A while back I saw a post on Lemmy accusing ASU, who is publicly partnered with OpenAI, of trying to quietly replace advisors with chatbots.
It’s truly a dark time for USA higher education.
Holy crap… slashdot still exists??
I checked it out again when reddit did their api fuckery. The progressives left and the libertarians are all that remain. I didn’t stick around long enough to get a better feel for the situation.
It’s still the same 10 users complaining about systemd
Hot grits
Never forget, never forgive
Oh crap, the last time I looked at Slashdot comments, systemd didn’t exist yet
“He’s telling us not to use it, and then he’s using it himself,”
Yeah it sucks but there is zero chance this argument holds any weight in court.
The problem is that a student has a reasonable expectation of being taught by someone qualified and knowledgeable in the topic. If the professor is using AI, then that is a major breach of trust that brings into question the professor’s qualifications and whether you are actually getting the education you are paying for.
Not to mention the risk of plagiarism
Yeah, I had teachers change the rubric on the day of the final and even after and the deans at UCSB didnt care at all. Teachers can do just about anything under the guise of education…
Pretty good pizza at Woodstock’s, tho.
Because the truth is they’re the ones deciding how to grade you and for the most part that’s not really “regulated”
The rubric is meant to be an outline of how they grade it so you understand how you got graded, it really isn’t supposed to show you how you will eventually be graded you know?
This is whats wrong with the world, people will come out of the woods and defend the most batshit insane things…
Why would they need to change how the class is graded after you took the class? The asnwer is simply to fuck you out of money. There is no educational purpose, just a monetary one.
Just because its reguarly done does not mean it should be normalized.
What would you do if your boss said the purpose of your salary is not to show you how much you will make by the end of the year, but to motivate you to work, and then doesnt pay you for months of work… would you have the same naive outlook?
There are some really good reasons to make changes, not trying to say that this was the case in the parent comment, but there are certainly cases where this makes sense. About halfway through my discrete math final my professor wrote a curve on the board based on exam results from the other test session. He realized that he hadn’t properly taught some concepts and he thought it would be unfair for us to suffer because of his mistakes. Should he have been forced to stick to a non curved exam because he hadn’t announced it in the rubric or to the first exam session?
“He’s telling us not to use it, and then he’s using it himself”
Just because the teacher might have screwed up doesn’t change that experts in a subject can assess LLM output, while a student who knows jack shit about the topic can’t. Just because the teacher messed up and let ai weirdness degrade the quality of education in the eyes of students, doesn’t mean just anyone can use chatgpt to generate college courses.
I read the original article but not the interview. I wonder how much communication there was about the work before the student decided they deserved a refund.
Ya I mean, you could buy the teachers versions of textbooks on eBay in the late 1990s… pretty sure teachers didn’t want us using those.
For fucks sake people, it’s not hard. AI can be useful to generate drafts or give suggestions, but ultimately everything has to be tweaked/written by an actual human expert. AI is a tool, not a product. If something isn’t edited enough to have no trace of AI signature left, then you’re being lazy and putting out garbage.
It’s a tool whose only purpose is to lie and generate bullshit. We’re right to be upset when we find out we paid a human expert top fucking dollar to give us bullshit.
it’s “hard” because every peddler of AI is pushing it exactly in the way you say, and I agree, is wrong
This is it exactly. I use ChatGPT to double check things when I’m second guessing myself and I use it to make assignments.
Almost everytime, I need to tweak things but it turns 40 minutes of work into 5-10 minutes.
“no trace” isn’t a necessary bar. You can learn business theory from a presentation including a 3 armed gargoyle without loss of information. Materials just need to be checked to be factual, which this seems to meet.
Mr Business Professor is probably one of the highest paid instructors in the college and his time is NOT well spent cruising the internet for PowerPoint images or formatting lecture materials. Frankly that’s not a good use of TA time either.
Write a brief introductory paragraph on the subject of business theory as if you were a three-armed gargoyle teaching a first year college class on the subject.
