Discussion
The use of #genAI amongst my Masters students has increased a lot since last year, to the extent that about half of the dissertations are essentially elaborate fabrications purporting to discuss individual work, rather than discussions of individual work.
I mean that they discuss design decisions etc, but they did not make any: the code and the discussion are mostly genAI.
I still have to mark them but it feel like an utter waste of time.
@janet It's rather dispiriting. From the student perspective, it is understandable though.
@mplouffe Hopefully the approach to marking will change, and I will definitely push for it, but the university is giving us less and less agency when it comes to such things.
@wim_v12e we're currently redoing the format for all of our assessments up try to more genuinely assess students' actual work. It's dispiriting.
@scroeser I had a viva (oral exam) with each student and that works very well. Some of them did still write most if not all code by hand. But even those students use genAI for writing the dissertation, and it is so very different from what they would write without it.
I will push for giving much more weight to the viva.
But I am so fed up with this. And worst of all, most colleagues actually believe that using genAI is a good thing when they do it themselves.
@wim_v12e @scroeser Why can't you ban AI use? It's the student's that should be writing their reports/code after all? You're not supposed to grade the output of an amorphous blob that exists half-way around the world. This is all so stupid. How did "not doing the work" become a fair improvement over "doing the work". Before this, this behavior was considered cheating and would get you relegated?!
The university policy allows use of genAI and no single department can go against it even if they wanted to (they don't even want to). As individual academic I have even less leeway. If I ban it, the students will appeal and win.
It is in practice impossible to prove that the student used genAI in a way that contravenes the university policy, except through oral examination. But with our current rules, 90% of the marks for the final year project are on the written report.
@gustav @wim_v12e I can't ban things unless I have the ability to enforce a ban.
I can change assessment formats so that GenAI can't be used (eg. in-person exams).
I can put students whose assessments have citations that don't properly match sources through our academic integrity process on the basis that this is "falsifying data". This is a common sign that GenAI is used, but it's bad practice no matter the cause.
But I have no way of reliably and definitively telling if a student has used GenAI in a take-home essay, so I can't ban it.
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