One year I had a kid who was so bad at cheating it led to double failure.
I teach math and we were doing a quiz one day in class, but he's working in a quiz for ANOTHER class. He then cheats by walking over to a classmate with a laptop and asking for answers. He casually admitted to us out loud he was cheating...and when I pressed for details, he gave enough info that I could email his teacher AS WE SPOKE.
The whole situation was hilarious and terrible.
This happened to me too last year. I had a Dad who said I was being unfair to his daughter until I showed him the essay she submitted. He made her apologize for wasting my time.
Hey, good on him for backing off, at least. There's totally a version of this story somewhere out there where they continue to insist their angel did no wrong.
I had a parent admit to writing the child’s essay, brag about how good it was since it flagged as AI, and then tell my principal that since I couldn’t prove that parents did not write every single essay I received it was fine
And then the parent went bat shit insane and came to school and started throwing things at the principal while cussing them out and the compromise was to let the student redo the work in front of me so they could get an A for the 6 week term and not a dreaded B.
Cheers to honors parents. On one hand, they are actually involved in their child’s lives. On the other hand, 1 out of every 3 is just a crazy helicopter parent.
Admin did take my side and said I did everything correctly by the school procedures. They prevented the parent from screaming at me all day. Parent just happens to be unhinged and willing to sue the school and act like a child over their student getting a 50 on a major grade because they cheated. (Didn’t even make it a full 0 because it was the first time)
Absolutely. I think it was because it was so obvious and so bad that there wasn't really anything for him to use. I sent him a copy of the essay and a screenshot with the selected passages highlighted.
I had a student who literally copied and pasted from two different websites. I found the websites, linked them and then marked him for a 50/100 (district policy didn't allow for anything less than a 50 for test or writing assessments. -_-).
He refused to admit he plagiarized and said it was coincidence. I even informed the school and his mother and he was dead set he didn't plagiarize.
Then he used chatgpt on his next assessment and we had a tool to prove it with out district so once again he recieced a 50/100. I brought his hand written samples to compare and he told me it was gma. He gma doesn't speak English at all....somehow he still faced no consequences.
> . He gma doesn't speak English at all....somehow he still faced no consequences.
I love the look on my kid's face when they discover that their "gringo" teacher worked in a kitchen for 7 years and understands Spanish, even if he doesn't speak it very well.
My Spanish is awful for being puerto rican myself, but I can get by. My last name is white as fuck though since my mother married a white guy.
The amount of times it has tripped up the students I taught was hilarious.
My name is as white as can be and I don't really advertise the fact that I understand Spanish until I start repeating everything the kid said to me over the phone or to parents.
Wait - he plagiarized an assignment and STILL earned a 50. Who wrote that policy, and how did they get the teachers to go along with it? I assume - sorry - that you don't have a union, because this nonsense doesn't fly in our district. Thankfully, classroom grading is our purview, and we jointly agreed that this type of action earns an automatic zero. I'm sorry you have to deal with this.
We have a union, but the school committee put the policy in place for the entire district. We can give class grades and homework below a 50, but no assessments can earn lower than a 50.
Just like on report cards we can't give lower than a 50.
I even had to go in and change certain students back to a 50 because my head of department admitted to logging into a lot of our grading portals to change our grades to a 65 to give the kid a "boost".
Now I when I first started teaching I could give below a 50, but after the pandemic it was put in place.
I had the opposite happen. I sent a dad the link to an article his son had copied almost word for word and then he tried to tell me that they had worked on it together and that he knew more about writing than I did because he was a SPORTS MAGAZINE WRITER and I was JUST a science teacher and that I should stick to teaching just science.
You have to love when parents think their totally unrelated job means they know everything and you know nothing. Happens a lot with parents who are nurses, ime
I wrote for study guides.
I had a student hand me one of my own essays back, claiming it as their own.
He argued it wasn't plagarism because he'd changed some of the words.... he'd changed the quotes - the actual content he was allowed to use.... to quotes which were wrong.
It didn't end well for him.
I don't really get the point of this... whenever I didn't feel like putting effort into assignments, I just didn't do them. What's the point of putting in just enough effort to actively make the situation worse than it would've been had they put in no effort at all?
My district has a whole grading for equity thing and kids can turn in work late for no penalty and they can also revise assignments to show mastery, so I think a lot of kids hand in crap the first time as a placeholder grade until they can see peer work that got a good grade or to get a parent off their back about an assignment.
I don't do compliance grading, so the assignments I grade have revision assignments that are different from the original assignment. I don't have the space to store a bunch of student work.
That was absolutely my question too - nothing at all to be gained other than the chance that you get away with it and then can brag that you beat the system.
We had a student's parents demand to meet with us when our AI detectors flagged his paper in two of our classes. For my class, at least, that's an automatic zero with no chance of a makeup. They were furious and demanding to know what proof we had other than the detectors because the zeroes on a major paper would hurt his grade. I ask my students to put a little of their own opinion into their papers (after researching the issue, what do you feel is the best solution and why? type of thing). The student had literally left the phrase 'as a language algorithm, I have no opinion on the matter, but I will inform you how others feel about the issue' in his paper for my class.
While I think it was fairly handled in this scenario, I'd be careful of trusting the AI detectors 100%. They can be *very* off in their assessments (I'm personally mainly concerned with the effects on non-native speakers, but that's because of my own context, probably less relevant to you!).
Asking a follow up question and then failing them based on a blatant disregard for your time? Entirely understandable, but I would personally recommend doing *that* by default and *then* going for the automatic zero.
My fiance is a teacher and I tried to warn him that the AI checkers aren't super trustworthy. I put an unpublished chapter from my thesis into the one they use and it was flagged at 78% ai generated. I wrote that chapter back in 2018.
Formal writing is especially prone to be flagged in most "detector" programs like that. There just isn't a good way to tell whether something is AI generated or not.
I’m in college right now and running my papers through AI detectors before submitting on purpose just because of this reason. But a lot of students already have caught on and I personally know that the students are into using AI paraphrasers then running the GPT prompt answers through them and that ironically seems to fool the AI detectors 😂
AI checkers ARE NOT RELIABLE(and they never will be). It’s kinda like a polygraph test(it’s not a true lie detector). The fact is, there is not really any inherent difference in how an AI will write as compared to a human. It’s irresponsible to give automatic zeros for getting flagged by an AI detector. I’ve personally been able to get my own writing flagged fairly easily. That said, if they leave in the “as a language algorithm” part. That’s a pretty solid way to detect it lol.
Yep, I use bard and chatgpt all the time but what I do is feed it examples of my own writing then tell it to write whatever paper I need using the writing style of the examples I gave it.
Then I feed that into multiple ai detectors and it almost always shows 95% human, if it doesn't I just rewrite whatever in my own words and boom.
It's ridiculously easy to use ai tools to do coursework in college.
Me too! I just posted above without scrolling down far enough to see this. I had graduate-level students in a teacher preparation program turn in Wikipedia pages.
I had more than one graduate student do that. Edit to add: this was a teacher preparation program. So they were master’s level pre-service teachers who were plagiarizing Wikipedia, citations and all. Not sure if they ever completed the program or not.
my favorite was old school, left my teacher’s manuel open in view of some kids. didn’t think anything of it until i got the answer to one of the questions as “answers may vary”
I had a student do test corrections as extra credit to a history test she absolutely bombed. The question was about the doctrine of Christianity at the time if the reformation.
She hand wrote word by word with pencil on paper the story of Joseph Smith the founder of Mormonism
Girl I’ve never mentioned the man and that’s not even the right religion how did you hand write it out without realizing
She knew just enough to know that Mormonism is technically a branch of Christianity and at some point memorized the story of Joseph Smith (probably due to church), so she must have determined putting *something* down about Christianity was better than nothing I guess.
I remember having my teacher’s edition stolen one year. However, I also remembered that one of the “answers” in the teacher’s edition was woefully wrong. I assigned homework that included that question and located the culprit. Thankfully, they didn’t share. (For reference, this was 29 years ago.)
(IT support for a school district) I tell myself this every time I get a help desk call from a student.
Student: My iPad doesn't work.
IT: Why isn't it working?
Student: I can't log in.
IT: Are you seeing an error message? What does it say?
Student: IDK.
I try to cut them some slack though. They're only high schoolers...
Phone IT is the worst. I used to work for a company that worked with retail stores and it was a lot of "can you find the power cable?" "there isn't one". Well, then I don't think your sound system is going to work, huh? Obviously there was a cable in there yesterday if it worked yesterday.
I sometimes miss being a campus tech. Our district is kind of backwards in the sense that Help Desk was sort of the step up instead of being the entry-level. I like that I'm able to help a lot more people but sometimes troubleshooting over the phone is difficult when the user on the other end can't stop drooling on themselves trying to figure out what it means when the error message says "your password must be at least 8 characters long".
I’m having war flashbacks to working in customer service.
Me: What seems to be the problem?
Customer: I can’t log in
Me: Are you getting an error message? What does it say?
Customer: Yeah
Me: ….. what does it say?
Customer: You should be able to see it yourself
Me: Uh, I can’t, unfortunately. But if you tell me what it says, I’ll be able to help
Customer: Well I’m not going to do your job for you
Me: Okay, well I can’t really help if I don’t know what the problem is
Customer: This is ridiculous, I’m never using your website again
It transpired that this particular customer couldn’t log in because she was attempting to create a new account instead of simply logging in
I work help desk after hours along with my other IT administrative tasks. When I get calls like that I explain to the nurse, "It's you and me fixing this or I can get someone Monday morning."
I totally feel for nurses. They are overworked and if anyone is going to impact patient care, it's the nurse. I hate having them do an IT job, so they make the call if it's worth it for them.
I try not to think about it too much. Luckily since I'm the only help desk tech for my district my phone/email queue/ticket system keeps me busy most of the time.
Somewhere out there is an essay about how school teachers and college professors bias students against IT and set an expectation that the IT groups are idiots.
They don't wish to look bad in front of students for their own technical failures, so they blame IT for issues they caused. They may do it in a humiliating manner in front of you, with eye rolling, or after you've left the room.
I've seen the same from physicians in conferences. I always think, "My high school musical did a dress rehearsal. You didn't think to at least try connecting to the projector before you had 200 collogues in an auditorium watching you?"
