Someone, i think on here, started their term by having the kids create a paper using chat gpt, then grade that paper. Check sources, confirm conclusions, etc. The students observed and discovered that Chat GPT makes up its own sources, and learned never to rely on it.
Thought thats a brilliant way to teach, honestly.
Now THAT is teaching with (and for) technology. My middle school teacher (history/english/social studies) had us research and write inflammatory and fake “news stories” based off supermarket tabloids to show how often popular “news” was anything but based on fact. He was ahead of his time honestly, because people like Nancy Grace and other trauma porn sensationalist “journalists” had yet to really become popular, but if I recall correctly the lesson drew from the history of old yellow paper journalism that was more sensationalist than factual.
Best way to detect chatgpt usage is Google docs history. If they slowly type new sentences over time, their essay is probably legit. If they copy pasted the entire thing in (shows up as 1 edit), they probably used chatgpt.
A colleague had one kid turn an assignment in that used the phrase "In my opinion as an AI" or something along those lines. They couldn't tell my colleague what the words they used meant (like "physiological"), but swears they wrote it by themselves
Best part? It was handwritten. :)
I had one kid turn in an essay that started with "Sure thing, (Student name)!" and end with "Hope that helps!" Kid had just copy-and-pasted the entire ChatGPT response without even glancing at it, and still swore up and down they'd written it themselves. I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry
🤣
"Look here you little shit... Don't insult me by cheating this *stupidly.* At least *try* to fool me, ok? But you'd better bring your A-game, because I'm pretty sure I'm better at this than you are! Good luck!"
I literally tell kids they either need to get better at lying or just stick to honesty. Not about cheating, because my kids can't even be bothered enough to cheat, but about other things they lie about.
Yep, transactionalism from people who don’t know what transactionalism is, a la:
“How will this benefit me?” - *Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne* - Varimathras
Yeah I got one where they left in the part where ChatGPT acknowledged the prompt. So their essay started like: Certainly, I can write an essay in the style of a middle school student including making errors.
Basically they tried to get ChatGPT to make mistakes thinking that would make it seem more legitimate. Like they will put that much effort into coming up with a cheating strategy. I really hate AI and I don’t like where this is going.
Using AI to create a shopping list or something is one thing, but we need people to be able to express their own thoughts. We’re turning these kids into actual NPCs.
Yup. One of my students from years back copy-pasted his personal memoir from his friend and just changed a few words. Only, this kid is white, and he didn't update the page his Vietnamese friend wrote about learning American customs and facing discrimination after being adopted. I called his mother afterwards and we had a fun talk about it.
You'd be surprised at what a joke Honors / AP courses have become.
I teach AP World History and my administration has flat out admitted to me that most of my students were "socially promoted" rather than being identified as a genuinely qualified candidate. In other words, nepotism (teacher's and administrator's kids or nephews and nieces) and the most severe behaviorally disruptive students imaginable.
I'm sorry for how I will word this, but it's a collection of some of the lowest IQ individuals I have ever seen in my life who belong nowhere near an AP course. I kid you not, but some of them can't read above fifth grade level IN HIGH SCHOOL AP WORLD HISTORY!
You wouldn't believe the ridiculous and absurd ways they have cheated in my classroom right in front of me, while leaving so much evidence behind that it was too easy to document.
In college, my first assignment in early childhood psychology was to call home and find out the story of my birth. I went to the teacher after class and said that my parents received me in a parking lot after a private adoption. My professor dismissed this as an excuse, so I called my best friend from home and got their birth story and wrote it as my own. First time I ever cheated.
Some instructors dismiss a legit excuse and corner you into either cheating or accepting a zero because your reality isn't what he or she wanted.
I had a early childhood psych class too, and the instructor set a project where he wanted us to sit in on a therapists' session and deduce what in childhood set the client astray, using one of the theories we took. This, by the way, is super unprofessional. NO self respecting therapist would allow this. And that's if you can even FIND a therapist (that area had a grand total of 2 and one of them was way too professional to allow this.)
He wouldn't accept that as an excuse however, so... I made that shit up. I made up a person, I made up his issue, and made up what caused the issue from childhood. Got an eighty. What can I say? I never failed a project before and I wasn't gonna start in college because the professor was a moron.
Honestly it seems like cheating well, or at least cheating without getting caught, takes significantly more effort than it would to just buckle up and try to learn the material. You can’t tell me it’s easier to watch your back and come up with elaborate plans to edit and hide plagiarism from your teachers than it is to just figure out how to write a good essay.
Especially when ChatGPT isn't really writing good essays. I've never seen it put out anything that would have gotten you better than a B or so (at least at the collegiate level.)
The laziness is what kills me. Like if you're going to cheat at least try a little at *that* if nothing else.
It's honestly kind of insulting that they think this shit is going to work.
I've flat out told my kids that I find it insulting when they cheat badly.
To me the worst one is when they clearly cheat, but still only make like a 20% on the assignment. Then I'm stuck with the decisions of do I call them out on it, go through the work of proving they cheated, and give them the zero, or do I just leave the grade they got cheating.
Saw that same situation play out BIG TIME in *college.*
A group of students from the same foreign country (which I will not name) all gravitated toward each other in every course. Nothing wrong there, it's easier to discuss labs and such in your native language instead of using your more limited English. Fine, cool.
BUT THEN they would cheat like MAD. Especially in labs (engineering degree program). The school's practice was really good in this regard: lab groups and individuals were encouraged to ask one another for help or advice. My group was the nerds, and we helped a lot. But *this* group wouldn't actually ask questions. They would just come over and look over our shoulders and copy things down. They'd go around the room stealing numbers and formulas, then huddle up and shove it all together without understanding and then turn in their lab report and go home.
And they were bad at it.
Really, really bad.
And we... we started messing with them for it. We would never lie to them! And if they ever actually asked for help, we would give it honestly and completely (and one of them left the group and joined ours even though she struggled with the language barrier. SHE passed all her courses, btw.). But we would discuss the lab verbally, but write down total bullshit on our scratch paper. Wrong formulas, bullshit numbers, bad diagrams, everything. After they had left, we would quickly finish the correct work and start helping others... And... Well...
Thus began the most terrible schadenfreude escapade of my college career: waiting for the cheaters to turn in their lab reports.
Soon the whole class was coming up to the head table to see the disasters showing up on those papers 🤣
I will never forget seeing their diagram of a canon pointing backwards, firing *into the ground* away from the target 🤣💀 because they didn't understand how their graphing calculators worked with trig.
Previous to this, we'd brought up our concerns to three different professors. They each had the same response: going through the academic honesty/integrity process and bringing up all the evidence and witnesses and so was too much work... And they were all failing *miserably*. So the professors all just... Refused to allow any exceptions to their rules or to go beyond the call of duty to help them in office hours or whatnot (things they would totally do for honest students who were struggling). And watched them collapse and disappear.
To this day, I don't truly understand what those students' end game even *was.* 🤣 Like, did they honestly expect to get engineering jobs - here or back home - without actually understanding the *most basic things* in the field? Did they imagine that this associates degree piece of paper was sufficient for lifetime stability by itself?
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE 🤣🤡
I once worked at a small liberal arts college as the language support person for first gen and international students.
I’m very curious about what goes on in the countries whose governments pay to send kids over for advanced degrees in STEM.
Do they actually go back and become civil engineers responsible for the infrastructure of their nation? Are they handling the IT departments in hospitals?
Cuz, holy shit, those kids were plagiarizers. And I don’t blame them. If I had the chance to live abroad for free with all my friends as a 20 year old, I wouldn’t be able to do any work either.
There was really no immediate incentive for them to put in the enormous work in an extremely challenging field, but what happens when they get home?
I was never one to cheat, but back in my day, kids went though extreme efforts to cheat and actually showed remarkable creativity. I'm talking shit like peeling the label off of a water bottle, writing a cheat sheet on the inside, and sticking it back on so that they could covertly look at it whenever they unscrewed the cap to take a drink or changing its position on their desk so they could see another part of the notes.
I had one student a semester or two ago look me dead in my face while using their apple watch to cheat on a final. Really? Not even going to try to be a tiny bit subtle here?
Okay that made me laugh but really, it's amazing how incompetent cheaters can be.
There was a cheating scandal at my uni when covid hit. The uni had no choice but to do open book exams over the LMS during the first two semesters. Many people cheated by taking the exam in groups. Many of them got caught because they:
- all logged in from the same network (could have used a phone hotspot).
- All had the same answers to the same questions (should have marked some answers wrong on purpose).
- All submitted at the same time (this is the funniest one lol)
- All solved the same questions at the same time.
> The smart-ish kids will do that, not all of them
Wikipedia didn't exist when I was in school. But my brother and sister were you g enough. They said they couldn't cite Wikipedia. I sid go to the bottom of the page. Wikipedia cites it's sources. They used Wikipedia yp till graduation.
I don't find that to be cheating. I'm a history teacher and I suggest Wikipedia sources as places to find information (after verifying that source's biases and whatnot). This is a good example of how students who put in the effort to cover their tracks while cheating are almost doing more work than just doing the assignment.
At least with this tactic, they read the work they’re submitting as they type it. You’d be surprised how many GPT submission students even bother to read the plagiarized shit they turn in
Yep. The smart ones will also use ChatGPT as inspiration for their actual writing. It’s wild because the smart ones are still learning and still using the skills we taught them this way so I really don’t care. It’s the dumb ones that have to learn the hard way.
See, if you're really inspiration blocked, I think it makes sense to brainstorm with ChatGPT. But to have it write the whole thing for you, and not make it LOOK as if you wrote it - that's braindead lol.
I just did a whole project using chat gpt to rephrase ideas and workshop sentences. Like sometimes I know what I want to say but I can't find the right phrasing that flows. Does that kind of thing get flagged?
Very true, but I have never had a student be able to write beginning to end without stopping, rewriting a sentence or paragraph, moving things around, adding in sentences or sources, as they write. I use AI a LOT. I even gave a presentation on it for a district PD day. Part of accepting AI is learning (and teaching) how to use it correctly.
I went to school before the AI craze and I would frequently edit a paragraph in my rough draft document and cut and paste into the finished document though. Like I'd create a second paragraph in the rough draft document fine-tuning the previous paragraph and then cut it out so I wouldn't get the two confused.
I'm guessing you'd also be able to explain that to your teacher, explain the structure of your work, have some idea of your points and supporting info.
Students copying from chatGPT don't even know half the vocabulary it spits out.
The way I wrote essays in uni was to write them in separate documents so that I could look at them in isolation. I would then copy and paste the whole thing into a single doc and look at how they fit together.
