...it’s not the AI that concerns me.Pretty alarming that ChatGPT can produce not just a passing paper, but “the best paper in the class.”
— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) January 17, 2023
https://t.co/PQn33I5kxu
First, this speaks to the usual quality of composition among college students, or at least the expectations of that quality (lowered considerably in my lifetime. The work I did in high school English was set at a higher standard than I could ever have asked of my students even 5 years later when I was a TA in graduate school. And that was a common public school, not a private school or a “charter school.” 25 years later, when I started teaching again, the expectations were even lower. And got lower and lower as I went on. I assigned a 5 page research paper to make my students write a “long” paper. In my junior year in high school I wrote a 20 page heavily researched paper. Not only could my students barely do any research, they could barely write 5 pages. They came to me woefully undereducated, and I couldn’t fix all their deficiencies in one college semester, or even two.)
Which takes us to the second. I had a student, when I was a TA, who had a vocabulary of more than a few hundred words. This made her seem to write better than my other students, a privilege she proudly carried into Freshman English from her high school. But what she wrote was empty gibberish; lots of words, but no content. I tried to get her to add content to form, but she couldn’t understand what she was doing wrong, and the next semester found a teacher more sympathetic to her “style.” Was I right, and everyone else wrong? No; but standards are a matter of judgment. They are also a matter of expectation. I learned what to expect after 20 years of trying to improve my students’ accomplishments.
So the AI doesn’t worry me. It’s all relative to expectations.
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