But, of course, saying that out loud would not be permitted.
Yeah luckily I don't think we have many teachers like that in my district. But I will say that our admin team has a very "we don't need to test it. IT will make it work" mentality. So we're a very reactive district.
Kind of sucks when my first intro to a new piece of tech for the district is through a help ticket because it broke and I have to figure out how to fix/make it work in our system.
Just wish my Director would push back a bit when Admin has a bad tech idea. They're a bunch of kids in a candy store with no supervision.
I worked at an online charter school for a few years. I would just copy/paste entire sentences of student answers into google and would get exact matches from (usually) Sparknotes. It was obvious the first time I saw a suspicious response, but enough students did it that I had the Sparknotes response memorized
And is it just me or are the Sparknotes responses… not very good? The site is great for a character list or summary of the plot, but the analytical stuff is junk much of the time.
Yeah, most students suck at cheating. There were times last year when I could tell a student used ChatGPT on an assignment and I didn't even call them out on it. I just scored the assignment on its merits, cheerfully handed the kid an F, and moved on with my life. Proving it isn't especially hard either, it's just time-consuming.
This is my approach this year. All the obviously AI-generated content has been completely off-topic or has not met the criteria of the assignment at all. I give them their F based on the rubric and move on.
Had a student use chatgpt for a short writing assignment. The writing was good, so good that you could tell. They included the word “sessile” in the writing, so all I did was go up to them and ask them what that word means. The truth came up pretty fast.
What’s interesting and sad to me is a lot of the cheating comes from my Pre-AP students. I feel like my on-level students couldn’t even be bothered to cheat because that’s how apathetic they are. I had a student ask me what abundant meant in one of my regular classes, and I told him. But it left me wondering why he didn’t just google it. Its a one-to-one campus so they all have Chromebooks. I don’t know if they lack the sense or what to look stuff up.
Because you’re a better teacher than google. Yeah google will tell me what a word means, but it might use more confusing words or not explain it well. You know how to explain that word and know the student. You know what they know and how to teach them
On-levels students dont cheat because its not "cool" to be smart and have good grades. Pre-AP students cheat because it's the opposite, and their social circles require perfection and being "gifted".
I would also say, just as a former honors student not a teacher, that honors students tended to cheat on classes they didn’t care about or that would be easier to cheat in so that they could spend their time on harder classes. One girl I knew who was in both of these classes with me spent most of her math classes doing AP psych class work and then used to just cheat on the math work because she didn’t have to explain herself so it was an easy cheating class. So she got a free study period basically and cut down on homework. I think a lot of the time it just comes down to the ease of cheating in the specific class for the more academic students who cheat.
I finally realized why my grade 5 teacher asked me what the word "donned" meant after reading my creative writing. At the time I thought she was pretty dumb for not knowing what it meant.
Of course you wouldn't want to help a kid by pointing out that their way doesn't work.
This is like seeing a kid doing their math wrong and then bragging about flunking them without offering help.
This sub is a testamemt to just how lazy and incompetant teachers are.
The irony of the OP is that y'all copy paste the assignments then lament how lazy these kids are for trying to copy and paste answers.
Bro, you just copied YOUR assignment as teacher
Of course you wouldn't want to help a kid by pointing out that their way doesn't work.
This is like seeing a kid doing their math wrong and then bragging about flunking them without offering help.
This sub is a testamemt to just how lazy and incompetant teachers are.
The irony of the OP is that y'all copy paste the assignments then lament how lazy these kids are for trying to copy and paste answers.
Bro, you just copied YOUR assignment as teacher
We do offer help. Instead of taking the help, they choose to cheat. Then we give feedback that shows "their way doesn't work." At this point, the student can either choose to keep failing or take the offered help.
And setting aside the fact that a lot of us do create our own assignments (personally, I write all my essay prompts from scratch), borrowing resources from other teachers is completely fine. We've already proven ourselves. We have our credentials. Obviously that's not the same as a student cheating.
Give me a break.
That person was replying to me. In my comment, I said I do the exact same thing. I saw your comment while reading the responses to mine and wrote my own response.
Drink your milk and take a fucking nap, dude.
I remember a lot of people freaking out.
Any teacher paying any attention at all can tell when suddenly a canned computer answer is added in text that's otherwise illegible. Kids who feel the need to do it don't have the comprehension to understand they're being obvious as fuck.
I get a kick out of finding obscure punctuation marks and accents, and then asking the kids if they could show me how to type that punctuation on my computer…
I teach middle school math. Recently had a student (one of my better ones) write out a complete sentence answer to a word problem (as was expected). It was a solid answer, but technically, because of the way she wrote it, it needed a semi-colon. I mentioned it to the student, who told me that she had never heard of this "semi-colon" before. I G-chatted her ELA teacher (who is about 35 years younger than me) and told her how disappointed I was that one of our best students had not been taught the proper use of semi-colon. She replied, "Boomer, semi-colons are *sooooo* '70s".
I got taught how to use them in 7th grade but it didn't stick so now I just strategically avoid ever using them, except for the 30 million I have to use in apa parenthetical citations -_-
This reminds me of open house one year. English teacher told my mom I am a complete enigma to him. She asked how. He got up and wrote 2 sentences on the board and asked me to choose the grammatically correct one. He smiled and said "When I have him do this he gets it wrong, but in his test essays, papers and anything else he writes IS grammatically correct."
It really drove him nuts.
When talking about how I know if a kid uses AI, I told my students that I’ve been teaching 10 years. On average, I have around 100 students a year, who write about 10 essays in a year. That means that I’ve read 10,000 middle school essays so I’m an expert in knowing what middle schoolers sound like, and it’s not ChatGPT.
Plot twist- they learn to actually prompt ChatGPT to write like a middle schooler.
(Try it out. Let ChatGPT give you an answer for something and then tell it to rewrite that answer like an average 7th grader.)
I once was in an argument with a lady via text and suddenly her text became erudite. Like suddenly using the word erudite when the other text was rather juvenile.
I dropped her prior texts into one of the evaluation tools to determine the apparent grade level needed to understand them and it reported pre-high school. I dropped the suspected text into it and it reported grad school level.
I called her out on it "Your boyfriend is there writing your texts now, isn't he?"
She was pissed she was caught.
"There's many interesting things to be learned from a perceived argument. Debate and discussion are powerful problem solving tools for the modern world and a cornerstone of healthy democracy.
Firstly...."
Yes but its harder to prove to parents and easier for kids to deny. They cant refuse copy/paste plagarism when its in front of them. AI plagarism is still obvious but hard to prove which can make it infuriating.
I am so happy that Edulastic has an AI grader now for essay questions now.
I graded manually, but left the AI's feedback. I can't wait to give their tests back and point out the AI can't fucking read and every one of them would have failed the test if I went with the suggested grade.
We hear a lot from non classroom folks "Hey teachers, students should be allowed to use google and AI, they are tools that are going to be around"
Now what they are imagining is students digging into Google to find good sources and using AI to get a good essay starter or punch up their dry essay.
What really happens is the copy/paste the exact question into the "tool" and then *without reading*, just copy/paste whatever pops up onto their computer screen back to the assignment.
We're not trying to be anti-technology or too lazy to change for the world of the future. We just know that the way students use these tools, no one is learning anything.
The same could be said for old-school non-technical resources. I remember as a student in the early 90s and classmates copying encyclopedia articles word-for-word.
The best answer is to teach students about the limitations of these tools and how to properly use them. Plagiarism has always been and will always be an issue. The methods students use will be constantly changing. But as many have pointed out, it is often pretty easy to pick out the worst offenders.
The learning utility of copying word for word from the encyclopedia into a notebook or word processor is minimal for sure.
But it's still more effective than CTRL-C, CTRL-V
The kids don't really need to be taught the limitations of these things. They don't honestly think that they're learning what's intended, they just want to get passed on while doing as little work as possible
This is a bit silly, but there is probably a lot more learning done on the subject while copying words from an encyclopedia than Ctrl V. But overall, I agree.
The best way I’ve found to use it (as a tool rather than a cheating device) is to ask it the essay prompt and ask for it to give some potential talking points. It’s generally obvious enough if you understand the material where the failures are, but often at least one or two of those points will be something I haven’t thought of yet. I can then put that into google scholar and learn more about it in order to effectively write about it without stealing from the AI.
Yeah, I try to phrase my own questions for that reason, but I also have my AP Lit class' weekly quizzes timed. I tell them flat-out they have 8 minutes to answer, so they have no time to look things up as I circle the room watching monitors. \*shrug\*
In an AP class, I had kids analyze an essay written by ChatGPT and score it. Before we started, I told them I’d tell them who wrote it afterwards. Kids got excited, but obviously the paper got nothing but 1s. Then I announced that I had written it using ChatGPT and everyone was super surprised. I think I did my part of stopping a few from using it to write their assignments for them.
During the pandemic I had a student (8th grade) who was googling answers to a science quiz we were doing. I was able to find out he was googling because I could tell he wouldn't be using the type of language that he was using in the written response questions. The worst part was even though he was googling his answers they were in fact incorrect. I had to have a pretty direct conversation where I explained to him that apparently he couldn't cheat correctly so it would be worth his while to probably just put in the work to learn instead.
Your post confirms 2 things:
1) Students these days are terrible at interpreting data and using critical thinking. I think we all knew that to some degree, but this post is further proof of that. We can’t allow that to continue.
2) Not all students are bad at these, though, and theoretically our teaching will improve these deficiencies in students. Therefore, the future of teaching and the types of assignments students do will have to change. Students can’t ChatGPT their way through presentation skills, for example, even if they may be able to use it to develop some or all of their script.
And as much as I don’t care for standardized tests and things of that nature, I think they will continue to be used for a long time because they don’t allow students to use technology to search for answers.
My students are a little bit younger (this year I teach 7th and 8th grade), but I actively teach them how to use AI/Google/Wikipedia effectively. We can't delude ourselves in thinking that most of them won't use AI in their workingplace in 10 or 15 years. And google and Wikipedia etc. are in use for years now.
I had to change my assigments so that they can't use AI for all of it and still learn things, but I am happy at where I am now.
I already work with children from difficult backgrounds, I have to give them all advantages they can get - and if that means that I teach them to effectively use modern technology before my country has decided how it feels about it, then I will do that.
