The loss that he describes is deeper and more existential than anything academic integrity can protect: a specific, if perhaps decaying, way of being among students and their teachers. “AI has already changed the classroom into something I no longer recognize,” he told me. In this view, AI isn’t a harbinger of the future but the last straw in a profession that was almost lost already, to funding collapse, gun violence, state overreach, economic decay, credentialism, and all the rest. New technology arrives on that grim shore, making schoolwork feel worthless, carried out to turn the crank of a machine rather than for teaching or learning.
College writing instructor. Most of my time is spent trying to get students to un-learn bad habits from high school.
Oh I don't blame high school teachers for their situation. Even if we didn't have the testing regime they're required to teach towards, good writing inherently requires students to interrogate authority (even the authority of the instructor), which isn't something that most parents want their kids doing in a real way. After all, a good writer recognizes both why rules exist and under what conditions they should be broken. That kind of contingency is generally skeptical of authority, etc.
Of course the academy, with the hollowing of tenure, is doing its best to remove the possibility to do that even in college, so things will probably become pretty fuckt in the next few decades...
I remember my freshman university writing class and getting totally OWNED by the first assignment, I was so mad bc I had always gotten top scores in writing in high school, I was actually offended
Luckily I was able to pull my head out of my ass and learn to write from my instructor but not out of some desire to improve but bc I was a nerd that wanted A’s
I am lucky I went to a school that had uni writing as a requirement bc if I had gone somewhere else I probably would have never learned to write properly
It's a blight elsewhere too.
I remember getting a stern talking to when I first read de Montaigne and tried to copy his structure in an essay instead of the standard one. Copying the guy who invented the essay is considered to be unacceptable innovation!
One of my favourites. Renaissance humanism is surprisingly beautiful at times. Back when Liberalism was young and angry and full of ideas and pushing history forward.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay but for burgers
On one hand dogmatically adhering to this structure is the only way my add brain can even get started on writing something. On the other hand I learnt this way and you've seen my posts I, can't write for shit.
was told sentences can never be paragraphs, a paragraph must have at least three sentences.
Yup, this messed with me when I was growing up because I was trying to write stories even when I was a kid and I'd try to follow this formula only to have disastrous results. Sometimes the idea you're trying to convey can be summed up in one sentence, and sometimes it's just snappier to just make it the one line. Third sentence.
The crazy thing about comp sci is that writing is not only needed but is extremely important if you want to communicate and sell your ideas to more than like 3 other people. It’s just taken for granted because people in stem are goddamn morons.
but the way most Americans learn to write in high school is just these extremely formulaic intro 2 body paragraphs and a conclusion scrawls
The exports of Libya are numerous in amount. One thing they export is corn... or, as the Indians call it, maize. Another famous Indian was Crazy Horse. In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts.
In my country we don't write college essays. Which is good since I wouldn't have gotten in college if I had to write one.
Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia, told me about one student so disengaged, he sometimes attended class in his pajamas.
THE INDIGNITY
I think the idea of AI as the last straw in education from your excerpt is very accurate. If a student is going to have ChatGPT write their essays outright you lost them ages ago, you just didn't know it.
I also think this might not be nearly as much of an issue if the consequences for failing a course were not to the tune of thousands of dollars to retake it, as well as a setback to the piece of paper 80% of careers are locked behind
People don't even dress up to travel on airlines anymore :agony-minion:
UNG is one of the non-federal military colleges like VA Tech, Texas A&M and the Citadel. Notoriously uptight, even after they swallowed up several community colleges a few years back.
The first year of what now
EDIT: Oh it's just that this is the first year ChatGPT has been around, thought it might have been some truly hellish "university" where the teachers are ChatGPT.
Damn if ai is making schoolwork look pointless then maybe teachers should try assigning work that actually gets students to learn something other than how to properly format a paper in MLA
What a fucking stupid take. Just absolutely no thought put in dogshit opinion.
That still results in an arms race. Teachers would still need the support to produce completely new material every year.
Man anyone remember when your parents trapped within that boomer mentality thought a college degree was all you needed to make the big bucks? :yes-honey-left:
Higher education was already dead and mutilated by capitalism and reactionary denigration, ChatGPT just made sure to double tap it and prove that most students are just attending college as a means of obtaining a piece of paper (I was one of them) and praying they can get a job that leaves them only semi in the near poverty zone. I'm honestly wondering what the educational makeup is going to be in the US within the next decade because as trends continue we are likely seeing how late stage capitalism is reinforcing that learning, just like putting effort into work, actually means nothing for your material wellbeing.
