling, my kids and I use AI periodically, and overall, I think it has been a great benefit. It hasn’t affected us negatively at all, and I see no reason why it should.

Have you read Dr Cooney Horvath's THE DIGITAL DELUSION? From an academic, this book is accessible and uses the research to back the claims in ways not done to this point. It highlights current research that show what is best and highlights the LACK OF REPLICATED RESEARCH for things being used in schools at the moment claiming to be effective. Between that and the books that Jonathon Haidt has done, and the articles you've highlighted, I'm starting to see the voices sounding the alarms in academia and it is nice to not feel alone!!!!

Plato and the Academy, walking along the stoa, talking about the different aspects of the number *8* or the meaning of virtue. An idea whose time has come again.

John Warner is also great on the topic of so-called "ai" (large language models, super-fancy autocomplete) and student writing substack.com/@biblioracle

My son and I just had a conversation about this the other night, he is a rising senior in college. He said that some classes now have a standard that when they run a paper through an AI checker it has to be below a certain percentage of AI generated. My son loves to write and is a natural writer. He is so frustrated because names of journals come up as AI because you have to type it exactly correct and that is easily searched by the program as being copied. Same with quotes that are required to use and correctly cited. Even a common phrase you might use because the AI program can see it is a phrase a lot of papers have used before. He now spends more time checking and then changing his own words so it meets those percentages.

Nathanael Gallagher

That article had a very abrupt ending. Was it written by AI? The audio of the article was AI generated. I'm so concerned about humanity's future...

If I’m paying for a college degree I would expect to pay less if a bot was putting together modules and doing the grading. I doubt colleges are going to discount these degrees, though, and professors aren’t going to accept a pay cut for doing less work.

At what point are we going to have the discussion that education should no longer be compulsory? If it's all being done by machines in both directions, why bother spending resources on students who have no desire to learn or problem solve? If you don't want to be in school, then don't go.

At this point it seems like students are using AI to complete tasks assigned by teachers using AI. It’s so disheartening. Coming up with ideas yourself is hard, rewarding work. Outsourcing all of that work to AI makes us all dumber. AI is designed to tell you what you want to hear, not help you wrestle with uncomfortable ideas.

Sobering…

It’s so, so disheartening.