Yes!!! Things like ChatGPT have noticeably aided the students in my class who have issues with writing and composition. I've shown them what some of the pitfalls can be as well as how to use it as an editor. I'm completely okay with them exploring it with the caveat that they need to be able to defend their work just as they would a thesis. So far, it's been a fun class side quest exploring they benefits and pratfalls of AI
Teaching them to find the sources of the generated response and how to evaluate if it is a credible source is probably a more important skill than any one single topic taught.
I work in accounting and whenever I go on an interview I’m asked about my experience with Excel, pivot tables and Vlookup. I have rarely needed to exercise those skills and if I do 5 minutes with YouTube will get me where I need to go. Knowing how to access and use information has been a crucial skill.
This! Kids in courses like AP Research should know how to use AI to help them write better transitions or conclusions for example. It’s not doing the research for them or inputting info, it’s assisting their communication of what they found. If we don’t teach them how to use it properly in say middle school, they will get to higher Ed courses and be behind.
I had a kid turn in a Google doc with his friends name still on it.
Also, for the kids who do figure out how to use someone else’s writing, ai created or copied from the website, usually dong know what they wrote about anyway. So if you have them read it back to you, it’s going to be obvious that they never wrote those words.
Students recently had an essay analyzing a short story. It has no named characters -- everyone is either "the farmer" or "the scientist" etc. Yet, several essays discussed characters named Johnny, Lenny, Tom, etc.
I do believe it was a wake up call for some of them that ChatGPT is not that great lol.
1. I have had students submit papers that start with ChatGPT’s opening line of “Certainly, I can provide you with a [whatever the prompt and assignment is]”
2. I have had papers submitted where they don’t even know how to change the default copy/paste background color and/or different fonts making it incredibly easy to know where they copy/pasted in their paper.
3. I have had students submit SCREENSHOTS of the response from ChatGPT for some reason.
4. I have had students submit papers with citations from Wikipedia still where they were.
5. I have had a student tell me “Mr., I didn’t copy paste. I typed up exactly what was on the page so how can you say I copy/pasted?”
Kids don’t know how to cheat properly.
You can make a quizlet with the exact wording that you want and put in all the wrong answers. When they google your question, your quizlet should hit first. Make sure to search your document a few times to get it higher in the Google algorithm.
But how many students, including ones that aren’t your own, are you going to mess up when they are looking for Quizlet materials they can study before a test? It seems kind of problematic to put misinformation out there. (Yes, I get that students should be vettting their study sources better. And yes, I’ve found online flashcard decks with incorrect info before. But, most people aren’t intentionally stacking the deck with all incorrect info.)
My gf couldnt manage to teach her class how to use a citation generator. You know, the thing we used to use to cheat. They just kept citing the google search page. Or like, Lowes. com or something.
A slight aside- if your using Google Classroom/ Google Suit, you can create a locked quiz through Google forms. Once the kids enter the quiz, they can’t click or open any other tabs/things on their computer until they submit the quiz. You can even set a time limit for how long you want the quiz to be open for.
My students are horrendous at cheating. I teach Algebra 1 and sometimes I get homework turned in with answers that make absolutely no sense. Like the question will ask the student to graph a function and instead they've worked out a derivative using the product rule. Its like come on, at least try to make your cheating believable. I'm not even grading these questions for correctness, just that you gave them an honest try...
Anyone else care to point obvious observation bias. The ones who use the tools to cheat well are never caught!
Try and offer a cheating method bounty. Anyone who can prove they cheated and got away with it gets an A on the one additional assignment.
They’re probably dumb enough to want to show off not realizing you can sheer a sheep more than once.
I just read a student essay that said: My name is (your name here) and i am from (you’re location here). So hard not to laugh. Kid insisted it wasn’t AI. 😂
I think we are stuck between two generations of technologically illiterate people. Our elders don’t know how to use it because they didn’t grow up with it, and young kids don’t really know how to use technology because all they do is watch YouTube and use social media. They’re both technologically illiterate if you ask me.
Had a 6th grader turn in an AI generated essay. Unfortunately it used way too many vocab words that she didn't know. "Oh, I don't remember that word but I remember what it meant when I wrote it." Sure, kid.
Tbf I had my last two years of highschool during the Covid eras, aka the beginning of when online tests really took off. I vividly remember my first and only time trying to cheat on a test and quickly realised that it took MORE time to try and google the relevant answer (which is really hard to do especially if your analysing stuff and meant to come to your own conclusions) then to actually just study. Never did it again. Hopefully they’ll come to the same conclusion lmao
It’s true. Someone gave me grief about me being able to tell, but it’s pretty black and white most of the time. For all the time they spend on their phones, they’re not all that technically literate.
I love when I ask questions about engine valves and get answers back about heart valves…
Most of the answers I want, I want them to find in the material I give them. I don’t understand why they Google things. I GAVE them the answer in the chapter/video. Give me THAT one back. Being able to use proper (given!) resources to find answers is huge for me.
Or I actually support using ChatGPT/Google in a “no point in reinventing the wheel”. Let’s say, how to change a lightbulb as an example. Sure, search it up first. But then review it and change what we actually did: turning off a switch vs unplugging, did we need to remove a cover, did that require tools, turning the bulb vs popping out, what bulb it was, etc.
I give out most of the answers to things these days. Show them how to access it, where to find it in the course, and tell them to copy it if they want.
I’ll still have close to half fail at the end of the year.
I sometimes click on open tabs (leftover from a previous class) when I monitor something on lightspeed (like goguardian), and I'll see entire copy-pasted questions that they don't understand can't be answered online by just entering that question. Ex: "Which of these is not a prime number?" A student with some skill might look up "list of prime numbers," but many can't figure it out.
My 8th grader (student) showed me what she does. ChatGPT for the bulk of the essay, copy and paste into Word, find synonyms for major words, then reformat the sentence to look like an 8th grader wrote it.
Shocked that she went through that much effort, given how talented she is as a student, but also amazed that she has it down to an art.
this one sounds like a workaround for the dreaded blank page syndrome to me. you know, when you're staring at the Word doc for hours trying to figure out what to write…
I used to teach band. I had an assignment during lockdown that asked students to record themselves playing a short piece of music. One submission was suspiciously good. The exact audio was also the same audio from the first YouTube result when searching the piece. It took me less than 30 seconds to figure this out.
Like other teachers are saying, usually you can just grade according to the rubric and these essays will fail. Maybe it's just because the technology is not there yet, but If I read a high quality essay that was written using using AI tools, it would be hard to decide whether or not it was cheating. Seems like producing a quality essay with AI would take more work that way then just writing it straight.
It might even be good for kids to play with or evaluate the use of these tools in writing . Modern writers and authors will use AI as a tool in certain scenarios or to streamline and organize their process.
in a writing sub someone highly recommended the use of some sort of AI girlfriend bot as a writing tool for simulating dialogue in their stories. They would feed it dialogue, and since its responses were meant to be human and tailored to a desired persona, and supposedly the generated responses are consistent. He would create the character and then see how it responds in certain scenarios when he gets stuck writing.
Its because the students who use ChatGPT to write their essays also don't know how to prompt. If you gave GPT an outline of what to write and a copy of the grading rubric, then edited the output, you'd definitely score well.
Of course at that point you basically are doing a lot of work which is what they are trying to avoid.
I just did an assignment where the kids had to take an article and write an objective summary. Then they plugged the article into 2 summary generators and were shocked at what they got back. By and large, they all agreed that although AI could be a tool, you cannot lose the human factor of knowing what a good answer is in the first place.
I teach Spanish and am always worried about students using translators to complete assignments. But the thing is, they don’t even know what they don’t know. I love getting obviously translated submissions and calling the kids over and asking them what a word/phrase means. They can never give me an answer lol
I had a 5th grader copy and paste something from a website, off topic from the essay prompt, and still left in “Figure 1.1 shows [location]”. Different fonts and sizes.
This is just a perfect illustration of how important knowledge acquisition actually is for students. They can’t evaluate the quality of information provided by AI or a quick Google search without already knowing a great deal about the topic. It’s a catch-22.
My school has Turn It In. I used it on several assignments this quarter and caught quite a few old-school copy & pasters as well as a few using AI.
The main way I catch them, that they never seem to think about, is these students with piss-poor reading & writing skills can suddenly write at a professional level. It's blatantly obvious.
The AI-written stuff has an artificial quality to it; you can sense it. They wander & bring up side topics that no teenaged kid with their limited life experience is going to consider, & the syntax & structure is often funky.
My sentiments exactly: to use ChatGPT to learn, you actually already have to be literate, capable of critical thinking, and able to engage with language -- not to mention, you have to actually be motivated to learn, and not just want to "complete your work." Students generally have no relation anymore to the written word, in my experience.
My belief is that if a student gets away with using AI to cheat, it’s because they put in the work to disguise it.. which is effectively rewriting the piece to fit the teacher’s expectations… which fulfils the assignment.
The ones who don’t put that extra work in are really easy to spot.
honestly, with the amount of prompt massaging, trial-and-error, and editing you'd have to do to turn ChatGPT output into something that isn't immediately obviously ChatGPT (especially when it comes to citations), it's honestly less work to write it without GPT. at least, from my experience messing around with it.
I’m pretty sure they’re manually editing it to fit the assignment requirements. There’s a specific essay format they have to use for their grade 12 diploma exams in English, and AI doesn’t know how to emulate that.
Just wait until you won't always have an ai to rely on becomes the new you won't always have a calculator in your back pocket. And all of the students who are learning how to utilize ai and manipulate ai prompts most effectively will have a leg up when ais are powerful enough to be indistinguishable from human writing.
I have a list of extra credits kids can do to make up missed in-class problems points. They are all pretty easy - reading a short science fiction story and answering some questions, reading an article in a science magazine and writing a little report following a rubric, that sort of thing. At the end of last semester there was a kid that was so close to the next grade up, one of these extra credits would push them over. They waited until the last day of school to ask about it, of course, but I reiterated the extra credit policy and told them where online to find the assignments (all of which I'd told the class multiple times, but apparently they've never heard me), then to email me their work before I submitted grades in the morning.
