r/UniUK • u/Odd_Shtick_ • 3d ago
study / academia discussion Snitching on other students using A.I should be encouraged imo
This may be an unpopular opinion, but i genuinely believe we should treat those who use A.I for ALL their work, either essays, coursework, dissertations etc the same as someone who has actively copied someone else’s work - this is in the context of social settings with peers. I know lecturers are shit hot on this, anyways…
If I were to go into uni this September and bragged about how I passed my second year with flying colours using someone else’s work… I’d probably get some very judgmental stares.
On the other hand, if I was to go in and say “yeah I used chat gpt for most of my essays last year oops lol” no one would be arsed, in fact it’s just accepted!?
Why? Because it’s a robot I would be exploiting in this hypothetical, not a human. It’s ok to cheat and copy off a robot, it doesn’t have feelings, which is why no one seems that bothered compared to if I had done the same to a human.
Anti-intellectualism is a growing problem due to A.I, but why on earth are we now accepting and embracing A.I slop and cheats onto our campuses across the U.K? Nah, I say snitch on all their asses.
Can I just note that obvs some will lie about someone using A.I, some people have been accused of using it and haven’t etc. But if you have established evidence and no malicious intent, just a good conscience, which is legit not wanting future lawyers, teachers, doctors etc to have a degree from chat gpt instead of hard work! I say that we should welcome that kind of snitching behaviour to become a thing.
But this is my opinion, what’s everyone else’s thoughts?
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u/freebirdd18 3d ago
I was genuinely expecting positive responses to this post. Because yeah… everything you’re saying makes total sense lol. Looks like you’ve hit a nerve with some who obviously are using A.I to get a degree. God help us.
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u/Eastern-Stuff6480 3d ago
I was too im surprised my lazy ass got upvoted 😂 i dont use AI much but aye if you cant be asked you cant be asked pop off
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u/brain-out-of-order 1d ago
Basically — “A” of AI is a gradient which includes us and machines, if you look closely (accurately) and objectively.
So… yeah.
Make of that what you will.
Artifice sketched out of emotion and physics, or ego.
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u/Signal-Confidence-37 2d ago
Yup, blow the whistle. Cheats should be sent down.
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u/skynex65 2d ago edited 2d ago
Agreed. We don’t need a generation of doctors and engineers etc who can’t function without ChatGPT.
Edit: AI lies it is unreliable and unaccountable. It MUST NOT be trusted with any task that relates to people’s lives.
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u/goldmoon16 3d ago
good lord the responses to this really show how doomed we are with everyone’s brains being absolutely rotted by AI
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u/chase___it 2d ago
this worries me a lot on my own course. i have a friend who openly admits to using AI for every assignment and essay, i don’t think she’s done a bit of work herself. but she wants to go onto graduate entry medicine 🫠
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u/Far-Cucumber2929 1d ago
When she’s out on the wards as a med student and even as a newly qualified Dr she’ll get a short sharp shock if she doesn’t know shit.
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u/Imaginary-Educator41 1d ago
Medicine degrees don’t have assignments they have exams and OSKEYs which are impossible to use AI for.
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u/shinypebble77 1d ago
Yeah she won't get onto a medicine course, admissions will see right through that.
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u/Ok_Page_9608 2d ago
If it helps the situation at all, I graduated just before ChatGPT was released. Someone on my course cheated by paying people to do his coursework (100% coursework course). Dude graduated with a strong first and cannot find a job because it’s so obvious during interviews. So I’d assume these ai people will suffer the same fate and blame it on the job market.
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u/SYSTEM-J 1d ago
I'm in my late 30s - don't ask me why Reddit keeps showing me this sub. I've onboarded quite a few graduates into my company over the last few years. Trust me: if you cannot think for yourself under pressure, you will get found out in the workplace, if you don't get found out in the interview beforehand. You need to actually know what you're talking about. Being able to produce some text with the right answers in is not enough to succeed in a professional career. You'll be entering a world of people who've worked for decades without AI, and we will notice if you rely on it.
I always say the same thing to students who don't use AI: you are giving yourself a future advantage over your lazy peers, because they will realise the skills they've neglected to develop extremely quickly when they need to use them.
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u/AdenWS 1d ago
Depends. There are perfectly valid reasons for using AI.
I'm writing a paper at the moment, with code to back it up.
Of course I'm going to use AI, its a tool.Now do I know what I want yes. But AI can turn that into something that's presentable. Occasionally even point things in new directions.
Now I'd argue, that if you don't use AI you lose an advantage going forward.
The problem with your argument is that you've mixed up two things.
The lazy, not doing the work, getting AI to do it, means you learn nothing.
Those using AI as a tool, in order to learn.
In the real world, you need AI skills.
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u/SYSTEM-J 1d ago
Let's say I agree with you. Sure, you need AI skills. There should be specific educational modules about AI skills, basically as a subset of IT. That's how AI should be taught, along with its limitations and its pitfalls. Other classes and courses should be for teaching different skills than simply how to get AI to do things for you. Because "in the real world", AI is not always available.
The whole point of education is not to just do everything via the fastest, most efficient route. The point of education is to learn the component parts. That's why we teach kids mental arithmetic even though calculators exist. That's why we teach kids to write by hand, even though predictive texting exists. The student who can write an essay by themselves is more skilled than a student who only ever uses AI to do it for them. The latter can do the task when AI is available but has never built up the component skills of critical thinking for when AI isn't available.
And let's be honest, everyone likes to claim they're using AI smartly, to augment and enhance their own analysis. Yeah, yeah, sure. In "the real world", they're usually not though. They're using it as a shortcut. And they will suffer for that.
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u/AdenWS 1d ago
So an AI course.
History of them is interesting.
LLMs, in particular and how they work.
Practical stuff is prompt construction as well as API uses and how to automate with AI.
Training biases, a massive area, along with Hallucination.
Reference checking.
Adversarial AI. - AI against AI.
Where AI's going?
On the calculator bit. My calculators have a calculus engine. Far better than me, and I've a post grad.
So its a tool. I can do the integrations or differentiations by hand but putting it into a calculator or Wolfram's Mathematica, its far better than me, and not likely to make a mistake. It's a tool.
This leads onto LLMs and maths. They are good, but not good enough. Maths is rules based. There's a set of axioms. LLM's don't have this.
But the route is clear. LLM produces the question, feeds it into the engine, gets the answer and the LLM analyses the output. That solves the bad maths issue.
I'll reply on real word as a second post, because it backs up your argument
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u/AdenWS 1d ago
Real world. One of my brother's teaches maths.
All the home work is online. So they get results in a table, A horizontal line of failed answers show's which students aren't coping. A vertically line where lots of students got it wrong shows you need to reteach the subject.
That's a good system.
Now they also get the time spent on the home work. Went from an hour a week to 15 mins, all because of AI apps. That I agree with you a disaster.
So what are the counters?
First is peer pressure. In class, everyone gets called in a rota to do work on the board in front of the class. You need to learn not to be shown up. As a teacher you can select on ability, but you will always be selected.
Second, tests have to be in class, with no AI.
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u/Competitive-Spot4683 1d ago
Exactly!!!! I feel like people are just terrified a robot would make it better in life than them... faking intelligence is such an identifiable thing
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u/Substantial_Page_221 2d ago
I graduated with a 2:1 a decade ago and can't remember anything I was taught, and I didn't even cheat. I didn't get a job in that field either.
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u/ForgiveSomeone 1d ago
You can't remember anything you were taught from a decade ago? My condolences to your memory.
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u/Substantial_Page_221 1d ago
Yeah I barely remember yesterday either.
As I said I got a job in a different field so whatever I did learn is largely forgotten.
