<
https://freedium.cfd/https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/i-want-to-be-a-teacher-not-an-ai-detective-01211ad14499>
'I was making my way through the year's final batches of papers for my
high-school history class, and it happened again. Reading a student's work, I
went from thinking, "this isn't bad" to "this is a little more polished than I
usually get" to "ugh, this bears the lifeless, robotic mark of the AI beast."
This sparked a cascade of feelings that I've had all too often this year. I
don't get angry — I've been an educator long enough to understand that some
teenagers are going to cheat, especially if the incentives encourage them to do
so. There's some disappointment with the student who cheated, of course,
especially if the perpetrator was someone I thought wouldn't do such a thing.
But mostly, I feel irritated — not at the student but at the hassle I'm about
to endure.
Now I have to go back through the student's work with a fine-toothed comb to
decide whether the prose that activated my radar is really evidence of AI
usage. I might go back to the Google Doc in which they wrote the paper and
click through the revision history to see if I can find any suspicious events
(like a whole page of text getting pasted in all at once). If I find enough
evidence, I'll have to speak to the student, bring the case to the school's
dean, and perhaps participate in a disciplinary meeting with the student's
parents. The ten minutes I might have spent with this paper just spiraled out
into hours of my time.
Other times, I can't find any bulletproof evidence of cheating. I might have a
conversation with the student in question, but if that's inconclusive I'm left
with a choice: trust my instincts and insist on a punishment for this student
even though I might be wrong (accusing a student of cheating is a pretty
serious thing and carries major consequences for them) or just give them a
grade and move on with my life, even though I strongly suspect that the kid
just pulled a fast one on me. Either way, there's a lot of gray area and a lot
of room for me to doubt both myself and my student.
What I especially dislike is what happens when I read the next paper, and the
one after that. My mind, already addled from hours of slogging through student
work, starts to cast its wild-eyed, paranoid glance onto every paper. I wonder:
how many of them are cheating? Am I only catching the sloppy ones? Every time I
come across a smoothly written paper, I have to ask myself — did this student
get better at writing, or are they cheating?
I don't like feeling this way. I don't like having to second-guess my students.
I don't like feeling like I'm being made a fool. I don't like suspecting my
students of cheating rather than being glad that they've improved their
writing. I don't like having to be the interrogator or the cop with my
students. I don't like the way AI is making education feel.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