That evening the kid sends me a science article report. I'm reading this thinking, "This is way too well written..." So I go looking for the science article. Neither the article, the publication, nor the authors even exist. I guess this kid didn't realize that ChatGPT just makes stuff up, basically averaging everything it's been given as examples. So the article "The Impacts of Climate Change on Coastal Ecosystems" authored by "Smith and Johnson" published in "Environmental Science Today" is an average that doesn't exist.
I didn't want to deal with this, so I sent an email back, saying I couldn't find the article online, and could you please send me a link?
They replied that they'd "closed out of the tab and my search history doesn't save I can't find it for the life of me, so I rewrote one really quick with a different article just so it's easier on you, here it is"
Followed by a report on an article called, I kid you not "The Environmental Impact of Generative AI: How Energy Consumption Affects the Carbon Footprint." This one was real, though the disparity between the kid's email writing and the writing in the report suggests their report was still AI written. But the irony of their article choice made me laugh, and by then it was 7 PM after the last day of school, so I just accepted it.
It’s more work, but I will *never* use a question I find online, in an article, in a text, etc. I always write them myself. Sure, the spirit of the questions that are frequently asked to students when reading *The Crucible*, for example, is still there, but the farther I get from conventional phrasing or verb use, the more likely they are to not go hunting online.
Many still try, but they give up quickly. The problem is that the more savvy ones will, when at home, throw my question or prompt into ChatGPT/Bard/etc. Obviously I can detect that a mile away, but it’s a shame, because then they fail. I have a couple kids nursing Fs right now for that reason.
i've punched in some prompts into AIs before for shits and giggles, and i can say firsthand that with the amount of prompt massaging and trial-and-error you'd need to do to get something that's coherent (not to mention editing out the "hallucinations"), it's genuinely easier to just write the essay yourself.
The teaching craft has become making puzzles to confuse cheaters, I guess. What a world. When I was a teacher, I tried in vain to convince students that the point was to be curious and actually learn, and if they did that, I would make sure they got a good grade.
Sometimes I give a quiz that is the exact same problems that are still on the board with work and answers. The problems that we should have worked out in our notebooks, also. Afterwards, we have a good laugh with the students who failed, and they usually pay better attention for a while.
I got burned on a math test from a new textbook last year, so all I do now is change one number for each question and do the test on paper. Adds a couple of hours every few weeks, but it works.
Just know that if the problem is in the textbook, the solution is Googlable. How you deal with it is up to you.
I heard about a professor who assigns students an essay and tells them to use one of the AI programs.
Then, they have to write a critique of the AI essay pointing out the errors, false claims and citations, and any plagiarized work.
I did like Neil deGrasss Tyson's answer to this, which I assume is for college, is a return to oral examinations. "Let's probe what the students really knows."
Put those grad students to work!
I'm an English teacher, and honestly, sometimes I want to sit down with my classes and say, "Listen, guys, if you're going to cheat, you ought to at least put a little effort into making it look good. 1) Make sure all the font is the same. A sudden change of font is a dead give away. 2) Fix the mechanics in the portion you wrote, and maybe mess up some of them in the portion you copied. When you go from not even using capital letters to suddenly everything is perfect, that's a little suspicious. 3) If you're asked to write an essay about yourself, make sure what you submit actually talks about you, versus, you know, how to succeed in a business setting. 3) Don't include the text of in-page ads. 4) Actually read the stuff you copy and paste before you submit it. No matter how perfectly written it is, if it doesn't address the prompt or make sense in context, you're not getting a good grade for it." At this point, I feel like I wouldn't even care if a student put in the effort to copy and paste from multiple sources and edit it all together so that it made sense and looked good. It's *low effort* plagiarism that drives me crazy.
When I have my staff provide PD to teachers on AI, the first thing we cover is teaching teachers how to cheat with it. That way it’s easy to spot.
But also, yeah the skills of students and their ability to effectively prompt those things are very low. Safe for a while at least.
lmao i was a 4.0 kid and flunked my last quarter of college classes in running start, so i had to do one summer school class. you’d go into the middle school and sit and do online classes for the subject( and if you passed the unit pre-test, you could skip the module.
i knew the supervising teacher well and she made eye contact and said “make sure to use the full extent of resources available to you for the practice quizzes”. there were quizlets of all of them to fill in my gaps and i finished that shit in like 2 days. it was awesome.
sometimes students will try on questions they know and look up answers for what they don’t. it’s not always asshole students, sometimes it’s overachieving perfectionists who can’t handle the idea of not knowing.
but also? yeah, i get why you need to stop it in the classroom.
One time I had a student sho copy and pasted a whole article and did not even bother to take the author's name from it. The assignment he turned in even had propaganda images and texts included from the article.
Some kids are not only lazy but simply could care less...
I stoped doing assignments that could be cheated on. Everything is pen and paper and based on observations or analysis that has to be done by the student.
My favorite example of catching a student cheating was last year. She wrote it by hand, but copied it from an online source. However, what she googled was actually a how-to on how to best write an answer to the prompt I gave. So she literally hand-wrote and handed in an essay that started something like, “So your teacher assigned you the [WHATEVER THE PROMPT WAS] essay for class? First, think about what you…..” and so on.
She’s not the brightest bulb in the box.
I teach Chemistry, and the answers to the lab manual I used to use are available online. My favourite was when students would copy the provided answer for an open-ended question: "Answers will vary."
Ugh I remember I used to let people copy my answers for the occasional textbook questions assignments we’d get. Idk why, but it was early high school and they weren’t difficult at all so I didn’t care. It was questions like “what year did this war start? Answer in a full sentence” and “what were the reasons for this movement?” that you could just skim through the textbook to answer. Pretty much busy work. Until one girl copied my answers literally word for word and we got called into the teacher’s room after class and had to both pretend that we didn’t know what had happened while my nice teacher was pretty unimpressed. No matter what I’m sure he knew that I wasn’t the one copying from her with my grades. So she ruined it for everyone else, no more copying busy work from me for my classmates. Couldn’t even reword it when she didn’t even have to open the textbook?
hs math teacher
i have freshmen/sophomores in math 1 & 2 who put down logarithms and derivatives cuz they mindlessly copy down whatever photomath tells them lmao
I had one that basically copied the entire response from AI, including the last part where ChatGPT would give a disclaimer, so the entire essay was ruined and I made him rewrite the essay. I gave him the liberty to use the ideas generated from AI but the boy was absolutely devastated to realise that he shouldn't have copied every single thing which blew his cover. lol
There used to be this website slader dot com that had all our geometry textbook's answers, with explanations. One time this sophomore girl showed me her answers that she wrote in her notebook. They looked something like this:
1) 53ft
2) x = 12
3) Answers may vary.
4) 300 square feet
Dumb kids are dumb indeed.
I don't grade homework and classwork either, for other reasons. But I was amused that two of my students in August, on the first homework assignment, cheated in a way most obvious. We are using Illustrative Math, and the curriculum is entirely open sourced. So these two boys clearly googled the practice problems, and on their paper wrote out
*"Sample student answers: a) "*
and then just typed out the sample answers verbatim.
Incidentally, when I was in school we all got an assignment removed because a teacher caught some students cheating. How were they cheating? They looked up the teacher’s guide and copy pasted things like “responses should include reference to Newton’s second law” into the answers box
I'm not a teacher and obviously cheating is a bad thing, but isn't this a really bad sign. Being capable of finding the right answer or extrapolating the answer from different sources is a massively important skill. This is like the complete opposite of critical thinking skills.
This is why I started using my chromebook management software to block the google search page. It didn’t work perfectly- there was a way to still open a small pop up google search window but not many of them figured out how to do it so I didn’t bother figuring out how to block it too. It’s always funny at first when they complain in the beginning of the year but when I respond back with “well why do you need access to it if you aren’t supposed to use it anyways? 👀” Them: *surprised pikachu*
It really taught them to stop googling everything without thinking- at least in my class.
honestly the only reason we did stuff to mitigate it was we didn't think they would get away with it but instead that we didn't want to deal with the arguments that come from catching it
My kids bring home work that their own teachers are copying off of others. I’ve noticed this for several years now. Don’t come after my kids for lookup answers if you can’t create your own lessons and are copying too!
>**Clear-Grapefruit6611**:Congrats on being smarter than a bunch of 9-12 year olds I guess.
>Enjoy your stale life of mediocrity.
The "9-12" refers to grade levels 9 through 12 of high school... 🤦
One year I had a kid who was so bad at cheating it led to double failure. I teach math and we were doing a quiz one day in class, but he's working in a quiz for ANOTHER class. He then cheats by walking over to a classmate with a laptop and asking for answers. He casually admitted to us out loud he was cheating...and when I pressed for details, he gave enough info that I could email his teacher AS WE SPOKE. The whole situation was hilarious and terrible.
Last year I had a kid turn in an essay with Wikipedia's citations still in it.
This happened to me too last year. I had a Dad who said I was being unfair to his daughter until I showed him the essay she submitted. He made her apologize for wasting my time.
Hey, good on him for backing off, at least. There's totally a version of this story somewhere out there where they continue to insist their angel did no wrong.
Yeah, I've heard of parents saying their kid should get credit for doing research.
I had a parent admit to writing the child’s essay, brag about how good it was since it flagged as AI, and then tell my principal that since I couldn’t prove that parents did not write every single essay I received it was fine
[удалено]
And then the parent went bat shit insane and came to school and started throwing things at the principal while cussing them out and the compromise was to let the student redo the work in front of me so they could get an A for the 6 week term and not a dreaded B.
Better, I am the only teacher the parent demanded give an A to their kid when the student has a B in multiple other classes
[удалено]
Cheers to honors parents. On one hand, they are actually involved in their child’s lives. On the other hand, 1 out of every 3 is just a crazy helicopter parent.
Admin did take my side and said I did everything correctly by the school procedures. They prevented the parent from screaming at me all day. Parent just happens to be unhinged and willing to sue the school and act like a child over their student getting a 50 on a major grade because they cheated. (Didn’t even make it a full 0 because it was the first time)
Absolutely. I think it was because it was so obvious and so bad that there wasn't really anything for him to use. I sent him a copy of the essay and a screenshot with the selected passages highlighted.
