Instructors cannot tell if students understand or just copy text

“Hello! I teach 50-100 person online courses. I would like to revamp most of my courses and am interested in some assignment ideas you may have that (1) minimize (subjective) grading, (2) help myself not monitor their AI use (despite prohibiting it), and (3) scale to large online classes. For example, one idea I have seen is to have students submit the notes they took after reading or watching videos. Has anyone done this and can give some insight/advice? I hate discussion boards, or at least hav”

“In my first semester, I tried to make the exam consist of short-answer essay questions where the response shouldn't exceed a single line. However, because the class was relatively large—around 150 students—it was extremely exhausting. Even if you assign a designated box for each answer to keep students from rambling, you find that if they don't know the answer, they still write too much and beat around the bush just to wear you down into giving them partial credit. Then comes the office”

“I am mainly asking about the prose (formal versus informal writing). I was wafting through some response papers and term papers I have written in undergrad and they looked woefully informal. I just wrote like I was informally talking to a friend, I got good grades on these papers but compared to the papers I read in journals or my classmates they seem so careless, they make me seem like an unprepared lazy student. So, I suppose in UG profs didnt care so much about the prose of my writing, they p”

“Profs who tend to make class feel like it’s more of a discussion than a lecture…how? I’m just curious what exactly that looks like. Are there particular methods for making it work? What is a “typical” class day like? How do you prompt them in a way that feels more like a dialogue rather than an interview? submitted by /u/adozenredflags [link] [comments]”

“title EDIT: Thank you everyone for the responses. That paints a clearer a picture for me now. Appreciate it submitted by /u/Suspicious_Sink9036 [link] [comments]”

“I don't know if this counts as spam but here goes. I did Upchieve, and the person I got is really good. The problem is I did not have enough time to go on full revisions (like by sentence by sentence) because I had to go to work. I'm talking about like sharing my essay (on something like Docs, idk) and annotations on my essay on where I went wrong. Preferably for free but I know nothing’s for free. Or can I ask on here if someone can read my personal statement? If this doesn't make s”

“Cooked? No. But you are going to be in for a culture shock that was true decades ago when I was a freshman and its true now. But, I know yall do rarely get homework, in college, you will definitely get it. It might be just reading, it might be much more. And many professors arent going to give grace. So if you were thr type who emailed teachers in hs about turning in work 3 weeks late...”

“So many grad students in my program basically read straight off their slides word for word, you can tell they're just reciting a script. I used to do this too, and my mentor called me out on it. I was genuinely annoyed about it for a full week, I didn't really get why, I felt like being well prepared wasn't a bad thing. But thinking about it more, the best presentations I've ever sat through never felt scripted, I couldn't even tell if the person was working off notes or not.”

“When im taking notes for myself, I have 3 things in mind. Do I understand this? No? Write it down. (could be a premise or just a word definition) Does this interest/fascinate me? Yes? Write it down. Good to see things that keep me interested. (can explain a reason for this is to fill your bank of tidbit facts) Is this new info but painstakingly obvious? Yes? Write that down. Just because it's obvious doesn't mean you will remember it. (once you write it down you probably will but that&#3”

“For pretty much every course I take and will take, I have to write reflective essays about what I've learned. During my BSc, I mostly received barely-passing grades on my reflections. The main feedback was that it was hard to follow and appeared unorganised. I really want to learn how to honestly reflect on myself and how to structure these reflections better. I feel like I am often exaggerating things in my reflective essays and not always reflecting honestly. I'm often very unsure of h”

“Just wondering what makes a good essay? Any tips submitted by /u/that_inattentive_Kid [link] [comments]”

“…..If you re-read my post, you can see that I am advocating for students taking notes, but with more rigor and meaning. Simply copying is lower level, but easy.”

title submitted by /u/helpme7500 [link] [comments]

“So…. A student turned in a completed, sourced essay for my British Literature course. On The Great Gatsby . I’m not sure if this is some sort of frustrated academic seppuku or if, in spite of the instructions clearly stating the paper had to cover an author we’d studied this semester and that all of the texts we studied from Beowulf to Shakespeare were decidedly British, they somehow thought they could turn in an essay on a Modernist American author, but … here we are. The terrifying thing is, I”

“There are books that are oriented to college students and adults such as The Little Brown Handbook or The Elements of Style. These books go into grammar in excruciating detail. What you might find more useful are books that are oriented to the grade level that you will be teaching.”

