As most of my regular readers know, I read widely on AI subjects and very often find things I want to share.  This week's post comes from David Moldawer’s blog, The Maven Game, and his post, The Power of a Blue Book.  Very much of what he said is what I wish I had thought of myself, but like the cheating mentioned in his post, I am letting someone else do my thinking for me here. 

What we have to recognize is that students are going to use AI, they are going to use it to cheat, and the detectors we use provide so many false positives that they are almost useless. The battle against LLM abuse by students is already lost.  So what can we do instead? 

First, acknowledge the long-known fact that writing is a significant part of learning.  Creating a sentence is hard work and creating multiple sentences that go together coherently is really hard.  If we let LLMs do the writing, we are doing a disservice to them and us. 

Second, we have to acknowledge that the only solution is to write.  In the classroom, during class time, create assignments that require them to think and put it on paper.  This isn’t easy, I know.  We already have too much to cover and too little time to do it, but we also sacrifice hard assignments for simpler things that can be easily graded by Canvas.  Students need hard assignments to learn and we have to grade them. 

I thought I was doing this for my History 2321/2 classes at Dallas College.  The plan was to spend the first ten minutes of each class having the students write a summary of the readings they were supposed to have done before class.  I was a new teacher and let it go a little awry.  They would come to class with their book, reading for highlights and copying them down. At first, I let them, thinking that at least they were looking at the book.  Soon, though, I had allowed a pattern to be established and I did not know how to break it.  Grading wasn’t much work.  There was never more than half a page.  I could look at it for a few seconds and catch anything wrong.  It was pretty much a matter of ticking off the assignments as complete.  Now, if I had not allowed books, they would have had to think for themselves, they would have gotten in the habit of doing the reading before class, and the grading would not have been any harder.  Yeah, I will do that next time.  You could try it.