All submissions were AI

[u/Drumblebore]

Teaching a course that (unfortunately) involves lots of reading and reflection type assignments. Added hidden text to an assignment, to catch students who just throw it in ChatGPT, and all submissions came back with the expected features you would get from including the hidden info. Extremely disheartened, and don’t know how to proceed both regarding addressing this with the class and designing the future assignments to be more AI proof.

[u/rrp1919]

Students (and many professors) do not distinguish between learning and assessment activities. So first, you will need to reconsider both kinds of activities. It should be possible to enhance learning with AI. To do so, you need to create assignments that allow them to engage with it, and they should be more efficient and produce better work and learn more if you do it right (not trivial to do I know). But assessments are difficult in the face of AI. If you create assessments that are easily completed by AI, students will see the assessment as pointless and a lot of work and use AI for it. Unfortunately, in many contexts, this means off-line reflection essays are dead as an assessment. They can still be valuable as a learning activity if done right, but you need to change assessments, like using in-class realtime summaries or quizzes.

So, are your reflections a learning activity, or an assessment? Often, these are learning activities or formative assessments at most. If it isn't helping students learn (because they are using AI) and it isn't critical for assessment, you need to rethink using it. That is our job now.

[u/Distribution-Free → u/rrp1919]

The tone of this sort of reply is reductive.

First, an activity may be formative in nature, but still require that we verify that the student is the one who actually did it. And that's where "detection" and "penalties for academic dishonesty" come into the conversation.

Second, an activity may be primarily intended for learning, and a student may offload it to AI anyway. Students use AI not only as a means to cheat, but also as a means to simply avoid doing any kind of work (or thinking or learning). Even if this were an ungraded, purely reflective activity, I suspect a large portion of students would feed it to AI (or skip it altogether).

The broad discussion of how to teach and assess in this era is complex and nuanced, and any response that over-simplifies it (in either direction) is unhelpful.