Friday Fragments, June 25th
AI writing, expanding access to elite schools, and helping students study for their exams.
What I’m reading…
The author of How Do You Grade a GPT-2 Generated Term Paper? experiments with AI produced text for a paper on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
The possibilities are literally endless. These students won’t write A+ papers or win awards, but AI-generated text is completely undetectable to plagiarism detectors.
For me, it comes back to requiring that students submit work in stages, and show improvement based on feedback in between stages of their work. The more writing is an iterative process that involves the instructor, the less likely it is to get away with not doing the work. Portfolios, unique rubrics, making improvements worth points all encourage students to complete original work.
In Enrolling More Students at Prestigious Colleges Is a Losing Strategy, the authors (Robert Massa and Bill Conley) argue that “expanding access” to elite schools would do little to actually enroll more underserved students.
there’s little reason to think that colleges that expanded their numbers would admit a different kind of student than they do now. Most likely they would do what they have always done, but on a larger scale, meaning that rich, white students would benefit most from such an expansion…The more highly ranked institutions would just grab students from lower-ranked institutions, and so on down the selectivity ladder, without expanding access at all. The students who were always going to college would now be going to a more-prestigious college. Those who never were going to college still wouldn’t.
Blake Harvard’s post and accompanying poster on helping students understand how to study for a test focuses on two main strategies applicable to any discipline. Very helpful to share with students!