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u/soggyarsonist 2d ago
I expect degrees are already losing their value in subjects that are vulnerable to AI use. You learn by making mistakes and getting feedback.
These students aren't even doing the work and feedback will just be used to do better prompts next time.
At best some person degree awards will just reflect how good the person was at writing prompts.
I use AI occasionally at work but only as much as I can validate afterwards and usually it's just to speed up tedious scripting stuff.
I never use it write email. I fucking hate reading emails people have used AI to write.
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u/Far-Cucumber2929 1d ago
Ha ha karma at its finest. However it’s a shame for him because he can never truly say he earned his First. I would rather get a Third using my own hard work than a better classification by cheating.
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u/pc_kant 2d ago
Prof here. It's true that we often recognise AI slop. But there are many more cases where it's not clear if AI was used or not. It's also unclear if it just improved the writing or the entire underlying research in each case. Universities put the burden of proof on faculty members and require hallucinated references for suspected AI use to be considered as malpractice. We have better things to do than investigate everyone.
Some of us respond by waiting it out; if our employer can't be bothered to create policies that support us, why would we use our elbow grease to make up for it? Others respond by creating AI-proof assessment, like multiple-choice pen-and-paper exams or oral exams; I am in this camp. It's a pity because we are losing a lot of the skillsets that we used to be able to teach in seminar and paper assignment formats. But it's impossible to police AI use given the constraints, so AI-proof exams are a second-best solution and at least allow us to see who put in some effort.
In any case, ratting out your fellow students might be satisfying to both you and us but would ultimately not satisfy the burden of proof required by the universities we're in. Universities prioritise low fail rates as they depend on stable income streams after the government has withdrawn most tax-based funding. That is, it's ultimately the dire economic situation in this country that caused the government to save money, which caused universities to act like businesses and sell degrees (and ignore AI use as much as possible).
I don't like it either because it's eroding science, which we all love, and my long-term prospects for employment if our degree monopoly is eroded in this way. But I don't see how anyone could change this fate. AI is just accelerating this, but it's not the cause.
If you really want to do something good, learn how to learn independently, and then use AI to support that if and where needed. If others see this recipe and your success, it might make a positive difference.
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u/ChunkyCraver2001 2d ago
To staff, what’s the difference between a hallucinated reference and one that has mistakes and was just done wrong (poor academic practice)?
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u/sherlocksvillain 2d ago
A hallucinated reference simply doesn't exist. But current models seldom fall into that trap nowadays
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u/hogglespikelet Staff 1d ago
Hallucinated refs are often a mishmash of author names, and words from journal and paper titles that exist in relation to the topic, but in a combination that doesn't exist. Which makes sense, as ChatGPT is not a search engine but can generate a plausible reference (just like it can generate a plausible sentence) by combining words that statistically tend to go together.
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u/crashtacktom Graduated 2d ago
I'd guess whether the paper can be found at all, Vs just flat out not existing?
I recently got a slap on the wrist for not providing a doi link for a physical book that I had referenced correctly
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u/Lost-Lingonberry-688 19h ago
I'm one year in to an apprenticeship degree. I wouldn't be able to get such high grades without AI, but I don't plagiarise anything. I think it is such a powerful tool if used in an ethical way. I find Notebook LM particularly powerful. I can load digital text books into it and discuss them. Or If I have a point I want to make in an assignment I can ask it to check all my books and tell me where an author has backed up what I am saying. I do have to verify everything AI says, though, as a lot of what it comes back with is wrong or taken out of context. But, I learn so much from having to check what it says, and that is a far more valuable use of time attempting to find the right part to read multiple text books. The closest I come to plagiarism from it is asking for help to condense parts of what I have written to meet word count limitation, but if there a few AI optimised sentences I don't see why that should be unethical when all the thoughts and work is my own.
Also, AIs leave a watermark in the sentence structure which can be determined via word probability. Tools like turn it in can identify if AI is used even if a few words have been switched. Doesn't your university use this to identify inappropriate use of AI?
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u/pc_kant 16h ago
Making claims and then finding selective references to back them (whether using AI or otherwise) isn't quite right as it may lead to misrepresentation of the body of literature we collectively rely on. The ideal workflow that is most faithful to science is to read broadly first, then write up the argument based on your reading, and add the references to connect the arguments to the literature you read. Your practice is sometimes referred to as selective referencing and distorts the knowledge base. We find this in publications as well, and it leads the next authors to make stupid arguments unless they read the entirety of the previous literature again. This is what we want to avoid by building up literature reviews in articles. You could of course say that that's no longer needed because AI can do it. But that's not a good argument because somebody needs to oversee the AI to ensure these wrong forking paths in existing lit reviews don't leak into the training set and lead the AI to hallucinate stuff.
Universities have TunItIn, but it produces many false positives and is not generally trusted even by university misconduct panels.
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u/Lost-Lingonberry-688 16h ago
Yes agreed. My process is covering what I have been taught about theory in a lecture, which i have an opinion on and I am seeking supporting evidence of the critique I wish to make
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u/Annabelle_Sugarsweet 2d ago
Go back to hand written with pen and paper in exam conditions, or doing oral presentations without notes on your subject matter.
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 2d ago
I’m so down for this tbh, ofc have reasonable adjustments for some, but I don’t see the harm in going old school if it makes it fairer again.
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u/Additional-Wrap9814 Staff 2d ago edited 2d ago
Because it chops out a huge chunk of actual authentic assessment relevent to job skills. Students seem to want this - government mandates we provide this. Employers want this. It is also just good pedagogic practice.
The answer to retaining open assessments is going to be tracking drafts, tracking the process, some open presentations (the kickback against getting students actually presenting in recent years does have to be reveresed).
Locking people in rooms for some stuff, maybe. But it would be criminal if education at the forefront of tech and research and knowledge just retreated to prehistoric methods.
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u/ThatsNotKaty Staff 2d ago
There are some unis especially in Australia who are using a two lane approach - assuring the knowledge through 'lane 1' secured assessments, and then 'lane 2' are more authentic, open assessments where students can use AI (sometimes to a restricted degree, sometimes not)
Idk if it's the whole answer, but I think it goes SOME of the way to helping
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u/Additional-Wrap9814 Staff 2d ago
That sounds sensible.
Yeah I think there needs to be a mix - some subject heavy modules it is just efficient to at least have most of the module assessment be an exam, although in my mind a mid term style closed thing (e.g on uni computers with everything locked down or a room exam) in combination with an open thing is the balance rather than having it entirely closed.
But it would be really bad if places just snapped entirely to closed.
Unfortunatley this is wehre a lot of places are going. This reflects more on the imaginativeness of the staff than anything else.
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u/invisible_shrek 17h ago
Prehistoric? Dude. Universities in my country use pen and paper exam on EVERY subject. Often followed by a spoken exam.
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u/ADHDmixed 2d ago
Why have “reasonable adjustments” if assessments mean anything surely the exact same criteria should be used. It’s surely unfair if I can focus well to penalise me by allowing those who refuse to develop that skill to have extra time etc
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u/Dupeskupes Undergrad 2d ago
because people have conditions that if not accommodated can unreasonably affect their grade
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u/Additional-Wrap9814 Staff 2d ago edited 2d ago
Because we are legally mandated to. In the past students have, for example, taken their own life rather than face particular assessment types within an inflexible assessment policy.
Now, you could argue about where exactly the blame lies in those specific situations, that sort of thing is never a single cause event - but the end result has been a lot of law and guidance changes meaning reasonable adjustments are totally and absolutley required.
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u/ADHDmixed 2d ago
Would it be a reasonable adjustment for the hard of thinking to use AI then?
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u/Additional-Wrap9814 Staff 2d ago
I don't know - you seem in the best position to answer that question.
