I had a student use ChatGPT to generate a list of quotations for a commonplace book. It gave him a fake C.S. Lewis quote, a nonsense sentence, and a blatant rip off of a summer beach read novel. He lacked the discernment to catch this because he had not really been reading That Hideous Strength with the rest of us. Lazy students will always find ways to be lazy. The challenges for me as a teacher: how do I shepherd a student toward human work? And am I asking questions that will form a human rather than a machine?
Students are smart enough to know when an essay is busy work or an attempt to make enough grades for the marking period. Teachers need to craft assessments that are worth the time and work and thought so that a student’s virtue (or lack there of) is tested and revealed in the process and product.
A memory from undergrad (which was 20 years ago now!) that is a great example of evaluation *inside* the classroom was during a poetry class— after asking a few questions to prompt discussion (these went absolutely nowhere), our teacher then asked if any of us had actually read what we were assigned to read for that day’s class. We were silent. He then told us that we were wasting his time and dismissed us. It was the best lesson I ever had on being prepared for class.
This was, of course, before A.I., but the lesson is the same: it’s impossible to fake an in-class discussion if you haven’t read the material.
I had a student use ChatGPT to generate a list of quotations for a commonplace book. It gave him a fake C.S. Lewis quote, a nonsense sentence, and a blatant rip off of a summer beach read novel. He lacked the discernment to catch this because he had not really been reading That Hideous Strength with the rest of us. Lazy students will always find ways to be lazy. The challenges for me as a teacher: how do I shepherd a student toward human work? And am I asking questions that will form a human rather than a machine?
Students are smart enough to know when an essay is busy work or an attempt to make enough grades for the marking period. Teachers need to craft assessments that are worth the time and work and thought so that a student’s virtue (or lack there of) is tested and revealed in the process and product.
A memory from undergrad (which was 20 years ago now!) that is a great example of evaluation *inside* the classroom was during a poetry class— after asking a few questions to prompt discussion (these went absolutely nowhere), our teacher then asked if any of us had actually read what we were assigned to read for that day’s class. We were silent. He then told us that we were wasting his time and dismissed us. It was the best lesson I ever had on being prepared for class.
This was, of course, before A.I., but the lesson is the same: it’s impossible to fake an in-class discussion if you haven’t read the material.
Class discussion bears it all out very well!
The writing exercises of the progymnasmata and medieval style disputations are great ways to evaluate student interaction with the material.
Have you read this one?
https://stgb.substack.com/p/the-medieval-disputation