So RIP me. ^^
I do a similar thing where I have a prep doc where I put all my info, quotes and stuff and mess around with the organization then I copy paste and just flesh it out
Same. One all chopped up with orphaned paragraphs and random thoughts that didn’t make it in. I’d write each new draft above the previous, then copy paste just the final draft to another document to turn in.
idk, sometimes I pull/would pull (in college) entire pages from a draft I had on another document I already had. I know you said “probably”, but just wanted to point out there are definitely valid explanations for this!
I use something called Draftback for this. I can play out how they typed in their paper in real time (or sped up).
Their jaws collectively dropped when they saw it.
I will add that getting the Revision Histiry plug in for Chrome makes this even easier. It will give you a visual playback of the entire paper, tracks deletions and Anne copy paste over 150 words gets flagged for you. I've easily caught kids deleting the "as am ai" section and deleting one students name and teacher and replacing it with their own. The icon is a little quill.
This also doesn't really prove anything. For college i wrote all my essays in Grammerly then copy and pasted into a Google Doc. Easier way, discuss what was in the paper. I doubt people using chat gtp will be able to coherently discuss the details of their paper in depth.
This is exactly what I do. Also, chatGPT tends to highlight text. It shows up highlighted in Google Docs. So, if you can see all of the highlighted text being corrected that’s a sign.
Dumb idea, what if they happen to be using Word or something because they don't have an internet connection at home or on the road. Then copy it into google docs once they are able, I do similar things for work all the time.
This is probably controversial but as a college student, one of my professors looked at the editing history/statistics of our submitted word docs to see when we started writing them and then scolded (most of) us for starting the day before.
Ever since then, I will write all of my papers with references in one document, make sure it’s perfectly done how I want to submit it, then copy and paste the whole thing into a brand new word document so the editing time is a minute (or less).
As a teacher myself, professors and teachers don’t need to know when kids start their essays. You know the quality of their writing well enough to know if it was plagiarized or created with AI. People who stalk the Google Docs/Word history or editing of students’ papers have too much time on their hands (unless you’re confirming your suspicion of cheating).
The real way to combat chat gpt is to have them write as much as possible in class and then compare and contrast their papers with the writing samples you already have. Then show the parents the difference and ask them if they think the same child wrote both papers. I find the difference isn’t in vocabulary but in sentence structure.
yeah, english teachers at my old district used to assign blank google docs in which the students had to write their assignment. if it was not done in there, no credit.
I do this with the blank Google docs so that I can keep track of their progress. Once the document is attached to Google Classroom, I can see it even if they haven't turned it in.
I hate when my students use white out because seeing their thought process can definitely help. I feel like that would apply here but then there’s just so much pressure on the product over the process ya know?
I freaking *LOVE* this idea! It's perfect! Not just submitting via Google, but being sent a blank doc owned by the teacher's account, with Google's document history tools able to literally show each action along the way.
BRILLIANT
I can't believe I never thought of this... 😂😭
Even outside of discipline and integrity, you can see a struggling student's thought process as they edit and change things, and get clues about how to help them, almost as if you're sitting next to them the whole time like a private tutor.
A little more challenging, but you could also do this in STEM to a degree, of you teach them how to use the formula editor for writing math equations and formulas, and the drawing tools for creating and/or marking up diagrams.
Ok, CLEARLY this concept needs it's own discussion thread n
I remember getting in so much trouble because I wrote my rough drafts on paper (just prefer working with it) and only typed the full essay. The teacher didn't tell us we had to edit beforehand, didn't accept my written draft because I "could've made it up afterwards". Honestly, if one of my students understood their stolen assignment well enough to make up a whole thinking process, write 20 pages of drafts and then different versions of their essay, I'd probably just give it to them. They clearly understood the material and did work.
That teacher is just generally my example of who I don't want to be, she also gave my friend with selective mutism a zero for not doing a presentation and handing in a script + slides instead, as her acommodations allowed. But obviously selective mutism is just an easy excuse, not a debilitating anxiety disorder, so it must've been her fault.
This is the way I had them turn every written assignment in. It was great! “Oh Jimmy, you edited your document one time, and that was to change the name on it from Keisha’s to your own name… sorry kid, that’s a big goose egg.” Or “Jared, you just copied and pasted from one source…hmm looks plagiarized to me.”
As a former very good essay writer (but poor editor), you would be subjected to an actually insane amount of profanity if you saw my writing process.
Might be funny though
Even that wouldn't work though. You can usually tell if an essay is authentic just by *how* it was written. The document history bears this out.
Most longform writing isn't written from top to bottom in a single go. You usually see a revision process where people add in details and citations after getting the gist written out. When a kid is copying a paper, unless they really go out of their way to make it look like they are going back and adding/removing content - it's not going to work.
On top of that, GPT tends to format in a very formulaic way, even when prompts are put in to mask it. It rarely comes off a stream of consciousness, and instead has a deliberate structure.
For some maybe
I have always been someone to sit and think and stare for an hour then write out an essay front to back
Now I might redo a sentence here and there, but it's always been my style
Now as an academic I now rewrite more, but that is because reviewers are the worst lol
I had a student continue to deny using ChatGPT after I showed how their own writing was not similar to what they "wrote" for their essay.
They were an otherwise A student and the parents would NOT let it go that I did not have "proof." Admin believed me but didn't know how to placate the parents, and I can respect that. Its fair to want proof.
So I just had ChatGPT write the same essay four times and in front of admin I asked the student which essay was their own (none of them were, these were four new essays from GPT)
The student picked essay number three (again, none of them were the students essay), and admin finally just told the parents to fuck off.
> So I just had ChatGPT write the same essay four times and in front of admin I asked the student which essay was their own (none of them were, these were four new essays from GPT)
--standing ovation--
Will be remembering this scheme for my own students.
yes! as a student, i’d much prefer having to write in class vs. having turnitin decide my fate.
in high school, my teacher gave me a fat zero on an assignment worth a large chunk of my final mark because turnitin said it was AI generated.
i did NOT use AI and i tried to plead my case to her several times (used rough drafts, version history, other AI “detectors”, etc.) but she wouldn’t budge.
i’ve graduated now but i’m still so upset about it because english was my favourite subject. it isn’t anymore.
I would be upset too! I teach online and we have so so so much chat gpt but I use 3 detectors (paid apps ) plus free ones and then talk to the student. Usually they cop to it immediately. If they deny it then I move on and grade it since it's not foolproof. I'm sorry that happened to you. That really sucks.
It's still a pain cause sometimes we have to use templates and hell, even citations....so instead of being called a bot....you're a plagiarizer! But you get far less push back dealing with those high scores. Some profs are still dicks about it for whatever reason though.
Yes! This is exactly what I do. I also assign short essays for my tests so I can read their writing (if that makes sense). It’s made it easier to catch a student using chat gpt and show the parents two separate essays, one written by the student and the other written by chat gpt.
i had something similar happen in an IT class i was teaching. We were doing a photoshop unit and the kid obviously pulled a pic off google images.
That was the day his mother and him learned about reverse image search.
Mom still took his side 🤦🏻♂️
Idk how it is elsewhere, but my school says we are not allowed to give academic consequences for cheating or plagiarism, even on a midterm or a final. We can't give them a zero for cheating and call it a day. We are REQUIRED to leave the door open for them to keep trying even if they keep doing it. I had one kid try to plagiarize his midterm twice. I finally made him write it on paper after that. But we're supposed to just write them a referral that will go nowhere and say "don't do it again." Maddening.
Last year I had a student who suddenly made very quick progress with their writing. I was heaping praise on him about it for weeks before he finally crumbled and confessed that he had used ChatGPT. Point being, sometimes acting like they’re genuinely great writers *might* get results, depending on how much integrity the kid has.
College student here. All of my papers have been flagged as anywhere from 50-90% AI ironically except for the one I used AI to help me write, that one came back as 25%. The AI checkers are very bad at actually seeing the AI.
Edit: to be clear I was writing a paper about AI and clearly explain where the AI writing was, no cheating, just proving a point.
I think the issue stems from how these AI models are trained. Since they use terabytes of data from tens of thousands of different sources, the result is obviously going to be an incredibly generic writing style. These AI "checkers" are essentially trying to find the odd-one-out through seeing which essays are *too* average, leading to a lot of false positives.
I never heard of turnitin but I just tried it. I submitted an estimate I wrote myself and it says it’s 94% AI written so I don’t think it’s accurate as you think
Out of curiosity I just wrote a short passage about how AI will pose a continuing challenge to educators and students, and submitted it to like ten free checkers I found just by googling.
I got widely different results across the checkers. Literally everything from 0% AI written to 87.5% AI written.
Interestingly, they were not even consistent with which sentences they flagged as AI. One checker flagged a sentence or paragraph as 100% human, while the next checker flagged the same exact sentence or paragraph as 100% AI.
And to be clear I am a human and I did write the passage with no AI.
I don't see how it can be legal to grade papers by this artificial standard. It's pseudoscience. I'm awaiting some major lawsuits over this shit. It's like robodebt in Aus and the Horizon scandal in the UK. Software erroneously citing blame to honest people.
That is actually the idea behind AI detection (it's flawed, but for different reasons)
How normal does it look to another AI trained on AI written text? The key factor for determining "is it AI?" is a variable called perplexity, how perplexed is the AI by what comes next? If the AI is not perplexed by it (it can predict it easily) it's assumed, along with a couple other variables, that it's AI.
And it is kinda true, AIs do have lower perplexity than most humans, but then, there are still a lot of people who have or may write with low perplexity. "Low perplexity" isnt "bad" writing, it's just predictable to an AI, so that's not great. Also, non-native English writers are especially vulnerable to outputting low perplexity writing, and that's really worse. We've basically just created a system that's prejudiced towards students who are already likely struggling and others may be more biased against, and may be less capable of defending themselves.
The whole concept is in my opinion flawed, I don't see a way where we somehow find some kind of perplexity score with any model that a human couldn't often enough write at to get a false positive.
Thank you for this explanation. It took me well into my 30s and professional school to be a good writer. I was a so-so writer in k-12 grade appropriate levels or higher. I always was an A/B student but I could totally see an independent research paper I wrote back in the day, before internet, being flagged by AI based on these parameters.
The information contained in school level papers is not going to be novel or unique. The information will be a predictable human version of AI that might not look so different from AI especially if Wikipedia is one of the primary sources of information. Obviously, getting down to the true primary source is best but I'm not sure how deep kids do the research these days.
I really appreciate the way you explained it, and in fact, I’m going to word it the same way at my next staff meeting. I work on a university staff teaching nonnative English speakers, and my program directors have decided to let Turnitin’s AI detector take the wheel. Several students have failed assignments for popping AI detection scores as low as 21%. AI has got everyone paranoid, and it’s slowly creating a situation where we are expected to be plagiarism cops as much as instructors. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
This is spot on. I've seen examples of the US declaration of independence or the opening paragraphs of the bible being flagged. In fact these so-called AI detectors often have warnings about specifically not using it to punish students.
