BTW, I took time to look up some of these sources my student used, couldn't find the quotes they quote, so told them the paper is an "A" if they can show me every quotation and failing otherwise. Does this seem like a fair policy (my thought is -- no matter the method, fabrication of evidence is justification for failing work)?

This is totally fair. They should already have those sources, and you should be making them use something like BibTeX to annotate them. The footnote/reference should include page numbers as well for their specific source/ISBN.

being a teacher has to be absolute hell these days, I'm so sorry

Are students actually interested in the topics? Would they be doing anything different if the chatbots didn't exist?

"Tell you what Bawby, back in mah day, we used to type the main topic of our homework on wikipedia, paraphrase the best quotes, and then copy and paste the citation links for those quotes into the same citation generator the teacher would recommend in the class syllabus. Gosh darn kids don't even know how to bullshit their work enough for an overworked public school teacher to give it a B-."

I'm going back to school for my Master's degree. I am in my 30s and I have realized that "Generative AI" does nothing but cheat me out of learning. Using AI for your homework/assignments does nothing but outsource your thinking and learning to the machine. It makes you dumber.

Pass Fail Verbal exams. Seriously just ask them a random very simple question about their paper and if they cant answer it then 0%.

This bypasses the AI problem because if they've gone to all the trouble of making a fake paper and then learning it's bullshit by heart then hopefully they've learned something about how papers are written, even if by accident.

Fail them on the first fake citation. Does your uni have SafeAssign or Turnitin?

Your policy is fine, but what matters is the schools academic integrity rules and procedures. Usually you have to report it if you suspect they cheated or plagiarized.

I've heard some schools have given up on AI though and just refuse to pursue it. Made up citations is an easy catch though.

Kill me please. Comrades, I’m so tired. I just want to teach writing. I want to give students a way to exercise agency in the world – to both see bad arguments and make good ones. They don’t care. I’m so tired.

Why not teach them with tools to actually do this?

Enforce usage of something like Zotero and have them submit their Zotero library along with their paper. Makes it extremely easy to grade their sources as well.

Bibliography and source management can be better proved out now! If you constrict the assignments you can easily catch this stuff.

I would make having photo evidence of the citations available on request a prerequisite. They all have cell phones that can make this process very easy and screenshots of course are trivial.

Your policy is fair, because then your students would hypothetically actually use their damn brains a tiny bit, which is what school should be about

I would also posit that any false quotation could just be docked one letter grade, so 5 of them is an F

I'm getting my Masters right now at a college that has a really big foreign student population, particularly Desi people. I was in a class with this one kid who straight up did not speak English, like not he spoke it poorly or with a heavy accent, just did not speak it at all. He had ChatGPT on his laptop every class. At the end of the semester we had student presentations, this kid presented a slide show that was clearly made by AI, bad images and all, and kept trying to speak English phonetically. It was awkward as fuck.