Greetings, fledgling scholars! I am Professor Thraxxor, your three-armed guide to the mystic labyrinth of business theory—where spreadsheets whisper secrets and invisible hands tug at the fabric of markets. With one hand I’ll gesture toward classical economics, with another I’ll sketch diagrams of organizational behavior, and with the third—ah yes—that one’s just for throwing chalk at nappers. In this course, we’ll examine the ancient and evolving forces that govern commerce, from Adam Smith’s hallowed halls to the chaos of modern corporate strategy. Stay alert—capitalism waits for no one.
—via ChatGPT
Sooner or later I’ll learn to caveat my AI comments to make clear I’m only talking about LLM/text-gen. I don’t personally care about image-gen. It’s garbage, but to quote Star Wars, sometimes “the garbage will do.”
Somewhat unrelated but I’ve never understood why business professors make so much more than others. I get their logic of basing it off what they could be paid private side but business degrees tend to skew things due to how overpaid CEOs of larger corporations are.
I know at the university nearby the difference between someone with a phd in business admin versus genetics is… vast, to say the least.
I get their logic of basing it off what they could be paid private side
Then you get it. They pay what they need to in order to get the talent they need for the course. Business school is often more expensive than other disciplines because of the high salaries needed to attract talent and businesses schools get a lot of sponsors, so the school is being compensated for the high salaries.
In short, it’s supply and demand. It’s a lot cheaper to find a PhD in genetics vs a PhD in business who is willing to work at a university.
I wish I knew the answer. I know one person who took that path and he is not a super bright guy and I’m not sure what value he brings… but business PhD and then teaching position in the 600k range. I did a rocket science PhD and finally took an industry job after like 6 years running a lab for less than 100k, but my advisor was around 180k with full faculty.
400k was the salary of the university president, so… you add the rocket science faculty to the president and you get a faculty salary in the business school? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I suppose maybe because MBA is a high demand degree? If you figure it out let me know, I’d also like to know the answer.
I think there’s a sweet spot you can hit, but sometimes I fight with it so long to get what I want, that by them, copy paste whatever is good enough… To be fair, I’m not an educator
Time after time, I see people who should know better fail at basic things like this.
Even I don’t get called out for AI-written responses, even though a big number of my messages here are technically written by AI. The key difference is that I actually take the time to write a first draft of what I want to say, then run it through ChatGPT to help clean up my word salad - and finally, I go over the output again to make it sound like me. The thinking is mine. AI just helps me communicate more clearly.
I’d never ask it to write an entire response from scratch without providing structure or points I want to make. All I want is for the person reading my message to understand what I’m actually trying to say - so they can respond to that, not to a misinterpretation of what I was trying to say.
I’ll just leave that first draft here to illustrate my point:
Time after time I see people that should know better to fail at basic things like this.
Even I don’t get called out for AI responses even though a huge number of my messages posted here are technically written by AI. However, the difference here is that I actually took time to first write the first draft of what I want to say only then to give it for chatGPT to make sense of my word salad only for me to then go over it’s output to make it sound like me again. The thinking is done by me - AI only helps me to communicate more clearly. I’d never ask it to write the entire response from ground up without providing any structure and points about what I want to say. All I want is the person reading this message to get as clear of an understanding as possible of what I’m trying to say so that they can respond to that rather than to misintrepretation of what I was trying to say.
This is a great use of AI and it’s caught some small errors like the wrong its (which is one I find distracting when reading). The editing is light enough that it’s still your voice, just with extra punctuation and fewer typos.
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LLMs should augment your skills not substitute them. That’s just laziness or incompetence.
Or worst case scenario it means your job is replaceable.
Agreed.
I’d be pissed too. This is sloppy as hell.
As long as the materials are accurate and serve as an effective teaching aid, where’s the case?
It would be different if the sum total of course materials were wikipedia articles presented by a non expert, but the professor IS an expert. Sure, anyone can use genAI, BUT not anyone can write a relevant, targeted prompt and check the accuracy of the output. This is of course assuming the professor is generating (or at least vetting) materials for accuracy.
IF it turns out the student can find a pattern of inaccurate content there is a case. Otherwise there’s nothing: it would be like arguing that a TA made the materials (or the lecture materials came from a book written by SOMEONE ELSE gasp) and the professor presented them so the class is invalid.
I think the key take away is that college is over rated, as you can easily find and create your own course materials on par with (or often better than) what the professors create
Lol no. You absolutely cannot.