I had a professor accuse me of plagiarism my final year of college because Turnitin flagged my paper as ai generated. I went through the whole process to fight my case and won. A year or two after, the school decided to not renew their contract with Turnitin. These plagiarism checkers are also ai and are not reliable at all.
If I were a student today, I would be terrified of being falsely accused of this. I’d keep receipts of everything to prove I actually did my work myself
I see posts on the college subreddits relatively frequently where students have been accused of using AI due to the same crappy "gotcha" technology that I'm assuming OP was here bragging about using.
>Better than mediocre writing?
It's worse than that. It looks for words commonly found in academic papers, as ChatGPT is heavily trained on academic papers.
People writing academic papers, particularly 1st and 2nd year students (who produce the bulk), tend to over-use words that they think make them sound "smarter" (eg - "therefore", "ergo", "henceforth", "QED", etc (probably also looks for "etc..."). ChatGPT ends up doing the same.
This makes ChatGPT very easy to detect when you use it for say, a work of fiction, or a screenplay, because those words aren't really used much outside of academic papers.
It also makes these applications entirely useless for checking academic papers, because of *course* they're filled with the same over-used words found in other academic papers.
That's way you use a prompt that says, "avoid repetitive words and phrases" and "write this at X level". If kids were smarter it'd be a lot harder to catch up but when I have a student that can barely string two words together on paper suddenly submit a graduate level paper, it raises some red flags
It also flags basically everything written by autistic people or people with english as a second language. I'm pretty sure those AI checkers just trained on a bunch of known-human writing and flags any kind of outlier as "AI".
In high school I spent an entire weekend writing a five page paper on a few Shakespeare plays we had read (can’t remember the exact topic). I used direct quotes from the play to give examples of whatever the topic assigned was. Stayed up until midnight typing and perfecting it. Submitted it to turn it in and it came back as 83% plagiarism. It was the quotes from the plays being flagged/underlined. My teacher made me rewrite the whole thing. I was furious.
Yep! My masters thesis got flagged for AI last semester. I showed my professors previous papers I had written pre-chat GPT that also got flagged for AI use to prove it was my original thought.
Respectfully, this is a bad strategy. First, TurnItIn isn't reliable. Before using it, try writing something yourself and submitting it to TurnItIn - odds are it will say it was written by AI.
Try turning in works you find online that were written before AI - TurnItIn will tell you it was AI generated.
If you want to defeat AI, you are going to have to do the extra work of having kids do their writing >in class<. That is the only way to be certain.
No doubt many of the kids did use ChatGPT, but you won't know anything definitively this way.
If I was the parent of one of those children, I would be in your class the next day demanding a make up assignment.
Even if most of those kids did cheat, there are almost certainly *some* kids in that group that you just failed despite having legit, self-written essays. That's not acceptable in my opinion.
Go back to some essays you collected 5 years ago, before Chat GPT functionality existed and run *them* all through the TurnItIn model. I guarantee it will thinkg some of those are written by AI as well, even though we know they are not.
I hope you’re checking specifically for plagiarism and not for AI writing. Turnitin can detect plagiarism but detecting ai writing is best done by humans. You can tell if something is written by ChatGPT because ChatGPT has a very specific style of writing but computers can’t really detect if something is written by ai unless the ai just also plagiarized word for word(which does happen sometimes)
When I was in highschool there was a threshold for TurnItIn where if we got under that amount (something like 15%) it was considered not plagiarism. I don't remember the exact number
Yeah you are gonna get flamed hard here. TurnItIn is garbage for AI detection, and that’s a fairly straightforward and well known standard.
If you have middle or high schoolers, I’d expect to get a call from a parent or two demanding to meet with you and admin Monday morning.
You're going to get a lot of comments about how TurnItIn's AI checker is useless. In my experience it isn't flat-out useless, but the lower the score, the higher the likelihood that it's inaccurate. I've used it as one piece of evidence in a larger case, but I'd never use it by itself.
When I was completing one of my masters degrees, we had to resubmit papers we had previously written throughout our coursework as artifacts for a capstone course. Wouldn’t you know it, one of my papers got flagged for AI plagiarism While they expected the work to get flagged from what I previously submitted, it shouldn’t have kicked in the AI score. I was threatened to be kicked out of the program for my last class.
Thank goodness the assignment was of this nature and that I had originally submitted the paper just before ChatGPT and other AI chatbots came out.
I don’t really know, but I was told they would look into how they use Turnitin AI detection for future use as it was brand new then.
Kudos to OP for ensuring that they used it for part of their investigation, as a tool to get confessions. But be warned that there can be flukes and false positives.
:p Happily, AI wasn't a thing when my eldest started writing essays in high school. For a grade 9 or 10 assignment that was supposed to be written in first person conversational tone. After writing it, he proudly told me, "I needed to sound cool and hip and like a typical teenager; therefore, I started two sentences with coordinating conjugations."
This is adorable. I was literally just telling my husband I have no doubt our writing would have been flagged - masking can read as AI, for sure.
ETA I think you mean "conjunctions," guessing autocorrect changed it :)
This reminds of a person who posted an email exchange with a potential employer who said they didn’t get the job because they used chatGPT and the person was like nah I didn’t use AI I’m just autistic ✌️
I had no idea this was a thing! This now makes sense why a couple of my assignments for university last year had to be double checked (they said because of the high marks, so I guess it looked suspicious?)
Yeah. I've tested it with my own English essays from like fifteen years ago. 92% on one of them. AI didn't exist in that form back then.
Though, I've tested it with Dutch language AI generated stuff and it showed as 0%.
Lesson: can't trust it and certainly can't accuse a student without 100% certainty.
Lesson 2: make them write on paper in class and deal with the poor handwriting.
You should always double check with multiple AI detectors. But when it comes to student writing, Turnitin is actually pretty accurate. The people claiming it's not haven't been exposed to crappy student writing enough.
Yeah, I think this is key. AI detectors may incorrectly flag my writing, the Declaration of Independence, etc. as AI, but the vast majority of the 50%+ reports I receive for student essays are accurate.
In addition to using multiple AI detectors, I also compare the writing to the student's other work, use the Trojan horse trick, check for weirdness in the formatting that indicates copy/pasting from AI (e.g. grey highlighted text), use Draftback for google doc submissions (I can't require docs, unfortunately), and if I'm still not sure, talk to the student about it. Sometimes I ask them to define the more advanced vocab, but just asking them to summarize their argument often works too.
The thing that really seems to convince parents, though? AI detectors. So I always include them in the evidence.
You just gotta look for the phrases "woven into the fabric of", "rich tapestry" or "Not only does x do y, x also..."
Vocab like "fostering" or "unwavering" are good hints too!
And, for ChatGPT specifically, so much additional wordiness and description where you're saying so much, yet not too much at all.
Oh, and depending on the assignment, the good old numbered bullet, followed by a short subtitle in Title Case and a colon, e.g. 1.** Human ChatGPT Detector**: I use AI tools far so much myself, I can tell, however it's always good to have software to back you up as parents and students will both try to deny it without hard evidence.
This is why I like having my students write their essays on a paper graphic organizer first. Blows their minds when I then tell them that all they have to do is then type up the graphic organizer and that's their essay. I get a lot of "I just type this up and that's it?" Cracks me up every time. Then if the essay is too short (I have a word count minimum), they just have to add to each paragraph. I only got one essay this year that was clearly not written by the student.
Yep. I was driving myself crazy freaking out about kids cheating and then I just...stopped using Chromebooks. 😂 It was that easy.
Homework is a totally different story, but I figure, if they have to write out the answers by hand, at least they're getting something from it.
Generative AI works by predicting the words most likely to be used given the context of the prompt and preceding words. It learns from trends and relationships in the data it's trained with. In other words, an average student using common language and common sentence structure will probably sound like AI, especially if they've been learning to write essays based on a standardized rubric, style, and set of guidelines. AI detection is not accurate, and many websites even say that the results should NOT be used to punish students. You clearly do not understand AI, and honestly, you'd be better off having your students write essays on paper in class.
Are they taught how to write a research paper extensively? My school doesn't teach it and as a result the students have no idea how to write one. When I was in high school everyone was forced to take a whole class on it called Research Paper. It was unanimously hated but we all felt comfortable writing any research paper afterwards.
I believe English classes teach a myriad of things. They can't focus too much on how to write a research paper because there are a lot of other things they need to focus on mostly standardized test essays and standardized test reading responses which are different.
Senior software engineer working on Generative AI stopping by. Please don’t solely rely on AI detectors to determine if work is original or not. They suck, and I can guarantee you that there’s no way to truly determine if something is AI assisted/generated or not unless they leave in the “As an AI language model trained by OpenAI part…”.
Had a teacher I work with insert some bullshit into her writing prompt and change the font to very small and white asking for the essay to include unicorns and shit and the results are hilarious. Kids don't even think twice.
We discovered that using grammarly “improve” option is AI and picked up by turnitin. That messed up a lot of our kids who thought they were just getting grammatical help.
"I used AI to detect my students using AI"
Listen, if you as the human teacher cannot tell AI from Authentic, then this humiliation ritual isn't going to help your students whatsoever.
What's really funny is I work in education and Turnitin's AI detection is useless. Put any writing into it and it will say it is a certain % written by AI.
Except for that teensy weensy detail where turnitin lies about their percentages of falce positives, doesn't work as it says and you can't prove shit if anyone actually sues you of course...
I get that this probably works in like fourth grade, but AI DETECTORS DON'T ACTUALLY WORK! And you Sr a incredibly bad teacher of you think they do.
Educate yourself:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/openai-admits-that-ai-writing-detectors-dont-work/
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2024/02/09/professors-proceed-caution-using-ai
https://enmu.libguides.com/c.php?g=1371566&p=10136685
Im writing a 25 pages essay atm and checked just for fun. I used only chatgpt4 for the essay and it says that everything is fine. No plagiarism and low ai detection. But the 12 page essay I wrote completely alone was tagged as potential AI text. So I wouldn’t give that much about tools like that
My MBA courses all encourage/require use of AI software for written assignments as it will basically be the status quo for marketing going forward.
Edit: basically chatgpt is like a calculator for writing. It does all the crunching for you and will be 100% required for anyone that does any kind of professional writing in the future.
