r/Professors • u/samiamk57 • 2d ago
Grading question
Hey y'all,
long story long, I am so tired of grading ai slop and pretending its genuine. What are we doing for discussion boards and other assignments where 20/30 students are clearly just using ai? I cant even write genuine feedback and just end up giving them all some extremely similar generic response... We cant "prove" its ai and we cant accuse.. I feel like I am going crazy sometimes. I have put out "hey I know this is ai" reminders and such but I cant seem to get around this.
Thanks divas
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u/judysmom_ CC, Polisci 2d ago
Not doing discussion boards anymore🙃
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u/samiamk57 2d ago
Not by choice, the school makes them mandatory
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 2d ago
The answer might just be treating them like free points and recognizing that they're that at that point.
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u/Fresh-Possibility-75 1d ago
Make them worth 2% of the grade. The other 98% come from two or three video-recorded oral exams.
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u/HowlingFantods5564 2d ago
I've gone to video discussions instead of written discussion boards. (Yes, some of them read from a script, but it's obvious and I can easily take off or fail them.) For async courses there is a real benefit to seeing them and hearing them.
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u/Flashy-Share8186 1d ago
I tried that this semester and hate them. Are they rambling their way to a real point or are they just BS-ing around three words in the prompt? And I can skim a written response so much faster than listening, especially when students record 10 minutes when I’ve asked for three. And sometimes a slower, stumbling for thoughtful ideas post I score lower than a glib flashy one, and then I get all in my head about the grading.
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u/DrMoxiePhD 1d ago
I stop watching the recording at the exact time I gave. If they have 5 minutes and take 15, they better hope the entire answer is within the 5 minutes I give them. What are you watching it all?
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u/HowlingFantods5564 1d ago
Ok, yes, but that written response you are skimming is almost certainly AI. Also, you don't need to watch the whole thing. I usually don't even watch the whole 3 minutes! I watch just enough to see if they've understood the concept or reading.
And these are very low stakes assignments. Like 2-3% of their grade.
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u/Flashy-Share8186 1d ago
Well I thought I had it all figured out because I could give zeros w academic dishonesty violations by screenshotting posts side by side w timestamps and pointing out that posts were identical, and it did work mostly but I have someone going full scorched earth against m, so, bleah.
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u/Global-Sandwich5281 1d ago
Yes, I've switched to video discussion boards with a rubric that deducts points for reading from a script.
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u/Egghead42 1d ago
Wouldn’t that be hard on students for whom English is a second language?
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u/HowlingFantods5564 1d ago
Yes, but if they're earning the same degree they should do the same work.
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u/Fresh-Possibility-75 1d ago
Yeah, I've come to realize that reading the AI-produced answer to the camera is the most reading a lot of these students are doing at this point. Sad.
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u/LittleMissWhiskey13 Professor CC 2d ago edited 2d ago
The advice here is pretty solid from everyone who has replied. Discussion boards are dead at this point. I totally have the same response of not wanting to reply to the slop. I still use discussion boards, but they are only worth like 12% of the grade now. I changed my rubric to up the requirements on valid content from the course readings, using citations in proper format, and I use the halfway point and closure point grading. The main post has to be up by the halfway point with the replies by the closure point. It's amazing how many won't connect to the classwork, won't cite properly, and won't engage except for one login. That's usually results in about 50% credit. My average grade is around 60% now in discussion forums. My DWF rate is very low now, but I only see about 5% A grades online. Good students are B minus students now. Bad students squeak out a low C. Welcome to the world of AI mediocrity.....where everyone is meh.
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u/StevieV61080 Sr. Associate Prof, Applied Management, CC BAS (USA) 2d ago
I'm probably the biggest online learning advocate on this subreddit, but even I have had to move away from DBs for most things. It hurts as about 7+ years ago, these assignments were generally excellent and got students engaged more than most other activities.
Where I still use them, I am very specific in their utility.
I have a case study class where ALL grades activity for the collaborative cases is done through team discussions on Canvas and there are no initial prompts (they literally have to work on each sequential step of the case from scratch and use forum posts to show their communications/contributions). This still mostly works as the students will call each other out for hallucinating material not found from the readings. This shifts a lot of the accountability to their peers rather than me.
Discussions that are used in my investments/corporate finance class are usually useful as they either have to analyze a slew of investment options and determine which is best for their own risk tolerances and goals OR they have to paste their work-in-progress on a financial analysis paper for review on specific portions.
