This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A while back I saw a post on Lemmy accusing ASU, who is publicly partnered with OpenAI, of trying to quietly replace advisors with chatbots.
It's truly a dark time for USA higher education.
Holy crap... slashdot still exists??
Apparently, Digg may be coming back.
I checked it out again when reddit did their api fuckery. The progressives left and the libertarians are all that remain. I didn't stick around long enough to get a better feel for the situation.
It’s still the same 10 users complaining about systemd
Hot grits
Never forget, never forgive
Oh crap, the last time I looked at Slashdot comments, systemd didn't exist yet
"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself"
Just because the teacher might have screwed up doesn't change that experts in a subject can assess LLM output, while a student who knows jack shit about the topic can't. Just because the teacher messed up and let ai weirdness degrade the quality of education in the eyes of students, doesn't mean just anyone can use chatgpt to generate college courses.
I read the original article but not the interview. I wonder how much communication there was about the work before the student decided they deserved a refund.
Ya I mean, you could buy the teachers versions of textbooks on eBay in the late 1990s… pretty sure teachers didn’t want us using those.
"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself,"
Yeah it sucks but there is zero chance this argument holds any weight in court.
The problem is that a student has a reasonable expectation of being taught by someone qualified and knowledgeable in the topic. If the professor is using AI, then that is a major breach of trust that brings into question the professor’s qualifications and whether you are actually getting the education you are paying for.
Not to mention the risk of plagiarism
Yeah, I had teachers change the rubric on the day of the final and even after and the deans at UCSB didnt care at all. Teachers can do just about anything under the guise of education...
Pretty good pizza at Woodstock's, tho.
Because the truth is they're the ones deciding how to grade you and for the most part that's not really "regulated"
The rubric is meant to be an outline of how they grade it so you understand how you got graded, it really isn't supposed to show you how you will eventually be graded you know?
This is whats wrong with the world, people will come out of the woods and defend the most batshit insane things....
Why would they need to change how the class is graded after you took the class? The asnwer is simply to fuck you out of money. There is no educational purpose, just a monetary one.
Just because its reguarly done does not mean it should be normalized.
What would you do if your boss said the purpose of your salary is not to show you how much you will make by the end of the year, but to motivate you to work, and then doesnt pay you for months of work... would you have the same naive outlook?
But that's not what happened.
If you learned the information presented in class I'd assume how you're graded doesn't really matter. A grading rubric is nice to know but if you're hedging everything on that and get twisted when it's changed maybe you didn't actually learn in the class?
You might DM too much because you think youre the master of the universe. Im assuming you were homeschooled by flatearthers, and thats cool you had a good experiance but that doesnt mean other people didnt have bad ones.
What a dumb thing to say, petty, scared and weak like your little brain. Who doesn't understand grading rubrics? Lmfao
You're probably too stupid to write a simple paper without having specific guidelines, did mommy have to hold your hand throughout highschool? Probably if a simple grading rubric ruined your life lol
What a dummy.
There are some really good reasons to make changes, not trying to say that this was the case in the parent comment, but there are certainly cases where this makes sense. About halfway through my discrete math final my professor wrote a curve on the board based on exam results from the other test session. He realized that he hadn't properly taught some concepts and he thought it would be unfair for us to suffer because of his mistakes. Should he have been forced to stick to a non curved exam because he hadn't announced it in the rubric or to the first exam session?
Though even in that case, the people in the class where the material wasn't taught properly get a pass without necessarily understanding that material. On the one hand, it's not fair for them to be punished for the prof's mistake, but on the other hand, it's not necessarily a good thing to give them credit for something they don't know. It could hurt the credibility of the degree itself, similarly to the ones where you'll get the diploma as long as you pay the bills.
People who hire the free pass people see they lack the skills despite having the paper saying they have them and stop hiring people with those credentials. It's the same reason why cheating is dealt with so harshly.
The skills and knowledge are the whole point, not getting high marks or everything being fair. That said, it would be a difficult situation to deal with because being fair should still be a part of the equation, I just disagree about it being the most important part.
Another scenario for changing the rubric would be if the people running the course realized that something they thought was important for determining competence was actually trivial. This one could also be complex to handle fairly.
There definately good reasons to allow making judgement calls, but I wouldnt be complaining if that all they use that freedom for.
Most of the time if you asked for some exception they would allow you to drop the class without issue. So they wont break the rubric to make the class easier, but they will to make the class harder. And thats what I take issue with.
On one of my finals the professor said "you all did too well on the midterm, so I changed the final to be on meaningless details in the reading to test your comprehension and only your final grades matter" so we could fail despite learing everything we set out to learn.
I had an engineering ethics professor tell me I could I turn in the first assignment late on the second day of class, but after the final she said my grade was entirely dependant on the first assignment and it was late so I got zero points and failed the class. They have a quota of students to fail and they just pick people to fail and come up with bullshit after. They use their unchecked liberties to screw the students out of their money and nothing more in my experience.
As long as the materials are accurate and serve as an effective teaching aid, where's the case?
It would be different if the sum total of course materials were wikipedia articles presented by a non expert, but the professor IS an expert. Sure, anyone can use genAI, BUT not anyone can write a relevant, targeted prompt and check the accuracy of the output. This is of course assuming the professor is generating (or at least vetting) materials for accuracy.
IF it turns out the student can find a pattern of inaccurate content there is a case. Otherwise there's nothing: it would be like arguing that a TA made the materials (or the lecture materials came from a book written by SOMEONE ELSE gasp) and the professor presented them so the class is invalid.
I think the key take away is that college is over rated, as you can easily find and create your own course materials on par with (or often better than) what the professors create
Lol no. You absolutely cannot.
You can maybe make it look nicer, but your high school diploma and street cred does not an education make.
The neat thing about it is, if you think this way, it would be impossible to prove to you that you can't do it yourself just as well. Without DOING it, you just don't know how much you don't know compared to a university faculty member. There are people who can go to the library (or Internet) and good will hunting an education, but I can basically guarantee that neither you nor anyone you know or will ever know is one of them.
It probably depends on the specific field of study. My experience comes from software engineering
Exactly. Nobody should care how the professor generates materials for the class, they should only care that the materials are effective and accurate. That's the professor's job, and they should be free to use whatever tools they find helpful in producing effective, accurate materials.
Mistakes happen. I found a bunch of errors in my classes, and this was before AI was a thing. The information was accurate, but the presentation was poor.