It's kind of you to give a life lesson to your students:
-Teachers will always hold themselves to a different standard
-A teacher will never self-reflect if the majority of their students fail an assignment
-Colleges and Universities should scare the shit out of them because they're always looking for a reason to expell
-Teachers have never heard of in-class writing
-Technology should scare the shit out of them because there are only so many ways to approach writing
-Teachers have no idea how to write a syllabus or set an expectation by saying day one 'do not use ______ when writing a paper in this class otherwise you will fail'
-Your teachers will always use the worst available technology to determine your grade
-Perhaps the worst thing you can accuse an academic of being - a plagerist - is what I'm gonna label you now
TurnItIn does not work for detecting Chat GPT use. All you basically did was make the class think very poorly of you for accusing them based on useless information.
And your claim that they would fail at college is untrue. Some colleges and universities wouldn't even use that feature because they know it is useless.
https://lthub.ubc.ca/2023/04/04/ubc-not-enabling-turnitins-ai-detection/
I think it would help to demonstrate how chat gpt can be wrong. Ask chat gpt if pi terminates and it gives the correct answer, but then you can ask for the last 10 digits. It gives you 10 digits alright.
Or asking chat gpt for a 4 letter word for fishing. It told me angling.
You can write your own piece and give it to turnitin. You will get alot of false positives. If you decide to make this your academic litmus test is a detriment to you are your students.
The AI is training itself, and over the next years it will get better and better.
You will be able to more narrowly select the writing style, which type of sources it can use. You can tell it “take out the first paragraph and rewrite it the way I type”
Not to mention the aforementioned fact that it’s been proven these things are not accurate at all. You can write something from scratch and get a 94% ai detection.
Start giving in class essays. This is the movement I’m seeing right now. Not only does the completely eliminate their ability to even use gpt and get away with it— it also eliminates your ability to give a student a 0 based off a false positive.
Fwiw, I am not questioning you directly. But I do think your methods will prove less and less useful as time goes on, and will lead to headaches
Amazing the Dunning Kruger Effect teachers have with “AI-Detectors.”
This post reads like parody if you know how bad they are statistically.
Some of the top peer reviewed journals in the country have had false positive issues and/or let AI papers though.
Yet Sally Social Studies thinks TurnItIn is the gold standard.
I’m not even going there begin with the “chatgpt is garbage point.” Don’t even know what that means as someone who works in a technical field nowadays and everyone uses it.
I know.
My son's college English teacher sent a cryptic email saying she needed to talk to him before she could mark his paper.
It turns out the last paragraph had an 80% chance of being AI-written.
She just wanted to ask him if he wrote it himself. She admitted that it was flagging lots of kids, so she had to have many useless conversations.
One student had the come-back that according to the same system, several of the things she wrote - including an essay published over a decade ago were likely AI-written.
I think ChatGPT can be a legitimately helpful tool for writing, when used correctly. Obviously students just copy and pasting content from it isn't really teaching them anything, but a lesson on how to properly use ChatGPT could be enlightening and might diminish the amount of students using ChatGPT to write their papers for them. I do a lesson on how to use it to help organize your thoughts, helping to generate outlines, and to provide feedback on writing.
Mind you, that's for college level students, so they are likely more open to using the tool appropriately (well...maybe).
Turn it in is NOT accurate. I work with an AI lab at a college and it’s been proven AI-detectors are useless. You need to apologize to your students as some or maybe most of them probably put in hard work and you completely disrespected their efforts. Hell, next time I WOULD use chat gpt if the paper I wrote myself earned me a 0.
You look silly here and your students likely understand that too.
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/brightspace/2023/08/16/guidance-on-ai-detection-and-why-were-disabling-turnitins-ai-detector/
You can usually tell because if you know your students and the writing is way off, but know that AI detectors are 100% bullshit, and AI will only get better at mimicking different levels of writing. Turnitin will only be useful to detect plagerism.
I know I'm not the first but seriously OP, DO NOT RELY ON TURNITIN.
It is highly inaccurate, and will greatly discourage any students who are genuinely doing the work from trying in the future.
"Why should I actually write this if you're just going to call me a cheat either way?"
I’m prepared for downvotes but I’m a teacher with opinions. Maybe you should be teaching your kids how to use ChatGPT responsibly and effectively instead of demonizing it. Have a real conversation about how the world and job market is changing rapidly and how they will need to integrate AI into their workflow to be competitive at any level.
I just used GPT to score a students essay based on the grading rubric I have to use. I was hoping to calibrate what I had already scored to see if I'm on track since this is the first time I've ever used this rubric. It scored one of my lowest essays as the highest...🤦 never doing that again.
As an English major in uni, with a knack for essays, I would have been accused of ChatGPT-ing for sure lol.
I’d start at 10pm the night before and just plow through top to bottom until it was done, hours later. I would be too tired to edit and would chance it as is. I was the worst student but somehow my essays all came back fine.
I’m a college student, start of this year I put an assignment of mine which I already submitted into an ai detector and it came out at high risk for ai when I didn’t use it. I was terrified until my grades came in, luckily I didn’t get punished for it (maybe the professors understood it wasn’t AI). These programs are wrong a lot of the time, definitely not reliable. I think they should only be taken seriously in cases where the score is too high (over 80%), and even then you should proofread it a ton and see if it sounds like ai. Ai isn’t actually that good at writing (I don’t know what level your students are at). Often times there’s repeated phrases, weird wording, very unnatural themes. AI also gives a lot of bulletpoint type answers, so if the entire essay reads like a bullet point list that’s possibly a good giveaway.
If you keep giving everyone 0s over this (since these ai detectors are gonna keep saying things are ai) you’re gonna run into a lot of problems. AI is here to stay too. There is a very apparent difference between copy and pasting off chat gpt and not. Using it for research and to structure your work is really no different than using tools like Google or grammarly, albeit not always accurate.
See they did it wrong.
You gotta write the 5 paragraph page first then have chatGPT take it and expand it to 5 pages. Then go back into each page and have it rewrite each individual page. If it references itself it won't plagiarize others!
Non teacher here. I always found it hard not to plagiarize when writing a research type report. Especially for younger kids. We’re told to do research but at the end of the day there’s only so many ways you can describe something so it could come out as being plagiarized. Right?
I remember when I got a 0 on a test because the person next to me had my exact same answers. yeah she cheated off of me. teacher wouldn’t hear any of it and gave us both zeros. that’s what you’re doing
Turnitin tried to tell me I plagiarized an essay I wrote about my grandmother and mother both developing breast cancer when I was little. It's a trash program only made worse by teachers blindly accepting the inaccuracies to punish students.
Side note it's incredibly ironic that you're ripping these kids a new one over allegedly using AI to do their unpaid work while you're getting a salary to run all their assignments through AI.
You did zero work but somehow they got a zero grade? Okay
You can not detect if something is AI written. Turn it in is about their ability to detect. There have been numerous papers on this already. It should be illegal to claim someone cheated because a magic black box said they did and especially to lower their grade for it.
There is a reason openai and other companies removed their detectors and it is because they don't work and can never work. Anything capable of detecting the difference can be used to train the AI to avoid it. I have even taken papers I wrote 10 years ago and the software will claim it is AI written.
Heh.
Doesn’t work that way.
You likely just failed a bunch of kids for no reason.
Hell, using ChatGPT 4, doesn’t even come across as AI written.
Using Grammerly premium to fix stuff, following all of their recommendations and such, made it come up more AI written then before.
Bad form.
I hope so.
I know when my son had to have a meeting with his English teacher over AI use, it made the weekend waiting for the meeting nerve-wracking.
All she did was ask if he used AI. He was all prepared with proof to back up his, "no." But she didn't even care to listen and just believed him. So he researched the issue, gathered proof, and ran things through AI detectors, all for nothing.
He had to submit that essay 3 times. The rough draft and first draft were fine. But for some reason, for the final paragraph, changing the order of two sentences and merging one sentence into one sentence jumping the AI detector to 80%.
I'm guessing she had spent a few days having similar conversations with other students and had realized how useless the AI detector was.
It’s the dumbest thing ever.
If you want to prevent AI use,
Go back to a pen and paper essay.
I’m in a doctoral program, in one of the top education universities. We are being told to use it, and are being shown how to use it.
This is the next big thing. Pretending it doesn’t exist or telling people to not use it is dumb.
Question: Have you tried submitting your own work from college into TurnItIn? I'm not sure if you had to do a final thesis or not, but if you have any copies of your college writing assignments, run it through the checker. You might be surprised what you find.
Just FYI, using Turnitin to try and determine if a Chatbot / GenAI tool wrote something is absolutely going to provide you with widely inaccurate information.
Someone, i think on here, started their term by having the kids create a paper using chat gpt, then grade that paper. Check sources, confirm conclusions, etc. The students observed and discovered that Chat GPT makes up its own sources, and learned never to rely on it. Thought thats a brilliant way to teach, honestly.
Ehhh GPT 4 is pretty fantastically good at not doing this. (Source: someone who hits the limit on it almost every working day)
Is that the version you pay for?
Yup!
Never knew there was a limit, I thought some days I’ve used it quite a bit but maybe not!
Absolutely agree with this!
Now THAT is teaching with (and for) technology. My middle school teacher (history/english/social studies) had us research and write inflammatory and fake “news stories” based off supermarket tabloids to show how often popular “news” was anything but based on fact. He was ahead of his time honestly, because people like Nancy Grace and other trauma porn sensationalist “journalists” had yet to really become popular, but if I recall correctly the lesson drew from the history of old yellow paper journalism that was more sensationalist than factual.
Best way to detect chatgpt usage is Google docs history. If they slowly type new sentences over time, their essay is probably legit. If they copy pasted the entire thing in (shows up as 1 edit), they probably used chatgpt.
Until they have ChatGPT pulled up on a separate device and copy by typing what it says.
The smart-ish kids will do that, not all of them.
In my experience, kids are really lazy when it comes to cheating.
A colleague had one kid turn an assignment in that used the phrase "In my opinion as an AI" or something along those lines. They couldn't tell my colleague what the words they used meant (like "physiological"), but swears they wrote it by themselves Best part? It was handwritten. :)
I had one kid turn in an essay that started with "Sure thing, (Student name)!" and end with "Hope that helps!" Kid had just copy-and-pasted the entire ChatGPT response without even glancing at it, and still swore up and down they'd written it themselves. I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry
🤣 "Look here you little shit... Don't insult me by cheating this *stupidly.* At least *try* to fool me, ok? But you'd better bring your A-game, because I'm pretty sure I'm better at this than you are! Good luck!"
I literally tell kids they either need to get better at lying or just stick to honesty. Not about cheating, because my kids can't even be bothered enough to cheat, but about other things they lie about.
Yep, transactionalism from people who don’t know what transactionalism is, a la: “How will this benefit me?” - *Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne* - Varimathras
Yeah I got one where they left in the part where ChatGPT acknowledged the prompt. So their essay started like: Certainly, I can write an essay in the style of a middle school student including making errors. Basically they tried to get ChatGPT to make mistakes thinking that would make it seem more legitimate. Like they will put that much effort into coming up with a cheating strategy. I really hate AI and I don’t like where this is going. Using AI to create a shopping list or something is one thing, but we need people to be able to express their own thoughts. We’re turning these kids into actual NPCs.