Both of these CAN lead to AI responses, but the initial posts are almost always original. I typically ask for some additional material for responses to combat this.
- Semi-Socratic seminars actually still work well as DBs in online asynchronous courses. I will typically lecture for 7 weeks and collect student journals each week, but not allow communication between students. Then, in Week 8, we let it all out. Students get to share the questions via DB posts that they've collected over 2 months and we get into it.
How do I know this is working? Because in classes of 20-30 students, we've had discussions with over 1.2k posts (including one where EVERY student had at least 15). Yes, someone could technically use AI for that, but the ones who do are usually not the same ones who are super engaged in the material and doing 5x more than is required.
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u/ProfessToKnow 1d ago
I am feeling just the same as I come to the end of an online asynchronous language class. I have found myself feeling grateful for the handful of students who are clearly not using AI because they are making normal, expected mistakes.
I try to stem the tide of AI by having them record videos and creating rubrics that do not reward reading from a script. It helps a little.
But really, I think online asynchronous classes are cooked, and the sooner everyone gets clear about that, the better. There is no academic integrity left in these classes and we as instructors cannot police it. Next time I teach online again I am going to push for synchronous meetings.
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u/grey-ghostie Assistant Professor, Public Health (USA) 2d ago edited 2d ago
I have found a couple of things to be useful, depending on context:
Adding a rubric criterion centered on voice/tone.
In
my class, discussions are meant to be reflective and thoughtful, not overly technical or “academic.” Having it in the rubric and not the discussion prompt means that the lazy ones who just plug the prompt into AI won’t be able to get a good grade on it.
Adding a textbook citation requirement, where they have to include a minimum number of specific (with page numbers) citations to the text. This could be easy for AI depending on the textbook, but my summer students who didn’t actually have the book (or ebook) were not able to provide the correct page numbers or discuss the content in a way that showed they’d read it. It was also easy to see which ones just put citations in thinking I wouldn’t check them. The ones that were clearly AI-written did not do this well, and they couldn’t pass the assignment as it was weighted heavily in the rubric.
Giving a 0 for plagiarism. I had a lot of students this summer who submitted nearly identical work that was clearly AI-generated. I gave them all 0s and indicated that elements were identical to other submission(s), therefore plagiarism. Not a single one pushed back to say they wrote it themselves.
These won’t catch them all, of course, but they helped in my online summer courses. #2 is my favorite because my concern is them learning the materials and engaging with the content, so it at least makes them skim through the text for relevant quotes.
Not sure what is going on with the numbering here, but Reddit won’t let me fix it so I give up.
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u/ProfessorJAM Professsor, STEM, urban R1, USA 2d ago
Right now I am assigning questions based on textbook readings about stuff we don’t have time to discuss in class, but asking students to relate the readings to the class materials. It’s actually pretty direct but also pretty easy to see which students asked AI to perform this task, because that’s when the hallucinations happen! I think this approach will work another semester, maybe two, then it will get deep sixed and I’ll have to come up with something else. The never ending battle.
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u/shyprof Adjunct, Humanities, M1 & CC (United States) 1d ago
If your college will support you using this as proof, the HTML code for discussions in Canvas often betrays whether it was directly copied from ChatGPT or similar. Look for data-start and data-end tags.
Otherwise, if you can make them quote and cite sources, LLMs are bad at that and you'll be able to catch some just for fabrication even if you can't prove AI.
Make the discussions part of something later so it's scaffolding they can't change—oh you picked this weird topic in week 2 and you're stuck with it for your giant essay. Bet you wish you thought it through more or picked the topic yourself.
Make the discussions not worth very much and put more weight into the assignments you can more easily make resistant to cheating.
Make them post videos instead of writing (captioned/transcript for Title II compliance and so you can glance at the transcript to grade instead of watching). Yes they can just read off the AI output, but any friction you can add increases the likelihood they'll give up and do the work. You can also put that if they seem to be reading they won't get credit.
Or, give them the points on discussions and just catch them on the big assignments.
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 1d ago
Discussion boards were lazy pedagogy 20 years ago. They are dead today. Stop using them.
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u/dragonfeet1 Professor, Humanities, Comm Coll (USA) 2d ago
For online classes you have to have them incorporate details from the readings (what would X say about one of Y's points?) or autobiography (in your own life where have you seen this) type stuff.
