Defending Academic Integrity Against ChatGPT

[Sun_Worshiper]

A former student asked me for a letter of recommendation to graduate school a few days ago.  She was not a great student, but people learn and grow, and I was willing to write her a simple, non-glowing but non-negative letter.

I asked her for the usual inputs: her resume, and her graduate school application statement. The tone and vocabulary of the graduate school statement were a dead giveaway, confirmed by zerogpt as 100% AI generated. :/

I am having second thoughts about writing her LOR, and am wondering how to tell her ....

Maybe I should ask chatgpt to draft an email to her?

While I don't doubt that she used AI to generate her materials, zerogpt and other AI detectors can't confirm anything with accuracy.

[fishbrains]

How's this for weird: assigned an in-class prewriting exercise, in which students provided their personal opinions on the reading (i.e., their emotional and psychological reactions, but no real argument). The situation depicted in the reading was ambiguous and nuanced, so I wanted to students to reflect on their reactions before responding during discussion.

I'd say at least 5 students begun their prewriting in the exact same way: "The issue of Basketweaving in The Great American Novel is a simple one. But Basketweaving means something different to every person." If I didn't know any better, I'd assume there was some AI usage here, especially since their "personal opinions" were all quite similar (and similarly vague). So maybe some students are beginning to replicate the weird language of ChatGPT in their own writing?

Or they learned this as a standard (and honestly boring) way to start all of their essays.  Kind of like the stereotypical "Since the dawn of time, humans have looked to the [baskets] and pondered [about things]"

K-12 writing instruction--to the extent that there is such a thing in the first place--does seem to produce a lot of very stereotyped results.  Speaking of which, are Forumites still seeing the notorious five-paragraph essay?

Oh, yes. The students have no idea there's any other kind.


Larimar

I teach my CC students that the five paragraph essay is the very basic formula, a very basic formula they should have somewhere in their backpacks even if they are going to move way past it in their composition classes.

When I look at the assignments of some professors--especially at the sophomore and freshizzle level--they seem to be asking for this basic formula, or just a slightly-modified version of the formula. Speech 101 outlines tend to reflect the formula. Essay test questions frequently prompt for the formula (as in "Discuss three causes of the War of 1812 in a short essay").

That said, these days I'm amazed how many students don't even know the basic five paragraph formula (and it's not because they've been shown how to structure essays in a different way).

[MarathonRunner]

Canadian here. Did elementary school in Manitoba, high school in Ontario, university in Ontario. I've never been taught the five paragraph essay, and only heard about it on these fora. Never formally taught how to reference either. We were just expected to somehow learn how to write and cite ourselves. I made use of the student learning centre a lot in my first year of university (I'm also first gen, so had no family to guide me).

[Kron3007]

Canadian here. Did elementary school in Manitoba, high school in Ontario, university in Ontario. I've never been taught the five paragraph essay, and only heard about it on these fora. Never formally taught how to reference either. We were just expected to somehow learn how to write and cite ourselves. I made use of the student learning centre a lot in my first year of university (I'm also first gen, so had no family to guide me).

Also Canadian educated here, and we most definitely learned the five paragraph format in my school.  Maybe this depends on your age, but it was the standard when I was in high school.

I don't think it is the worst format to learn how to write an essay though.  Of course it is not the only way, and perhaps not even the best, but I can see why high school teachers embrace it to teach the basics. 

It's like in science when they tell you that electrons orbit the nucleus, then turn around and tell you that is false and they actually exist within an electron cloud.  The orbiting electron theory is relatively easy to grasp, making it useful to understand chemical bonds and how atoms interact, even if it is not technically accurate. Sometimes you need to teach people a flawed theory or basic approach so that they will be in a position to grasp a more complex and better version. Many never go beyond step one, but that's ok since most people dont need mad essay writing skills or to understand chemical bonds.
     

[larryc]

I will echo what others have said, that crafting very specific assignments with mandatory sources makes it pretty hard to get away with anything.

The intro American History class I am teaching this quarter has a weekly buffet of idiosyncratic items. A couple of chapters of an online textbook (American Yawp), a couple of video lectures from the Biography of America series, a podcast episode or two, some local history web readings. The weekly assignment is to write a "Letter to a Child" describing the most interesting things they learned that week, with quotes and specific details from the assigned material, clearly sign-posted as such.

I always get a few letters that are well-written and have specific details about the era but nothing from the assigned sources. Are they AI-generated? Sometimes obviously so, sometimes I am not sure. But they get an F because they didn't follow the guidelines.

A couple of weeks into this online survey class full of high school students and they are mostly writing A or B essays every week, if complaining some about the workload. And they are not using AI.

[Hegemony]

Boy have I got a lot of students who are using AI to write their assignments. It's totally obvious, but it's a pain having to report them all. Which I am doing nevertheless.