Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Greessey t1_j5fsivf wrote

I really like what the author of this article says about giving students agency rather than having them all answer the same questions. As a young person in college, most of my assignments are rather boring to me. I've used ChatGPT on a number of things because I just didn't want to engage with the material, I didn't find it interesting. I never copied word for word of course.

With that being said, I had an English teacher who repeatedly assigned essays with topics that I just absolutely despised. They were just dreadful. I just emailed the teacher and said a more complicated version of, "Hey I don't really like this topic, I would like to do this instead, here's how it aligns with the objectives of the original assignment. Is that okay?"

I've done this multiple times with multiple professors and I have never had any of them say no. It's really hard to assign material that will be engaging for all of the students. I think it'd be better to enable students to request permission to do something else if they can articulate how it aligns with the original assignment. A student will always work harder on something they care about.

53

Joyce1920 t1_j5gpqsd wrote

When I was teaching freshman composition, the problem that I ran into was that some students really struggled with too much freedom if I allowed them to pick the topic. I usually had a few general topics explicitly listed, but also allowed students to explore other topics that mirrored their interest.

Another problem is that evaluating writing is much more time intensive than most other forms of evaluation. When you have to evaluate 40+ papers in only a few days, it becomes increasingly tricky to allow latitude. If an instructor is only getting paid for 3 hours to grade papers, it's hard to blame them for not allowing much divergence from a prompt. That's a problem that can be solved by lowering student-teacher ratios, but most universities are more focused on cost cutting.

Finally, the purpose of college is increasingly coming into question. Nowadays, it's being used as essentially a job training facility when that has not been the point of it historically. Capitalist ideology has really snuck into every corner of academia now, and that mindset values standardization and objective results. As long as the primary goal of academia is to create a supply for the workforce, then assignments and evaluations will tend to focus on standardization over creativity.

37

Greessey t1_j5h1kwf wrote

Love this response and I agree wholeheartedly. It's not realistic for every student to do what I do. It's also not realistic for teachers to be able to make class engaging for everyone when they have so many students and so little time.

My favorite classes have been the ones where it's like 1 teacher and less than 10 students. They're amazing.

5

Joyce1920 t1_j5h3os1 wrote

What you're describing is basically grad school. Graduate school is an amazing academic experience in the right circumstances. I really found my time as a grad student to be intellectually fulfilling.

Unfortunately, most universities also see grad students as a source of cheap labor, so they are generally ripe for exploitation. Basically, any discussion of grad school is going to result in me repeating my earlier points about capitalist ideology infiltrating academia.

7

Boxsquid0 t1_j5inopt wrote

You mean it wasn't a good idea for my university to prioritize the athletic department at the expense of all the other academic departments?

2

CarnationVamp t1_j5iv1o0 wrote

Big brain move now is to develop an AI that grades papers for the teachers.

4

calliope_kekule OP t1_j5g104q wrote

This is really cool. And I can imagine your professors would really appreciate it as well. After all you are making their life easier for them. 👍

7

gk99 t1_j5h1ebi wrote

I'm doing a sort of flipside to this. I have to write a big-effort research paper over the course of the semester, but the prompt is extremely open-ended and I don't really know where to go with it. I've got until Feb 1st to figure out something interesting to write about, and as a last ditch, I'm probably just gonna ask ChatGPT to give me a list of prompts. CGPT has an "issue" where it will effectively just make things up because there's no problem solving underneath to actually check if its statements are accurate, but it's great for inspiration.

4

Greessey t1_j5h2yok wrote

And I think that's a great way to use it. There's such things as having prompts that are too open. I've used cgpt in similar ways as well.

Idk where I heard this, but constraint breeds creativity. Being confined to a prompt can create wonderful results. I just appreciate being able to act on an idea I may have instead.

3