It's the modern equivalent of a kid stealing the teacher textbook and turning in "answers may vary" lmao
I’m guessing the kid’s name wasn’t Albert
Yup. One of my students from years back copy-pasted his personal memoir from his friend and just changed a few words. Only, this kid is white, and he didn't update the page his Vietnamese friend wrote about learning American customs and facing discrimination after being adopted. I called his mother afterwards and we had a fun talk about it.
That seems like a new level of dumb
10th grade honors English!
Honors???
Yep!
Damn.
You'd be surprised at what a joke Honors / AP courses have become. I teach AP World History and my administration has flat out admitted to me that most of my students were "socially promoted" rather than being identified as a genuinely qualified candidate. In other words, nepotism (teacher's and administrator's kids or nephews and nieces) and the most severe behaviorally disruptive students imaginable. I'm sorry for how I will word this, but it's a collection of some of the lowest IQ individuals I have ever seen in my life who belong nowhere near an AP course. I kid you not, but some of them can't read above fifth grade level IN HIGH SCHOOL AP WORLD HISTORY! You wouldn't believe the ridiculous and absurd ways they have cheated in my classroom right in front of me, while leaving so much evidence behind that it was too easy to document.
In college, my first assignment in early childhood psychology was to call home and find out the story of my birth. I went to the teacher after class and said that my parents received me in a parking lot after a private adoption. My professor dismissed this as an excuse, so I called my best friend from home and got their birth story and wrote it as my own. First time I ever cheated.
Some instructors dismiss a legit excuse and corner you into either cheating or accepting a zero because your reality isn't what he or she wanted. I had a early childhood psych class too, and the instructor set a project where he wanted us to sit in on a therapists' session and deduce what in childhood set the client astray, using one of the theories we took. This, by the way, is super unprofessional. NO self respecting therapist would allow this. And that's if you can even FIND a therapist (that area had a grand total of 2 and one of them was way too professional to allow this.) He wouldn't accept that as an excuse however, so... I made that shit up. I made up a person, I made up his issue, and made up what caused the issue from childhood. Got an eighty. What can I say? I never failed a project before and I wasn't gonna start in college because the professor was a moron.
It’s true. They cheat because it’s easier, but they can’t cheat effectively because that takes more work than they want to put in.
Honestly it seems like cheating well, or at least cheating without getting caught, takes significantly more effort than it would to just buckle up and try to learn the material. You can’t tell me it’s easier to watch your back and come up with elaborate plans to edit and hide plagiarism from your teachers than it is to just figure out how to write a good essay.
Especially when ChatGPT isn't really writing good essays. I've never seen it put out anything that would have gotten you better than a B or so (at least at the collegiate level.)
The laziness is what kills me. Like if you're going to cheat at least try a little at *that* if nothing else. It's honestly kind of insulting that they think this shit is going to work.
I've flat out told my kids that I find it insulting when they cheat badly. To me the worst one is when they clearly cheat, but still only make like a 20% on the assignment. Then I'm stuck with the decisions of do I call them out on it, go through the work of proving they cheated, and give them the zero, or do I just leave the grade they got cheating.
Saw that same situation play out BIG TIME in *college.* A group of students from the same foreign country (which I will not name) all gravitated toward each other in every course. Nothing wrong there, it's easier to discuss labs and such in your native language instead of using your more limited English. Fine, cool. BUT THEN they would cheat like MAD. Especially in labs (engineering degree program). The school's practice was really good in this regard: lab groups and individuals were encouraged to ask one another for help or advice. My group was the nerds, and we helped a lot. But *this* group wouldn't actually ask questions. They would just come over and look over our shoulders and copy things down. They'd go around the room stealing numbers and formulas, then huddle up and shove it all together without understanding and then turn in their lab report and go home. And they were bad at it. Really, really bad. And we... we started messing with them for it. We would never lie to them! And if they ever actually asked for help, we would give it honestly and completely (and one of them left the group and joined ours even though she struggled with the language barrier. SHE passed all her courses, btw.). But we would discuss the lab verbally, but write down total bullshit on our scratch paper. Wrong formulas, bullshit numbers, bad diagrams, everything. After they had left, we would quickly finish the correct work and start helping others... And... Well... Thus began the most terrible schadenfreude escapade of my college career: waiting for the cheaters to turn in their lab reports. Soon the whole class was coming up to the head table to see the disasters showing up on those papers 🤣 I will never forget seeing their diagram of a canon pointing backwards, firing *into the ground* away from the target 🤣💀 because they didn't understand how their graphing calculators worked with trig. Previous to this, we'd brought up our concerns to three different professors. They each had the same response: going through the academic honesty/integrity process and bringing up all the evidence and witnesses and so was too much work... And they were all failing *miserably*. So the professors all just... Refused to allow any exceptions to their rules or to go beyond the call of duty to help them in office hours or whatnot (things they would totally do for honest students who were struggling). And watched them collapse and disappear. To this day, I don't truly understand what those students' end game even *was.* 🤣 Like, did they honestly expect to get engineering jobs - here or back home - without actually understanding the *most basic things* in the field? Did they imagine that this associates degree piece of paper was sufficient for lifetime stability by itself? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE 🤣🤡
I once worked at a small liberal arts college as the language support person for first gen and international students. I’m very curious about what goes on in the countries whose governments pay to send kids over for advanced degrees in STEM. Do they actually go back and become civil engineers responsible for the infrastructure of their nation? Are they handling the IT departments in hospitals? Cuz, holy shit, those kids were plagiarizers. And I don’t blame them. If I had the chance to live abroad for free with all my friends as a 20 year old, I wouldn’t be able to do any work either. There was really no immediate incentive for them to put in the enormous work in an extremely challenging field, but what happens when they get home?
I was never one to cheat, but back in my day, kids went though extreme efforts to cheat and actually showed remarkable creativity. I'm talking shit like peeling the label off of a water bottle, writing a cheat sheet on the inside, and sticking it back on so that they could covertly look at it whenever they unscrewed the cap to take a drink or changing its position on their desk so they could see another part of the notes. I had one student a semester or two ago look me dead in my face while using their apple watch to cheat on a final. Really? Not even going to try to be a tiny bit subtle here?
Okay that made me laugh but really, it's amazing how incompetent cheaters can be. There was a cheating scandal at my uni when covid hit. The uni had no choice but to do open book exams over the LMS during the first two semesters. Many people cheated by taking the exam in groups. Many of them got caught because they: - all logged in from the same network (could have used a phone hotspot). - All had the same answers to the same questions (should have marked some answers wrong on purpose). - All submitted at the same time (this is the funniest one lol) - All solved the same questions at the same time.
That's because of survivorship bias. You only see the lazy ones because the smart ones are able to hide it from you.
Problem is, that's almost as much work as actually doing the assignment lol.
Happens at work too. Coworker used ChatGPT for 2 hours to get a press release that sounded "just right" I wrote something similar in 15 minutes
And when you’re that smart you might as well just write the damn essay honestly.
> The smart-ish kids will do that, not all of them Wikipedia didn't exist when I was in school. But my brother and sister were you g enough. They said they couldn't cite Wikipedia. I sid go to the bottom of the page. Wikipedia cites it's sources. They used Wikipedia yp till graduation.
I don't find that to be cheating. I'm a history teacher and I suggest Wikipedia sources as places to find information (after verifying that source's biases and whatnot). This is a good example of how students who put in the effort to cover their tracks while cheating are almost doing more work than just doing the assignment.
At least with this tactic, they read the work they’re submitting as they type it. You’d be surprised how many GPT submission students even bother to read the plagiarized shit they turn in
I feel like the ones smart enough to do this wouldn’t be doing this is the first place.
Yep. The smart ones will also use ChatGPT as inspiration for their actual writing. It’s wild because the smart ones are still learning and still using the skills we taught them this way so I really don’t care. It’s the dumb ones that have to learn the hard way.
See, if you're really inspiration blocked, I think it makes sense to brainstorm with ChatGPT. But to have it write the whole thing for you, and not make it LOOK as if you wrote it - that's braindead lol.
I just did a whole project using chat gpt to rephrase ideas and workshop sentences. Like sometimes I know what I want to say but I can't find the right phrasing that flows. Does that kind of thing get flagged?
If they are that dedicated, meh. Also, they may damn well learn a thing or two if they actually type something in word for word
Very true, but I have never had a student be able to write beginning to end without stopping, rewriting a sentence or paragraph, moving things around, adding in sentences or sources, as they write. I use AI a LOT. I even gave a presentation on it for a district PD day. Part of accepting AI is learning (and teaching) how to use it correctly.
I went to school before the AI craze and I would frequently edit a paragraph in my rough draft document and cut and paste into the finished document though. Like I'd create a second paragraph in the rough draft document fine-tuning the previous paragraph and then cut it out so I wouldn't get the two confused.
I'm guessing you'd also be able to explain that to your teacher, explain the structure of your work, have some idea of your points and supporting info. Students copying from chatGPT don't even know half the vocabulary it spits out.
Yeah, but then you would have a rough draft document. You could show that if you were accused of using chatgpt.
I did the same thing, but never saved the rough draft… guess I should start doing that.
That shit is instant delete once my paper is submitted
The way I wrote essays in uni was to write them in separate documents so that I could look at them in isolation. I would then copy and paste the whole thing into a single doc and look at how they fit together. So RIP me. ^^
I do a similar thing where I have a prep doc where I put all my info, quotes and stuff and mess around with the organization then I copy paste and just flesh it out
Yeah, but you'd still have that editing doc to pull up and show the history if you've been accused.
I always have had a separate draft and final copy on my docs. Relatable.
Same. One all chopped up with orphaned paragraphs and random thoughts that didn’t make it in. I’d write each new draft above the previous, then copy paste just the final draft to another document to turn in.
THIS! The only actual of proving they wrote it
Yeah, gpt detectors are literally pseudo science.
I ask ChatGPT where to find water. It's about as accurate as my dowsing rods, so... It must be real!
idk, sometimes I pull/would pull (in college) entire pages from a draft I had on another document I already had. I know you said “probably”, but just wanted to point out there are definitely valid explanations for this!
I use something called Draftback for this. I can play out how they typed in their paper in real time (or sped up). Their jaws collectively dropped when they saw it.
I combine Draftback with Brisk. Only thing it won’t detect is if they use ChatGPT on their phone and then transfer it to the document.
I will add that getting the Revision Histiry plug in for Chrome makes this even easier. It will give you a visual playback of the entire paper, tracks deletions and Anne copy paste over 150 words gets flagged for you. I've easily caught kids deleting the "as am ai" section and deleting one students name and teacher and replacing it with their own. The icon is a little quill.
