Here’s a rather elegant workaround to the problem of grading student work that avoids accusing individual students.
Declare that a fixed number of points will be deducted for every sentence that a free “is it AI?” online checker believes is AI.
Mandate that the students use the AI checker as part of the writing process “so that they don’t lose points”.
Emphasize that it doesn’t matter whether a sentence was written by AI or not, only what the tool thinks, because “we’re trying to not write just like AI in this class”.
If the tool is even reasonably accurate, students know that they can’t submit AI writing because they’ll fail. And the teacher never needs to accuse anyone of cheating, individually.
There doesn’t seem to be a “reasonably accurate” checker. The current best tool afaict, Pangram, claims (and I believe them) to have very low false positive rate, but this is at the cost of much higher false negative rate.
Rather than “students know that they can’t submit AI writing because they’ll fail”, students know that they can submit AI writing as long as they put in a bit more effort asking AI to rewrite it until it passes the filter.
For many tasks and students this will lead to editing AI at best and autohumanizing at worst.
“AI writes the first draft and then you edit it by hand” isn’t a bad individual task for students to get reps in (though you also want cases where they’re writing the first draft.) Just as long as you know those are the likely scenarios, not “students know they can’t submit AI writing.”
(I personally think the best solutions are blue books for short-term writing and “thesis defense” for long-term writing, but the former doesn’t work for a lot of writing and the latter is absolutely a time investment.)
Here’s a rather elegant workaround to the problem of grading student work that avoids accusing individual students.
Declare that a fixed number of points will be deducted for every sentence that a free “is it AI?” online checker believes is AI.
Mandate that the students use the AI checker as part of the writing process “so that they don’t lose points”.
Emphasize that it doesn’t matter whether a sentence was written by AI or not, only what the tool thinks, because “we’re trying to not write just like AI in this class”.
If the tool is even reasonably accurate, students know that they can’t submit AI writing because they’ll fail. And the teacher never needs to accuse anyone of cheating, individually.
Goodhart’s law.
There doesn’t seem to be a “reasonably accurate” checker. The current best tool afaict, Pangram, claims (and I believe them) to have very low false positive rate, but this is at the cost of much higher false negative rate.
Rather than “students know that they can’t submit AI writing because they’ll fail”, students know that they can submit AI writing as long as they put in a bit more effort asking AI to rewrite it until it passes the filter.
For many tasks and students this will lead to editing AI at best and autohumanizing at worst.
“AI writes the first draft and then you edit it by hand” isn’t a bad individual task for students to get reps in (though you also want cases where they’re writing the first draft.) Just as long as you know those are the likely scenarios, not “students know they can’t submit AI writing.”
(I personally think the best solutions are blue books for short-term writing and “thesis defense” for long-term writing, but the former doesn’t work for a lot of writing and the latter is absolutely a time investment.)