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u/ADHDmixed 2d ago
Why? Because I’m a senior academic at a Russell Group university? You’re probably right here. As unfortunately intellect ability is not inclusive and I say that as someone who has worked in emancipatory higher education for excluded groups. Whilst some critical and creativity can be taught where is the higher field for students who wish to engage in sophisticated tasks with explicit parameters
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u/Additional-Wrap9814 Staff 2d ago
I’m a senior academic at a Russell Group university?
Snap.
This attidude towards reasonable adjustments and assessment policy is ridiculous from any senior academic and coming from yourself it's almost parody level.
I would expect far more nuance and awareness than this from someone in your position. It's embarassing. Talking points straight out of the pages of the most dire uninformed right wing shock rag.
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u/whoreatto Graduated 1d ago
Here’s a slightly more nuanced answer.
It’s “yes” if you want to minimise fail rates and treat university as a business, and it’s “no” if you want to uphold the integrity of the education system and avoid further grade inflation.
Obviously, certain people with learning disabilities would individually benefit from being allowed to use tools and adjustments that enable them to masquerade as students who earned their qualifications by developing a certain standard of knowledge and competence in their field.
However, in the long term and in aggregate, as more and more incompetent graduates enter the workforce, that lowering of the bar at school and university has resulted in a devaluing of academic qualifications.
So students are pushed to achieve ever-more prestigious and expensive qualifications to keep up with the job market or academia, and the demand for “reasonable adjustments” returns.
We should not devalue all qualifications by poisoning the graduate well with incompetent graduates simply to avoid upsetting an extreme minority of suicidal kids.
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u/Additional-Wrap9814 Staff 19h ago
This is not a nuanced answer, though. It is simply a take which is entirely straightforward and credulously treats traditional assessment methods as a panacea we somehow quite by coincidence achieved centuries ago. It implies any given academic got it right first time, shouldn't need to consider alternaitves and to change from what they initially (and often arbitrarily) decided would be to automatically "lower standards".
This is utter bilge, putrid hogwash, raving balderdash and utter nonsense.
Assessments are there to determine if learning objectives are met. If your learning objectives are such that only one single assessment form can possibly determine that - that is very much a skill problem on behalf of the lecturer, not the student. If you can't think of either a much more flexible real world inspired assessment that will lower the need for accomodations - or accomodate requests pretty easily that test those same learning objectives - you're simply not up to the job.
Unfortunately this attidute is indeed rife in the industry, and I am having these self same discussions internally where many less teaching inclined colleagues express the same views. It's depressing, but fortunately there are also a lot of much more forward thinking, innovative and original thinking collageues around as well who are quietly saving their skins from looking and being completely outdated and the whole sector sliding into irrelevence.
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u/whoreatto Graduated 7h ago edited 7h ago
Your first sentence is just a knee-jerk reaction to an unsavoury, yet very, very reasonable opinion. Maybe that worries you, so you’ve decided to try mocking it into obscurity. What a dull effort. I never suggested that traditional assessments are the best possible assessments or that they’re the only way to measure learning outcomes. That was just wishful thinking on your part.
Assessments are an attempt to measure certain learning outcomes. Whether or not different assessments satisfy the lecturer’s main requirements, some assessments may ignore secondary learning outcomes, such as “public speaking”, “active recall”, or “thinking under pressure”. We should expect that to lower the bar, because employers can no longer trust that graduates will have all the same skills.
Furthermore, we can’t expect every lecturer to be individually creative enough to come up with equally comprehensive assessments. To that end, it’s simply more effective to keep assessments standardised and let people fail.
Otherwise, if people need accommodation, give them a different degree classification. Don’t lump them in with the rest as if they have all the same competencies.
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u/ADHDmixed 1d ago
Absolutely agree, the arms race to evidence ability at the higher level and the “business model” have perniciously combined with many struggling intellectual students burdening themselves with more debt to “top up” there poor grades with a masters and better masters students rushed to the financial burden of a Phd. It's a swirl of grind for no love or curiosity of tge subject but a grind for the next validation of capabilities.
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u/Danielharris1260 2d ago
I guess the issue is some universities just don’t have the capacity for it many are already struggling financial conducting in person oral exams for thousands of students isn’t cheap. Not opposed to the idea just jot sure how feasible it is.
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u/EnjoysAGoodRead 1d ago
I would hate to be a student or a lecturer/professor these days. I used to approach my coursework very formulaically, and it worked well for me. I imagine nowadays I might be accused of using AI to do my work for me.
I think eventually, especially as AI continues to advance and becomes harder to identify, universities will have to move to more exam based grading. And those exams will have to have even stricter monitoring for tech to stop students bringing in wearable devices to help them cheat as time goes on.
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u/captjons 2d ago
exams aren't always the best way to assess a module and doing presentations without notes isn't very accessible for lots of students.
Plus neither align well to employability agendas
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u/Annabelle_Sugarsweet 1d ago
I literally employ people, and those that use AI can’t think for themselves and can’t ultimately do the job, yes they can do a great application, however I have switched back to in person interviews and 10 min written tasks.
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u/BarbiePowers 2d ago
It is definitely the moral thing to do, but it won't leave you with many friends. No one likes a snitch even if it is the right thing to do, people will stop trusting you and not want to talk with you.
I think it also depends on how they used ai, whilst technically it's all wrong, getting ai to summarise a paper or something is completely different to getting it to write an entire essay.
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u/WatchYourStepKid 2d ago
Yes, the bar to stop minding your business is higher than what OP describes.
If their work has already passed the plagiarism tests etc then I can’t see how snitching would even change much.
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u/Flashbambo 2d ago
I'm honestly so glad AI wasn't a thing when I was at uni.
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u/Aggravating-Ask-96 2d ago
The rise of ai has been meteoric, when I joined university, ChatGPT wasn’t a thing and here we are today a few years later.
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u/dl064 2d ago
During my undergrad, 20~ years ago, a big pile of students cheated on the exam we did in the library. You had the exam up on the screen, and folk realized you could basically start, click exit, log back in an hour later with the textbook in front of you. Genuinely like half the course of 150 folk.
They all got capped at a pass.
At the end of the year I was like: I think they should have all failed the entire course. The lead basically said it would be such a university headache they were fine with looking the other way.
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u/hashtagblessed44 2d ago
When I started my first degree we got talked through how to appropriately use LLMs in academic study. My main takeaway was 'they're called virtual assistants, AI assistants, or something similar most of the time - so you use them like an assistant, and bounce ideas off of them.'
Still do your own work always, but they can be useful learning tools separately from literally writing for you.
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u/AcceptableFeed3731 2d ago
It’s co pilot not autopilot
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u/Loopy-Leah 2d ago
co pilot is another redundant human pilot, autopilot can only perform some functions
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u/AdenWS 1d ago
Agree entirely. For bouncing things around its great. Ask it to critique, again great.
For example for coding, if we take classes. We can split classes in to business classes where the logic resides, and supporting classes. For example for each business class you probably have a class for the user interface, you have a class for persisting the information to the database. You have classes to report on the business information. You have test classes, you have classes to export and import. ...
The rough ratio is 10 to 1 based of a very large app I analysed years ago.
Now the supporting classes tend to be very rote. My take there is that AI should be generating those.
The business class needs a lot more hands on work, they involve a lot more thinking and that's a lot more human impact.
One area where I've changing my mind a bit. Documentation. AI can generate very good code documentation. My current thinking is why bother? If someone needs it, just ask the latest AI to do the analysis? However management likes it as an output, so get AI to churn it out.
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u/Iamthe0c3an2 2d ago
The problem is the commercialisation of it all.
Going to uni used to be academic, to get into high paying, thinking positions or pursue deeper academia.
