this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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College student put on academic probation for using Grammarly: ‘AI violation’::Marley Stevens, a junior at the University of North Georgia, says she was wrongly accused of cheating.

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[–] [email protected] 217 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Simple solution. Ask the student to talk about their paper. If they know the subject matter, the point of the assignment is meant.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 8 months ago

This is the right answer. No tool can detect AI generated content with zero false positives, but someone using AI to cheat won't actually know the subject matter.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 8 months ago (4 children)

That's great for some people, but would be absolutely horrible for people like me. I usually know the subject matter, but I tend to have problems gettingy thoughts out of my head. So I'd just end up getting double screwed if I were in this situation.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'm reminded of the lecturer who was accused of being an AI when they sent an email.

Getting the triple-whammy of being accused of using an AI when you didn't, drawing a blank during an oral interview/explanation, and then being penalised like you'd used one anyway, would be hellish.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

Yes, which is why I hate job interviews and especially people pretending to be good as interviewers and telling stories how somebody didn't know something elementary. Well, maybe if it's elementary, then the applicant did know that, just your questions confuse people, which makes it mostly your fault (that's not directed to anybody present).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

Same. The anxiety kicks in and everything you ever knew leaves your brain in the span of half a second and doesn’t come back until the other person is free and clear of your presence.

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[–] [email protected] 133 points 8 months ago (1 children)

turn it in is a fucking content farm anyway. you sign over your rights to them. we should insist schools stop using it.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 8 months ago (5 children)

You sign over rights to your works when you turn them in for grades anyway. The school can do whatever they want with your papers.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Which is such a fucking scam. You're paying the school so the school has rights to your shit somehow?

My friend put his own Masters Thesis on libgen because fuck that absolute horseshit.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

Based friend

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[–] [email protected] 107 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I've been at the front of the classroom--using tools like TurnItIn is fine for getting "red flags," but I'd never rely on just tools to give someone a zero.

First, unless you're in a class with a hundred people, the professor would have a general idea as to whether you're putting in effort--are they attentive? Do they ask questions? And an informal talk with the person would likely determine how well they understand the content in the paper. Even for people who can't articulate well, there are questions you can ask that will give you a good feel for whether they wrote it.

I've caught cheaters several times, it's not that hard. Will a few slide through? Yes, but they will regardless of how many stupid AI tools you use. Give the students the benefit of the doubt and put in some effort, lazy profs.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My sister once got a zero because of a 100% match in the system with her own same work uploaded there a few minutes before. It was resolved, but - not very nice emotions.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'd have put a complaint in with the department for unprofessional conduct . If they can't catch something that obvious, they aren't even trying to run a class properly.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago

Same, and discussed with my lecturers.

Especially 1st year business - we use the same text book as the last 10 years (just different versions), where nothing has really changed in the last 30 odd years, using the same template that runs through 600 odd students a year, where nearly every student uses the same easy three references that we used in class.

Its new to you, but no one is going to have an original idea or anything revolutionary in that assessment.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Anyone marking an assignment with a TurnItIn report, who is also in possession of half a brain, knows to read through the report and check where the matches are coming from. A high similarity score can come about for many reasons, and in my experience most of those reasons are not due to cheating.

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A professor once accused me of cheating because he mixed up my project with another students, marked that students project twice, and assumed i copied them.... Acedemia is not always the place of enlightenment people imagine....

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Academia is not always the place of enlightenment people imagine....

Was it ever?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

Yes but it's been quite a while since it was. Now it's a heinous cash grab that puts young people, that don't understand basic finance, into lifelong debt. Long ago a tool like this would've probably been adopted by academia as a tool you need to learn to leverage on order to get to a better, more thorough, understanding of a subject. We've capitalismed education and it's hurting everyone.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Here where I live using AI detection tools is not allowed because they are not 100% correct, which means they might flag an innocent student.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago

"It is better that one hundred innocent college students fail a class than that one guilty college student write a paper with AI." - Benjamin Academic

[–] [email protected] 69 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Something my instructors could never explain to me is what Turnitin does with the content of papers after they're scanned. How long are they kept? Are they used for verifying anyone else's work? I didn't consent to any of that. When someone runs for office 20 years later are they going to leak old papers? Are they selling that data to other AI trainers? That's some fucking bullshit. It needs to be out of the classroom for more reasons than just false positives.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago

It gets added to their database forever as far as I know. Unsure if they're selling it but based on the trajectory of capitalism yes they're selling the fuck out of to anyone who will buy.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I remember seeing some fine print when signing agreements for my college that any papers I write are intellectual property of the school. I'm guessing that's standard nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago

College: You will pay is 30k a year and all your base belong to us!

[–] [email protected] 59 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Not shocked that this comes from TurnItIn. Has always been a garbage service in my experience. Only useful for flagging quotes, citations, class/insturctor names, and my own name as plagiarism.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

I saw it flagging "the [...]. I am [...]" it didn't even care about the words in between, just decided to highlight the most common words in English in that one paragraph out of spite I guess.

It also once flagged my page numbering lmao, like I'm sorry I didn't know I had to come up with a new and exciting numeric system for every essay I submit

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Don't forget the table of contents and page headings like "analysis" or "recommendations".

Garbage software.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 8 months ago

So the teacher uses an unreliable AI tool to do his job, to teach a student a lesson about allegedly using an AI tool to do her work, and the only evidence he has is "this proprietary block box language model says you plagiarized this assignment". No actual plagerism to cite, just a computer generated response arbitrarily making accusations. What's the lesson here? AI models are so unreliable, when we use them we punish you for things you didn't do, so don't you dare use them for schoolwork?

It has a 1% false positive rate. If you have students turn in 20 assignments each semester, 1 in 5 students will get disciplined for plagiarism they didn't commit. All because a teacher was too lazy to do his job without blindly accepting the results of an AI tool, while pretending that they are against such things as a matter of academic integrity...

[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago

I remember when grammar and spellcheck tools became available, it was hilarious running well-known texts through them and accepting all the changes.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

this is ridiculous. spell and grammar check tools != AI content generators or plagiarism.

edid: apparently grammarly has changed a lot since i last used it.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Grammarly is a lot more than a spell checker. Here are some screenshots from their marketing page that specifically recommends using their product as a student.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago

aha, grammarly has changed a lot since i last used it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago

I feel the need to point out, this is exactly the same type of feedback you’d get from a competent proofreader.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

But you still need to put the content in there. All it does is do the boring formatting stuff. The real crime is not teaching students latex.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ehhh…

They integrated GPT last year. It’s entirely possible to use Grammarly in a way that raises academic integrity concerns nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

Thats still a bullshit vague intro. Like you still need to feed it what you are introducing and ideally how you want to get there. Again. This depends if this is an English writing class or anything else. Cause the point of the essay is to convey the point, knowing you need an intro is the key point, writing something to get into your meat is 40% of the boring bullshit you need to write in a report, the other 40% is the conclusion and formatting. Using AI to streamline that is not cheating unless its an English writing class. these are tools you use to convey your point better. You need a point to begin with.

This is like saying calculators are gonna make math homework easier. Make better homework!

and its not like these AI detection tools arent snakeoil either.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I agree, but also grammarly did get into the ai market. https://www.grammarly.com/ai

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I feel like this article was mostly interested in just showing her pictures. 🙄

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago

She can just show them the version history in Google Docs.

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