11 Comments
Mar 11Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

The issue you see within the system from the lowest level to the highest is a comprehensive refusal to teach basic skills combined with a comprehensive refusal to test for the presence of those basic skills. Instead, professors demand that students sit for exams and produce papers that the students are not qualified for. Then, everyone gets an inflated grade, and no one learns much. The subject matter of the courses is knowledge already present in books that students must show that they have temporarily retained.

This also what causes many students stress: they know that they are unskilled, they know that they are "imposters," and their emotional reaction is a rational consequence of these realizations. This receives massive subsidies, so alternative models struggle to compete.

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Mar 11Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Honestly, if you are going to suggest Grammarly as a program, you should stand by your use of that program.

I use the program when I write, and I'm constantly having to dismiss suggestions that it gives me. For some reason, it wants to change names, phrasing, and almost everything I write. I guess it doesn't like my style.

Just as an example, in the above statement, it tried to get me to change, the phrasing to If you suggest Grammarly as a program, you should stand by it.

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To be fair, the sentence "If you suggest Grammarly as a program, you should stand by it." really is more concise. Your initial sentence isn't wrong, of course, but a good human line editor would tighten it up. And, just to be picky, one can suggest a program without actually using it, so I would prefer "If you list Grammarly as an option, you should stand by your suggestion."

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Mar 11Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

The only solution is to go back to Oral Boards. 45 minutes in the hot seat.

"Mr. Gudmundsson can you tell me about Napoleon's time in Egypt?"

This will work for some and be a disaster for others but you can't fake it.

It will never happen. Oral Boards would expose the instructors as much as the students.

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author

"Sir, when it comes to explaining Napoleon's time in Egypt, I defer to Professor Gino."

https://extramuros.substack.com/p/academic-fraud-the-case-of-francesca

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On a practical note, the problem with oral boards is that they can't scale. If you have 20 students in your class, and administer a 45-minute exam, that would require 15 hours. If an instructor teaches 3 classes in a semester, that turns into 45 hours of examination. There literally isn't enough time to do this in a modern university.

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Mar 11Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Although AI is an entirely new problem, the fact that administrators recommend Grammerly is another one with longer roots. To wit, that colleges routinely admit students that cannot put together a grammatically correct sentence. This has been a problem for some time. At some point colleges were going to have to push back on public schools about producing students who are barely literate or else deal with the fact that most of their students need to be failed for not writing their own work. I suppose they have dodged that problem long enough that now AI is just going to make all attempts at grading work that wasn't done in the class room on non-internet enabled media impossible... so yay?

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Mar 11Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Based on what I have heard from my son, a recent college graduate, and observed on my own, many college courses have themselves devolved into little more than “soulless algorithms”. A sad, stupid and pathetic situation than no one should have to pay for.

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Academics are criminals I don’t respect.

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🔥schools

Give Stevens money back

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There's a disturbing question behind this story -- how do we know that AI detection programs actually work? Why should we believe that the Turn It In program is able to accurately determine who is cheating and who isn't? Every diagnostic test generates false positives and false negatives; that's a universal truth. What's the rate of false positives for Turn It In, and what's the evidence that this is in any way reliable? And what about the "third-party app" -- how well does that work? Who's in charge here?

Controlled experiments show that expert human readers are incapable of detecting AI-generated text, so whatever distinguishes this material, it must be very subtle. In that case, any detection algorithm is going to have to be very aggressive in diagnosing AI contamination if it hopes to catch perpetrators, and this will inflate the false positive rate. There will be a lot of innocent students who get labelled as cheaters with this approach.

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