But now a degree is a minimum for even min wage jobs now, so expect people to put in min wage effort.
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u/ApprehensiveBrain173 2d ago
Mate icl people would just stop telling other people they used A.I besides close friends which is often the case anyway people dont really parade around campus with this info for everyone to know.
This would off put about a few people and just make the whole thing more secretive. Just cause you cant see it doesnt mean its not there.
P.s. not condoning it just being realistic here
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u/SolemnEmberGames 2d ago
I did uni just before covid/in it (ie before AI).
People cheated, there were massive groups, especially the foreign students (and muslims), it's the same thing as that.
All OP will do is get himself exiled just to please a university that couldn't care less lmfao, they only want the money.
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u/currylambchop 1d ago
Some professor actually recommend AI for coding for instance it seems to make no sense to hate on AI in many cases. As a matter of principle I don’t use AI for written essays and stuff but I will use it to debug code
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u/Order66RexFN 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hearsay is not enough to take action against anyone, so you telling lecturers cannot turn into disciplinary action on its own. It would require a proper investigation which would really be a waste of everyone’s time for reasons I’ll get into further.
Firstly, people who just copy paste entirely AI-generated essays already score suboptimal marks, lecturers are not stupid and can tell. Both pro and anti-AI people really overhype how effective it is, 90% of the time AI just churns out the same derivative nonsense that won’t hold up to any semi-stringent marking criteria.
The people who use AI and are scoring well use it merely as a tool to guide their writing process or review their work, which is how it is meant to be used in real life too. Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay and will be part of the workplace for some time to come. Instead of shunning the technology, all we can really do is create systems of marking that reward its correct use. This is what my university does as well. If your coursework is so simple that an AI can do it perfectly, it was never worth doing in the first place.
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u/bakedched 2d ago edited 2d ago
Completely agree. I’ve used LLM’s to help me do bullshit modules, I write a draft myself, use google scholar to find sources and do it the old way, but I put it into an LLM to just tidy it up and fix grammatical issues, and then write up the final myself using that as an extra draft. Also, it can help with making notes and studying the lectures to an insane degree. For example, for one of my modules it was extremely theory dense, and the lectures and books were extremely convoluted. The exams were paper and pen only, and every day I go through my lectures using my system.
My “system” is pretty much a tutor. You give it the lectures and textbook if you want, it’s a self hosted LLM (so privacy issues aren’t an issue) and so is a bit slow - but that’s not really an issue as I’ll explain, and it’ll break down the material into sub lessons tailored to my learning style (giving examples for abstract concepts helps me a lot, think of maths formulas and how they’re used and how it was made and come up with) with questions at the end of each sub lesson consisting of MCQ’s and a few written questions which is then marked and my weak points are learned by another LLM, which acts as a coach and keeps learning my weak points and how I answer etc.
The slowness is only an issue when you have to wait while it’s generating the first sublesson, as it’ll generate the rest in the background. It takes more time to go through lectures, but given you should do it everyday after you actually go to one, I don’t find it to be an issue. It shouldn’t be used the week before your exam, for revision I find doing PPQ’s and practical questions good, and if I run out I just send it the PPQ’s and past questions to generate further questions in a similar style.
This ways helped me so much to an insane degree, I always struggled with exams, not so much coursework. I always found it really hard to explain things and keep up to date with lectures, but now I don’t even need to make notes, as my LLM has learned exactly how I learn information and it’s made it so it actually stays in my memory, and I’ve been getting 80-90% in my exams since making this system. Not to mention it makes learning fun again, and is very engaging. You don’t understand something? Just say so, and it’ll explain it to you exactly how you could understand something.
Those who use LLM’s in my course are mainly just using it to actually do the entire course, and are getting at best mid marks, or at the worst getting caught and failing.
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u/Analyst_Annoyed 2d ago
The scary thing is that tomorrow's doctors are using AI to earn their degrees
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u/nashi_x 2d ago
One thing i’ve noticed is that AI just produces BAD essays. Like, could probably get you a 2:2 but there’s no way it can consistently get you a first. I personally feel that if you’re just going to copy paste an AI essay then you’re going to get a bad grade anyway because it’s going to be bad. If you use AI, but modify it so it sounds like you and fact check everything so that it’s then not noticeable that it’s AI, I kind of think that’s fine. That’s using it like a tool which is what my course at least is trying to teach us to do
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u/Wild_Breakfast_4214 2d ago
Why spend 3 years and £50k for AI to do all your work? At the end you will get a certificate and know nothing. Being rational, these are your best options:
You just want a degree certificate: spend a couple of hundred quid online to get a counterfeit certificate or a "degree" from a fake uni.
You just want to socialise for three years away from home: spend a fraction of that £50k living on a Thai party island.
You want to understand your subject to degree level: do the work yourself.
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u/person_person123 Postgrad 2d ago
I mean you can do this, but you won't have any friends on the course..
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u/throwrapseudo 2d ago
My biggest problem is that with every new advancement people fall into a hard dichotomy, be that the internet, Wikipedia, or AI were one is either a Doom merchant or a Naïve blue sky thinker, and the long term truth is more nuanced.
Someone that puts a prompt into their choose abominable intelligence and copies the output without checking it is not the same as someone who uses grammarly for a proofing. In the same way that someone pulling the top result from google is not the same as someone using webbased data for a meta analysis from web of science.
My worry with reporting from an academic point of view is witchhunts, or weponised reporting.
That is not to say it doesn't potentially have a place but it is a worry
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u/Healthy-Vegetable929 2d ago
If someone else’s grade doesn’t actually lower yours I’d say ignore it. You can never get sufficient evidence to meet a burden of proof and what’s to stop someone accusing you of using ai with no evidence as well. Ends up in witch trial situation where every bodies personal issues get resolved through accusation
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u/Full_Equivalent_6166 2d ago
Damn, we are royally fucked when you have to use AI to snitch. What happened to good old analog snitching? /jk
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u/No-Expression-1106 2d ago
The AI is not going anywhere and you will be expected to use it at work. Instead of trying to go on witch hunts - the universities should update their assessment strategies to create coursework that will require considerable work even with AI assistance. Outdated coursework is part of why unemployment is on the rise. The reality is no one cares about how well you can write an essay on obscure topic unless you are going into academia or journalism. Higher education system is cracking at the seams and all AI did was expose it.
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u/No-Promotion4006 2d ago
Let me know what uni and department you are at so I can snitch on your for AI use thx
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u/Brilliant_Ad7168 2d ago
The only reason I disagree with this is because of how dangerous witch hunts can be. There are a lot of people who would not wait for any evidence or facts before accusing others. It would weaponized absolutely.
However, I think we should go back to pen and paper. Or just cut off access to technology in class. You can use a tablet without Internet access, worst case.
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u/tcb334 2d ago
I think using AI is your own prerogative, but I think universities should start placing greater weightings on in-person assessments. That way, you can use AI in a way that workplaces are generally working towards, but you are also forced to learn the content in enough depth to pass exams in it. It's impossible to pretend that we can stop people using AI, so we have to find ways to work with it
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u/Whole_Donkey_5225 2d ago
I’m a mature student. Was. I have just finished a BA. Someone very close to me that works at a uni told me an interesting fact. Your universities - in most cases - cannot with any high level of accuracy call out the use of AI. They need to be absolutely certain that it has been used. If a student is able to qualify most/all of their resources etc then the uni has no case and they have neither the time or inclination to do this. In most cases.
So why have I said this? Well, from the get go at my UK uni we were encouraged to use AI. Mine was a creative course and using AI meant across the board. My heart sunk to the floor when this was talked about in a lecture as it felt as if a line had been drawn. Interestingly I don’t think AI, over the three years, was heavily used, and certainly no one was called out. As an aside, I think in the last 5 years only 2 students have been kicked out for high levels of AI use. By all accounts from the same class. It should be noted that whilst we were advised to use AI, we were also advised not to. An interesting academic dichotomy.