You can maybe make it look nicer, but your high school diploma and street cred does not an education make.
The neat thing about it is, if you think this way, it would be impossible to prove to you that you can’t do it yourself just as well. Without DOING it, you just don’t know how much you don’t know compared to a university faculty member. There are people who can go to the library (or Internet) and good will hunting an education, but I can basically guarantee that neither you nor anyone you know or will ever know is one of them.
Exactly. Nobody should care how the professor generates materials for the class, they should only care that the materials are effective and accurate. That’s the professor’s job, and they should be free to use whatever tools they find helpful in producing effective, accurate materials.
Mistakes happen. I found a bunch of errors in my classes, and this was before AI was a thing. The information was accurate, but the presentation was poor.
If I see a representative or senator using ChatGPT, could I demand that he resign from his position?
I’m already asking, no one listens to the people anyway
You could, but you would be pissing in the wind asking.
Isn’t the phrase meant to be “pissing into the wind”?
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Why do people not review their LLMs output?
Well of course I do.
…Gemini, review this ChatGPT paragraph
This is unironically a technique for catching LLM errors and also for speeding up generation.
For example in speculative decoding or mixture of experts architectures these kind of setups are used.
I had professor usi g worksheets watermarked by another professor at a college in another state, y’all think anything came of it? He also gave us all the answers to the tests in the form of self graded quizes and let us take them into tests.
HS diplomas became a joke, degrees are becoming a joke…
As someone who was a TA a bit, I think that is 99% because if schools tried to hold students accountable to the standards of even ten years ago they would have to fail 2/3rds of their students.
Highschool becoming a joke means none of the kids have strong enough core skills to be tackling real college work by the time they get there, but schools cant afford to enforce actual quality standards for work. The graded model has completely fallen apart at this point given how steep the curve is. The quality of work that gets an A today would have been a B or high C from 10-15 years ago. Of course there is real A grade work being done too, but what defines an A grade has ballooned to a ridiculous degree such that most of it is not really A grade work
The problem isnt new, it was already bad 10 years ago to be honest. I had a professor in community college about 10 years ago who had been a professor at ASU, and she had quit teaching there specifically because the university wouldnt allow anyone to be graded below a C, regardless of if they did any work or not.
Most large public universities are just degree mills at this point, or bordering on it if not
You say that but I’ve had two classes this semester with an 70%+ fail rate. One of them probably needs addressed in the sense the professor was ass, but one was just straight up hard. They gave no fucks about failing over half the class. The pre-req for that class also had a 60% failure rate (based on who I see repeating it).
I don’t doubt some universities are degree mills, and ASU has always been known as a party school, but I assure you it’s not as widespread as some would believe based on my experiences at 3 universities.
That being said, the quality of student certainly seems to have dropped.
yeah, which is why where you get your degree sometimes matters but with all the standization, strictly speaking a AAEE-T from a shitty school counts just as much as any other school, even if the quality isn’t there.
Was your grade exclusively based on the tests and quizzes? That’s the only part that’s questionable here.
Every prof need not write their own unique materials, rather they need to teach you the target material using whatever resources best suit that purpose.
Most of the grade was on the tests, I think 70% then like 30% on the “Lab” portion…which was basically attedance and if you turned something in, he didn’t check for accuracy. One of the worst professor at this college.
I’m currently doing an online Master’s with Northeastern. Honestly not surprised this happened, the quality of classes is WILD.
Taking 2 classes per term, and each term so far 1 class has been very well designed but also insanely easy, while the other has been so poorly implemented that the course learning materials don’t actually help you do the coursework.
Probably most astonishing so far though is a course I’m taking now just served me with the literally exact same assignment that I did for a course I just finished. Now, granted that both classes are from the elective course choices, so not everyone will take both, but come on… and they grill me about plagiarism with every submission I make…
I reuse assignments between similar classes, because maybe those classes share a learning objective and that assignment is just gangbusters.
In cases where students take both (which, we actively discourage because of the similarity of courses), I have my team require the students, for example, use a different person as their subjects for the two assignments.
This assignment is literally a fill in the blanks to complete a set of code to make it produce values expected by the assignment.