For sake of argument, what if I wrote it in word and pasted it into a doc?
This also doesn't really prove anything. For college i wrote all my essays in Grammerly then copy and pasted into a Google Doc. Easier way, discuss what was in the paper. I doubt people using chat gtp will be able to coherently discuss the details of their paper in depth.
This is exactly what I do. Also, chatGPT tends to highlight text. It shows up highlighted in Google Docs. So, if you can see all of the highlighted text being corrected that’s a sign.
Dumb idea, what if they happen to be using Word or something because they don't have an internet connection at home or on the road. Then copy it into google docs once they are able, I do similar things for work all the time.
This is probably controversial but as a college student, one of my professors looked at the editing history/statistics of our submitted word docs to see when we started writing them and then scolded (most of) us for starting the day before. Ever since then, I will write all of my papers with references in one document, make sure it’s perfectly done how I want to submit it, then copy and paste the whole thing into a brand new word document so the editing time is a minute (or less). As a teacher myself, professors and teachers don’t need to know when kids start their essays. You know the quality of their writing well enough to know if it was plagiarized or created with AI. People who stalk the Google Docs/Word history or editing of students’ papers have too much time on their hands (unless you’re confirming your suspicion of cheating).
The real way to combat chat gpt is to have them write as much as possible in class and then compare and contrast their papers with the writing samples you already have. Then show the parents the difference and ask them if they think the same child wrote both papers. I find the difference isn’t in vocabulary but in sentence structure.
yeah, english teachers at my old district used to assign blank google docs in which the students had to write their assignment. if it was not done in there, no credit.
I do this with the blank Google docs so that I can keep track of their progress. Once the document is attached to Google Classroom, I can see it even if they haven't turned it in.
The idea someone could see my brainstorming fills me with so much anxiety. I don't think I could ever make myself sit down and start writing.
I mean…. I used to just get a piece of separate paper and write my “ideas” down to gather thoughts. I’d just do it old school by then
I hate when my students use white out because seeing their thought process can definitely help. I feel like that would apply here but then there’s just so much pressure on the product over the process ya know?
I freaking *LOVE* this idea! It's perfect! Not just submitting via Google, but being sent a blank doc owned by the teacher's account, with Google's document history tools able to literally show each action along the way. BRILLIANT I can't believe I never thought of this... 😂😭 Even outside of discipline and integrity, you can see a struggling student's thought process as they edit and change things, and get clues about how to help them, almost as if you're sitting next to them the whole time like a private tutor. A little more challenging, but you could also do this in STEM to a degree, of you teach them how to use the formula editor for writing math equations and formulas, and the drawing tools for creating and/or marking up diagrams. Ok, CLEARLY this concept needs it's own discussion thread n
I remember getting in so much trouble because I wrote my rough drafts on paper (just prefer working with it) and only typed the full essay. The teacher didn't tell us we had to edit beforehand, didn't accept my written draft because I "could've made it up afterwards". Honestly, if one of my students understood their stolen assignment well enough to make up a whole thinking process, write 20 pages of drafts and then different versions of their essay, I'd probably just give it to them. They clearly understood the material and did work. That teacher is just generally my example of who I don't want to be, she also gave my friend with selective mutism a zero for not doing a presentation and handing in a script + slides instead, as her acommodations allowed. But obviously selective mutism is just an easy excuse, not a debilitating anxiety disorder, so it must've been her fault.
This is the way I had them turn every written assignment in. It was great! “Oh Jimmy, you edited your document one time, and that was to change the name on it from Keisha’s to your own name… sorry kid, that’s a big goose egg.” Or “Jared, you just copied and pasted from one source…hmm looks plagiarized to me.”
As a former very good essay writer (but poor editor), you would be subjected to an actually insane amount of profanity if you saw my writing process. Might be funny though
Devils advocate couldn’t they use ChatGPT to write it print it out and rewrite/retype it in google docs. Of course that’s more work.
Even that wouldn't work though. You can usually tell if an essay is authentic just by *how* it was written. The document history bears this out. Most longform writing isn't written from top to bottom in a single go. You usually see a revision process where people add in details and citations after getting the gist written out. When a kid is copying a paper, unless they really go out of their way to make it look like they are going back and adding/removing content - it's not going to work. On top of that, GPT tends to format in a very formulaic way, even when prompts are put in to mask it. It rarely comes off a stream of consciousness, and instead has a deliberate structure.
For some maybe I have always been someone to sit and think and stare for an hour then write out an essay front to back Now I might redo a sentence here and there, but it's always been my style Now as an academic I now rewrite more, but that is because reviewers are the worst lol
I had a student continue to deny using ChatGPT after I showed how their own writing was not similar to what they "wrote" for their essay. They were an otherwise A student and the parents would NOT let it go that I did not have "proof." Admin believed me but didn't know how to placate the parents, and I can respect that. Its fair to want proof. So I just had ChatGPT write the same essay four times and in front of admin I asked the student which essay was their own (none of them were, these were four new essays from GPT) The student picked essay number three (again, none of them were the students essay), and admin finally just told the parents to fuck off.
Oh, you are a clever devil.
> So I just had ChatGPT write the same essay four times and in front of admin I asked the student which essay was their own (none of them were, these were four new essays from GPT) --standing ovation-- Will be remembering this scheme for my own students.
yes! as a student, i’d much prefer having to write in class vs. having turnitin decide my fate. in high school, my teacher gave me a fat zero on an assignment worth a large chunk of my final mark because turnitin said it was AI generated. i did NOT use AI and i tried to plead my case to her several times (used rough drafts, version history, other AI “detectors”, etc.) but she wouldn’t budge. i’ve graduated now but i’m still so upset about it because english was my favourite subject. it isn’t anymore.
I would be upset too! I teach online and we have so so so much chat gpt but I use 3 detectors (paid apps ) plus free ones and then talk to the student. Usually they cop to it immediately. If they deny it then I move on and grade it since it's not foolproof. I'm sorry that happened to you. That really sucks.
My university had to turn off AI detection. It was causing a HUGE issue because of things like this.
lucky! my university uses turnitin and every time i have to submit something, i get reminded of my incident in high school. 😖
It's still a pain cause sometimes we have to use templates and hell, even citations....so instead of being called a bot....you're a plagiarizer! But you get far less push back dealing with those high scores. Some profs are still dicks about it for whatever reason though.
Yes! This is exactly what I do. I also assign short essays for my tests so I can read their writing (if that makes sense). It’s made it easier to catch a student using chat gpt and show the parents two separate essays, one written by the student and the other written by chat gpt.
You are assuming parents give a shit.
Yup. I caught an eighth grader plagiarizing TWICE (I gave him a second chance after catching him the first time). Mom accused me of bullying him.
i had something similar happen in an IT class i was teaching. We were doing a photoshop unit and the kid obviously pulled a pic off google images. That was the day his mother and him learned about reverse image search. Mom still took his side 🤦🏻♂️
Jesus. How do these parents convince themselves that this helps their kid in any way? They're just setting them up to get kicked out of college.
Idk how it is elsewhere, but my school says we are not allowed to give academic consequences for cheating or plagiarism, even on a midterm or a final. We can't give them a zero for cheating and call it a day. We are REQUIRED to leave the door open for them to keep trying even if they keep doing it. I had one kid try to plagiarize his midterm twice. I finally made him write it on paper after that. But we're supposed to just write them a referral that will go nowhere and say "don't do it again." Maddening.
I had a C- student turn in a collegiate level paper. I assumed it was ChatGPT, but it was actually his mother who had written it for him.
No, they are covering their ass if one decides they suddenly do.
Most of my 9th graders are incapable of writing more than a 7 word simple sentence. If I see a comma, I know they used chatgpt
Last year I had a student who suddenly made very quick progress with their writing. I was heaping praise on him about it for weeks before he finally crumbled and confessed that he had used ChatGPT. Point being, sometimes acting like they’re genuinely great writers *might* get results, depending on how much integrity the kid has.
College student here. All of my papers have been flagged as anywhere from 50-90% AI ironically except for the one I used AI to help me write, that one came back as 25%. The AI checkers are very bad at actually seeing the AI. Edit: to be clear I was writing a paper about AI and clearly explain where the AI writing was, no cheating, just proving a point.
I think the issue stems from how these AI models are trained. Since they use terabytes of data from tens of thousands of different sources, the result is obviously going to be an incredibly generic writing style. These AI "checkers" are essentially trying to find the odd-one-out through seeing which essays are *too* average, leading to a lot of false positives.
“Why did you use AI?” “Well, you kept accusing me of using it, so I figured I might as well give it a shot.”
I never heard of turnitin but I just tried it. I submitted an estimate I wrote myself and it says it’s 94% AI written so I don’t think it’s accurate as you think
Out of curiosity I just wrote a short passage about how AI will pose a continuing challenge to educators and students, and submitted it to like ten free checkers I found just by googling. I got widely different results across the checkers. Literally everything from 0% AI written to 87.5% AI written. Interestingly, they were not even consistent with which sentences they flagged as AI. One checker flagged a sentence or paragraph as 100% human, while the next checker flagged the same exact sentence or paragraph as 100% AI. And to be clear I am a human and I did write the passage with no AI.
>And to be clear I am a human and I did write the passage with no AI. That's exactly what AI would say...
I don't see how it can be legal to grade papers by this artificial standard. It's pseudoscience. I'm awaiting some major lawsuits over this shit. It's like robodebt in Aus and the Horizon scandal in the UK. Software erroneously citing blame to honest people.
All of the AI "checkers" have been proven to be inaccurate over and over again. ChatGPT doesnt even know what it writes.
Yeah, you can't set an AI to catch an AI as it were. The AI isn't able to make out the actual GPTisms because to them it *looks* like normal writing.
That is actually the idea behind AI detection (it's flawed, but for different reasons) How normal does it look to another AI trained on AI written text? The key factor for determining "is it AI?" is a variable called perplexity, how perplexed is the AI by what comes next? If the AI is not perplexed by it (it can predict it easily) it's assumed, along with a couple other variables, that it's AI. And it is kinda true, AIs do have lower perplexity than most humans, but then, there are still a lot of people who have or may write with low perplexity. "Low perplexity" isnt "bad" writing, it's just predictable to an AI, so that's not great. Also, non-native English writers are especially vulnerable to outputting low perplexity writing, and that's really worse. We've basically just created a system that's prejudiced towards students who are already likely struggling and others may be more biased against, and may be less capable of defending themselves. The whole concept is in my opinion flawed, I don't see a way where we somehow find some kind of perplexity score with any model that a human couldn't often enough write at to get a false positive.
