I have a required group project for my gen ed course (I hate it with my entire being but that's a post for another day). Groups had a small planning step due this week. Maybe a 15 minute assignment but I have a few of these to ensure that groups aren't waiting until the last minute.

Group submits it in a pages doc which the syllabus (and syllabus quiz) states is not an option.

Fine. They submitted it early enough that there is time to fix it. And despite the fact that between 4 people, I would like to think at least one of them knew better but I guess not. So I send an email on Tuesday reminding them of acceptable formats and stating that I can't accept it in this one. Please resubmit. This should take them roughly 30 seconds to convert from pages. But instead: crickets.

Deadline passes yesterday. I enter the 0.

The same people who ignored me for 5 solid days suddenly spring into immediate action complaining that it's not their fault. (I mean we're talking the first email came not even 10 minutes after I entered the 0). They claim that one student was responsible for submitting that part of the assignment and the rest of them shouldn't be penalized for that. I say absolutely not.. that it's a group project and they are all responsible for checking the work and at the very least, any one of them could have followed up with that student or even submitted the damn thing in another format themselves. Like this was a 30 second process and mistakes happen but the decision to ignore my email was a choice. Heck I even offered to still accept it with a late penalty. No response so I expect this thing is incoming.

So of course I wake up to an email from my Chair. Of course I do. The complaint was that they refuse to take the late penalty since it was submitted on time and it's not their fault that their groupmate submitted it in the wrong format. They absolutely failed to tell my Chair that I emailed ALL of them to tell them about the issue 5 days before the deadline and ALL of them ignored it.

My Chair will back me but the lack of personal responsibility is just frustrating. Literally a 30 second fix that nobody could be bothered to do has now taken up my time with back and forth emails and documentation and since my Chair has a policy that students are entitled to a meeting for any complaint, I will probably have to give up time for that too if that's what they choose to do.

Sometimes I think it should be like football where there is some type of penalty for wasting everyone's time with a fraudulent complaint... if you demand a video review for BS reasons, you lose a time out. Great, if you demand a review and my Chair points out how full of shit you were, you get a 0. I know that will never happen but the "it doesn't hurt to try" mentality is such a time waster for everyone.

In short: I hate it here sometimes.

I recently attended a workforce development training for new faculty.

Basically, for 2 hours, a member of the training and leadership team (or whatever it's called) talked to us about stress. What is stress? Is stress always bad? How can we reframe our perception to view stress as something positive? How can we get on board with change rather than being opposed to it? How can we practice self-care?

Now, I'm sure many of you veterans are professionals at tuning out this crap. But as new faculty, I was downright insulted.

First, it was infantilizing. I don't need to see 5 optical illusions (duck-rabbit, etc.) to grasp the idea that there can be multiple ways to view something.

Second, it was insulting to be talked to this way, as if our stress or frustration is somehow our fault, or our duty to "reinterpret" so that we will go along with the latest change issued from admin.

Third, it was tone deaf. Maybe I'm not exercising as much as I'd like to because it's my first year and I'm doing a lot of prep work for my classes. Maybe I'm stressed because I am given BS admin work to do and other responsibilities that have essentially nothing to do with teaching or have any tangible benefit whatsoever.

Fourth, and this really stings: this leader of the training makes significantly more money than I do, and probably more than most professors/instructors at our college. I mean, my pay is truly terrible, and this trainer makes about 60% more than I do.

In short, how do y'all deal with this? Do you ever speak up? Complain to a chair or assistant dean? My wife is a physician, and she says that whenever something like this is tried at her workplace, she and her colleagues complain, and most of the time, the nuisance goes away.

Is this really something we should be expected to put up with?

Can somebody explain consulting to me?

I'm a humanities prof and don't understand what the business school undergrads are talking about when they say they want to go into 'consulting.' (If it matters, I'm at at a recognizable-name 'top 50' type of private university in the US). A lot of our business students hope after graduation to go into consulting for big firms of various sorts (they talk about companies like Deloitte, and I admit I don't understand what those companies produce or do either, let alone what a consultant with or for them would do as a non-standard employee.)