“How bad does that look? Is anyone okay if I DM them a couple questions about it? submitted by /u/EasyTeam2616 [link] [comments]”

“I'm teaching a 7 week summer course right now. We are currently in week 5. I use McGraw Hill Connect for short online quizzes and mini-cases and have discussion boards and a group project through the LMS. Now I've had various forms of the "do we really need the text" question over the years. That is nothing new. But we are at the due date of the week 5 assignments, and a student just asked if they could get an extension because they're courtesy access ran out and they are w”

“good point about it being document heavy, people always underestimate how much paperwork music ed involves”

“Half the points I have lost in college were not for bad work. They were for answering a slightly different question than the one being graded. Professors bury requirements in vague verbs ("analyze," "critically engage") and then dock you for not doing the thing they never actually spelled out. So before I write anything now, I decode the assignment first. ``` Here is an assignment prompt from my professor. Do NOT help me write it yet. Act as the person who will grade it. Reve”

“hi guys would appreciate a review of my college essay, we are paying 500 dollars an hour now, well my parents r for a Rice student who majors in creative writing and i feel like shes just telling me its good bc we r paying her alot. ive heard its good from my parents and friends too but would love some unbiased feedback. thank u sm!! for people who say delete before copyright, ive submitted this to fly ins and a bunch of scholarships so if somebody takes it, it would look bad on them especially”

“I’m teaching five (yes, five!) 11-week courses this term. They’re canned courses. Three are first-year college writing and two are critical thinking courses. 130 students total. I am really struggling with grading and giving specific feedback. I made a schedule so I would be grading 5-6 hours a day during the week, but it’s clearly not enough because I’m grading on the weekends, too. I have to say, the college where I am seems to be hit pretty hard by low literacy skills. I’ve worked in many dif”

“Everyone talks about the main discussion-board post, but the part that actually kills me is the reply requirement. Post 250 words, then reply to two classmates by Thursday. And every reply on the whole board is the same: "Great point, I totally agree, this reminds me of..." It is theatre. Nobody is discussing anything. I got tired of writing filler replies, so I built a prompt that at least makes the reply add one real thing, either a detail from the reading they skipped or a concrete”

“If you talk about the same activity in two diff essays for the same school, are we supposed to assume they know what the activity is by the second essay? Or do we reexplain it? submitted by /u/Responsible-Mix4804 [link] [comments]”

“I teach a grad seminar and it can be a struggle to get everyone to do the readings. I currently have students submit discussion questions before class. I provide examples of good questions, guidelines for how to develop thoughtful, analytical questions, and reference the questions we submit in our class discussions. I was thinking about having students also use pen/paper to take notes on every reading and submit photos of the notes with the discussion questions. I think I have some ways to prese”

“Curious to hear from people who went through this in the last couple of years (or parents of kids who did), now that a new batch of rising seniors is starting to stare at the dreaded blank page. Not looking for generic tips like "Be authentic". 🤮 More like: What's a specific thing a parent, teacher, counselor, or random Internet stranger told you, and did it actually help or actively make things worse? Bonus points if it's something you didn't expect to work (or backfire).”

100% agree, especially when most of these presentations are poorly done.

“there's a type of studying that feels productive but does almost nothing for your exam grade. it's when you read your notes, everything looks familiar, and you feel like you know it all, and then you sit in the exam and can't even write a single sentence from scratch. that's not a confidence problem but it's the difference between recognising knowledge and generating it. to solve this paste this into chatgpt, claude, perplexity, gemini, notebooklm or any ai you use: "Tes”

“Hi All! Hope everyone's summer is going as they all planned! I am a relatively new faculty entering my second year of teaching and I wanted to get some insights from others in the same field. I am currently teaching organic chemistry and organic chemistry lab. Something I have noticed last year was when I was grading these lab reports, there were blatant AI use in the students introduction and even data analysis. Which makes me wonder how many are actually doing critical analysis vs. just pl”

“most students can easily recite the facts they have learned but, they struggle the moment an exam asks them why something is true or why it isn't, this problem isn't because of your memory but rather its a understanding problem and no matter how much you re-read it won't solve it. this prompt fixes it, just fill the blanks and paste it into chatgpt, claude, perplexity, notebooklm or any other ai you use: "I am going to state a fact from [SUBJECT]: [STATE THE FACT OR CONCEPT] Do”

“Is anyone else having trouble listing all relevant experiences/description in the 250 characters provided? Should it be a bullet point list of the activity names or does it need to be sentences? For me a list doesnt even fit. Would love to see how others are approaching this tyyy submitted by /u/Medcup [link] [comments]”