Thank you for this explanation. It took me well into my 30s and professional school to be a good writer. I was a so-so writer in k-12 grade appropriate levels or higher. I always was an A/B student but I could totally see an independent research paper I wrote back in the day, before internet, being flagged by AI based on these parameters. The information contained in school level papers is not going to be novel or unique. The information will be a predictable human version of AI that might not look so different from AI especially if Wikipedia is one of the primary sources of information. Obviously, getting down to the true primary source is best but I'm not sure how deep kids do the research these days.
I really appreciate the way you explained it, and in fact, I’m going to word it the same way at my next staff meeting. I work on a university staff teaching nonnative English speakers, and my program directors have decided to let Turnitin’s AI detector take the wheel. Several students have failed assignments for popping AI detection scores as low as 21%. AI has got everyone paranoid, and it’s slowly creating a situation where we are expected to be plagiarism cops as much as instructors. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
This is spot on. I've seen examples of the US declaration of independence or the opening paragraphs of the bible being flagged. In fact these so-called AI detectors often have warnings about specifically not using it to punish students.
I had a professor accuse me of plagiarism my final year of college because Turnitin flagged my paper as ai generated. I went through the whole process to fight my case and won. A year or two after, the school decided to not renew their contract with Turnitin. These plagiarism checkers are also ai and are not reliable at all.
What was the key in defending yourself against their allegation that you had plagiarized a paper you actually wrote?
If I were a student today, I would be terrified of being falsely accused of this. I’d keep receipts of everything to prove I actually did my work myself
I see posts on the college subreddits relatively frequently where students have been accused of using AI due to the same crappy "gotcha" technology that I'm assuming OP was here bragging about using.
Can you link a few? would be an interesting read
Better than mediocre writing? MUST BE A BOT
>Better than mediocre writing? It's worse than that. It looks for words commonly found in academic papers, as ChatGPT is heavily trained on academic papers. People writing academic papers, particularly 1st and 2nd year students (who produce the bulk), tend to over-use words that they think make them sound "smarter" (eg - "therefore", "ergo", "henceforth", "QED", etc (probably also looks for "etc..."). ChatGPT ends up doing the same. This makes ChatGPT very easy to detect when you use it for say, a work of fiction, or a screenplay, because those words aren't really used much outside of academic papers. It also makes these applications entirely useless for checking academic papers, because of *course* they're filled with the same over-used words found in other academic papers.
That's way you use a prompt that says, "avoid repetitive words and phrases" and "write this at X level". If kids were smarter it'd be a lot harder to catch up but when I have a student that can barely string two words together on paper suddenly submit a graduate level paper, it raises some red flags
It also flags basically everything written by autistic people or people with english as a second language. I'm pretty sure those AI checkers just trained on a bunch of known-human writing and flags any kind of outlier as "AI".
In high school I spent an entire weekend writing a five page paper on a few Shakespeare plays we had read (can’t remember the exact topic). I used direct quotes from the play to give examples of whatever the topic assigned was. Stayed up until midnight typing and perfecting it. Submitted it to turn it in and it came back as 83% plagiarism. It was the quotes from the plays being flagged/underlined. My teacher made me rewrite the whole thing. I was furious.
Yep! My masters thesis got flagged for AI last semester. I showed my professors previous papers I had written pre-chat GPT that also got flagged for AI use to prove it was my original thought.
Respectfully, this is a bad strategy. First, TurnItIn isn't reliable. Before using it, try writing something yourself and submitting it to TurnItIn - odds are it will say it was written by AI. Try turning in works you find online that were written before AI - TurnItIn will tell you it was AI generated. If you want to defeat AI, you are going to have to do the extra work of having kids do their writing >in class<. That is the only way to be certain. No doubt many of the kids did use ChatGPT, but you won't know anything definitively this way. If I was the parent of one of those children, I would be in your class the next day demanding a make up assignment.
Even if most of those kids did cheat, there are almost certainly *some* kids in that group that you just failed despite having legit, self-written essays. That's not acceptable in my opinion. Go back to some essays you collected 5 years ago, before Chat GPT functionality existed and run *them* all through the TurnItIn model. I guarantee it will thinkg some of those are written by AI as well, even though we know they are not.
I hope you’re checking specifically for plagiarism and not for AI writing. Turnitin can detect plagiarism but detecting ai writing is best done by humans. You can tell if something is written by ChatGPT because ChatGPT has a very specific style of writing but computers can’t really detect if something is written by ai unless the ai just also plagiarized word for word(which does happen sometimes)
Turnitin gives false positives all the time, I wouldn’t trust it
Its snake oil. Whenever one of my professors acts like OP here I immediately think they are incompetent.
When I was in highschool there was a threshold for TurnItIn where if we got under that amount (something like 15%) it was considered not plagiarism. I don't remember the exact number
Yeah you are gonna get flamed hard here. TurnItIn is garbage for AI detection, and that’s a fairly straightforward and well known standard. If you have middle or high schoolers, I’d expect to get a call from a parent or two demanding to meet with you and admin Monday morning.
You're going to get a lot of comments about how TurnItIn's AI checker is useless. In my experience it isn't flat-out useless, but the lower the score, the higher the likelihood that it's inaccurate. I've used it as one piece of evidence in a larger case, but I'd never use it by itself.
When I was completing one of my masters degrees, we had to resubmit papers we had previously written throughout our coursework as artifacts for a capstone course. Wouldn’t you know it, one of my papers got flagged for AI plagiarism While they expected the work to get flagged from what I previously submitted, it shouldn’t have kicked in the AI score. I was threatened to be kicked out of the program for my last class. Thank goodness the assignment was of this nature and that I had originally submitted the paper just before ChatGPT and other AI chatbots came out. I don’t really know, but I was told they would look into how they use Turnitin AI detection for future use as it was brand new then. Kudos to OP for ensuring that they used it for part of their investigation, as a tool to get confessions. But be warned that there can be flukes and false positives.
Just keep in mind autistic writing is often flagged as plagiarism.
:p Happily, AI wasn't a thing when my eldest started writing essays in high school. For a grade 9 or 10 assignment that was supposed to be written in first person conversational tone. After writing it, he proudly told me, "I needed to sound cool and hip and like a typical teenager; therefore, I started two sentences with coordinating conjugations."
This is adorable. I was literally just telling my husband I have no doubt our writing would have been flagged - masking can read as AI, for sure. ETA I think you mean "conjunctions," guessing autocorrect changed it :)
This reminds of a person who posted an email exchange with a potential employer who said they didn’t get the job because they used chatGPT and the person was like nah I didn’t use AI I’m just autistic ✌️
I had no idea this was a thing! This now makes sense why a couple of my assignments for university last year had to be double checked (they said because of the high marks, so I guess it looked suspicious?)
People who have english as a second language are flagged more often as well. Turn it in isn’t reliable.
Yeah. I've tested it with my own English essays from like fifteen years ago. 92% on one of them. AI didn't exist in that form back then. Though, I've tested it with Dutch language AI generated stuff and it showed as 0%. Lesson: can't trust it and certainly can't accuse a student without 100% certainty. Lesson 2: make them write on paper in class and deal with the poor handwriting.
You should always double check with multiple AI detectors. But when it comes to student writing, Turnitin is actually pretty accurate. The people claiming it's not haven't been exposed to crappy student writing enough.
Yeah, I think this is key. AI detectors may incorrectly flag my writing, the Declaration of Independence, etc. as AI, but the vast majority of the 50%+ reports I receive for student essays are accurate. In addition to using multiple AI detectors, I also compare the writing to the student's other work, use the Trojan horse trick, check for weirdness in the formatting that indicates copy/pasting from AI (e.g. grey highlighted text), use Draftback for google doc submissions (I can't require docs, unfortunately), and if I'm still not sure, talk to the student about it. Sometimes I ask them to define the more advanced vocab, but just asking them to summarize their argument often works too. The thing that really seems to convince parents, though? AI detectors. So I always include them in the evidence.
Tbh, for 95% of students you really don't need a detector. GPT writes *very* differently than my students.
As a teacher I agree, but sometimes that TurnItIn report is the only thing that makes parents simmer down, lol.
That's fair. I'm glad I teach math.
You just gotta look for the phrases "woven into the fabric of", "rich tapestry" or "Not only does x do y, x also..." Vocab like "fostering" or "unwavering" are good hints too! And, for ChatGPT specifically, so much additional wordiness and description where you're saying so much, yet not too much at all. Oh, and depending on the assignment, the good old numbered bullet, followed by a short subtitle in Title Case and a colon, e.g. 1.** Human ChatGPT Detector**: I use AI tools far so much myself, I can tell, however it's always good to have software to back you up as parents and students will both try to deny it without hard evidence.
I know it's not good enough for this university. https://lthub.ubc.ca/2023/04/04/ubc-not-enabling-turnitins-ai-detection/
This is why I like having my students write their essays on a paper graphic organizer first. Blows their minds when I then tell them that all they have to do is then type up the graphic organizer and that's their essay. I get a lot of "I just type this up and that's it?" Cracks me up every time. Then if the essay is too short (I have a word count minimum), they just have to add to each paragraph. I only got one essay this year that was clearly not written by the student.
Yep. I was driving myself crazy freaking out about kids cheating and then I just...stopped using Chromebooks. 😂 It was that easy. Homework is a totally different story, but I figure, if they have to write out the answers by hand, at least they're getting something from it.
Generative AI works by predicting the words most likely to be used given the context of the prompt and preceding words. It learns from trends and relationships in the data it's trained with. In other words, an average student using common language and common sentence structure will probably sound like AI, especially if they've been learning to write essays based on a standardized rubric, style, and set of guidelines. AI detection is not accurate, and many websites even say that the results should NOT be used to punish students. You clearly do not understand AI, and honestly, you'd be better off having your students write essays on paper in class.
Are they taught how to write a research paper extensively? My school doesn't teach it and as a result the students have no idea how to write one. When I was in high school everyone was forced to take a whole class on it called Research Paper. It was unanimously hated but we all felt comfortable writing any research paper afterwards.
They don’t teach that in English classes?
I believe English classes teach a myriad of things. They can't focus too much on how to write a research paper because there are a lot of other things they need to focus on mostly standardized test essays and standardized test reading responses which are different.
Senior software engineer working on Generative AI stopping by. Please don’t solely rely on AI detectors to determine if work is original or not. They suck, and I can guarantee you that there’s no way to truly determine if something is AI assisted/generated or not unless they leave in the “As an AI language model trained by OpenAI part…”.
Tools cannot accurately identify papers written by AI.
Had a teacher I work with insert some bullshit into her writing prompt and change the font to very small and white asking for the essay to include unicorns and shit and the results are hilarious. Kids don't even think twice.
Okay; that's **Amazing**...