Could have homework be a "club", where students do their assignments in the library and receive a signature of supervision.
Or could just stop having essay homework.
Writing is a technology that restructures thought, comrade. Doing writing that reflects on your own writing needs to be the new norm since that's what's actually valuable (hot take).
However to do the reflective writing you have to attempt "normal" writing which is where the friction and at times feelings of meaninglessness set in.
Metacognition(as we call it in the biz) has always been the real purpose of good writing instruction, but the fact is you can't just reflect on... Nothing.
I'm not suggesting you stop doing essay work, but that it simply no longer gets done as homework.
Ah I misread. Yes, that's definitely one possibility. However I think that making everything graded "in class" has its own flaws, it could definitely reduce the problem
Put a "% of work submitted written by AI" on the final grades. Grading would then look like:
A* 92%
B 14%
A 79%
C 0%
Let universities and future employers figure out what they want to do with that information.
If I had my way my class would just be pass/no pass and I'd just leave students helpful comments to help them grow as writers instead of having to fine-tune grades on a scale. What's the actual difference between an 89 and 90? Nothing really but it's huge for a student's GPA. Really annoying.
Oh I agree, the difference doesn't exist for students it exists for unis/employers though right? They're the ones that want that granularity.
Arent those just tutorials? You have a small section of the class, usually like 20 people going over some aspect of the course material. Sometimes including attendance or quiz marks.
Under capitalism school is not about growing as a person or expensive human knowledge. It's about creating a productive workforce that is able to reliably crank out the desired output. Students are not there to learn, they're there to get a job that will make them as comfortable as possible. If a chatbot can help them achieve that they will use it because that's the way the system is set up.
The AI in schools debate has some of the characteristics of boomers who are mad that kids don't learn cursive anymore but it also touches on some real concerns about how easy access to the bullshit machine prevents students from learning the basics necessary to actually use the bullshit machine for useful things.
I don't know what the right solution is but I believe schools will have to accept large language models as a fact and teach students about their strengths and weaknesses so they know how to use them properly. Maybe the days of big written exams where students are graded on a scale for their ability to produce a formulaic paper are ending as machines are able to do that now.
Really, A.I. only threatens one specific mode of schoolwork: writing papers. There’s so many other ways to show you’ve learned the material. Of course writing itself is a critical for everyone to learn, but maybe you have to limit it to in-person short essays during class time.
Mostly this will just be something that kicks their teeth in down the line. Cheating is always an option, but then you are just learning to cheat, not learning the material, and everything is always cumulative for knowledge in most classes. If you don't get the basics, you won't even know how to create the correct questions to generate a good response to more complicated topics, or even know if the response generated makes any sense.
Alright. I am no longer tolerating this bullshit. Either actually put the periods in A.I., indicating Artificial Intelligence (even though they are just dumb fucking Language Models) or I am just going to assume from now on that all of this has been done by some mischievous little boy named 'Al'.
Maybe the way College traditionally constructed is just outdated? Not everything can be the same for hundreds or even half a hundred years.
Going to the more classic college srtucture would be an improvement. Contemporary college is just this but with more capitalism and standartized testing and without the cool parts.
Frankly, the Thayer Method they use at West Point sounds very effective for adapting to this situation.
i imagine much of this could be dealt with by something radical like funding education so highly that course sizes were no more than a dozen people and letting the instructor use discussion and/or novel forms of evaluation.
students should learn the strategies and tactics of composition as much as they should be able to communicate well orally and however the fuck else, but the focus on the essay -> manuscript -> article -> publication treadmill is kinda buttcheeks, imo. the scientific publication system in higher learning is over emphasized and archaic. nobody reads peer reviewed publications, even the people who are supposed to. i have multiple peer reviewed publications as a primary author and they are garbage to read. the only people who read them are required to read them and they only read enough to cite what they need.
if a young science brain can learn the science thing and then develop some other media for delivery of the ideas and their analysis, that's good and may do something to actually deliver scientific knowledge out into the world. the academy has absolutely fallen on its ass when it comes to being of service to the human community and could use a kick in the ass.
in conclusion, maybe the death of the essay does not fucking matter because there are other, better ways to communicate ideas.