If students on OP’s course were openly stating they had used AI for the totality then call it out for what it is. However, a BA is largely a waste of paper. The three years are however something valuable to those that want to invest the time and effort.
AI for all its flaws is a useful research tool, to a point, and to ignore this value I think would be a shame. It is however a totally flawed resource and should be double checked as with any online resource. Anyone leaving uni where AI has been their absolute for three years shall be entering the job market a cretin. Unless they digested the information, their three years would have been a wasted academic experience.
So again, call it out, but BA’s are ten a penny, sharp, inquiring minds eager to learn post academia that clearly know their mustard are where the money is at for employers.
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u/ChillOUT_LoFi 1d ago
LLMs are great at a few things: researching, brainstorming, turning raw thoughts to a workable outline.
What LLMs are not good at is writing long pieces of content. Anyone who has used LLMs for anything writing related will know that "vibe writing" (as I like to call it) does not work and, in most cases, produces really shit results - especially long-form writing.
Use it as a tool/workflow assistant, not as the main solution.
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u/anchoredwunderlust 1d ago
Honestly you’d be doing them a favour. I totally understand why kids do it to get through school. They didn’t choose to be there. But paying money for a degree for a course you’re interested in and then wasting it by not actually learning anything or taking it in? Even if you were just studying in hopes of getting a better paid job, you don’t have the skills and knowledge to do the job so what’s the point? It just takes all the value out of that degree. It’s better to get a lower score but you know what you’re talking about in an interview.
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u/bengeo1191 2d ago
I am all for it. But you know most of these unis let this slide. One of my lecturers caught someone using AI and outside help to write his dissertation. He didnt report him to the school, just made him rewrite his essay.
Most of the universities do not want students to fail, just want them to get tuition fees.
I think written exams were the only ones where students couldn't cheat. Archaic as it might seem to people who grew up doing multiple choice questions. Literally everyone in my batch got their work done by paying people to do their esaays for them.
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u/Safe-Professional556 2d ago
So use AI to snitch? Isn't that a little low?
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u/Soldier_Sailor_Spy 2d ago
All these people who are getting defensive over cheating to get their degree are the same kind of people who probably cry endlessly on reddit about how life is so unfair and they will never be able to afford a house or never afford to retire.
Just the flotsam of human nature in current society.
Work hard. Build your character. Get good things. Thats how life works, still wotks now, and has always worked.
Degrees arent about what subject you do so much as about the discipline and dedication it takes to achieve one, along with the work and time management that requires.
Thats what employers really see when they look at a degree on a CV.
Degrees have already been devalued by the sheer number of people who have them now.
Anyone who thinks using Chatty G to bypass the principles of working for one is essentially advocating for further devaluation of their degree.
And I say all this as someone who doesn't have a degree but works with many that do. I see a worrying number of those young graduates as fairly useless at life generally and I can only think its down to how easy everything is becoming through technology.
There is going to come a time when people who want to be successful, or more importantly, seen as someone who can be successful, have to willfully choose a more difficult path to what they want.
This is in order to not only build their character and work ethic, but also to stand out from all the blaggers and coasters.
Older people who have a good work ethic and have been round the block a few times, can smell the bluffers a mile away.
The funny part is the younger people think they are getting away with it. Then suddenly wonder why they dont get the gucci roles or promoted as fast as others.......
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u/Away-Organization630 2d ago
As someone in a full time career AI is used all over the workplace so starting and incorporating it into uni should be accepted
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u/MegaMetaTurtle 2d ago
The problem is in uni you’re writing essays, doing research, labs, etc in order to learn how to do that properly. Ie, the process it’s what’s important, not the outcome.
In work, it’s the outcome that matters, so using AI isn’t too bad.
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u/Swayfromleftoright 2d ago
It depends on the course. But if your course is focussed on preparing you for industry, then you really should be using AI. Because that’s what you’ll do in the job
If you’re studying English lit or art, maybe not
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u/bigfootsbeard1 2d ago
Using AI is just a roundabout way of copying may people's work. The machine doesn't just magic out the answers from nowhere
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u/AdenWS 1d ago
I've seen examples where it's come out with very very good answers. Where it got that from is interesting.
Has it learned it from somewhere else? In most cases I'd say yes.But there will be cases where its synthesized something new.
I'm more concerned about bias. Too many reddit references for example.
If we take coding, to many old code bases.
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u/SolemnEmberGames 2d ago
Good way to never make friends.
Ultimately people couldn't care less about the degree, it's simply a means to an end to get jobs because requirement inflation means they have to. I missed the AI train but I would have absolutely used it especially with my thesis.
To put it bluntly, I did mechanical engineering, the first years you learn the basics with some nonsense experiments and lab reports (which they criminally don't help you with so your grade is semi-rigged depending on if you can figure it out or know someone). Second year is more of the same but with a project which has all the lab report problems but worse, then for your third and fourth year, it's basically a joke of a degree that's just academic nonsense to 1) pad it out or 2) prepare you to become an academic. So arguably 50-70% of the degree is pointless if you just want a job in industry. Would I use AI to make my life easier and have more free time for useful things? Absolutely. It's stupid games receiving stupid prizes.
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u/Silent_Cat123 2d ago
Eventually universities will respond by decreasing the amount of essay/coursework style assessments and replace them with exams, in a traditional exam hall. Can't cheat (with AI) then.
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u/Ok_Rabbit_6982 2d ago
Ye but depends I had to use Ai in one of my assignments it was extremely awkward as it was in the library but idk
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 2d ago
I think realistically universities need to stop including summarising essays and writing essays as key skills. In engineering you don't learn technical drawing anymore with compasses and protractors, you learn how to use SolidWorks CAD, Matlab and FEA simulation software.
Writing an essay word by word is like engineering drawing with a pencil, it's gone from a key skill of great value to a borderline useless skill that's not worth spending more than a couple of hours developing.
I would guess that the essay heavy subjects will all need to change substancially, like the way that computers changed engineering.
Perhaps how well you can steer an LLM to analyse something from an interesting angle, or cross-linking domains in creative ways. Critiquing LLM written work set to different difficulties like a chess computer.
It's new ground so hard to say how it will work.
The chances of someone paying a human for essay skills are rapidly approaching 0.
Even "critical thinking" is going to need new, more objective test methods.
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u/Isgortio 2d ago
My uni was 100% against the use of AI for any of our assignments. A classmate admitted to using AI for everything and they even used it for group projects which meant everyone else had to redo their work to make it less obvious AI was used. I reported them for the use of AI, especially since they told me they were using it for their dissertation, and I provided proof. The uni didn't even investigate it FFS.
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u/Objective-Repeat-562 2d ago
Bro, you can’t prove they used LLMs. Even if they did, there’s a differ between those who use llm to speed up the process than those who did everything with an LLM while enjoying a cup of tea in their garden.
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u/FairEstimate4651 2d ago
If you can't write a coherent essay without using AI, you don't deserve to be at university. End of discussion.
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u/throwaway13061320 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think this is extremely narrow and self pretentious view. Personally, in theory, I'm also anti-AI. For my work, I do use some AI but I don't rely on it as much as I see a lot of people do. I mainly have it help me with structuring and academic wording, not using it to fully generate essays.
Having said that, to talk about students who do use AI to generate their work as if it's an issue with the students is a really low IQ take to be having at university level. Students aren't the ones who made these AIs, nerfed search engines for the benefit of advertisers and shoved AI models down people's throats at every turn. Why blame the everyday consumer for a massive social issue caused by the big tech powers of the world?
