spring semester planning

 me writing my syllabi for January, having to include ever stricter statements about how using AI generators to write your papers is merely sparkling plagiarism:

Also there's a Metafilter thread on it where basically they say "if you use an AI detector you're a cop and we all hate cops" and I don't know what they EXPECT of professors. I don't want a student to fake their way into a job and then prove themselves incompetent (or worse: have that come out after someone has died or something) because that reflects back on the department, even beyond the human cost)

I don't know any more, guys. My desire to think of people as "basically good" is in conflict with my experience of "almost everyone will lie and cheat and scam if they think it will benefit them and they're likely to get away with it."

I don't know how we fix this short of going to blue books for all essays. Which poses several problems:

- There's a generational break in this. I did some blue-book essays when I was in high school but I went to a somewhat-traditionalist prep school, and I'm also in my fifties. I don't think most of our college students here have even SEEN a blue book

- Blue book essays take TIME. It is one thing with a captive audience of largely-boarding-school students who can be sat in a room from 2 to 5 pm and told to write. Our students are overscheduled and outside of the 50 minute classes or 1 hour and 50 minute labs, we can't guarantee they can be on campus, and it makes me despair to think of having to schedule even a dozen students for different three hour blocks where I could proctor

- Even outside of that, there are some folks whose handwriting is difficult enough to read that I wouldn't want to. (Though I suppose one could solve that with typewriters, or with wordprocessors that won't connect to the internet, and a printer.)

- There'd be massive resistance

- And beyond that: the sort of research based stuff in the sciences can't be done in 3 hours. I mean, I suppose you could give people a couple weeks to prepare reading notes over their topic, and then check going in to be sure they don't have a finished paper in there they're just going to transcribe, but.

I don't know. I try telling folks that those generative models are no better than the worst wrongest stuff on the internet (they are full of mistakes and they invent references) but like many things, people do not believe it. 

The evolutionary arms race in re: cheating is exhausting. And yes, say what you will, I think having a machine do the thinking for you in this case - instead of learning material, synthesizing the ideas, and trying to express them in a coherent way - is cheating. Oh, it's not GOOD cheating, most of us can now smell an AI paper a mile off (but we still need proof), but there ARE enough faculty who are either burned out enough or who have swallowed the camel that "this is the future" wholesale and they LET students do it. And with ALL these things, it's a "but my other professors...." and while in many cases that's a lie, still, the fact that apparently on SOME campuses they do let people write papers with AI.....well, it makes it harder for us to fight it, or at least, it makes people's response to us saying no more incredulous. 

I don't know. I'm just tired and still kind of despairing of having enough time to finish everything before I have to leave on Sunday.