Tag Archives: ai

Education, Grades

Misreading What’s Wrong with College: Social Media Edition

[Header Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash]

Social media is all atwitter over two compelling stories about colleges and universities in the US.

First, is the politically charged controversy over a student receiving a zero on an essay assignment at the University of Oklahoma:

Second is concern over the significant increase in students with accommodations in higher education:

While both stories are provocative and likely raise important concerns about what is wrong with colleges and universities in the US, most people are misreading where the problems lie.

I have been a teacher and then professor for 42 years, the last 24 years in higher education.

In that context, I want to stress that I believe both situations offer an opportunity to address the systemic problems with our society and how we do education. Regretfully but predictably, in both stories, most of the commentary is focused on the individuals instead of systemic forces.

Let me start with the student receiving a zero for the essay assignment.

Coincidentally, when this story broke, many of my students were experiencing feedback from me on their major essay assignment, a message that informed them they had not completed the project as assigned.

Since the Oklahoma student’s essay and the assignment rubric have been made public (and should not have been, in my opinion), I am very comfortable with the instructor’s very measured and detailed response acknowledging that, in a very clear way, the student had not fulfilled the assignment. [1]

Here is the issue, however.

Because the instructor and student are bound by a traditional grading system, the zero is completely justifiable, as are other arguments for less harsh but still failing scores for the work.

In no way is the essay acceptable or passing college-level work.

I am a non-grader, and my students work under a course grade contract. Students must complete all assignments fully (and preferably on time); therefore, a zero is not a real option.

When my students fail to complete an assignment as assigned, they are prompted with feedback and conferencing to revise and resubmit the assignment.

I work under the belief that if an assignment is worth assigning, then a student choosing not to complete it or a teacher simply assigning the work a zero or failing grade deems the assignment not worth assigning in the first place.

The shift I make in an un-graded classroom is that my assignments are teaching and learning experiences, and not assessments (the assessment component is moved to the contract).

Therefore, in the traditional grading context of the Oklahoma incident, the zero is valid; but I think that traditional context is the problem—not the instructor or the student (even as I doubt the sincerity of the student and those fanning the flames of blaming the instructor).

If that student had been prompted to resubmit with guidance on why she had not fulfilled the assignment, no one would have ever heard of the incident—and she likely would have learned and grown in ways that a zero ended. (Or more likely, her ploy to trap the instructor would have fallen short.)

Next, the issue about the rise in students with accommodations in higher ed also resonates with me because when I moved to college teaching in 2002, I immediately noticed what I thought then was a high number of students with accommodation plans.

I did not think these were frivolous, but I did attribute much of that to the students being affluent and having access to mental health care that identified and supported real needs.

The current concern about high numbers of students with accommodations, I think, fits into a larger belief that “kids today” are frail or weak—or frailer and weaker than they used to be (a ridiculous belief that exists at every “now” in the US stretching back more than a century).

Similar to the popular misunderstanding about autism, the higher number of students with academic accommodations is likely the result of better definitions and diagnoses of these needs along with current college students having lived through incredibly precarious experiences, including Covid.

Higher numbers of students with accommodations is not a problem but a symptom of a very harsh American culture that is replicated in the high-stakes environments of K-12 schooling.

Most of these students are not frail; they are damaged or broken by a hostile society and a dehumanized education system.

These growing numbers of students with accommodations are our canaries in the coalmine.

When students have accommodations or not in my courses, however, I typically never notice and there is never an issue because the way the course works is itself accommodating to all students.

This again is grounded in not grading, not giving tests, and shifting the course toward teaching/learning and away from punishment/rewards.

The student receiving a zero is not a lesson about that instructor or that student, but about our culture of grading in education.

Rising numbers of students with accommodations in our colleges and universities is not a lesson on the weakening of America’s youth, but a signal about the often harsh and hostile environments of those young people’s lives and, yes, their formal schooling.

These are lessons Americans typically refuse to see, and with that negligence, we insure even greater harm and more evidence of failure and frailty that we, in fact, created.

[1] Early in my career teaching in a very conservative right-to-work state, I did not accept a student essay that argued against interracial marriage, a position common in my Southern community and that I found deeply offensive. The student used no evidence in the essay, not fulfilling the minimum requirements for accepting the submission (students were writing evidence-based and cited persuasive essays). The process was, even then, that the student simply needed to resubmit, meeting the requirements. The student quickly resubmitted, adding the sentence “It’s in the Bible.” I again did not accept the submission, explaining he had not provided evidence, and that if, in fact, that was in the Bible, he merely had to quote and cite the passage(s) supporting his position.

Several days passed before I was contacted by administration that the student and his father wanted a conference, which my principal attended. At the conference, the father explained that he and his son had gone to their pastor, who was unable to locate a passage in the Bible to support his argument (because that doesn’t exist, by the way; the often misapplied Old Testament passage they were likely seeking is about no marriage between different tribes). I very patiently stated that the assignment required students write an argument that can be supported by evidence and that the evidence had to be cited. After a pause, my principal said, “Well, looks like your son needs a different topic.”

ai, ChatGPT, Education, plagiarism, Writing

Did You Write This?: Or Why You Can’t Spell “Plagiarism” without “AI”

[Header Photo by Lauren Mancke on Unsplash]

“Did you write this?” I once asked a sophomore in my advanced English class. The student was one of three siblings I would teach, and their mother was a colleague of mine in our English department.

With students and my own daughter, I have asked questions like that one often, and I always knew the answer. The question was an opportunity for the student to confront what I already knew.

This student, you see, had turned in a cited essay that her older sister had turned in just a few years earlier. I had the paper in my files, and since I immediately recognized it, I had the copy with her sister’s name on the cover page waiting for her reply.