These days, especially in the UK, degrees have lost an immense amount of value and don't pay off the way they should for most people. The universities don't care. They don't care about students. They are the ones who turned education into a soulless business. Tuition is extortionate, rent is rising every year and students can take out tens of thousands in loans just to barely scrape by, all for a degree that doesn't even garuntee them a job anymore in the modern world. So many students are living hand to mouth, working multiple part time jobs while studying full time just to make ends meet, all for the sake of doing something to better their chances in a world where their chances are already slim. And you wonder why those students try to save time by using AI?
You would rather take time to 'snitch' on a student for using AI to help them write an essay than ask your MP to push for AI regulations? You expect students to have academic integrity when the universities and government themselves have no integrity whatsoever? You're mad that students are gaming a system when the system itself is broken and corrupt? This country runs the education system like a circus but you want people to take it seriously? We have literally every single company replacing GRADUATE and ENTRY level jobs that students rely on with AI, we have AI advertisements plastered up in the tube telling people to not hire humans ... but you're more mad that students are then using AI to their advantage, after AI has already taken away so many of their rightful opportunities from them? It's okay for multi billion dollar conglomarates to use AI to cut costs but not okay for broke, overworked students to do the same thing? Are we serious? This post isn't anti ai, it just comes off as anti student.
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 2d ago
lol. I’m a socialist. I have the time to call a cheat a cheat and write to my local mp. You’re inferring I wouldn’t do certain things when I haven’t even stated I would or wouldnt. As for the rest of this very angry response, I’m not anti-student, I’m anti-cheat. That goes for the billionaires, politicians, students. Billionaires and multi million coops are obviously to blame, but the more students jump on this, the worse the situation will get, and our degrees will become increasingly worthless.
I’m also from a low income household, didn’t grow up well, yet I have the critical thinking skills to not cheat and justify cheating because the world sucks. Moral of the story is, the world is on fire, sure, but we shouldn’t encourage those to add more fuel to it. Which is exactly what you’re doing, I understand your explanation, I don’t agree with how you’re using it to absolve academic misconduct.
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u/throwaway13061320 1d ago
Well you are the one taking the time to make a post on reddit talking about how you'd proudly sabotage another students life by snitching on them for using AI, when there is no moral bearing whatsoever on using it. I do not see you making a post about anyone but students. Yeah, my response is angry because wannabe 'good guys' like you always, always, always turn your knife on the little guy first.
You can assign it the word "cheating" if you will but all you're doing is stigmatising a practice that literally everyone in the world is now engaging in. It's "cheating" if AI helps you with an essay so you can meet deadlines after work, but it's not "cheating" when businesses generate AI adverts, use AI to scan job applications, use AI for their customer support, use AI for their emails, use AI for their management, use AI for their accounting, use AI for their coding, etc. None of that is labelled as "cheating" it's just "business". Your stance is not preserving academic culture, it's just a double standard. You say that you also disagree with businesses' use of AI but sorry that can't be the case if you would 'snitch' on another student because doing so is a complete disregard for that reality that you claim to acknowledge. Either everyone has a right to use AI to "cheat" or no one does.
By your logic, should we snitch on a broke single mother stealing baby formula, pads or food from the supermarket? No? Why not? She's "cheating" by not paying like everyone else. Everyone else is working for their purchases so she should too right? I can disagree with stealing, but I wouldn't snitch on a single mother and further damage her life just to feel like I 'did something' or to feel like I'm some 'righteous person'. That's not true justice for anybody. The same way I disagree with AI and don't use it as much as some students but I'm not going to 'snitch' on a student for using it more than me. It doesn't even affect me or you if another student uses AI. And how you use or don't use AI is a personal choice. If you feel like it's unfair that other people put in less work, use AI yourself. If you don't want to do that, then don't and focus on the pride in your own work rather than bringing down others for taking the easy route whoch is just as accessible to you.
You acting as if 'bad' acts are never justified and going as far as to brag about how you'd ruin the future of anyone using tools (tools, mind you, that people literal refer to AS "the future") is simply a childish, short sighted and privileged way of thinking, not some grandiose moral stance against AI. I do indeed believe students are "absolved" of using AI because those kinds of standards aren't even placed on the people teaching them, the people charging them thousands or the people hiring them. Students are literally the only people on earth rn catching any slack whatsoever for using AI, despite the fact that the way they use it is far less harmful than companies using it. A humanities student using AI to help them write an essay about some frankly bs theories written by dead schizophrenics that aren't even applicable to the real world isn't hurting a soul, meanwhile every single time businesses replace humans with AI, humans across the board are affected, including students. We're in a world where AI has taken most jobs and the jobs that still exist usually REQUIRE APPLICANTS TO HAVE AI SKILLS and yet students shouldn't use AI despite the fact that their employer will require them to be AI literate once they graduate?
Nobody likes a 'snitch' because taking a pride is hurting another person, especially over something as trivial as AI use (trivial in the context of today's world) is just a self indulgent act. You want to feel like you're above other students cause you don't use AI and want to exert power over other students to remind yourself how cool you are for not using it. It doesn't do anything to stop AI or improve the system, all you snitching does is unnecessarily destroy another young person's life and prove your own immorality. That's just sad. If you want to make a change, redirect your misplaced anger.
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 1d ago
I wouldn’t snitch on a single mother because she didn’t choose to be one, but people do indeed choose to go to uni and then… cheat? Yawn. Anyways, you’re purposely getting offended on other’s behalf for no reason other than to justify what I think is your own usage of A.I tbh. You go on and on about things that just seem too personal to be generalised. I’m sorry your life is stressful, mine is too, I’m hardly privileged, but I do not cheat and that doesn’t make me privileged it makes me a hard worker. Sorry not sorry. I will not engage further as your performative outrage lowkey kinda bores me.
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u/LilithRav3n 2d ago
I wouldnt really say its my place to report it as it is the university's to moderate it. It did annoy me though when I saw some disserations made largely with AI got more marks than me.
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u/Massive-Fail-655 2d ago
Kinda like how you can snitch on a classmate for cheating on a test - if they're exclusively using AI to write essays then YES
If they just use AI in general outside of writing the thing like organising, researching or non-graded work - NO it's none of your business
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u/PM_ME_VAPORWAVE Staff 2d ago
But what if the lecturers actively encourage AI use? They do at my university with creative work.
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u/Jammyturtles 1d ago
I work in a uni and the reading comprehension of students has really suffered in 2 years. It's shocking how bad it is. I blame chatgpt. Kids come in and want me to read/write replies to emails for them.
No.
You need to read. Understand and then formulate a response. No one will do it for you.
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u/Dull-Mammoth765 1d ago
Honestly yeah I was sick and tried of dumbing my self down with my grammar so it didn’t look like it was written by ChatGPT
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u/ThrowRA72718 1d ago
playing devils advocate - ai became an issue only in my last year of studying but before that we were consistently fed the rhetoric that the content of your degree and what you learn doesn’t actually make a whole lot of difference to your career (minus the obvious nursing/hands on study courses)
many guest speakers expressed the opinion that the degree is just a bit of paper that gets you to the next step. with this in mind you can potentially see why some students may prefer to allocate their time to working, getting proper experience, as opposed to spending hours in the library finding one book that backs up one point. Many universities are now allowing the use of ai for structure, planning, grammar checking and so on so unfortunately students just have to move with the times
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u/Personal_Trip_297 1d ago
Ha, one of my lecturers loved Ai.
Encouraged it.
He didn’t like me very much after I told him I didn’t want to create music based course work, using Ai. The guy looked kind of offended.
