College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT::The growing number of students using the AI program ChatGPT as a shortcut in their coursework has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.
I’m sure they’ll write exams that actually require an actual understanding of the material rather than regurgitating the seminar PowerPoint presentations as accurately as possible…
No? I’m shocked!
We get in trouble if we fail everyone because we made them do a novel synthesis, instead of just repeating what we told them.
Particularly for an intro course, remembering what you were told is good enough.
The first step to understanding the material is exactly just remembering what the teacher told them.
Thats a shitty system from both sides.
Meh. I haven’t been in Uni in over 20 years. But it honestly seems kind of practical to me.
Your first year is usually when you haven’t even settled on a major. Intro classes are less about learning and more about finding out if you CAN learn, and if you’ll actually like the college experience or drop out after your first year.
The actual learning comes when the crowd has been whittled to those who have the discipline to be there.
I’m glad you had a better experience than mine on academia. Still wanting that time back.
I would love to have that time and money back.
One of the disadvantages of being of an age where you straddle the line between worlds without internet and with, is that you get to enjoy the 20,000 dollars you spent on learning in the 90s suddenly be available for free in the present.
Seriously, there isn’t a single thing I learned in my Near Eastern Classical Archaeology degree that I couldn’t just go learn from Wikipedia today.
I wish! I got roped into doing it after the Internet was available.
Teachers halfass pretended to teach and we halfass pretended to learn cause I tought that piece of paper at the end would make a difference.
Turns out googling shit instead of being in debt was the way to go all along.
I always found this argument completely unsatisfactory…
Imagine someone coming up to you and saying “you must learn to juggle otherwise you can’t be a fisherman” and then after 14 years of learning to juggle, they say “you don’t actually need to know how to juggle, we just had to see if you CAN learn. Now I can teach you to fish.”
You’d be furious. But, because we all grew up with this nonsense we just accept it. Everyone can learn, there’s just tons of stuff that people find uninteresting to learn, and thus don’t unless forced; especially when the format is extremely dry, unengaging, and you’ve already realized… You’re never going to need to know how to juggle to be a fisherman… ever.
The show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” (IMO) accurately captures just how worthless 90% of that experience is to the average adult. I’ve forgotten so much from school, and that’s normal.
Also this is just ridiculous, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
You do realize you get to choose which courses to take in undergrad right? Universities aren’t forcing you to take any of the courses, you choose ones in subjects you are interested in, and first year is to get you up to speed/introduce you to those subjects, so you can decide if you want to study them further.
once you have a major or specialist, then yeah, you have some required courses, but they do tend to be things very relevant to what you want to do.
That’s not true at all, every degree has a required core curriculum at every university I’ve ever heard of (e.g., humanities, some amount of math, some amount of English, etc). It also says nothing for the K-12 years.
In my university you had breadth requirements, but it was 1 humanities course, 1 social science, and 1 science, and you could pick any course within those areas to fulfill the requirement. So you had a lot of choice within the core curriculum. Man, if other unis aren’t doing that, that sucks.
https://bulletin.uakron.edu/undergraduate/general-education/#associatedegreerequirementstext
That’s roughly 10-14 classes. Most universities I’ve seen the first 2 years is mostly general education with a little bit of your major involved. Then there’s your “college” requirements inside of the university, another 8 credits so 3-4 classes typically. Then the rest if your major credits, but that’s at least 1/3 of your time on non-major work, and a lot of your degree program is going to be adjacent not totally relevant work, so, it’s more than that.
My favourite lecturer at uni actually did that really well. He also said the exam was small and could be done in about an hour or two but gave us a 3 hour timeslot because he said he wanted us to take our time and think about each problem carefully. That was a great class.
IME, a lot of professors liked to write exams that specifically didn’t cover anything from the PowerPoint presentations lol