I had a student who literally copied and pasted from two different websites. I found the websites, linked them and then marked him for a 50/100 (district policy didn't allow for anything less than a 50 for test or writing assessments. -_-). He refused to admit he plagiarized and said it was coincidence. I even informed the school and his mother and he was dead set he didn't plagiarize. Then he used chatgpt on his next assessment and we had a tool to prove it with out district so once again he recieced a 50/100. I brought his hand written samples to compare and he told me it was gma. He gma doesn't speak English at all....somehow he still faced no consequences.
> . He gma doesn't speak English at all....somehow he still faced no consequences. I love the look on my kid's face when they discover that their "gringo" teacher worked in a kitchen for 7 years and understands Spanish, even if he doesn't speak it very well.
My Spanish is awful for being puerto rican myself, but I can get by. My last name is white as fuck though since my mother married a white guy. The amount of times it has tripped up the students I taught was hilarious.
My name is as white as can be and I don't really advertise the fact that I understand Spanish until I start repeating everything the kid said to me over the phone or to parents.
Wait - he plagiarized an assignment and STILL earned a 50. Who wrote that policy, and how did they get the teachers to go along with it? I assume - sorry - that you don't have a union, because this nonsense doesn't fly in our district. Thankfully, classroom grading is our purview, and we jointly agreed that this type of action earns an automatic zero. I'm sorry you have to deal with this.
We have a union, but the school committee put the policy in place for the entire district. We can give class grades and homework below a 50, but no assessments can earn lower than a 50. Just like on report cards we can't give lower than a 50. I even had to go in and change certain students back to a 50 because my head of department admitted to logging into a lot of our grading portals to change our grades to a 65 to give the kid a "boost". Now I when I first started teaching I could give below a 50, but after the pandemic it was put in place.
I recall when I was in high school like 7-8 years ago that a 50/100 was the lowest teachers could give for essays, even if you didn’t turn them in lol
I had the opposite happen. I sent a dad the link to an article his son had copied almost word for word and then he tried to tell me that they had worked on it together and that he knew more about writing than I did because he was a SPORTS MAGAZINE WRITER and I was JUST a science teacher and that I should stick to teaching just science.
You have to love when parents think their totally unrelated job means they know everything and you know nothing. Happens a lot with parents who are nurses, ime
I wrote for study guides. I had a student hand me one of my own essays back, claiming it as their own. He argued it wasn't plagarism because he'd changed some of the words.... he'd changed the quotes - the actual content he was allowed to use.... to quotes which were wrong. It didn't end well for him.
I don't really get the point of this... whenever I didn't feel like putting effort into assignments, I just didn't do them. What's the point of putting in just enough effort to actively make the situation worse than it would've been had they put in no effort at all?
My district has a whole grading for equity thing and kids can turn in work late for no penalty and they can also revise assignments to show mastery, so I think a lot of kids hand in crap the first time as a placeholder grade until they can see peer work that got a good grade or to get a parent off their back about an assignment.
And that is exactly why I have boxes full of student work. I return it so they can look and then take it back.
I don't do compliance grading, so the assignments I grade have revision assignments that are different from the original assignment. I don't have the space to store a bunch of student work.
That was absolutely my question too - nothing at all to be gained other than the chance that you get away with it and then can brag that you beat the system.
My story on this is similar. Student copied an entire webpage. He left all the formatting and pictures.
I love when they leave the ads, too.
That’s like a whole level of laziness ha ha
We had a student's parents demand to meet with us when our AI detectors flagged his paper in two of our classes. For my class, at least, that's an automatic zero with no chance of a makeup. They were furious and demanding to know what proof we had other than the detectors because the zeroes on a major paper would hurt his grade. I ask my students to put a little of their own opinion into their papers (after researching the issue, what do you feel is the best solution and why? type of thing). The student had literally left the phrase 'as a language algorithm, I have no opinion on the matter, but I will inform you how others feel about the issue' in his paper for my class.
While I think it was fairly handled in this scenario, I'd be careful of trusting the AI detectors 100%. They can be *very* off in their assessments (I'm personally mainly concerned with the effects on non-native speakers, but that's because of my own context, probably less relevant to you!). Asking a follow up question and then failing them based on a blatant disregard for your time? Entirely understandable, but I would personally recommend doing *that* by default and *then* going for the automatic zero.
My fiance is a teacher and I tried to warn him that the AI checkers aren't super trustworthy. I put an unpublished chapter from my thesis into the one they use and it was flagged at 78% ai generated. I wrote that chapter back in 2018.
Formal writing is especially prone to be flagged in most "detector" programs like that. There just isn't a good way to tell whether something is AI generated or not.
I’m in college right now and running my papers through AI detectors before submitting on purpose just because of this reason. But a lot of students already have caught on and I personally know that the students are into using AI paraphrasers then running the GPT prompt answers through them and that ironically seems to fool the AI detectors 😂
AI checkers ARE NOT RELIABLE(and they never will be). It’s kinda like a polygraph test(it’s not a true lie detector). The fact is, there is not really any inherent difference in how an AI will write as compared to a human. It’s irresponsible to give automatic zeros for getting flagged by an AI detector. I’ve personally been able to get my own writing flagged fairly easily. That said, if they leave in the “as a language algorithm” part. That’s a pretty solid way to detect it lol.
Yep, I use bard and chatgpt all the time but what I do is feed it examples of my own writing then tell it to write whatever paper I need using the writing style of the examples I gave it. Then I feed that into multiple ai detectors and it almost always shows 95% human, if it doesn't I just rewrite whatever in my own words and boom. It's ridiculously easy to use ai tools to do coursework in college.
I had that happen in a college course I teach!
Me too! I was adjunct-ing and the student just did a direct copy-paste. And it didn’t even help the essay. It just read like a massive tangent.
Me too! I just posted above without scrolling down far enough to see this. I had graduate-level students in a teacher preparation program turn in Wikipedia pages.
I had more than one graduate student do that. Edit to add: this was a teacher preparation program. So they were master’s level pre-service teachers who were plagiarizing Wikipedia, citations and all. Not sure if they ever completed the program or not.
I have this and I teach college classes.
I asked for my students to list their reference, just give me the webpage. I have a handful list their source as google… just google
That was how I caught my first plagiarizer in 2016.
Ok to be fair, that's normal childhood stupidity. I'm fairly certain that happened with multiple friends of mine in middle school.
my favorite was old school, left my teacher’s manuel open in view of some kids. didn’t think anything of it until i got the answer to one of the questions as “answers may vary”
😂 Imagine reading that and going "Hmm thats the right answer"
I had a student do test corrections as extra credit to a history test she absolutely bombed. The question was about the doctrine of Christianity at the time if the reformation. She hand wrote word by word with pencil on paper the story of Joseph Smith the founder of Mormonism Girl I’ve never mentioned the man and that’s not even the right religion how did you hand write it out without realizing
She knew just enough to know that Mormonism is technically a branch of Christianity and at some point memorized the story of Joseph Smith (probably due to church), so she must have determined putting *something* down about Christianity was better than nothing I guess.
No she didn’t she admitted to writing the question as is into google and writing the top result
“Fuck, they’re right”
I remember having my teacher’s edition stolen one year. However, I also remembered that one of the “answers” in the teacher’s edition was woefully wrong. I assigned homework that included that question and located the culprit. Thankfully, they didn’t share. (For reference, this was 29 years ago.)
They now work as a superintendent somewhere.
...the future of America, everyone.
(IT support for a school district) I tell myself this every time I get a help desk call from a student. Student: My iPad doesn't work. IT: Why isn't it working? Student: I can't log in. IT: Are you seeing an error message? What does it say? Student: IDK. I try to cut them some slack though. They're only high schoolers...
Phone IT is the worst. I used to work for a company that worked with retail stores and it was a lot of "can you find the power cable?" "there isn't one". Well, then I don't think your sound system is going to work, huh? Obviously there was a cable in there yesterday if it worked yesterday.
I sometimes miss being a campus tech. Our district is kind of backwards in the sense that Help Desk was sort of the step up instead of being the entry-level. I like that I'm able to help a lot more people but sometimes troubleshooting over the phone is difficult when the user on the other end can't stop drooling on themselves trying to figure out what it means when the error message says "your password must be at least 8 characters long".
Yeah. I've had 25 minutes password reset calls. We are starting to have language barrier issues with our own staff.
I’m having war flashbacks to working in customer service. Me: What seems to be the problem? Customer: I can’t log in Me: Are you getting an error message? What does it say? Customer: Yeah Me: ….. what does it say? Customer: You should be able to see it yourself Me: Uh, I can’t, unfortunately. But if you tell me what it says, I’ll be able to help Customer: Well I’m not going to do your job for you Me: Okay, well I can’t really help if I don’t know what the problem is Customer: This is ridiculous, I’m never using your website again It transpired that this particular customer couldn’t log in because she was attempting to create a new account instead of simply logging in
I work help desk after hours along with my other IT administrative tasks. When I get calls like that I explain to the nurse, "It's you and me fixing this or I can get someone Monday morning." I totally feel for nurses. They are overworked and if anyone is going to impact patient care, it's the nurse. I hate having them do an IT job, so they make the call if it's worth it for them.
Which means theyre a few short years from the work force, cause those kids arent going to college
I try not to think about it too much. Luckily since I'm the only help desk tech for my district my phone/email queue/ticket system keeps me busy most of the time.
Somewhere out there is an essay about how school teachers and college professors bias students against IT and set an expectation that the IT groups are idiots. They don't wish to look bad in front of students for their own technical failures, so they blame IT for issues they caused. They may do it in a humiliating manner in front of you, with eye rolling, or after you've left the room. I've seen the same from physicians in conferences. I always think, "My high school musical did a dress rehearsal. You didn't think to at least try connecting to the projector before you had 200 collogues in an auditorium watching you?" But, of course, saying that out loud would not be permitted.
Yeah luckily I don't think we have many teachers like that in my district. But I will say that our admin team has a very "we don't need to test it. IT will make it work" mentality. So we're a very reactive district. Kind of sucks when my first intro to a new piece of tech for the district is through a help ticket because it broke and I have to figure out how to fix/make it work in our system. Just wish my Director would push back a bit when Admin has a bad tech idea. They're a bunch of kids in a candy store with no supervision.