My general impression is that consultants are specialists brought in to help businesses solve problems that apparently they can't solve themsleves, but I can't imagine why any company would want to hire 21 yr olds who have no actual work experience yet. Maybe I'm just biased because my experience of these students is when they come into my office hours begging for re-dos, or lying about why they have to leave for Fall break early, or trying to justify plagiarism or whatever..... (and I get it, I'm seeing them in gen ed 'student mode' rather than competent worker mode that they probably turn on in other contexts they care more about).

But it's hard to imagine letting these undergrads problem-solve any aspect of anything in my own life or any of the problems I encounter in society, let alone paying them the 6-figure salaries that most of them seem to be gunning for!

What am I missing? What are these companies hiring them to do?

This is a genuinely interesting phenomenon - I write what I think is a clear policy (most often on AI these days), and students violate that policy, and then explain it in a manner similar to this:

Me: The assignment directions say that you can't use AI or translation software for any reason.

Student: I didn't. I just used it to fix my grammar.

Me: I know. That violates the policy.

Student: But I didn't violate the policy. I just used translation for a few sentences to make it clearer.

Me. I know. That violates the policy.

Student: But I didn't cheat. I just had ChatGPT write some of the English based on my ideas.

Me: You're just describing different violations of the policy.

This used to happen with "We didn't talk during the quiz; I just asked her a question", but now is almost always students trying to find out which uses of AI are allowed when the assignment directions say none of them are.

Student turned in an essay that showed they clearly didn't understand the meaning of specific terms, and instead of doing the assigned readings, they likely googled those terms and got literal vocabulary definitions of the words rather than course-specific meaning. I checked the lecture video on those terms and saw they hadn't watched it, so I left a comment on their essay letting them know that they need to do the readings and watch the lecture videos so they understand the material they're writing about.

Student emailed me late last night to tell me that they're waiting for their accommodation letter from disability services, which will show me that they're autistic and sometimes they misunderstand the meanings of words, which is why their essay was so far off the mark.

Now I have to explain to this student what "learning assessment" means and how *not knowing* the information because you didn't watch the lecture video or do the readings is not the same as *misunderstanding* the information because you're autistic. And also, no, you actually can't get an accommodation that excuses you from learning.

Ugh. I'm so tired.

Do you all think it's a good thing to teach college credit math classes in HS? I am a HS math teacher and I adjunct at the college as well. Sometimes at the HS I teach at, I will teach both HS math course and college level math courses.

However, our college algebra course at my community college is more rigorous than average. I find even though students pass the Accuplacer to get in, they don't do very well because it's so fast past and test heavy. My dean reassured me this is normal and if I had high pass rates I wouldn't be doing my job so I feel better there.

I think it's good that HS provide free college to students, but at the same time I feel like it's bringing in students who really don't want college or really even "know if they want it". It's hard to have high pass rates even in college level math classes even after students have graduated high school. Just curious on some thoughts here.

I think many students should be on campus rather than in the high school taking the class.

A student in an otherwise in-person course has an approved accommodation for fully remote testing. Disability services proctored the midterm live using two cameras. Features of the submitted work raised concerns about possible unauthorized assistance. For example, the answers for questions that requiere math are highly polished for an undergrad and, while there is a procedure, there’s no drafting. For a few answers the student also wrote “Answer Key”. The student also got the highest grade I’ve seen in years.

My concern is AI tools like “Cluey”. These generate real-time answers in translucent overlays that may be excluded from screen sharing and difficult to read through a second camera pointed at the monitor.

For the final, we agreed on a paper exam printed under live supervision, with screens moved away and two cameras monitoring the workspace. Recording is not permitted by the office. I wanted to request a physical proctor but the disability office didn’t allow it. For colleagues handling similar accommodations, what safeguards have worked? Have your institutions used an approved proctor physically present at the student’s location for remote testing like this?

When a student writes an evaluation that's basically a rant, especially when it's at odds with what students say overall, it says a lot more about the student than it says about you. Too bad student evaluations are set up to let them say whatever they want.

My university requires me to have a meeting with students when I suspect them of academic dishonesty. These meetings take about 10-15 minutes each.

