How to finish marking

[notmemrt]

I have seven left and need to get them back. But I've lost the will to live.

They are either brilliant, or really limp and AI-ish, with surface correctness but no evidence of understanding. There's no group in the middle. I have nothing left to say.

How do I motivate myself to finish? I just want to go to bed - I have a really early commute.

I've got slower and slower every year. I used to enjoy marking and be very good and quick at it. There is nothing left in the well!

Imagine the quality of feedback your most lazy colleague provides and aim for that. The brilliant ones will just be happy they got a good mark and not care about the detail. The AI ones don’t deserve the effort.

I put my phone timer on to 25 minutes or whatever the average is for the assignment. It motivates me.

Im noticing so much homework is AI now marking it is absolutely pointless. Ive decided with ks4 homework is now going to be mind-map style prep for a timed essay in front of me. Surely at higher level use of AI is a fail?

I promised myself a piece of chocolate after x amount of essays marked. As mentioned above, I also used a timer. After marking 10 essays or so, I would write up in a word document comments I could cut and paste appropriately. AI stuff I would document usage of, and fail.

I can't prove the use of AI - there's just a vibe!

Hallucinated references tend to be the only solid method. I'm not convinced by the automated checking.

Yes, fantasy references are one way. I popped the essay question into a few of the AI sites. ChatGPT, Claude.ai, etc, and it was amazing how entire paragraphs in the student’s essay were taken from these sites. Screenshot it, document, fail the student.

This is absolutely what I do, and its been life-changing this year.

Combined with this, I try and restrict myself to 10-minutes per 2.5K essay. It doesn't mean I really get many more done per day because I always hit a wall at about 15. But it means I can get them over with and then carry on with my day.

AI-generated work, I have no idea. We can't prove AI-use (I haven't found ghost references yet) so can't fail essays that are just AI-feeling. Those I suspect of being AI-generated I give a very low mark and then tailor comments to the marking scheme but with a thinly veiled "I know ChatGPT did this"- comments about lack of depth which suggests only a surface scrape of materials, unusual structure which isn't in line with academic conventions, lack of cohesive argument which shows lack of deep understanding of the subject, verbosity or an unusual writing style.

I had an essay last semester with hallucinated references. I reported it as academic conduct and the case is currently making its way through the relevant university channels, but the student still maintains that they really did not use chat gpt and that the references truly exist(ed) but that they must have been removed from the internet since they wrote the essay...

I hate marking. Hate hate hate it. No matter what I do, how hard I work it just takes so long, AI means more vague and unsubstantiated answers, students don’t come to seminars so don’t follow instructions, don’t reference correctly. It’s all just so tedious.

I'm an adjudicator for academic offences at my place and suspected AI takes up most of my time these days. We don't use AI detectors as they're so unreliable - hallucinated references being the only sure fire way of proving it.

As a marker I suspect AI use all the time - I'd also guess quite a lot gets through unnoticed by students who are clever prompt engineers and take the time to polish AI output.

I had this, and the student said they had just got the details wrong and this was accepted by the academic offences team.

It wasn't like it was 2013 instead of 2015 or something, the hallucinated references were eg 'Analysis of Thomas the Tank ', Smith, 2010, Journal of Trains, and the student was saying this had been confused with a real article, 'Experiment on Bob the Builder', Jones, 2023, Building Journal.

So frustrating.