Anyone have any recommended tools to use to detect AI generated student essays

[gallopingissuchfun]

Sick of reading assignments that are clearly styled by AI and at odds with students’ previous critical abilities. University’s TurnitIn software doesn’t detect AI text. What tools are out there to prove it was AI generated?

I’m in a RG ranked pretty highly and (was) a believer in essays as critically important in practicing the long form argument.

No, of course students are not going to write an ‘essay’ at work once they’re done with uni. Essays are not about writing, they are about thinking. Thinking on a topic, offering an argument, explaining it, and justifying it with reliable evidence. Arguing at length is difficult, but really develops a students thinking and learning. Making a justified argument at work is an important skill.

However, sadly I’m coming to accept that the essay is dead. And critical thinking skills, dependent on domain knowledge, will be eroded. Except for students at Oxford and Cambridge who will still write and defend weekly essays in small tutorials. The divide is going to grow.

This year we have gone to great lengths to teach them how to do an annotated bibliography, how to research a topic, what an argument looks like etc in order to teach students how to use it so they aren't made stupid by it.

Pretty much all of them (hundreds) use it stupidly despite everything we painstakingly taught them. It does not just write for them. It thinks for them. Much of the thinking is describing a laundry list, rather than critical analysis, and ends on an upbeat, positive, corporatist bs. And I’d love a student to read a full article to check their understanding, not to ask for summaries first, and not use GenAI for constructing an argument. They just don’t.

Humans love it when technology makes our life easier. Atm, GenAI makes students lives hugely easier so of course they’re going to use it. Tim Wu titled his book, The Tyranny of Convenience and his argument holds for me. No idea what the answer is, but I’m glad I’m near the end of my career.

Never used it to produce slides but I have asked it to produce activities and even then I've just taken the idea and reconfigured it.
I've gone for a presentation to assess one of my modules. There's a limit to what AI can do with a presentation. There's little we can do if they've used it to prepare the presentation but they can rarely answer any questions if they don't understand the subject. However, I do have one student who is allowed to pre-record because of anxiety.

Our students are complaining about faculty using it to create slides and complaining about faculty using it for marking. The irony.

It is social media on steroids to the nth degree. Arriving on everyone’s radar just as people have woken up to the harms generated by sm and are trying to discourage young people from accessing it.

Look at the men developing and promoting GenAI. Do you trust any of them? Do any of them have moral principles, ethical standards, good intentions? No.

What needs more sunlight and discussion is on the capacity for detailed data mining it poses, the surveillance GenAI allows, and the potential for dictating what (people) students think. Even now, most students reproduce what they’ve been told, not having been taught from a young age to question.

I certainly fear for our students futures and fear for a future society organised around use of and reliance on GenAI.

www.newcartographies.com/p/the-myth-of-automated-learning

PP mentioned AI in the workplace. Its replacing lots of graphic designers in my area, but its a copyright infringement nightmare and many of our recent grads with an arts background have no clue of the value of original work in order to protect us from being sued. And then there is the nightmare of AI CVs and cover letters, all these wonderful articulate and talented young people, who weirdly can't string a sentence together at interview.

Feels like - what lack of exercise has done to the physical body - AI will do to our minds. Most of us have to plan and go out of our way to get anything approaching what would once have been a normal amount of physical exercise - it's use it or lose it.

My students like to feed their lecture notes into chat and get summaries. In the past, you'd expect the students' notes to have more depth than the handouts - now these summaries have less. Everything is just so .... slick but shallow.

Surely when it comes to finals the students that have used AI throughout the course come undone?

And then you get in trouble because the fail rate for your module is too high...

So what's the point of exams that everyone can pass but passing the exam doesn't demonstrate anything worthwhile?

Not ever course has finals/exams. Mine doesn’t. We may need to move to more exam focused assessments but will need to get the whole programme re validated if we change assessments (professional registration).

Same. Because on every subject that I know the least thing about they are so painfully wrong it's infuriating.
As are the sort of "oh, if you don't just go with it you just want to go back to quill pens" idiotic comments.

Great post.

I work in FE and all the tutors brag about using AI!

When I raised AI as an issue 2+ years ago, I was told I was a dinosaur. 🤷‍♀️

It's not a university's job to "prepare students for the workplace." If preparation for the workplace is what they want there are much more direct ways to get it. Although I would argue that invigilated exams at least teach you thinking on the fly, the key role of preparation, and self-sufficiency, which is not nothing, and is better than just learning how to copy an AI answer.

I am in secondary and even there got fed up of marking AI answers to 6 mark homework questions, so now I set a question a week in advance with hints, and the students have to answer it written in class. This is obviously a much easier fix in my subject/ level because it can be done in a short time in class. Plus of course our gcse exams are still in person.

My two daughters at Uni are seeing lots of peers essentially cheating. My daughter doing maths is extremely anti AI and refuses to use it- her assignments are a % of her grade each year but she also has written in person exams. She will be at a massive advantage in the exams as she has actually done the work herself but it isn’t fair that others on the course who have got AI to do all the assignments all year will get that part of their grade ‘for tree’. They can’t get over the fact she doesn’t do this. An easy shift in that case would make the assignments compulsory to pass the course but not as part of the grade. My other daughter was really put out last year when a boy on her course handed in an AI essay generated an hour before a deadline and got a decent grade despite it being flagged as 80% probably AI . However a recent project had to be delivered as a short set of slides which she presented and took questions on which was much more AI proof.

I hope that there is a conversation like this one going on at their respective Unis about how to change assessment style would safeguard the students actually doing the work- but if there is it isn’t currently being shared with students and it can be very demoralising for those not using it who are being disadvantaged.

University departments don't want high levels of failure on the record though ... So they're going to lower their standards with all the AI stuff.

And degrees will become even more meaningless!

And the. Apprenticeships will take over as the preferred employment pathway for employers

Well that’s depressing.

It’s because they are now businesses first, then educational establishments!

I’m currently doing a humanities PhD and also teaching undergrads, as well as mature students in our Continuing Ed department, so seeing it from both sides. I’m really far through my thesis (currently writing up) so have so far chosen not to use AI at all - and am now worrying that as the university is saying they are likely to make an AI statement compulsory that I will look like a dinosaur for not using it… Hopefully I will submit before they introduce the statement!
In terms of teaching it is tricky - I’m pretty sure the mature students aren’t using it much as they are paying for their own courses and are super motivated (but who knows!). There is a fairly high level of in person exams here so that helps with the undergrads who know they will face exams so might as well engage during the year, but there have been tines when I’ve marked an essay down for being full of smooth fluff but not really going into depth and have wondered.
Someone suggested upthread that institutions could use Google docs (or equivalent) data and that seems a good idea - you could make it compulsory to write an essay/assessment on certain software and if you have suspicions you could ask IT to dig out the tracked changes which surely would show the writing process in progress. Or maybe AI will find a way round that as well!