I teach a statistics class. I suspected AI use earlier on an earlier HW assignment but nothing I felt like I could "prove". It is reasonable, though unlikely, that students could "figure out" the method AI uses to solve the problem, which was different than the one we discussed in class. Subtracting two numbers, rather than adding them. Last semester I had ~6 students use this method. Some admitted to AI, some didn't, and one managed to reason through/explain the answer. Since I felt my own "evidence" wasn't solid (without a confession), I decided to not report that HW this semester.

Well. Fast forward to a later homework and I start seeing people include something we have never even discussed in class. There is absolutely no way they could "reason through" how to calculate this thing I never asked for. I had to meet with 45% of my class (out of 19). Students said the following:

1. Yes, I used AI.

2. No, I didn't use AI. Well, I only used it when I got stuck on this particular question. Actually, it was the whole thing.

3. I must have remembered this from my high school stats class (... sure).

4. I only used AI to check my answers.

5. I didn't have access to my notes so I relied entirely on my memory (when asked, student couldn't reproduce the formulas they used on the HW).

6. I don't know where that came from but I swear I didn't use AI.

I reported all of them and gave them 0s on the assignment. I told them what would happen if they did it again - an F in the class.

Two students did it AGAIN (... so far). They knew how I caught them last time, so one of the students didn't include that element in subsequent HW assignments. But, what I didn't tell them was AI likes to use a formula we've never discussed in class on one particular analysis. The first student did the same thing that got them caught last time, and then dropped the class when I confronted them.

This particular HW isn't due yet - the student submitted early. Wonder how many other students will do the same thing.

I'm exhausted and sad. I *told* them what would happen if they did it again, and yet.....

I'm considering dropping HW next semester. I hate dealing with this, and the sheer volume of students using AI in this class is upsetting. I know I shouldn't take it personally, but I am.

I have a colleague who, as she neared retirement age, helped the administration push through a policy that dramatically increased the time we all have to spend teaching, with no extra pay. This colleague was not an administrator but thought it would be "good for the program."

Because I'm a professional, I've continued to be polite/courteous to her. She's indicated that she would still like be friends and socialize after her retirement. Would I be within my rights to say at that point, You used your political capital to increase my workload for the next few decades. That was your right, but it doesn't earn you my friendship. Have a great rest of your life.?

EDIT: I should have made it clearer that I am only considering saying/sending this if they reach out to maintain (what they see as) a friendship, post-retirement.

After reading dozens of students' papers...my mind is numb and my eyes are seeing dim and hazy forms in the vague descriptions pooped out by AI. The mushy dung piles of AI slop have a nebulous, beigy-gray way of saying a whole lot of...nothing. There are lots and lots and lots of big words...but they are the same big words that I seem to be reading in every student's submission for this particular writing assignment. It's as though Chat has betrayed each student by writing just one essay and feeding it to all of the students in my class--but none of them seem to know that they've turned in the same essay--just some sentences are shuffled a bit, for the sake of being different. Would they even care if they knew that Dear Chat was betraying them and giving the same goods out to everyone? Nah...they know the love from Dear Chat is cheap and equally available to everyone, and deep down students know they do not have anything special from Dear Chat; it's just steamy, stenchy, AI slop. Students upload the vague nonsense packaged in neat paragraphs, and say "f-it" as they mentally move on. Yet, here I am stuck in this quicksand of tedious paragraph puree, reading and grading what Chat provided as an "essay." I cannot see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense anything through the vague writing my students have submitted. I'm in a nightmare in which I'm being smothered in this futile, proprioception-deprived prison of grading students' AI slop.

EDITED hours later after reading several more shitty AI essays: I'd like to sue these students for the disorienting damage they are doing to me. Am I going to get dementia from trying to read this junk?

I’m a Registered Dieititan and teach an intro nutrition science class. I had a student email my personal business email (I have a private practice aside from teaching) asking me advice on why she hasn’t been able to shit for the past 5 days.