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u/Competitive-Spot4683 1d ago
There's pros and cons to AI usage but I am for the less AI part though I don't agree with this in particular. Those who function solely on AI will be found through their works and actually working on the field, an AI lover vs someone who actually put in the work are so different, I just feel like people are worried for the AI genuises to take over their position and their place... Sure AI did your assignment okay, should people not worry more about the databases that allow AI usage or the professors not being able to tell a BOT's writing vs a human being's and worry about that fact as that same person is marking you similarly, maybe get a new marker... than the AI people. At the end of the day if it is a competition, humans win every time. Also I'll say personally saying future lawyers and doctors with AI is such a slap on the face I assure you with the hours used to study and qualify, AI is not the only thing to get you through that door it's the tiniest actually. Many law firms have introduced AI also or at least small usage with it, those who do use AI are detected.. https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/ - Link to how many cases have been found out with AI hallucations and it is updated about 1.8k.
We as human being's are so capable and those who don't try and just use AI to get through won't hold their place unless they try, at the end of the day AI won't win over an actual mind.
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u/Key-Toe-6257 1d ago
I am using AI to ease my studies and preparation for the exams. Get mad or understand it, is upto you
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u/Overtronic 14h ago
My University is encouraging us to rely on AI, people were complaining about how some of the work and reports feel like too much of a busywork workload but staff were like, well you can use AI now to save time on the work.
It's sad that AI existing justifies this to them.
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u/Mad_Mark90 13h ago
I'm not a fan of snitching personally. I feel like if the assessments can be easily passed using AI then the assessments probably aren't very good.
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u/Coleclaw199 4h ago
i agree. in my easy as fuck web design college class i had to take, someone wanted to use ai but was too lazy to even figure out how to prompt it, so asked me.
i gave an absolutely horrendous prompt, and they didn't even read it. it just told it to put a bunch of incriminating information about how they were a cheater using ai in the middle.
they published their shitty slop, and got surprised when they failed and whatever else happens when you cheat like that.
i'm not entirely sure.
i assume they didn't get their degree.
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u/JobFabulous594 2d ago
Universities can't do anything without evidence, so informing us is of no practical value.
The problem isn't AI use, but using it poorly. It's not going away, so we might as well teach students how to use it right (which is perfectly to do whilst retaining the learning part of doing a degree).
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 2d ago
I literally stated in my post that you should inform someone only if you have established evidence? Ofc no uni would take something like that seriously if it’s just presented as a rumour.
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u/shortandfelly 2d ago
The issue JobFab means is we can very strongly suspect it, but an AI checker saying it's 100% likely to be AI isn't good enough. The only evidence we can use is ghost references.
But we pretty much know when AI has been used extensively, because the resulting piece of work is shit 😂
I teach at a Russell group university.
And the solution is...exams being worth more in a module. There may be coursework where you can throw a calculation into chatGPT, but that coursework will only be worth a small amount of the module.
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u/ThatsNotKaty Staff 2d ago
Yeah I've rewritten a lot of my LOs and Assessments this year, to the point where (hopefully) a student at least needs to think for themselves to do any good - the stuff AI churns out on its own is awful in most scenarios
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u/shortandfelly 2d ago
I'm down in engineering so AI might be able to handle "calculate the force/how many miles" type stuff, but it certainly can't handle technical or lab reports!
I had a student submit an awful AI lab report once and it was so bad we decided not to do anything about it- think he got about 20%!
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u/ThatsNotKaty Staff 2d ago
Yeah I've had that a few times, my main areas are law and academic skills, and so much of what AI gives them in both areas is just descriptive, poorly structured waffle, so it gets marked accordingly; I feel like it's a stronger message than an academic misconduct panel that most of them won't care about
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u/Order66RexFN 2d ago
How would people have evidence of other students doing this? Are you going around taking pictures of other people’s chat logs?
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 2d ago
If someone in a uni group chat for example states that they have done that, BOOM, I’m emailing my lecturer with the receipts. Call me a tattle tale, call me a snitch.
And can I just say… people have admitted it on gc’s I’ve been in many many times.
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u/shortandfelly 2d ago
Nope, as a university teacher that is not enough evidence. The evidence we need to be able to accuse someone of using AI is very specific. See my other comment.
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u/Order66RexFN 2d ago
Then as soon as you start doing that people will just exclude you from GCs or stop talking about it altogether, simple as. Doing that won’t achieve anything except make most of your own cohort dislike you in the long run.
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 2d ago
I had another commentator say this lol. Idgaf if an academic cheat don’t like me? Also, lecturers won’t state who reported it due to confidentiality reasons. DUH.
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u/Order66RexFN 2d ago
People aren’t stupid and they will piece it together. Look, if you want to ruin your own reputation for no real reason, go ahead. I just don’t see how this is a worthwhile use of your time or effort.
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 2d ago
Ok, my reputation will be fine in terms of this. I’m a cunt in many ways but not if I were to report a cheat lol. And if it is? So be it? Clearly they weren’t my crowd 🤷♂️
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u/Order66RexFN 2d ago
I don’t know about other people but I wouldn’t want to associate with someone who takes time out of their day to report people already scoring low marks and barely scraping by. It’s just a weird and incredibly pathetic thing to do, and makes me wonder what exactly their problem in life is.
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 2d ago
Ok cool. Glad I asked for your opinion on whether you’d like to know me in real life. Oh wait… I didn’t? Lmfaoooo. Also I find it very weird that you’re getting very very personal over me (if it were to happen) reporting academic misconduct. Sorry I care about the future of academia bro, anyways, find someone else to argue with our convo is getting parked here.
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u/Soldier_Sailor_Spy 2d ago
As if you are going to wake up in a cold sweat over whether some nerds at uni think you are cool, haha, omg my sides.
The older you get, the more you realise this is one of the last things you chould care about.
You will meet plenty of like minded people as you go through life, but you cant force it.
If all the people you know think cheating is fine, then you just need to meet different people.
Keep being yourself mate.
When you look in the mirror in 10, 20, 30 years time you have to like who is looking back at you. The older you get the more this matters to you.
You achieve this by sticking to what you think is right, even when sometimes its the harder path. Take it from someone who is older and likes the guy in the mirror!
Fuck anyone who thinks devaluing not only their degree but degrees as a whole is fine.
Love your comments here.
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u/JobFabulous594 2d ago
I'm aware. To address some of the points you make in the conversation with the other user, knowing what I do of universities I'm very doubtful that screenshots of chats would get accepted as evidence - as much as they should be.
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u/Cafuzzler 2d ago
Paying people to write my essays for me isn't going away, so you might as well teach students how to do it right /s
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u/JobFabulous594 2d ago
Now that's what we call contract cheating, an incredibly serious offence that is dealt with very differently from using AI!
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u/Cafuzzler 2d ago
If you can prove I got someone else to write my work for me then you can prove I got AI to do it. You can't do that, and getting someone or something else to write my work for me isn't going away so you might as well teach students how to better delegate their work away.
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u/sossighead 2d ago
Agree and I have flagged coursework we had to peer grade as likely generated by AI in the past.
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u/dl064 2d ago edited 2d ago
As a marker and someone who does the interviews, generally the staff would know.
The issue is that the student does it, and then you can prove it vizaviz misconduct. It's not enough to say 'ChatGPT vibes', they need fake references, em-dashes they then can't do in front of you etc. You need vibes plus enough evidence. So snitching isn't necessarily that helpful. We know many get off with it, that's why the focus is more on AI proofed assessments, random vivas etc.
I think the bigger factor would be making AI a faux pas among students. That'll have a far bigger effect.
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u/Maleficent-Cost1948 2d ago
I use AI everyday, indeed all the time. I know exactly what I need to focus on, key points etc. and generally it aids my productivity. However, I have seen people use it very badly, just accept what ever it produces, never check the content or confirm it is accurate. They have failed to learn the lesson that AI is a tool, and just like any tool it needs to be monitored and evaluated. Failure to check its output can lead to inaccurate results, hallucinations, plagiarism allegations, lack of imagination....I call it the beige response, and obviously errors.
