What A Retired Teacher Might Not Know
Schools change as soon as you leave
Source: Macworld
How the heck are teachers today dealing with AI? I know that a common phrase for many teaching retirees is: “I’m glad I got out when I did!” I had been hearing this from retired friends long before I left the profession myself two years ago. Then I said it.
My colleagues might have been talking about new state mandates, but they might also have been talking about technology. In my forty years in the profession, it seemed like I was riding a tsunami of new tech in teaching methods, record keeping, and parent communication. Changes were constantly coming as early as when we got our first word processors in the 80s. I didn’t know if some of the older retired friends I know realized how much was changing if they left more than twenty years ago. Now, I can’t fathom what AI has done to high school in the short time that I have been gone.
In my final month of teaching, a student that I had a couple years before approached me with a challenge. She was writing an article for the school newspaper about the emergence of Chat Gtp. She presented me with two pieces of writing and said that one was hers and one was AI generated. I had to determine which was which. I failed. So did several colleagues. This is when I first uttered the classic phrase: “I’m glad I am getting out when I am.”
My take on that student’s experiment is the theory that it is harder to determine the difference when the student in question is as bright as she is. I proposed that a weaker student’s writing would create a more glaring contrast with AI. If I was accustomed to a student’s poor writing ability, a polished Chat Gtp essay would surely stand out. Sadly, the brightest students have always been the best at cheating and now perhaps even more so. It would be harder to find the fake if the student was already a proficient writer. So, if my theory was correct, the scoring gap between the weakest and strongest students would only grow. I am told that AI can be adjusted to mimic a student’s writing style, though. Therefore, even a weaker student can be duplicated. I guess that the only comfort there is that a student would actually have to have written in order to have a sample of a style to mock.
In the last twenty years or so, the greatest technological challenge in assessing students’ writing had been the growth of plagiarism. Internet “research” made finding sources quite easy. Sure, plagiarism had always been around and was perhaps even harder to detect when students were using card catalogs and Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. With the advent of Google, however, it was as easy to find plagiarism as it was to do this “research” because students’ cheating techniques were so unsophisticated. A teacher would only need to type a suspect phrase into Google to find what the student was using as their own. Heaven forbid they just cite their sources.
For a while there, the purported best way to catch plagiarism was for teachers to use Turnitin.com. With students submitting their work through that site nationwide, this tool supposedly got smarter with every use. The site would flag passages that had been used before in someone else’s work. That today seems like a charming anachronism. Plagiarism is not the biggest problem any more. Now, why use someone else’s work when you can use AI to generate something that has never been written before.? Try and catch that, teachers.
I hear that there are ways to spot AI use. Chat Gtp apparently overuses adverbs. It also apparently has a preference for using “em dashes.” (What the heck—I like em dashes!”) This seems like a lot of work and difficult to prove. I have read articles about the innocent who have been unjustly accused of using AI. So seriously, what now? This problem may extend to all take home work. Maybe the only way to truly assess a student’s writing ability is through hand written, in-person assignments. Should teachers just abandon the assignment of term papers?
My colleagues who retired before the millennium were still doing their grades by averaging scores in a handwritten gradebook with a calculator. They were writing carbon copy progress reports in triplicate. They were admonished by administration that they had better be sure to mail home those progress reports (through the postal service) because we couldn’t trust a student to monitor their own grades or be honest about it. These colleagues were still using overhead transparencies in the days before PowerPoint was new and then replaced by Google Slides. They actually put things in file folders and used a file cabinet or three. In packing up my things for retirement, I realized that I hadn’t opened my file cabinets in over a decade. I filled a lot of trash barrels with unusable work product when I left. Too bad transparencies are not recyclable.
AI is the technology that tells me that I don’t know what I don’t know. Just as my pre-millennium predecessors may not realize how much the profession had changed with information technology (and hopefully like it that way), Chat Gtp is my comeuppance. I am so glad that I don’t have to wrestle that gorilla. I will just work as a substitute teacher once in a while and realize that I am a dinosaur.
One thing I’ve discovered at the post-secondary level is that the weaker students are easier to catch cheating with AI. It is easier to catch them not because the AI system fails to adjust to their writing and reasoning styles but because they tend to be weaker as a result of often (but not always) being either overwhelmed (especially the ones who work as well as attend college) or, sadly in some cases, lazy. Therefore, they cut corners and fail to pay attention WHILE they are cheating.
Not too long ago, I caught someone cheating on a take-home essay quiz when the answer provided to a hypothetical question was completely different from the way I had presented that material in class. Obviously, it was the AI system’s best effort at a topic that was not yet circulating online. The best questions, in that respect, tend to be the ones I like to use in which I ask, essentially, “how would you relate these two otherwise unrelated concepts in addressing this hypothetical situation?” AI is not good at that sort of thing ~ at least, not yet.
I believe that part of the sentiment behind “I’m glad I’m getting out when I am” is that teaching and grading in the age of AI makes our jobs as teachers more work intensive. It IS possible to sniff out this sort of cheating but (as you noted, Paul), it requires changes to assignment strategies (such as using computer programs to help us grade) that we have grown accustomed to using ~ and the reason we have grown accustomed to them has been largely prompted by the increases in teaching loads and expectations. Teachers and students are ALL feeling overwhelmed and seeking help in this respect.
If I were to start using more of my class time to complete assignments under personal supervision, it would greatly cut into the time that I otherwise would be using for actual teaching. The number of students and requirements have increased, greatly (if not exponentially), so fewer teachers can be used to accomplish the same results as in the past. Furthermore, additional topics within a course subject also keep increasing, especially when they become mandated by higher authorities.
Yet for many universities, greed among higher administration often is a culprit, resulting in much larger class sizes, even as overall enrollments have been declining. I remember my university in Chicago bragging to prospective students about the relatively low student-to-faculty class ratios while, simultaneously, provosts and deans were complaining to department chairs about the lack of cost effectiveness as a result of relatively low student-to-faculty class ratios. In that sense, cheating using AI is a symptom of a broader problem in education, today, which also has contributed to the sort of burnout that led me to accept an offer of early retirement from a university administration that has been desperately seeking ways to “slim down” the number of faculty ~ especially so it can avoid the truly catastrophic option of cutting back on athletics, including the unpopular yet hideously expensive football program. Wrestling, on the other hand, is great ~ AND cost effective.
Sorry for the outlandish length of this comment, Paul ~ I fear you struck a nerve! : |)
I still use file folders! And I’d like to try that AI challenge, I want to think I’d be able to figure it out but I’m guessing I’d struggle.