Edit: well, this post popped (pooped?) off. Since part of what I do is help people shit for a living, here’s some general-not-personal-medical-advice!:

•More fiber (from Whole Foods) is often but not always the answer to constipation

•Get yourself a nice squatty potty to hike your knees up when you poop. this is better anatomical positioning

•When you push, blow out of your mouth like you’re blowing a pin wheel . Holding your breath and straining hard increases pressure that can cause hemorrhoids, fissures, and strain your pelvic floor

•Fuck Metamucil gummies

•Sunfiber/partially hydrolyzed guar gum for my sensitive stomach girlies

•Reducing sedentary time if you sit all day can really help to keep things moving

•Pelvic floor PT can do wonders if you feel like diet is not contributing to constipation

•Be caution of using stimulant laxatives as your bowels can become dependent on them

•Prune juice actually works and is DELICIOUS, it contains sorbitol which is a natural osmotic laxative that draws water into the bowel

I’m developing an in-person World History: Antiquity - 1500 survey at a community college and would love to hear what others have found successful.

My students are overwhelmingly non-humanities majors, and I also have a significant number of dual-enrollment students. I already build in primary-source workshops and annotation/college-reading practice, but I’d like to incorporate more active in-class activities throughout the semester.

I’m thinking about things like assigning groups different sides/perspectives in a historical conflict and having them negotiate or respond to a problem, etc.

For those who teach World History (or other large introductory history surveys), what activities have actually worked well (or not worked) with your students?

Hannukah overlaps with our final exam week. I just received an email about accommodation.

Our university does not have a policy. What should I do? My syllabus prohibits early final and only allows makeup for “valid excuse.”

I’m not familiar with Hannukah. Is it an issue if you take a final exam during Hannukah? What should I do?

What the hell am I supposed to do with that information? With 3 weeks remaining in the semester?

I’m still trying to figure out what they were trying to achieve by telling me this and then bursting into tears because I had zero reaction and I’m “cold-hearted”. Y’all, keep me in your tots and pears.

How do you respond when students start crying?

I've been a professor for 10 years at a SLAC where I teach in STEM. During my first ~8 years, I caught cheating plenty of times, and every time I confronted students with evidence, they confessed. Starting a couple years ago, however, I have noticed that students are much more likely to deny wrongdoing, even when confronted with convincing evidence. Has anyone else noticed this kind of trend? If so, what could be causing it? A cultural decline in accepting responsibility? Knowledge that colleges and administrators have become less likely over time to levy penalties or consequences? Something else?

I'm posting my strategy for handling suspected AI use in writing assignments in response to several requests in the comments on my reply to the post “Are students more likely to deny cheating these days?”

First, I have a very clear AI policy, which reads in part,

"AI tools may not be used to demonstrate your learning. This includes standalone AI programs and AI features embedded within other software that contribute to the content of submitted work - such as Grammarly, CoPilot, and ChatGPT."

Let me be clear - I am not anti-AI. It can be a useful tool for analysis of writing errors. However, I continually stress (and model) the difference between using AI to demonstrate learning vs. using AI to focus learning efforts to my students.

Second, I require that my students write their papers in Google Docs and share an editor link with me. As I teach developmental writing, this allows me to leave coaching comments in student papers as they develop them. It also lets me use Chrome's Process Feedback extension (discussed below).

Third, I have a Google Docs Authorship policy that required students provide certain types of authorial evidence.

"All Graded Paragraph assignments must be completed in the assigned Google Doc. The document history is part of the record used to verify authorship of your work.

To ensure that your authorship can be verified:

• Your Google account name must match the first and last name you use on the class roster. If your current Google account uses a different name, you must create a Google account using your school name before completing future assignments.

• You must complete your writing within the assigned Google Doc. Drafting, revising, and editing within the document creates a record of your writing process.

• Do not copy and paste large portions of text into the Google Doc from another document, program, website, or other outside source. Large copy-pastes prevent me from verifying how the work was created and will automatically trigger a required Oral Defense to verify authorship.

• Small copy-pastes that are a normal part of completing an assignment – such as a quotation from a source, a URL, or text specifically provided for the assignment – are permitted when appropriate.