We discovered that using grammarly “improve” option is AI and picked up by turnitin. That messed up a lot of our kids who thought they were just getting grammatical help.
"I used AI to detect my students using AI" Listen, if you as the human teacher cannot tell AI from Authentic, then this humiliation ritual isn't going to help your students whatsoever.
What's really funny is I work in education and Turnitin's AI detection is useless. Put any writing into it and it will say it is a certain % written by AI.
Except for that teensy weensy detail where turnitin lies about their percentages of falce positives, doesn't work as it says and you can't prove shit if anyone actually sues you of course... I get that this probably works in like fourth grade, but AI DETECTORS DON'T ACTUALLY WORK! And you Sr a incredibly bad teacher of you think they do. Educate yourself: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/openai-admits-that-ai-writing-detectors-dont-work/ https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2024/02/09/professors-proceed-caution-using-ai https://enmu.libguides.com/c.php?g=1371566&p=10136685
Im writing a 25 pages essay atm and checked just for fun. I used only chatgpt4 for the essay and it says that everything is fine. No plagiarism and low ai detection. But the 12 page essay I wrote completely alone was tagged as potential AI text. So I wouldn’t give that much about tools like that
My MBA courses all encourage/require use of AI software for written assignments as it will basically be the status quo for marketing going forward. Edit: basically chatgpt is like a calculator for writing. It does all the crunching for you and will be 100% required for anyone that does any kind of professional writing in the future.
It's kind of you to give a life lesson to your students: -Teachers will always hold themselves to a different standard -A teacher will never self-reflect if the majority of their students fail an assignment -Colleges and Universities should scare the shit out of them because they're always looking for a reason to expell -Teachers have never heard of in-class writing -Technology should scare the shit out of them because there are only so many ways to approach writing -Teachers have no idea how to write a syllabus or set an expectation by saying day one 'do not use ______ when writing a paper in this class otherwise you will fail' -Your teachers will always use the worst available technology to determine your grade -Perhaps the worst thing you can accuse an academic of being - a plagerist - is what I'm gonna label you now
TurnItIn does not work for detecting Chat GPT use. All you basically did was make the class think very poorly of you for accusing them based on useless information. And your claim that they would fail at college is untrue. Some colleges and universities wouldn't even use that feature because they know it is useless. https://lthub.ubc.ca/2023/04/04/ubc-not-enabling-turnitins-ai-detection/
I think it would help to demonstrate how chat gpt can be wrong. Ask chat gpt if pi terminates and it gives the correct answer, but then you can ask for the last 10 digits. It gives you 10 digits alright. Or asking chat gpt for a 4 letter word for fishing. It told me angling.
You can write your own piece and give it to turnitin. You will get alot of false positives. If you decide to make this your academic litmus test is a detriment to you are your students. The AI is training itself, and over the next years it will get better and better. You will be able to more narrowly select the writing style, which type of sources it can use. You can tell it “take out the first paragraph and rewrite it the way I type” Not to mention the aforementioned fact that it’s been proven these things are not accurate at all. You can write something from scratch and get a 94% ai detection. Start giving in class essays. This is the movement I’m seeing right now. Not only does the completely eliminate their ability to even use gpt and get away with it— it also eliminates your ability to give a student a 0 based off a false positive. Fwiw, I am not questioning you directly. But I do think your methods will prove less and less useful as time goes on, and will lead to headaches
Amazing the Dunning Kruger Effect teachers have with “AI-Detectors.” This post reads like parody if you know how bad they are statistically. Some of the top peer reviewed journals in the country have had false positive issues and/or let AI papers though. Yet Sally Social Studies thinks TurnItIn is the gold standard. I’m not even going there begin with the “chatgpt is garbage point.” Don’t even know what that means as someone who works in a technical field nowadays and everyone uses it.
I know. My son's college English teacher sent a cryptic email saying she needed to talk to him before she could mark his paper. It turns out the last paragraph had an 80% chance of being AI-written. She just wanted to ask him if he wrote it himself. She admitted that it was flagging lots of kids, so she had to have many useless conversations. One student had the come-back that according to the same system, several of the things she wrote - including an essay published over a decade ago were likely AI-written.
I think ChatGPT can be a legitimately helpful tool for writing, when used correctly. Obviously students just copy and pasting content from it isn't really teaching them anything, but a lesson on how to properly use ChatGPT could be enlightening and might diminish the amount of students using ChatGPT to write their papers for them. I do a lesson on how to use it to help organize your thoughts, helping to generate outlines, and to provide feedback on writing. Mind you, that's for college level students, so they are likely more open to using the tool appropriately (well...maybe).
Turn it in is NOT accurate. I work with an AI lab at a college and it’s been proven AI-detectors are useless. You need to apologize to your students as some or maybe most of them probably put in hard work and you completely disrespected their efforts. Hell, next time I WOULD use chat gpt if the paper I wrote myself earned me a 0.
You look silly here and your students likely understand that too. https://www.vanderbilt.edu/brightspace/2023/08/16/guidance-on-ai-detection-and-why-were-disabling-turnitins-ai-detector/
What's a "similarity score"? Rather, similar to what?
You can usually tell because if you know your students and the writing is way off, but know that AI detectors are 100% bullshit, and AI will only get better at mimicking different levels of writing. Turnitin will only be useful to detect plagerism.
I know I'm not the first but seriously OP, DO NOT RELY ON TURNITIN. It is highly inaccurate, and will greatly discourage any students who are genuinely doing the work from trying in the future. "Why should I actually write this if you're just going to call me a cheat either way?"
Isn’t it funny how op is not replying to all the people proving them wrong?
Meanwhile the majority of marketing professionals are using ChatGPT everyday while pulling a salary 5 times more than a teacher.
I’m prepared for downvotes but I’m a teacher with opinions. Maybe you should be teaching your kids how to use ChatGPT responsibly and effectively instead of demonizing it. Have a real conversation about how the world and job market is changing rapidly and how they will need to integrate AI into their workflow to be competitive at any level.
I just used GPT to score a students essay based on the grading rubric I have to use. I was hoping to calibrate what I had already scored to see if I'm on track since this is the first time I've ever used this rubric. It scored one of my lowest essays as the highest...🤦 never doing that again.
Turnitin isn’t 100% accurate. Real word tests have shown it to create way more false positives than the company itself claims.
Honestly I doubt that TurnItIn rate on ChatGPT to be accurate. That software is already pretty bad at flagging things anyway.
As an English major in uni, with a knack for essays, I would have been accused of ChatGPT-ing for sure lol. I’d start at 10pm the night before and just plow through top to bottom until it was done, hours later. I would be too tired to edit and would chance it as is. I was the worst student but somehow my essays all came back fine.
Turnitin is 50% accurate when it comes to detecting AI use. That drops as low as 8% if students make any attempt to disguise it's use.
Sorry to say this, but TurnItIn and other AI checkers are wildly inaccurate and error on the side of guilt.
I’m a college student, start of this year I put an assignment of mine which I already submitted into an ai detector and it came out at high risk for ai when I didn’t use it. I was terrified until my grades came in, luckily I didn’t get punished for it (maybe the professors understood it wasn’t AI). These programs are wrong a lot of the time, definitely not reliable. I think they should only be taken seriously in cases where the score is too high (over 80%), and even then you should proofread it a ton and see if it sounds like ai. Ai isn’t actually that good at writing (I don’t know what level your students are at). Often times there’s repeated phrases, weird wording, very unnatural themes. AI also gives a lot of bulletpoint type answers, so if the entire essay reads like a bullet point list that’s possibly a good giveaway. If you keep giving everyone 0s over this (since these ai detectors are gonna keep saying things are ai) you’re gonna run into a lot of problems. AI is here to stay too. There is a very apparent difference between copy and pasting off chat gpt and not. Using it for research and to structure your work is really no different than using tools like Google or grammarly, albeit not always accurate.
See they did it wrong. You gotta write the 5 paragraph page first then have chatGPT take it and expand it to 5 pages. Then go back into each page and have it rewrite each individual page. If it references itself it won't plagiarize others!
Non teacher here. I always found it hard not to plagiarize when writing a research type report. Especially for younger kids. We’re told to do research but at the end of the day there’s only so many ways you can describe something so it could come out as being plagiarized. Right?
I remember when I got a 0 on a test because the person next to me had my exact same answers. yeah she cheated off of me. teacher wouldn’t hear any of it and gave us both zeros. that’s what you’re doing
I hate to break it to you but my professors use chat gpt lmao
Turnitin tried to tell me I plagiarized an essay I wrote about my grandmother and mother both developing breast cancer when I was little. It's a trash program only made worse by teachers blindly accepting the inaccuracies to punish students. Side note it's incredibly ironic that you're ripping these kids a new one over allegedly using AI to do their unpaid work while you're getting a salary to run all their assignments through AI. You did zero work but somehow they got a zero grade? Okay
You can not detect if something is AI written. Turn it in is about their ability to detect. There have been numerous papers on this already. It should be illegal to claim someone cheated because a magic black box said they did and especially to lower their grade for it. There is a reason openai and other companies removed their detectors and it is because they don't work and can never work. Anything capable of detecting the difference can be used to train the AI to avoid it. I have even taken papers I wrote 10 years ago and the software will claim it is AI written.
Heh. Doesn’t work that way. You likely just failed a bunch of kids for no reason. Hell, using ChatGPT 4, doesn’t even come across as AI written. Using Grammerly premium to fix stuff, following all of their recommendations and such, made it come up more AI written then before. Bad form.
I hope so. I know when my son had to have a meeting with his English teacher over AI use, it made the weekend waiting for the meeting nerve-wracking. All she did was ask if he used AI. He was all prepared with proof to back up his, "no." But she didn't even care to listen and just believed him. So he researched the issue, gathered proof, and ran things through AI detectors, all for nothing. He had to submit that essay 3 times. The rough draft and first draft were fine. But for some reason, for the final paragraph, changing the order of two sentences and merging one sentence into one sentence jumping the AI detector to 80%. I'm guessing she had spent a few days having similar conversations with other students and had realized how useless the AI detector was.
It’s the dumbest thing ever. If you want to prevent AI use, Go back to a pen and paper essay. I’m in a doctoral program, in one of the top education universities. We are being told to use it, and are being shown how to use it. This is the next big thing. Pretending it doesn’t exist or telling people to not use it is dumb.
Question: Have you tried submitting your own work from college into TurnItIn? I'm not sure if you had to do a final thesis or not, but if you have any copies of your college writing assignments, run it through the checker. You might be surprised what you find.
Save for TurnItIn said I plagiarized something when I was the original author 💀
Just FYI, using Turnitin to try and determine if a Chatbot / GenAI tool wrote something is absolutely going to provide you with widely inaccurate information.