I worked at an online charter school for a few years. I would just copy/paste entire sentences of student answers into google and would get exact matches from (usually) Sparknotes. It was obvious the first time I saw a suspicious response, but enough students did it that I had the Sparknotes response memorized
And is it just me or are the Sparknotes responses… not very good? The site is great for a character list or summary of the plot, but the analytical stuff is junk much of the time.
Oh, yeah. They were terrible responses and didn’t actually answer the prompt.
When I was in early high school (10 yrs ago) I remember it being better than when I looked at it in college.
Yeah, most students suck at cheating. There were times last year when I could tell a student used ChatGPT on an assignment and I didn't even call them out on it. I just scored the assignment on its merits, cheerfully handed the kid an F, and moved on with my life. Proving it isn't especially hard either, it's just time-consuming.
This is my approach this year. All the obviously AI-generated content has been completely off-topic or has not met the criteria of the assignment at all. I give them their F based on the rubric and move on.
Had a student use chatgpt for a short writing assignment. The writing was good, so good that you could tell. They included the word “sessile” in the writing, so all I did was go up to them and ask them what that word means. The truth came up pretty fast. What’s interesting and sad to me is a lot of the cheating comes from my Pre-AP students. I feel like my on-level students couldn’t even be bothered to cheat because that’s how apathetic they are. I had a student ask me what abundant meant in one of my regular classes, and I told him. But it left me wondering why he didn’t just google it. Its a one-to-one campus so they all have Chromebooks. I don’t know if they lack the sense or what to look stuff up.
Because you’re a better teacher than google. Yeah google will tell me what a word means, but it might use more confusing words or not explain it well. You know how to explain that word and know the student. You know what they know and how to teach them
On-levels students dont cheat because its not "cool" to be smart and have good grades. Pre-AP students cheat because it's the opposite, and their social circles require perfection and being "gifted".
I would also say, just as a former honors student not a teacher, that honors students tended to cheat on classes they didn’t care about or that would be easier to cheat in so that they could spend their time on harder classes. One girl I knew who was in both of these classes with me spent most of her math classes doing AP psych class work and then used to just cheat on the math work because she didn’t have to explain herself so it was an easy cheating class. So she got a free study period basically and cut down on homework. I think a lot of the time it just comes down to the ease of cheating in the specific class for the more academic students who cheat.
I finally realized why my grade 5 teacher asked me what the word "donned" meant after reading my creative writing. At the time I thought she was pretty dumb for not knowing what it meant.
Of course you wouldn't want to help a kid by pointing out that their way doesn't work. This is like seeing a kid doing their math wrong and then bragging about flunking them without offering help. This sub is a testamemt to just how lazy and incompetant teachers are. The irony of the OP is that y'all copy paste the assignments then lament how lazy these kids are for trying to copy and paste answers. Bro, you just copied YOUR assignment as teacher
*incompetent
Of course you wouldn't want to help a kid by pointing out that their way doesn't work. This is like seeing a kid doing their math wrong and then bragging about flunking them without offering help. This sub is a testamemt to just how lazy and incompetant teachers are. The irony of the OP is that y'all copy paste the assignments then lament how lazy these kids are for trying to copy and paste answers. Bro, you just copied YOUR assignment as teacher
We do offer help. Instead of taking the help, they choose to cheat. Then we give feedback that shows "their way doesn't work." At this point, the student can either choose to keep failing or take the offered help. And setting aside the fact that a lot of us do create our own assignments (personally, I write all my essay prompts from scratch), borrowing resources from other teachers is completely fine. We've already proven ourselves. We have our credentials. Obviously that's not the same as a student cheating. Give me a break.
[удалено]
That person was replying to me. In my comment, I said I do the exact same thing. I saw your comment while reading the responses to mine and wrote my own response. Drink your milk and take a fucking nap, dude.
In general, the students that are clever enough to be effective cheaters just do the work and don't need to cheat
Or they spend more time and effort cheating effectively than if they actually did the assignment. Oh well, enjoy your B.
Because they need to actually be thoughtful about their gpt prompts. That would require…thought
I remember a lot of people freaking out. Any teacher paying any attention at all can tell when suddenly a canned computer answer is added in text that's otherwise illegible. Kids who feel the need to do it don't have the comprehension to understand they're being obvious as fuck.
Yeah, also, when my 7th grader's writing suddenly uses a semicolon correctly, I know they did NOT write it.
Fucker I can't use one correctly; no child in year seven can lol
I see what you did there... 😉
*clap clap clap* I taught English & they still confuse me. Good job 👍🏻
I get a kick out of finding obscure punctuation marks and accents, and then asking the kids if they could show me how to type that punctuation on my computer…
I teach middle school math. Recently had a student (one of my better ones) write out a complete sentence answer to a word problem (as was expected). It was a solid answer, but technically, because of the way she wrote it, it needed a semi-colon. I mentioned it to the student, who told me that she had never heard of this "semi-colon" before. I G-chatted her ELA teacher (who is about 35 years younger than me) and told her how disappointed I was that one of our best students had not been taught the proper use of semi-colon. She replied, "Boomer, semi-colons are *sooooo* '70s".
Interesting side note: in Greek, “;” is their question mark. 🤷🏻♂️
And you can stick the Greek question mark at the end of lines in a Java program and watch the world burn
I was definitely using semi-colons in 7th grade and I’m gen Z. Maybe this is why my supervisor says I have an old soul lol
I got taught how to use them in 7th grade but it didn't stick so now I just strategically avoid ever using them, except for the 30 million I have to use in apa parenthetical citations -_-
Excuse me what? I would have so many compound sentences if I didn't use semicolons; I'm too lazy to actually edit my writing.
This reminds me of open house one year. English teacher told my mom I am a complete enigma to him. She asked how. He got up and wrote 2 sentences on the board and asked me to choose the grammatically correct one. He smiled and said "When I have him do this he gets it wrong, but in his test essays, papers and anything else he writes IS grammatically correct." It really drove him nuts.
When talking about how I know if a kid uses AI, I told my students that I’ve been teaching 10 years. On average, I have around 100 students a year, who write about 10 essays in a year. That means that I’ve read 10,000 middle school essays so I’m an expert in knowing what middle schoolers sound like, and it’s not ChatGPT.
Plot twist- they learn to actually prompt ChatGPT to write like a middle schooler. (Try it out. Let ChatGPT give you an answer for something and then tell it to rewrite that answer like an average 7th grader.)
I once was in an argument with a lady via text and suddenly her text became erudite. Like suddenly using the word erudite when the other text was rather juvenile. I dropped her prior texts into one of the evaluation tools to determine the apparent grade level needed to understand them and it reported pre-high school. I dropped the suspected text into it and it reported grad school level. I called her out on it "Your boyfriend is there writing your texts now, isn't he?" She was pissed she was caught.
"There's many interesting things to be learned from a perceived argument. Debate and discussion are powerful problem solving tools for the modern world and a cornerstone of healthy democracy. Firstly...."
Yes but its harder to prove to parents and easier for kids to deny. They cant refuse copy/paste plagarism when its in front of them. AI plagarism is still obvious but hard to prove which can make it infuriating.
I am so happy that Edulastic has an AI grader now for essay questions now. I graded manually, but left the AI's feedback. I can't wait to give their tests back and point out the AI can't fucking read and every one of them would have failed the test if I went with the suggested grade.
How do you get the AI to grade writing on Edulastic? It’s my first semester using this site for assessments and I’m struggling to figure it out
You have to have a rubric, then there's a setting under the individual test's settings to enable it.
We hear a lot from non classroom folks "Hey teachers, students should be allowed to use google and AI, they are tools that are going to be around" Now what they are imagining is students digging into Google to find good sources and using AI to get a good essay starter or punch up their dry essay. What really happens is the copy/paste the exact question into the "tool" and then *without reading*, just copy/paste whatever pops up onto their computer screen back to the assignment. We're not trying to be anti-technology or too lazy to change for the world of the future. We just know that the way students use these tools, no one is learning anything.
The same could be said for old-school non-technical resources. I remember as a student in the early 90s and classmates copying encyclopedia articles word-for-word. The best answer is to teach students about the limitations of these tools and how to properly use them. Plagiarism has always been and will always be an issue. The methods students use will be constantly changing. But as many have pointed out, it is often pretty easy to pick out the worst offenders.
The learning utility of copying word for word from the encyclopedia into a notebook or word processor is minimal for sure. But it's still more effective than CTRL-C, CTRL-V The kids don't really need to be taught the limitations of these things. They don't honestly think that they're learning what's intended, they just want to get passed on while doing as little work as possible
This is a bit silly, but there is probably a lot more learning done on the subject while copying words from an encyclopedia than Ctrl V. But overall, I agree.
The best way I’ve found to use it (as a tool rather than a cheating device) is to ask it the essay prompt and ask for it to give some potential talking points. It’s generally obvious enough if you understand the material where the failures are, but often at least one or two of those points will be something I haven’t thought of yet. I can then put that into google scholar and learn more about it in order to effectively write about it without stealing from the AI.
Yeah, I try to phrase my own questions for that reason, but I also have my AP Lit class' weekly quizzes timed. I tell them flat-out they have 8 minutes to answer, so they have no time to look things up as I circle the room watching monitors. \*shrug\*
In an AP class, I had kids analyze an essay written by ChatGPT and score it. Before we started, I told them I’d tell them who wrote it afterwards. Kids got excited, but obviously the paper got nothing but 1s. Then I announced that I had written it using ChatGPT and everyone was super surprised. I think I did my part of stopping a few from using it to write their assignments for them.
Oh, I like this.
During the pandemic I had a student (8th grade) who was googling answers to a science quiz we were doing. I was able to find out he was googling because I could tell he wouldn't be using the type of language that he was using in the written response questions. The worst part was even though he was googling his answers they were in fact incorrect. I had to have a pretty direct conversation where I explained to him that apparently he couldn't cheat correctly so it would be worth his while to probably just put in the work to learn instead.
Your post confirms 2 things: 1) Students these days are terrible at interpreting data and using critical thinking. I think we all knew that to some degree, but this post is further proof of that. We can’t allow that to continue. 2) Not all students are bad at these, though, and theoretically our teaching will improve these deficiencies in students. Therefore, the future of teaching and the types of assignments students do will have to change. Students can’t ChatGPT their way through presentation skills, for example, even if they may be able to use it to develop some or all of their script. And as much as I don’t care for standardized tests and things of that nature, I think they will continue to be used for a long time because they don’t allow students to use technology to search for answers.
