I teach 12th grade English, AP Language & Composition, and Journalism in a public high school in West Philadelphia. I was appalled at the beginning of this school year to find out that I had to complete an online training that encouraged the use of AI for teachers and students. I know of teachers at my school who use AI to write their lesson plans and give feedback on student work. I also know many teachers who either cannot recognize when a student has used AI to write an essay or don’t care enough to argue with the kids who do it. Around this time last year I began editing all my essay rubrics to include a line that says all essays must show evidence of drafting and editing in the Google Doc’s history, and any essays that appear all at once in the history will not be graded.
It’s not that hard. Just scroll through the editing history. You can even look at timestamps to see if the student actually spent any time thinking and editing or just re-typed a ChatGPT result word for word all in one go. Creating a plausible fake editing history isn’t easy.
That’s going to show up as a big copy-paste followed by a bunch of edits. Or a big full-retype with edit fixing.
The true arbiter is time. If a student you know struggled at writing during in class writing assignments just knocks off the essay in 15 mins of writing whereas the class median time is a couple of hours then it’s pretty obvious who cheated.
Is a student going to go out of their way to slowly retype a ChatGPT essay over the course of a few hours, with not only typo corrections but also full sentence rewriting? At that point I think they’ve proven they can write just by doing that extensive editing. They would probably finish faster by writing it on their own! Unless they’re just using ChatGPT to help them get a framework for the essay and then rewriting it in their own words. If I were a teacher I’d be fine with students doing the latter, though it’s still not ideal, at least it shows a lot of effort.
From the article:
Kate Conroy
That’s a neat way to have students show their work. Sounds like hell to validate though.
It’s not that hard. Just scroll through the editing history. You can even look at timestamps to see if the student actually spent any time thinking and editing or just re-typed a ChatGPT result word for word all in one go. Creating a plausible fake editing history isn’t easy.
I’ve spent a significant amount of my time at my last job looking through editing history in Google products. It’s slow and annoying. It’s not easy.
There’s probably a away to prompt AI to write everything but make mistakes. So most of the work is done, then you go and edit out the mistakes.
I think you underestimate how much work kids will do to avoid homework.
That’s going to show up as a big copy-paste followed by a bunch of edits. Or a big full-retype with edit fixing.
The true arbiter is time. If a student you know struggled at writing during in class writing assignments just knocks off the essay in 15 mins of writing whereas the class median time is a couple of hours then it’s pretty obvious who cheated.
Is a student going to go out of their way to slowly retype a ChatGPT essay over the course of a few hours, with not only typo corrections but also full sentence rewriting? At that point I think they’ve proven they can write just by doing that extensive editing. They would probably finish faster by writing it on their own! Unless they’re just using ChatGPT to help them get a framework for the essay and then rewriting it in their own words. If I were a teacher I’d be fine with students doing the latter, though it’s still not ideal, at least it shows a lot of effort.
Sounds like a great application for AI! Oh, wait…
Kid me would go to more effort to make GPT write a bunch of “in progress” versions than to just write the damn essay.