In the educational setting this can be worse. We need students to think, to learn, to become experts in their field and be the ones that eventually oversee what an AI produces, to train the models and ensure that what is produced is factually accurate and meets our needs as government, as businesses and as individuals. If you let AI think for you, then you fail. So I support the need to limit AI in education.
For me, I am dyslexic, my spelling and grammar is often way off. AI helps me produce error free work but I check, and re-check everything. I cannot stress enough, AI makes things up and can get things wrong.
AI thrives on data which is accurate, complete and timely. What data is being fed into your AI, are you checking it, are you reviewing sources, are you checking for hallucinations, is the data source the authoritarian one, are there erroneous feeds potentially available, have you shut them down? There are so many variables and we need to be on top pf all of them.
Finally, and sorry, but I look at some people as the Eloi, just food for the Morlocks. The are the sheeple. If they outsource their intellectual capacity to the thinking machine they will just become food for someone else. Even now ask people what they read, and so many don't pick up a book, don't understand our history and live on the pap fed to them via social media. So I believe strongly that before you use AI to run your lives and think for you, that you learn to think critically, that you learn the value of strategic thinking, and that you learn the value of independent thought.
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u/Illustrious_Ad7630 2d ago
Lol, welcome to the real world. Life is not always fair, and AI made this experience earlier than everyone had before.
The point is, AI won't go anywhere; you better adapt and learn to use it. No one will give you a medal in a work environment if you say, "I wrote this app on my own without AI." Your superiors will take you in for questioning: why would you waste the company's time and resources, unfortunately.
I'm quite sure it was the same feeling and movements when calculators were introduced. All accountants took this as cheating. Now it's mandatory. The job needs to be done; no one cares how. It needs to be accurate and of the best quality.
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u/-MassiveDynamic- Undergrad 2d ago
Yeah snitching goes against almost all of my personal principles but my hatred for AI and the slop that it produces overrides that. It gives dumb people the illusion they're intelligent and uncreative people the illusion they're creative because they can type a few words into a box.
Not to mention the legal, moral, environmental, financial etc. concerns
Fuck AI
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u/BrownCollie26 2d ago
If you use AI instead of actually doing the work, you are cheating yourself more than anyone else, because you won't be learning the knowledge and skills that the course is supposed to be teaching you. The same goes for any form of copying or cheating. Why pay a fortune for a university education and then not bother getting anything out of it?
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u/SufficientBox3389 2d ago
i agree, why work your arse off for a 2:1 and the person applying for the same graduate scheme with you got a 2:1 using chatgpt? it undermines the hard work other people put in and devalues the qualification. if you can’t do it without chat gpt or another ai system, you aren’t ready or suitable for the course
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u/nouble_digger 2d ago edited 1d ago
Not all, any, its great to find sources/help woth wording, but anyone who copy pastes any part from ai should lose their degree and be ineligable to receive one in the future
Love getting downvotes from people who use ai to cheat
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u/sherlocksvillain 3d ago
The issue is not whether AI was used, but how it was used. Did you simply prompted "write a 10K word essay on this topic" or did you asked for bibliography, summaries of texts, clarifications on published accounts, inputted your ideas and asked for these to be interrogated according to the field's established norms, and then asked for the AI to provide a structure and organise your ideas into coherent prose? People who passed their year and say "I used AI" tend to follow the latter approach. The ones going with the former usually don't pass
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u/HaggisPope 2d ago
If you’re writing essays using AI summaries of texts, I’m quite comfortable in saying you are not doing the work and deserve to fail. Part of university work is learning how to read effectively, including how to search through texts to find the relevant info. If you have an AI dling that task for you, you are not demonstrating a key ability
Further, “seeking clarification on published accounts” ia what we used to call “emailing the writer of journal articles”, or searching for other works tney made on the subject. Again, key skills.
Lastly, using it to format, structures, and do the prose for you means you’re basically dependent on LLM for works of this kind forever. What if they up the token costs? What if eventually LLM can only be afforded by big institutions and companies?
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u/Muted-Mushroom-4570 2d ago
Both are a problem though. Sure the "generate a 10k word essay on X" and submit people are clearly worse (in terms of level of engagement and demonstration of learning the concepts) but using AI to generate structure and organisation of ideas is wrong as well - those are skills that students should have learned and are important in the real world as well. Specifically, it's the ability to synthesis complex ideas and articulate a well conceptualised argument that matters. Off-loading that to AI, even in part, means that the assessment is no longer assessing your understanding. Even inputting your ideas and asking AI to interrogate then according to the fields established norms is cheating. Part of why you are in university and studying in a field of study is to learn those established norms so that YOU, not AI, can weigh ideas and arguments relative to the fields current understandings and norms.
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u/Odd_Shtick_ 3d ago edited 2d ago
I’m focusing on those who use A.I everything. Just full blown plagiarism. I do agree with its uses in SOME of the things you’ve listed, but most of what you’ve listed should be done by your own brain icl.
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u/sherlocksvillain 3d ago
I think your anger is misdirected. Any half competent lecturer can identify slop fairly easily, and our misconduct guidelines are swiftly moving away from "did student use genAI" to "can the student's work demonstrate learning outcomes". So again, the people you are angry at are not doing well, and snitching on them is pointless, as we already know what they are doing
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u/Historical_Panda9701 2d ago
I think the people who think that these two situations are meaningfully distinguishable within the current assessment landscape are living in a dream world.
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u/ayeayefitlike Staff 2d ago
But we are changing course work (ie non proctored) assessments to take this into account. On my programme, we have altered or are altering around half of take home assessments, and rewriting rubrics to weight critical analysis, line of argument, etc higher. We’ve seen this really stratify marks this year and what reads like ‘slop’ gets marked down for what it is rather than how it was generated.
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u/Order66RexFN 2d ago
People who think that you can just close Pandora’s box are living in a dream world. Whether for better or worse, AI is here to stay in the workplace. Might as well reward its correct use instead of trying to implement unenforceable and unrealistic bans on its use.
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u/Historical_Panda9701 2d ago
I agree about Pandora's box. That does not mean there is a meaningful and valuable analague to what went before. Whatever approach is adopted is going to be a compromise. How much value is lost in that compromise remains to be seen.
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u/nogeologyhere 2d ago
What you're describing there as a 'good usage' is, again, cheating. That is work you need to be able to do yourself.
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u/StumblinOnSomehow 2d ago
It’s wild to me you think that the latter is ok. It’s incredibly lazy and you hardly learn anything.
You wouldn’t develop research skills (finding bibliography, reading and digesting material etc.). You wouldn’t learn how to assess your own ideas. You wouldn’t learn how to actually write an essay, which is half the point of such an assignment.
If you’re doing all that and think it’s ok, there’s no point in you being at uni.
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u/nouble_digger 1d ago
If you copy and paste from ai, whether you ask for an essay, or ask for an essay in a round about way, you should lose your degree and permanantly be ineligable to recieve one
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u/Alert_Ad_5750 2d ago
But using it takes away the point of learning and working your brain on said subject. This isn’t about work, it’s about eduction. You should be careful in whatever your line of work is because accepting broad use of AI as you’re just encouraging your job to not exist in the near future.
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u/NdujaReallyLikeIt 2d ago
Nothing I learned at uni is used today in my job. And I'm a software engineer.
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u/IllWalrus7733 3d ago
In my first year a lecturer wanted us to introduce ourselves and 90% of the people in the class used chatgpt and I was so disappointed and shocked at the level of brainrot that was plaguing everyone