English and writing teachers especially, but all teachers are constantly seeking ways to insure students do their own work.

As long as there have been students, teachers, and formal schooling, however, students have sought ways to pass off writing and reading that they, in fact, had not done.

This student cold-face lied, and I handed her the paper by her sister.

Something like that has occurred several times over my forty-plus years of teaching.

A non-traditional aged woman in a night composition class for a local junior college became enraged when I asked her “Did you write this?”

I had been reading her writing for several weeks, and this essay she submitted wasn’t her work. There was no doubt and no need to prove it.

She became loud and angry, steadfast in her claim the writing was hers. After that night, I never saw her again.

Several years ago in my first-year writing seminar, a basketball player submitted a teammate’s essay from a few semesters earlier. The essay rang a bell, and after a search on my laptop, I found the original essay on my hard drive.

Plagiarism and passing off other people’s work as their own have not been rampant throughout my career, in part because I have implemented reading and writing workshop in courses. Students have been reading and writing in front of me for decades.

Lots of cheating can been avoided by daylight and surveillance.

Part of the workshop approach, as well, stresses for students that the reading and writing processes are acts of learning; further, the emphasis on process helps lessen the importance of the product as a mechanism for acquiring a grade.

“It ought to be unnecessary to say that writing is learned by writing; unfortunately there is need,” wrote Lou LaBrant in 1953. LaBrant then continued and this may sound familiar:

Again and again teachers or schools are accused of failing to teach students to write decent English, and again and again investigations show that students have been taught about punctuation, the function of a paragraph, parts of speech, selection of “vivid” words, spelling—that students have done everything but the writing of many complete papers. Again and again college freshmen report that never in either high school or grammar school have they been asked to select a topic for writing, and write their own ideas about that subject. Some have been given topics for writing; others have been asked to summarize what someone else has said; numbers have been given work on revising sentences, filling in blanks, punctuating sentences, and analyzing what others have written….Knowing facts about language does not necessarily result in ability to use it. (p. 417)

Over the seventy-plus years since LaBrant’s article, students have written original texts far too rarely; in fact, as writers and students in general, students sit in classrooms where the teacher does much of the work the student should be doing as part of learning.

Writing prompts and rubrics have done far more harm to students as writers than any technology work around, but technology has also joined in the fun over those eight decades.

ChatGPT and other forms of AI are the current miracle/crisis forms of technology in education. Seemingly, many people in education, surprisingly, are jumping on the AI bandwagon, much like the coding wave and cellphone bans.

You see, we are trapped in a love/hate binary with technology in education that too often isn’t based in evidence.

Tech and AI products like Grammarly and Turnitin.com have ridden high waves of use despite both products, to be blunt, just being very poor quality. Grammarly gives really bad writing advice, and Turnitin.com is less effective detecting plagiarism than a simple (and free) Google search.

The broader technology problem in education, which parallels the AI problem, is that technology in education is often like a microwave; something can be completed quicker but the product is either hard to stomach or simply ruined.

A recent study, in fact, shows that students using AI to draft tend to produce very similar texts that are shallow at best. Further, students who use AI to compose struggle to recall any of their writing.

Why? Let’s invoke LaBrant again: Writing is learned by writing.

Better worded, we should think of “writing” as composing. Composing is the art of simultaneously creating meaning, developing understanding, and drafting communication in words, sentences, and paragraphs.

AI generating functional text in some real-world contexts may be a time saver, a net positive. But for students, scholars, and writers, using AI at any point of the composing process is a new form of plagiarism.

Let me be clear, this is about the composing process because AI has long been useful for surface editing; grammar and spell check is not cheating, and AI can relieve the writer some of the burden of editing (a role humans often play for other people in the world of writing an publishing).

Maybe AI will prove valuable in many ways for humans, but AI that does for students the very behaviors students must perform to learn is never justified—just as teachers doing the work for students has never been justified.

“As citizens we need to be able to write and to understand the importance and difficulty of being honest and clear. We will learn to do this by doing it,” LaBrant offers bluntly.

“Did you write this?” is an enduring question between teacher and student.

In 2025, using AI is just as damning as putting your name on your sister’s essay before turning it in as your own.

So that’s why you cannot spell “plagiarism” without “AI.”

ChatGPT, Education, Writing

Recommended: Your Brain on ChatGPT

[Header Photo by Levart_Photographer on Unsplash]

Recently, advocacy for educators to fully embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a key part of how students learn has increased.

Ohio State University, for example, will now require AI training for students.

As a literacy educator for over 40 years, specifically as a teacher of writing, I have stated a solid “no AI” policy both in my courses and as a public stance.

While I am certainly not anti-technology, I am a technology skeptic and have acknowledged that popular technology used in education tends to be quite bad—for example, Turnitin.com.

My core reason for a “no AI” policy in my courses, specifically my writing courses, is that AI such as ChatGPT tends to do for students the very behaviors they need to be practicing in order to learn.

As a comparison, I have a “no AI” policy for the same reason I reject rubrics and writing prompts for teaching writing since rubrics and prompts, again, are making decisions for students that they need to be making as developing writers.

I recommend, then, a new analysis of ChatGPT: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.

Here are key findings that support my “no AI” policy:

I want to stress that my experience with students is that they often either fail to use useful technology (such as the grammar and spelling check in Word) or they are quite bad at using technology, despite being seen as technology natives.

That students need help in formal education with being better at using technology is a given, but it is not a contradiction to acknowledge that some technology is counter-educational; and that is the case with AI/ChatGPT.

Recommended

CAUTION: Technology!

ChatGPT and a New Battle in the Citation Gauntlet for Students and Teachers

Technology Fails Plagiarism, Citation Tests

It’s the End of Writing as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

The Training Wheel Fallacy for Teaching Writing

More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, John Warner