Thursday, June 13, 2024

Learning tidbits (2 of 2): The learning of others.

So, my one (Mormon) colleague was saying that ChatGPT has really been sweeping through his (state) college and creating all sorts of havoc.

Like, over the past number of years, he had been carefully and thoughtfully redesigning his (huge lecture course) curricula to include all of these writing assignments, since the dominant philosophy had been that you can never really replace careful pedagogical feedback on personal development of thought among disparate individuals, and that was how you got results and made your profession irreplaceable.

(Somehow he managed that, with a course with hundreds of students and like a dozen TAs.)

But, now there’s so many students doing ChatGPT, it’s not worth dealing with, what with the time-cost of monitoring for potential academic integrity violations and then student disciplinary procedures and stuff, and so he’s had to go back and rewrite all his course materials, and mostly he’s defaulted to doing the most crassest topic-specific multiple-choice quizzes.

Just imagine, all that student tuition money for that!

It’s really like a downward spiral to the emptiest form of credentialing.

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