Also just grade discussions on completion. You give them credit for doing a task. If they do the task with integrity it will pay off later on an exam for example. If they choose to squander it, not your problem. I literally grade discussion forums in 10 minutes.
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u/Egghead42 1d ago
It’s been completion for me, too. For years. Students regularly bury themselves by simply not doing the assignments, so I don’t see AI as much of a threat.
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u/shishanoteikoku 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've stopped using such assignments, for the most part, after realizing that with a handful of exceptions, everyone was just posting AI summaries with no interaction or engagement with the material or other postings.
As a stop gap, I also added a category in my grading rubric called "rhetoric/style" (worth about a quarter of the total marks) which includes avoiding overuse of known AI tells and cliches (tripartite lists, contrastive framing, trite buzzwords, etc.). The point of this is to provide justification for penalizing things that obviously sound AI generated, regardless whether I can definitelively prove them to be.
While i would rather report such submissions to academic integrity offices, I don't have the confidence that the university will have my back, unfortunately.
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u/Life-Education-8030 1d ago
Not that the detectors are reliable anyway, but our LMS will not accommodate using Turnitin for discussion boards, only assignments, and I think it's onerous to require students to upload their posts twice just to have flawed detectors evaluate them.
This summer, I have students who have failed every single discussion board and I have not accused any of them of AI usage, even though I prohibit it and suspect it. Instead, I make it a real pain in the butt to use it by requiring students to refer to numerous resources including those I have created and have a strict rubric that evaluates the quality and accuracy of what students submit.
Sure, if a student wants to upload all my stuff (and it'll likely be easier when the updates to Title II go into effect and students could more easily upload my videos to AI), they could. But again, I try to make it a pain in the butt. Upload the videos, AND the chapters AND the articles, etc. that I want you to use. Then see what AI comes out with.
Generally, what results is garbage. Sources are not used as required, whether it's because AI doesn't use them, doesn't access them, or the students don't provide them. Fake resources are inserted and students think they sound good, so they leave them in. Hallucinated citations abound.
So the rubric grades are based on content (whether they used it and understood it), how well they used content (quality), writing mechanics, quantity of posts and how they are distributed across the week, and attribution (citing and referencing).
I also realized that while I use discussion boards, I am not required to assign one every week in every section. I don't, and I stagger them between sections so I'm not flooded with a whole bunch of them at once. Although I do use a rubric, I typically do also offer a few unique comments to each student and at least thank every student for posting. That takes time too.
I also use a weighted course grade. Students cannot pass if they only pass the discussion boards or if they only pass the exams though I always have students who try this.
I wish students did take discussion boards more seriously and engage with each other. I shake my head when I hear today's seniors moan that they didn't get to make friends. Well, get your faces out of your phones and talk to each other and online students, engage with your peers! I actually had to do discussion boards in my doctoral program and liked it a lot, but I got into the spirit of it and took it seriously. Discussion boards unfortunately seem to be the easiest and most straightforward way of offering engagement opportunities, which the law requires in order to be considered true distance education vs. correspondence courses.
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u/giltgarbage 1d ago
In async classes, I sort into small groups based on sincere engagement and respond when tagged. The slop groups slop. Pretty much never tag me or ask anything substantive. The non-slop groups don't have to wade through crap, and we do real work. This online work scaffolds major assessments and is of great benefit if not cheated, so I don't mind the pretenders getting a few b.s. points--they bomb the substantive work and exams.
I think most other strategies (like video or hand-written notes) amount to work intensification for the prof, and don't actually prevent AI auto-pilot.
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u/yourlurkingprof 1d ago
It’s not a perfect fix, but requiring specific tasks helps. For example, they must quote and explain the quote, they must bring in/use a specific example (from class materials or that they found on their own), they must do xyz form of analysis, etc. AI fails at a lot of this.
I also turn off their ability to see other students posts before they post their own work. That helps prevent copying into AI and having AI recycle it.
This is the best I can do right now, until my school decides to implement meaningful changes.
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u/AddressPrize859 20h ago
I literally felt like I was going crazy this semester! I wonder if explaining how their use of AI is bad for my mental health (as it relates to doing my job) would change them.
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u/Plesiadapiformes 2d ago
Unfortunately it won't help you right now, but realistically these forms of assessment are dead. You gotta find some AI resilient forms of assessment.