“I fed a project my rubric and two old graded papers with the profs comments and told it to review my drafts the way she would. First two times were honestly decent. After that it started ignoring the old comments and inventing stuff she never said, and I basically had to re-set it up every assignment. Anyone actually maintained something like this for a whole semester? What did your setup look like and when did it break? Starting to wonder if the maintenance is more work than just rereading her”

“I mean, to a certain extent it’s true and I totally get the complaint. I used to wonder the same when I was an undergrad. I’d say, even the most rigorously constructed grading rubric can still contain a certain element of ambiguity and subjectivity, just like any legal text (which is why lawyers and judges always exist; the world has never been a black-or-white calculus where everything is clearly defined by hard and fast “rules”). It exists in most disciplines and content areas and I’m not goin”

“Hey everyone, I'm teaching an intro kinesiology class and would like to spend some time teaching students how to read research papers. I have ZERO clue what academic work/frameworks are out there as I was never taught myself. Any suggestions would be appreciated! P.S. I plan on roping this in with the FLICC taxonomy stuff done by Cook so they can spot misinformation along with understand the good stuff. submitted by /u/No_Catch2703 [link] [comments]”

“I'm not a PhD student, but I'm about to start writing my fist thesis. I know I'll have to read A LOT and juggle between citations, and I know that this is often a struggle for everyone. For this reasons, I'm asking you for advice. Who could give advices about this better than a PhD student? I'd like to know what is your writing system: for example, how do you organize and handle all of the paper and sources/bibliography/citations...? Where do you write your thesis (a google d”

“Right. The system incentivizes that corner cutting across the board. The reason we have written over oral exams is because society and teachers wanted to do less work in attending and grading students. Especially with the number of students came. Rather than work towards a system thats ergonomics to our minds.”

“As a student I am having trouble critiquing myself each shift. Besides saying “improve presentations, notes, physical exam, etc” I am not sure what to say. I can only say “work on presentations” so many times before it looks bad like I am not improving. Any advice for areas I should consider as part of self evaluations? I know this is probably dumb but I have no idea what my preceptors are looking for me to say. submitted by /u/negativecreep-med [link] [comments]”

“I teach at a CC so my point of view is of course from that level and the college level. I think one of the largest problems will be how much "easier" assessments and other things have gotten over the last decade. Many teachers are not going to want to go back to the dark ages. Some of us have gotten lazy. For example I almost can not fathom going back to paper tests. I can not count the hours 15 years ago where I would be sitting with friends or doing something having to grade paper te”

“That and a desire to do less work, which means taking every available shortcut.”

“Give me an operationalized definition of “understanding” that can serve for assessment.”

“Yes. Knowledge must always come before understanding. Even with everything being look-upable you can't really construct understanding if you aren't able to hold poeces of disparate knowledge in your head. AI is a way to bypass and shortcut that process, as was google too, but far worse.”

“eah, copying the teacher's summary isnt the same as seeing the teacher think.”

submitted by /u/itismeganrms [link] [comments]

“My university has finally put out "LLM guidelines", which, you guessed it, signal to students that using them is perfectly alright - as long as you document your use, i.e. which LLM did you use for what stage of your writing. We're all quite angry for not having been involved in this process, because at least in my department (English...), we would have liked to have a say. We are, however, allowed to publish and use our own, department-specific LLM guidelines, so HOORAY for that!!”

“I am 5 days in to a course and already have a student who is wildly unprofessional in their communication with me. They will comment on their submissions and try to negotiate points, use gifs in their emails, and use abbreviations like "lmao," "idk," or "smh" in their written responses to course assignments. They submitted an answer to a question (for a grade) that started the answer with the following: "(Idk how to word this but I tried lol i so funny)" T”

“Greetings hivemind, I need some advice. I’m re-writing my syllabus for a first year humanities subject to try and make it more AI-resistant so I’m shifting as many of the assessments into class as possible. I have to work with the listed assessment timetable that was created 24 months or so ago. (Regulations, don’t ask). I have a bit of wiggle-room with the type of assessment (e.g. if it says presentation, I can do whatever I like so long as it reasonably could be interpreted as a presentation).”

“Well by research I mean literature reviews, specifically using the Zotero plugins. That aspect is not really about recall and memorization but rather organizing your findings and drafting reviews Edit: so I have separately been using Obsidian for my research projects and I thought it would be interesting to apply that to medicine”

“In order for a degree to be worth something, people need to fail. You’re teaching an AP class, it’s supposed to be harder, it should be a more restrictive barrier that requires more from the students. You did great.”

