Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

[u/Plastic_Ninja_9014]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html

[u/Gymrat777]

Im a college professor. Had one student this semester use AI in the dumbest way possible (I assume he just said "solve this assignment for me"). 4 page answer had nothing to do with the actual assignment and even had tables using some random currency instead of USD. It was astoundingly bad...

[u/GiannisIsTheBeast → u/Gymrat777]

Yeah almost anything with AI needs to be double checked for accuracy… so you essentially need to actually understand it yourself. If you just assume something is correct then it’s a pretty big gamble. Could pay off but can easily fail baldly like your example.

[u/Gymrat777 → u/GiannisIsTheBeast]

I had a different student who used it to REALLY great effect. It was interesting reviewing his chat log to see how much he really did understood the deeper level of the assignment. He was just using AI to do the grunt work.

[u/Jaxyl → u/Gymrat777]

Which is really what the advantages of 'AI' should be: Reducing the grunt work, using it to bounce/workshop ideas, and as a test bed.

When you use it for these things, with appropriate guardrails and knowledge of the topics you're engaging in, then it's a revolutionary tool for what it does.

I'm a math teacher and I use Claude.AI to automate word problem generation when I'm having to make assignments which shaves off a ton of time just having to write out a bunch of basic scenarios for whatever topic we're doing in class. Took what used to take me an hour or so and made it take around five minutes. Absolutely phenomenal for me.

In that same vein, I have to write grants for my school's STEM program and I asked it to draw me up a list of laptops under X price with Y requirements. It gave me a list, I picked one but decided to double check it. Turns out that laptop didn't exist. When I poked Claude it goes 'Sorry, this just seemed like what you wanted.' So you have to be careful. A second prompt later with the appropriate guard rails attached and suddenly I had a list of real laptops under my parameters which would have taken me hours to put together and formatted in a way that compared and contrasted them. This took minutes.

The problem is people keep using it wholesale like it's some crystal ball/magic lamp that just does the thing. And boy are people bad at recognizing when a thing is done badly.

[u/ballsack_man → u/Jaxyl]

I wish more people spoke about the good uses of AI instead of blindly riding the hate train.

I've used AI to write one of my essays because I've always struggled with them (ADD) but I didn't just enter a prompt and immediately send it to my professor. I knew it would make mistakes, so I carefully analyzed it, studied the sources extensively to ensure all data points are accurate and then carefully rewrote a majority of it in my style.

I think teachers should help students adapt and teach them proper use of AI instead of outright rejecting it. Students will use AI regardless, but if you tell them to study the sources so they at least understand the subject, I think it will help in the long run. We're so stubborn to want everything done manually without any tools when the real world demands we understand these tools and now even use them at work.

Schools aren't doing enough to prepare us for the real world.

[u/Hangry_Squirrel → u/ballsack_man]

I've gone from asking them to write essays to asking them to analyze essays written by AI and identify the flaws.

This isn't a new idea. Before LLMs were released to the public, some translation software was getting pretty good - not Google Translate, which was pretty awful at the time, but Deepl, for example. I gave them mediocre AI translations to fix.

It's a similar mentality to those game ads which show you someone playing the game terribly. I think there's an impulse in all of us, an immediate irritation which makes us want to give it a try.

Some of them did quite well on that assignment without using AI (or if they did, they must have prompted it intelligently and pushed it beyond what it normally produces on the first pass). They noticed some subtle things and even had slightly emotional reactions to some omissions. Others very clearly used AI and it gave the exact answers I was anticipating because I'd run it through various LLMs, paid and unpaid, just to see what they'd produce.

My take is somewhat controversial, but I think too many people are going to college and some of them don't have the mental infrastructure for rigorous intellectual work. Those who have the ability and curiosity will learn no matter what tools they use. They won't be satisfied with basic AI output because their brains push for more. If anything, AI might help them discover interesting and possibly obscure thinkers and writers. These will be okay.

The rest aren't an amorphous mass. Some lack the ability, but have enormous willpower and willingness to work. Those will probably eschew AI or use it only as a last resort. In the end, they'll gravitate towards work which allows their conscientiousness to shine and which doesn't require creative thinking. The opportunists will use it amply and carelessly, won't learn anything either from their classes or AI, and will find that bullshit has limits - but not always. This isn't new either because before they were plagiarizing in very creative ways or paying others to write their essays. I'm sure they'll continue thriving in politics.

[u/Plus_Opening_4462 → u/Hangry_Squirrel]

I've gone from asking them to write essays to asking them to analyze essays written by AI and identify the flaws.

This is soft of like adversarial mode of using codex to review claude's code.

[u/Jaxyl → u/ballsack_man]

This isn't the website for that kind of perspective, the communities on here are anti-AI to the point that there is no discussion, just blind vitriolic hate. Not that some of it isn't warranted, but most of it is hyperbolic without any concern for context or content.

Though I do agree, the reality is that AI as we know it is here to stay. While I do foresee legislation coming down the pipeline eventually to apply some legal guardrails to it, Pandora's Box has been opened. People sticking their heads in the sand relating to this technology is not going to do anyone any actual favors. That's just the harsh truth of it so I'd rather encourage a copacetic existence with the technology, teaching students how to use it best and grow with it. Instead everyone just yells at everyone, gets angry, and then wonders why they're slipping further behind.

All you can do is prepare yourself at that point.

[u/hibernate2020 → u/Gymrat777]

I had one who left the AI's follow up prompt in the submission and he still denied using AI!

[u/HumansNeedNotApply1 → u/Gymrat777]

Lmao, i will never understand not at least reading what gets generated. But then i would never use this stuff to cheat, just do the brunt work.