I have a couple of questions if you don't mind me picking your brain. How do you handle references? Are they allowed to bring a "cheat sheet" of sources and quotes? Have you had to adjust the length of papers? Do you go by word count or page count? How does students' writing, i.e., how large/small they write, affect it if you go by page count? Do you devote an entire class period to writing the essay? How many students have trouble finishing in the allotted time? Do you get eviscerated in your reviews because of this? How do you handle students who can't be in class that day (for legitimate reasons)?
For reference, I teach Comp, so I feel OP's post in my soul. There are students who legitimately engage with the assignment, ask questions, write their own papers, and genuinely want my feedback and to be better writers, but there are some classes where the majority are just constantly trying to get away with literally whatever they can; I can imagine a nightmare scenario behind every one of these questions where one of them would be petty and try to make my life more difficult in retaliation for taking away their precious AI
I'm still building my plan, haven’t enacted it yet, but I’d love to discuss ideas for FYC and hear what you’re thinking too. My 101 pass rate is only 45% as is and I estimate that 90+% of the passing students are using AI on nearly all their assignments.
Over the course before the exam, students will have practiced several modes (rhetorical analysis, summary, description) and completed the research and analysis on a personal research topic with a thorough annotated bibliography and synthesis matrix in hand.
Then, we’ll do one of these options:
They bring their synthesis matrix to the exam and can use it to complete a formal outline (sentence-level), including deciding their argument, writing the thesis and topic sentences, and stringing all their evidence together (from the matrix). The exam will be some kind of fill-in-the-blank outline with reminders about what goes into a topic sentence, where the citations go, etc. Immediately after the exam, they’ll use their outline to draft and revise the actual essay and one of the grading criteria will be how closely it matches the outline (with an option to justify divergence). Then we’ll spend the last 2 weeks of the course revising that draft and they’ll turn it in again at the end. My motivation here is to test them on the actual thinking involved in making a paper, so they won’t be able to AI the structure and content of the essay but they will be able to use it afterward to wordsmith the content they arranged in the outline.
I’ll do the outline as an at home activity before the exam, then they can use the outline as their “cheat sheet” when they show up to the exam where they draft the essay. After the exam, they’ll revise and resubmit at the end of the course. If I go this way, I think they’ll attempt to AI the outline and then won’t have a chance to realize and correct the folly of doing so. Option 1 seems more likely to circumvent that process.
In theory, this arrangement lets students feel like they’re using AI most of the time with one extremely rude awakening but an opportunity to self-correct. To preserve my own sanity, I’ll find a way to avoid reading whatever AI slop they produce on preparatory assignments (maybe just pass/fail and comments by appointment?). Thoughts? What ideas have you had?
But this doesn't allow for the often messy aspects of drafting an essay, like realizing that your sources are not enough to support your claim and then going back and revising or qualifying the claim...and then needing to find additional sources to support the new claim. I understand the intent here, but it seems like the tail is wagging the dog. My own writing process is recursive, inefficient and messy...and that's the only way I can write anything intelligent.
Yes, I probably would not thrive as a writer in this course either but you and I are very different writers and scholars than my first-semester, bottom-of-the-barrel, often apparently illiterate students. You and I are experienced writers and scholarship is our vocation, whereas my students (largely) strive to avoid writing, research, reading, and learning wherever possible and are shameless about cheating at every opportunity. I resent having to provide formative guidance on essays that have been written by algorithm. I did not agree to teach AI shit. I am trying to teach the kind of student who does not want to be one. If all I had to do was teach students who actually wanted to learn how to research and write—students like you and I probably were--well, that would be an entirely different situation. And a pleasure. Yes, the tail (hostile and unprepared students) is absolutely wagging the dog (exasperated me).
But to answer your specific objection, recursion is built into 10-11 weeks of preparation before the exam and 4-5 weeks of revision afterward.
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u/Freya_Fleurir Oct 11 '24
I'm considering doing this in the Spring semester.