“Over the last few months, I noticed that most academic editing prompts fall into one of two extremes: They rewrite too aggressively and change the author's voice. They make only superficial corrections and miss structural problems. To address this, I started building a structured review workflow specifically for academic texts such as dissertations, theses, journal articles and research reports. The system works in two stages. Stage 1 – Analysis Before any rewriting happens, the prompt perfo”

“listing citations is not the same as using them. every marker knows the difference between a student who drops sources in and one who actually builds an argument with them. this prompt teaches you how to do the second thing. paste this into chatgpt, claude, perplexity, notebooklm or any other ai: "I am writing a paragraph for my [SUBJECT] essay and I need to integrate these sources: [LIST YOUR SOURCES WITH KEY CLAIMS] My topic sentence is: [PASTE TOPIC SENTENCE] Teach me to integrate, not d”

“Has anyone else noticed a flanderization of their secondaries in terms of quality/messaging as you write more? As I frankenstein a bunch of essays from previous ones and mold them to fit new prompts, I feel like I'm losing a good sense of how to respond effectively to each unique prompt. I had to step back and start reading/writing more carefully submitted by /u/bye_fart [link] [comments]”

“I don’t teach AP World, but I teach AP Bio in a school similar to yours. After teaching AP for many years, I’ve learned it’s the essay portion that separates 4s from 5s (once you cross the pass threshold) in most subjects. In Bio, those are known as FRQs and are a beast. I’ve seen snippets of what DBQs are like, also a beast. I would focus in on how to get those DBQs done precisely within the time limits given. Maybe find a community that includes AP World Readers and ask what being a reader has”

“Have any of you attempted to have students submit work by taking pictures of their work and uploading to Google Classroom? I’m potentially teaching half my classes in one room and half in the other which complicates my turn in and grading system. I was thinking about making students do pencil and paper work, but having them upload their work digitally via a photo in Google Classroom. What are your thoughts about this? submitted by /u/MaleficentCulture826 [link] [comments]”

“It is not useless at all! But it doesn't provide you all the answers”

“Does anyone know how Starfish notes/flags work in college or professional programs? I’m a student with strong grades, mostly A’s and B’s, and I put a lot of effort into my coursework. Recently, I became concerned that some faculty may be documenting negative comments about me in Starfish that do not seem reflected in my academic performance or the work I’ve submitted. I’m trying to understand who can see these notes. Are they only visible to advisors/student support staff, or can multiple profes”

“honestly, ive been trying to figure out a solid workflow for managing papers during my lit review and nothing seems to stick. i started with endnote but it felt clunky. switched to zotero which is great for storage but the pdf analysis is basically nonexistent. then i tried some ai tools but most of them hallucinate citations which is worse than useless. currently experimenting with a combination of zotero + a pdf analysis tool i found recently. its not perfect but at least it doesnt make up sou”

“It is rewarding when a student genuinely takes the lesson material and successfully reformulates it to make new connections as opposed to repeating. I do a little test problem on that idea. In lecture, I'll have a Force-time diagram where the plot regions for a square, triangle, and trapezoid. We'll use the area formulas to calculate impulse (J). For the test, I have a plot where their are two regions that are actually both trapezoids (the first being a right angle trapezoid). Most stude”

“Are schools actually expecting 1000+ words on some of these essays? I feel like most have 500 word limit maxes but some are way higher. I know they have thousands to review and don’t feel like they will read a multi-page essay? Am I wrong? Should I fill/ mostly fill these requirements? submitted by /u/That_Clue2201 [link] [comments]”

“I am teaching a 3-week asynchronous summer course later this month (I know, I know). It's 3 credits at the workload is heavy -- up to 40 hours of reading & work per week. Because I haven't taught a course in such a condensed fashion before, I asked my colleagues for advice. Some apparently open the course (on the LMS) early -- so even though the course is only 3, they give them up to 5 or so weeks to do the work if they want. I don't have an issue giving students more time, but i”

““Feedback I had considerable difficulty making sense of your submission for the research reflection. It does not follow the instructions of the assignment, which states that you are to work directly with the student reports. Instead, your essay brings in a number of outside references. The essay is also extremely short, about half the length that I expected. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it has numerous grammatical problems, which make it almost impossible to read. As such, I cannot giv”