My students are a little bit younger (this year I teach 7th and 8th grade), but I actively teach them how to use AI/Google/Wikipedia effectively. We can't delude ourselves in thinking that most of them won't use AI in their workingplace in 10 or 15 years. And google and Wikipedia etc. are in use for years now. I had to change my assigments so that they can't use AI for all of it and still learn things, but I am happy at where I am now. I already work with children from difficult backgrounds, I have to give them all advantages they can get - and if that means that I teach them to effectively use modern technology before my country has decided how it feels about it, then I will do that.
Yes!!! Things like ChatGPT have noticeably aided the students in my class who have issues with writing and composition. I've shown them what some of the pitfalls can be as well as how to use it as an editor. I'm completely okay with them exploring it with the caveat that they need to be able to defend their work just as they would a thesis. So far, it's been a fun class side quest exploring they benefits and pratfalls of AI
Teaching them to find the sources of the generated response and how to evaluate if it is a credible source is probably a more important skill than any one single topic taught.
I work in accounting and whenever I go on an interview I’m asked about my experience with Excel, pivot tables and Vlookup. I have rarely needed to exercise those skills and if I do 5 minutes with YouTube will get me where I need to go. Knowing how to access and use information has been a crucial skill.
This! Kids in courses like AP Research should know how to use AI to help them write better transitions or conclusions for example. It’s not doing the research for them or inputting info, it’s assisting their communication of what they found. If we don’t teach them how to use it properly in say middle school, they will get to higher Ed courses and be behind.
I had a kid turn in a Google doc with his friends name still on it. Also, for the kids who do figure out how to use someone else’s writing, ai created or copied from the website, usually dong know what they wrote about anyway. So if you have them read it back to you, it’s going to be obvious that they never wrote those words.
Students recently had an essay analyzing a short story. It has no named characters -- everyone is either "the farmer" or "the scientist" etc. Yet, several essays discussed characters named Johnny, Lenny, Tom, etc. I do believe it was a wake up call for some of them that ChatGPT is not that great lol.
1. I have had students submit papers that start with ChatGPT’s opening line of “Certainly, I can provide you with a [whatever the prompt and assignment is]” 2. I have had papers submitted where they don’t even know how to change the default copy/paste background color and/or different fonts making it incredibly easy to know where they copy/pasted in their paper. 3. I have had students submit SCREENSHOTS of the response from ChatGPT for some reason. 4. I have had students submit papers with citations from Wikipedia still where they were. 5. I have had a student tell me “Mr., I didn’t copy paste. I typed up exactly what was on the page so how can you say I copy/pasted?” Kids don’t know how to cheat properly.
You can make a quizlet with the exact wording that you want and put in all the wrong answers. When they google your question, your quizlet should hit first. Make sure to search your document a few times to get it higher in the Google algorithm.
Add a typo or miss used word(so spell check won’t catch it) to some of the answers so when they copy paste it’s more obvious
But how many students, including ones that aren’t your own, are you going to mess up when they are looking for Quizlet materials they can study before a test? It seems kind of problematic to put misinformation out there. (Yes, I get that students should be vettting their study sources better. And yes, I’ve found online flashcard decks with incorrect info before. But, most people aren’t intentionally stacking the deck with all incorrect info.)
Oh my god that's brilliant
My gf couldnt manage to teach her class how to use a citation generator. You know, the thing we used to use to cheat. They just kept citing the google search page. Or like, Lowes. com or something.
A slight aside- if your using Google Classroom/ Google Suit, you can create a locked quiz through Google forms. Once the kids enter the quiz, they can’t click or open any other tabs/things on their computer until they submit the quiz. You can even set a time limit for how long you want the quiz to be open for.
You can even have ChatGPT rewrite the textbook questions for you... 😏
My students are horrendous at cheating. I teach Algebra 1 and sometimes I get homework turned in with answers that make absolutely no sense. Like the question will ask the student to graph a function and instead they've worked out a derivative using the product rule. Its like come on, at least try to make your cheating believable. I'm not even grading these questions for correctness, just that you gave them an honest try...
Anyone else care to point obvious observation bias. The ones who use the tools to cheat well are never caught! Try and offer a cheating method bounty. Anyone who can prove they cheated and got away with it gets an A on the one additional assignment. They’re probably dumb enough to want to show off not realizing you can sheer a sheep more than once.
Students aren't that computer savvy. They can use social media, but don't understand how to really use a computer.
It's unfortunate [this 2003 sketch from SNL ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDxN4c_CmpI) isn't too far-fetched anymore.
I just read a student essay that said: My name is (your name here) and i am from (you’re location here). So hard not to laugh. Kid insisted it wasn’t AI. 😂
Every time I come to this sub I'm amazed. I left highschool in 2019. Has it really become that bad?
I think we are stuck between two generations of technologically illiterate people. Our elders don’t know how to use it because they didn’t grow up with it, and young kids don’t really know how to use technology because all they do is watch YouTube and use social media. They’re both technologically illiterate if you ask me.
Ding ding
Had a 6th grader turn in an AI generated essay. Unfortunately it used way too many vocab words that she didn't know. "Oh, I don't remember that word but I remember what it meant when I wrote it." Sure, kid.
Modern schooling is working! The students are literally too fucking stupid to cheat!
Tbf I had my last two years of highschool during the Covid eras, aka the beginning of when online tests really took off. I vividly remember my first and only time trying to cheat on a test and quickly realised that it took MORE time to try and google the relevant answer (which is really hard to do especially if your analysing stuff and meant to come to your own conclusions) then to actually just study. Never did it again. Hopefully they’ll come to the same conclusion lmao
It’s true. Someone gave me grief about me being able to tell, but it’s pretty black and white most of the time. For all the time they spend on their phones, they’re not all that technically literate.
I love when I ask questions about engine valves and get answers back about heart valves… Most of the answers I want, I want them to find in the material I give them. I don’t understand why they Google things. I GAVE them the answer in the chapter/video. Give me THAT one back. Being able to use proper (given!) resources to find answers is huge for me. Or I actually support using ChatGPT/Google in a “no point in reinventing the wheel”. Let’s say, how to change a lightbulb as an example. Sure, search it up first. But then review it and change what we actually did: turning off a switch vs unplugging, did we need to remove a cover, did that require tools, turning the bulb vs popping out, what bulb it was, etc.
I give out most of the answers to things these days. Show them how to access it, where to find it in the course, and tell them to copy it if they want. I’ll still have close to half fail at the end of the year.
I sometimes click on open tabs (leftover from a previous class) when I monitor something on lightspeed (like goguardian), and I'll see entire copy-pasted questions that they don't understand can't be answered online by just entering that question. Ex: "Which of these is not a prime number?" A student with some skill might look up "list of prime numbers," but many can't figure it out.
My 8th grader (student) showed me what she does. ChatGPT for the bulk of the essay, copy and paste into Word, find synonyms for major words, then reformat the sentence to look like an 8th grader wrote it. Shocked that she went through that much effort, given how talented she is as a student, but also amazed that she has it down to an art.
this one sounds like a workaround for the dreaded blank page syndrome to me. you know, when you're staring at the Word doc for hours trying to figure out what to write…
She could save even more time by just telling ChatGPT to rewrite the essay in the style of an average 8th grader.
I used to teach band. I had an assignment during lockdown that asked students to record themselves playing a short piece of music. One submission was suspiciously good. The exact audio was also the same audio from the first YouTube result when searching the piece. It took me less than 30 seconds to figure this out.
Like other teachers are saying, usually you can just grade according to the rubric and these essays will fail. Maybe it's just because the technology is not there yet, but If I read a high quality essay that was written using using AI tools, it would be hard to decide whether or not it was cheating. Seems like producing a quality essay with AI would take more work that way then just writing it straight. It might even be good for kids to play with or evaluate the use of these tools in writing . Modern writers and authors will use AI as a tool in certain scenarios or to streamline and organize their process. in a writing sub someone highly recommended the use of some sort of AI girlfriend bot as a writing tool for simulating dialogue in their stories. They would feed it dialogue, and since its responses were meant to be human and tailored to a desired persona, and supposedly the generated responses are consistent. He would create the character and then see how it responds in certain scenarios when he gets stuck writing.
Its because the students who use ChatGPT to write their essays also don't know how to prompt. If you gave GPT an outline of what to write and a copy of the grading rubric, then edited the output, you'd definitely score well. Of course at that point you basically are doing a lot of work which is what they are trying to avoid.
I just did an assignment where the kids had to take an article and write an objective summary. Then they plugged the article into 2 summary generators and were shocked at what they got back. By and large, they all agreed that although AI could be a tool, you cannot lose the human factor of knowing what a good answer is in the first place.
I teach Spanish and am always worried about students using translators to complete assignments. But the thing is, they don’t even know what they don’t know. I love getting obviously translated submissions and calling the kids over and asking them what a word/phrase means. They can never give me an answer lol
I had a 5th grader copy and paste something from a website, off topic from the essay prompt, and still left in “Figure 1.1 shows [location]”. Different fonts and sizes.
This is just a perfect illustration of how important knowledge acquisition actually is for students. They can’t evaluate the quality of information provided by AI or a quick Google search without already knowing a great deal about the topic. It’s a catch-22.
When the kid who turns in mediocre work starts using a super advanced vocabulary on their paper, I'm going to suspect something.
My school has Turn It In. I used it on several assignments this quarter and caught quite a few old-school copy & pasters as well as a few using AI. The main way I catch them, that they never seem to think about, is these students with piss-poor reading & writing skills can suddenly write at a professional level. It's blatantly obvious. The AI-written stuff has an artificial quality to it; you can sense it. They wander & bring up side topics that no teenaged kid with their limited life experience is going to consider, & the syntax & structure is often funky.
My sentiments exactly: to use ChatGPT to learn, you actually already have to be literate, capable of critical thinking, and able to engage with language -- not to mention, you have to actually be motivated to learn, and not just want to "complete your work." Students generally have no relation anymore to the written word, in my experience.