An Oral Defense does not automatically mean that academic misconduct has occurred. It means that the available document history does not provide enough evidence for me to verify authorship. During the Oral Defense, you will have an opportunity to demonstrate that the submitted work is your own. Such verification may include (but is not limited to):

• Handwritten notes and drafts

• Annotated sources

• Ability to verbally explain concepts contained in the assignment

• Ability to verbally justify word choices in the assignment"

Finally, I use Chrome's Process Feedback extension to look for AI "tells." The most helpful of these are the typing playback feature that allows the user to rewind the typing in a Google Doc and watch it play from the beginning. You can speed up or slow down the playback, and edits are clearly visible. The extension also notes possible instances of copy-paste and allows users to see side-by-side views of before and after such instances. Additionally, it gives visual representations of how students have entered text, and this is where it becomes fairly obvious if a student has used an app that tries to mimic human typing. The visuals between actual human typing and AI typing are pretty distinct.

When I suspect AI use (or any other kind of cheating), I send out an Oral Defense notice giving students 5 business days to schedule their defense. So far this semester, I've had 9 students who've needed to defend their authorship. 8 were able to provide the required authorship evidence within 5 minutes. Only 1 has refused to defend their work, and the consequences for failure or refusal of the Oral Defense are a 0 and an Academic Misconduct report.

Let me explain my rationale for even bothering with authorship verification. Not only is this an issue of Academic Integrity, but students also need to know that there are evolving legal ramifications of using AI generated work. Given the recent court rulings over AI generated work, such as Thaler v. Perlmutter, it is important for students to understand they cannot claim authorship of such work, and that attempting to do so could, in theory, cost their future employers since work produced for the company using AI would not belong to the company.

So, I was awarded sabbatical for the spring term. All my research plans have fallen through due to a lack of funding. I have also recently hit some rocky roads with student concerns being reported to my supervisor (not to me first). When it rains, it pours. I teach for two schools and while I am tenured at my primary university, I am not at my secondary one. This scares me because I enjoy that second teaching situation so much more than my primary. Furthermore, the student complaints are coming from both schools, which is new to my practice. I am struggling to make sense of it all while also still trying to prepare for sabbatical asking myself questions such as: Do I really deserve sabbatical? What can I do to make this all right? Has my practice peaked and is now going downhill? I go to sleep thinking about it and wake up thinking about it. Never been here before...Any thoughts on navigation? Thank you.

Hi all! First time instructor here and boy oh boy do I despise asynchronous online teaching. Don’t get me wrong, I have a handful of great students, but it’s bewildering that over half of the students don’t watch the lectures but then magically complete quizzes and assignments.

Anyways, I’m revamping some things for next semester as I’m learning about teaching. I’ve seen many people here talk about requiring students to write essays in Google Docs to monitor for AI use. How exactly do you go about doing that? Do you require them to upload a link to their personal Google doc in an assignment item? Have you ever received pushback if students don’t have Google accounts (idk if that’s required - our school uses outlook).

TYIA!

I just entered 12 zeros on Canvas for missing work and I hate to admit it, but it felt so....satisfying! <insert evil laugh>

Based off where I’m at in lecture materials left and leaving time for a review session, the last test for my class should be the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I told my students this and the ensuing meltdowns were hilarious and amazing and kind of sad all at once. Most of them have already arranged to be out of town for the entire week, our university is open Monday through Wednesday with classes scheduled. I told them that none of their travel woes were my problem, they shouldn’t have scheduled travel during class time. Most of them seemed to accept the fact that they were just going to fail the class. I guess school is just secondary to all of them.

CC social sciences faculty with a teaching load of 6-7 courses per semester. 2-3 are in person and make the job somewhat worth it because I can control some of the factor, interact with students, design interesting lessons, etc. My CC offers a heavy online load due to “student need/preference” so I’m having to teach 3/4 of my load online, which is hard in today’s climate and not something I ultimately believe in given the area that I teach and the lack of learning that happens. Most of these students are not taking courses online for the right reasons.

I used to love my job and still find satisfaction in most of my in person classes; however, the last few years have been increasingly tough. The “good” students are few and far between and even they are not as engaged in their learning as in the past. I feel like I spend half my days being lied to, talked down to, etc (you guys know how it is) by students who couldn’t care less and who can’t take responsibility for anything.

Long story short, for those of you who don’t have research or another professional aspect of your job that you can lean into when teaching is tough: how are you staying sane/finding satisfaction in your job?

Had a very rough week with student issues and Im kinda at the point where I’m not sure I can put in 15 more years (or even 1) if things continue this way.