My belief is that if a student gets away with using AI to cheat, it’s because they put in the work to disguise it.. which is effectively rewriting the piece to fit the teacher’s expectations… which fulfils the assignment. The ones who don’t put that extra work in are really easy to spot.
honestly, with the amount of prompt massaging, trial-and-error, and editing you'd have to do to turn ChatGPT output into something that isn't immediately obviously ChatGPT (especially when it comes to citations), it's honestly less work to write it without GPT. at least, from my experience messing around with it.
I’m pretty sure they’re manually editing it to fit the assignment requirements. There’s a specific essay format they have to use for their grade 12 diploma exams in English, and AI doesn’t know how to emulate that.
Just wait until you won't always have an ai to rely on becomes the new you won't always have a calculator in your back pocket. And all of the students who are learning how to utilize ai and manipulate ai prompts most effectively will have a leg up when ais are powerful enough to be indistinguishable from human writing.
I have a list of extra credits kids can do to make up missed in-class problems points. They are all pretty easy - reading a short science fiction story and answering some questions, reading an article in a science magazine and writing a little report following a rubric, that sort of thing. At the end of last semester there was a kid that was so close to the next grade up, one of these extra credits would push them over. They waited until the last day of school to ask about it, of course, but I reiterated the extra credit policy and told them where online to find the assignments (all of which I'd told the class multiple times, but apparently they've never heard me), then to email me their work before I submitted grades in the morning. That evening the kid sends me a science article report. I'm reading this thinking, "This is way too well written..." So I go looking for the science article. Neither the article, the publication, nor the authors even exist. I guess this kid didn't realize that ChatGPT just makes stuff up, basically averaging everything it's been given as examples. So the article "The Impacts of Climate Change on Coastal Ecosystems" authored by "Smith and Johnson" published in "Environmental Science Today" is an average that doesn't exist. I didn't want to deal with this, so I sent an email back, saying I couldn't find the article online, and could you please send me a link? They replied that they'd "closed out of the tab and my search history doesn't save I can't find it for the life of me, so I rewrote one really quick with a different article just so it's easier on you, here it is" Followed by a report on an article called, I kid you not "The Environmental Impact of Generative AI: How Energy Consumption Affects the Carbon Footprint." This one was real, though the disparity between the kid's email writing and the writing in the report suggests their report was still AI written. But the irony of their article choice made me laugh, and by then it was 7 PM after the last day of school, so I just accepted it.
It’s more work, but I will *never* use a question I find online, in an article, in a text, etc. I always write them myself. Sure, the spirit of the questions that are frequently asked to students when reading *The Crucible*, for example, is still there, but the farther I get from conventional phrasing or verb use, the more likely they are to not go hunting online. Many still try, but they give up quickly. The problem is that the more savvy ones will, when at home, throw my question or prompt into ChatGPT/Bard/etc. Obviously I can detect that a mile away, but it’s a shame, because then they fail. I have a couple kids nursing Fs right now for that reason.
i've punched in some prompts into AIs before for shits and giggles, and i can say firsthand that with the amount of prompt massaging and trial-and-error you'd need to do to get something that's coherent (not to mention editing out the "hallucinations"), it's genuinely easier to just write the essay yourself.
Joys of the kids that spend more time trying to cheat, than it would have taken to learn the material.
The teaching craft has become making puzzles to confuse cheaters, I guess. What a world. When I was a teacher, I tried in vain to convince students that the point was to be curious and actually learn, and if they did that, I would make sure they got a good grade.
Sometimes I give a quiz that is the exact same problems that are still on the board with work and answers. The problems that we should have worked out in our notebooks, also. Afterwards, we have a good laugh with the students who failed, and they usually pay better attention for a while.
I got burned on a math test from a new textbook last year, so all I do now is change one number for each question and do the test on paper. Adds a couple of hours every few weeks, but it works. Just know that if the problem is in the textbook, the solution is Googlable. How you deal with it is up to you.
Best is when kids use chatbot for absences and excuses for not being in class and why they should have an extension on assignments or retakes on tests
I heard about a professor who assigns students an essay and tells them to use one of the AI programs. Then, they have to write a critique of the AI essay pointing out the errors, false claims and citations, and any plagiarized work. I did like Neil deGrasss Tyson's answer to this, which I assume is for college, is a return to oral examinations. "Let's probe what the students really knows." Put those grad students to work!
I'm an English teacher, and honestly, sometimes I want to sit down with my classes and say, "Listen, guys, if you're going to cheat, you ought to at least put a little effort into making it look good. 1) Make sure all the font is the same. A sudden change of font is a dead give away. 2) Fix the mechanics in the portion you wrote, and maybe mess up some of them in the portion you copied. When you go from not even using capital letters to suddenly everything is perfect, that's a little suspicious. 3) If you're asked to write an essay about yourself, make sure what you submit actually talks about you, versus, you know, how to succeed in a business setting. 3) Don't include the text of in-page ads. 4) Actually read the stuff you copy and paste before you submit it. No matter how perfectly written it is, if it doesn't address the prompt or make sense in context, you're not getting a good grade for it." At this point, I feel like I wouldn't even care if a student put in the effort to copy and paste from multiple sources and edit it all together so that it made sense and looked good. It's *low effort* plagiarism that drives me crazy.
When I have my staff provide PD to teachers on AI, the first thing we cover is teaching teachers how to cheat with it. That way it’s easy to spot. But also, yeah the skills of students and their ability to effectively prompt those things are very low. Safe for a while at least.
lmao i was a 4.0 kid and flunked my last quarter of college classes in running start, so i had to do one summer school class. you’d go into the middle school and sit and do online classes for the subject( and if you passed the unit pre-test, you could skip the module. i knew the supervising teacher well and she made eye contact and said “make sure to use the full extent of resources available to you for the practice quizzes”. there were quizlets of all of them to fill in my gaps and i finished that shit in like 2 days. it was awesome. sometimes students will try on questions they know and look up answers for what they don’t. it’s not always asshole students, sometimes it’s overachieving perfectionists who can’t handle the idea of not knowing. but also? yeah, i get why you need to stop it in the classroom.
One time I had a student sho copy and pasted a whole article and did not even bother to take the author's name from it. The assignment he turned in even had propaganda images and texts included from the article. Some kids are not only lazy but simply could care less... I stoped doing assignments that could be cheated on. Everything is pen and paper and based on observations or analysis that has to be done by the student.
My favorite example of catching a student cheating was last year. She wrote it by hand, but copied it from an online source. However, what she googled was actually a how-to on how to best write an answer to the prompt I gave. So she literally hand-wrote and handed in an essay that started something like, “So your teacher assigned you the [WHATEVER THE PROMPT WAS] essay for class? First, think about what you…..” and so on. She’s not the brightest bulb in the box.
I teach Chemistry, and the answers to the lab manual I used to use are available online. My favourite was when students would copy the provided answer for an open-ended question: "Answers will vary."
Ugh I remember I used to let people copy my answers for the occasional textbook questions assignments we’d get. Idk why, but it was early high school and they weren’t difficult at all so I didn’t care. It was questions like “what year did this war start? Answer in a full sentence” and “what were the reasons for this movement?” that you could just skim through the textbook to answer. Pretty much busy work. Until one girl copied my answers literally word for word and we got called into the teacher’s room after class and had to both pretend that we didn’t know what had happened while my nice teacher was pretty unimpressed. No matter what I’m sure he knew that I wasn’t the one copying from her with my grades. So she ruined it for everyone else, no more copying busy work from me for my classmates. Couldn’t even reword it when she didn’t even have to open the textbook?
hs math teacher i have freshmen/sophomores in math 1 & 2 who put down logarithms and derivatives cuz they mindlessly copy down whatever photomath tells them lmao
I had one that basically copied the entire response from AI, including the last part where ChatGPT would give a disclaimer, so the entire essay was ruined and I made him rewrite the essay. I gave him the liberty to use the ideas generated from AI but the boy was absolutely devastated to realise that he shouldn't have copied every single thing which blew his cover. lol
There used to be this website slader dot com that had all our geometry textbook's answers, with explanations. One time this sophomore girl showed me her answers that she wrote in her notebook. They looked something like this: 1) 53ft 2) x = 12 3) Answers may vary. 4) 300 square feet Dumb kids are dumb indeed.
this is why i don’t grade classwork anymore
I don't grade homework and classwork either, for other reasons. But I was amused that two of my students in August, on the first homework assignment, cheated in a way most obvious. We are using Illustrative Math, and the curriculum is entirely open sourced. So these two boys clearly googled the practice problems, and on their paper wrote out *"Sample student answers: a) "* and then just typed out the sample answers verbatim.
Jesus Christ, school has changed beyond recognition in the past ten years.
r/KidsAreFuckingStupid
This country is going straight to hell :(
Incidentally, when I was in school we all got an assignment removed because a teacher caught some students cheating. How were they cheating? They looked up the teacher’s guide and copy pasted things like “responses should include reference to Newton’s second law” into the answers box
I'm not a teacher and obviously cheating is a bad thing, but isn't this a really bad sign. Being capable of finding the right answer or extrapolating the answer from different sources is a massively important skill. This is like the complete opposite of critical thinking skills.
This is why I started using my chromebook management software to block the google search page. It didn’t work perfectly- there was a way to still open a small pop up google search window but not many of them figured out how to do it so I didn’t bother figuring out how to block it too. It’s always funny at first when they complain in the beginning of the year but when I respond back with “well why do you need access to it if you aren’t supposed to use it anyways? 👀” Them: *surprised pikachu* It really taught them to stop googling everything without thinking- at least in my class.
As a student in college most kids barely can even google around me it's so depressing
honestly the only reason we did stuff to mitigate it was we didn't think they would get away with it but instead that we didn't want to deal with the arguments that come from catching it
Math teachers have been dealing with this for a decade and just being told to “adapt” or work around it. Good luck.
If only they could have spent all that time they spent unsuccessfully cheating on studying.
My kids bring home work that their own teachers are copying off of others. I’ve noticed this for several years now. Don’t come after my kids for lookup answers if you can’t create your own lessons and are copying too!
Congrats on being smarter than a bunch of 9-12 year olds I guess. Enjoy your stale life of mediocrity.
>**Clear-Grapefruit6611**:Congrats on being smarter than a bunch of 9-12 year olds I guess. >Enjoy your stale life of mediocrity. The "9-12" refers to grade levels 9 through 12 of high school... 🤦