Tech & Learning: I’ve always been uncomfortable with the grading part of being a professor. As a student, I loved learning, particularly writing, but dreaded the judgment of an instructor and the harsh disapproval of their red pen. When I started teaching, grading was my least favorite part of the job. I’d obsess over minor discrepancies and second-guess myself constantly.
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I’ve been thinking lately about how dependent some students have become on AI, especially with writing assignments. I think a lot of what tempts students to use AI is that education has become so focused on numeric grades and less on learning. I think a lot of people think that if grading is harsher, students might be less inclined to use AI. However, this article made me wonder if getting rid of grading altogether would decrease the amount of AI usage. If educators do not give numeric grades, then by using AI students aren’t gaining anything, they’re only inhibiting their learning. There is the question though of how we ensure students in pre-professional fields have actually gained the knowledge they need, and for that we could implement some sort of summary assessment, however that means that your success falls all on one assignment or test, which is also nonideal. Overall though, I do think we need to recenter students’ motivations on actually learning and not on achieving numeric grades.
I think "grade-based fear-mongering" is a crazy statement. There may be some level of fear surrounding grades for a lot of people, but ultimately grades exist to measure our learning/performance, not to scare us into doing work. I think that there has to be a metric. Nowadays people seem ready to abolish metrics all the time, but the ability to measure something is valuable. How you interpret that is more of a personal thing. Failing a class doesn't mean you are a terrible person, but the ability to see that one student has an A and one has a C tells you something about each of them, who needs help, who understands what's going on, etc. Now cheating is a separate thing, whether AI is involved or not. I think that no one should have AI doing their homework and I find it really disappointing that college students who are paying for their education are giving up their learning opportunities to a machine. The article talked about how graduate students are motivated and don't use AI and how you can't expect the same from undergrads or k-12, but I think you should be able to expect the same.
I think that if you teach a class that allows AI, you can’t use the same grading scale that you would have pre-AI. Grading a student’s original work to the same standard as someone who put prompts into a generator is insane. Students who choose to use AI in places they shouldn’t should rightfully get demerits–and they do, when the teacher/professor cares enough to rule out AI and if it’s easy enough to detect. The part of this article about “students caring more about the grade, not the learning” is not a new phenomenon and it cannot just be dated to increased AI use. The way I have learned to learn through our education system is not conducive for actually… learning the content or enjoying it in any way. Switching to a mastery-level learning strategy is impossible, but I really wish it was. I don’t want to be learning so I can just pass the class, I want to learn so I can actually take something away from the class.
It's becoming increasingly obvious that AI is going to do some serious damage to the educational system. Though, I do think there has always been a problem of students caring more about their grade than their learning, and AI while exacerbating that problem is not the whole problem. The idea of a gradless system sounds nice in theory, but I feel like there has to be some sort of feedback, and grades while imperfect do provide a somewhat standardized feedback system. I think the real way to motivate students to learn is to put them in classes they want to learn in, which isn't really possible in standardized education systems where the goal is to teach everyone to read whether they want to or not. This gets even tricker in higher education where students are sometimes forced to take classes they don't want to take to satisfy graduation requirements. So maybe the problem isn't with the grading system but the whole system of education and that's probably going to be rather difficult to fix by simply removing grades from writing classes.
I hate AI just as much as the next sane person, especially AI use in classrooms, but I would like to argue in this case that perhaps this influx of AI use in a classroom setting is revealing what is wrong with the current education system. This paper ironically highlights the issue again and again between the complaints about AI; grades. Systematically, we have taught generations and generations of kids that their worth is in some way tied to this number or letter, which is admitted here to be completely arbitrary. I feel like I have an upper hand working in theater since I have a very good understanding of social networking, and how the way someone feels about you makes an impact equivalent to the work put in, but this is exactly the problem. We are training kids to be employees. Not to be humans and navigate the world, but how to be this “functioning member of society.” Of course kids use AI, and cheat and lie- they want to feel worth something. If that worth is attached to productivity, which is attached to work ethic, which can be faked, they will. This is not a single person’s issue, but how we have taught kids for generations, and AI is showing us the flaws.
The concept of fear based motivation is really silly to mean, while yes you should care about your education I don’t think getting a bad grade once in a while should be something that scares you because it gives you a starting point to learn from, being bad at something isn’t the worst thing as long as there’s an attempt to improve, fear based motivation is also probably why so many students use ai, students are so scared of receiving bad grades they use ai(there are probably other reasons as well but I’ll focus on the reasons the article is discussing), even though I say this I do think the concept of having grades is important, it’s a metric that allows you to see how well your doing your assignments and while there are educational setting that do well without having grading systems I don’t think that would work across the board. I think that it’s important for college students to prioritize their learning even if your work is not good it’s better that you tried and continue to improve than just using ai(which is the equivalent of just not doing your work at all)
This is what's so frustrating to me about school is grade motivation. Especially in a time of AI, like they say in this article, people are not motivated to learn or to practice the skills they're meant to be learning in school. They're motivated to get a good grade and oftentimes the best way to do that is to use AI. Especially when people feel like the work they are turning in for school classes is busy work they definitely don't want to spend their time on it and so are really more likely to use AI and that's very frustrating for people who aren't interested in using AI and who are interested in learning but also are required to be grade motivated because that's how the system expects you to be. I've always been frustrated with this but it has become more frustrating as AI becomes a tool that makes getting a good grade easier while not actually enhancing your learning.
This article brings up a lot of different questions regarding AI and its integration into our modern educational system. I do think that grades have become the focus of education, rather than learning the course material itself. I feel that I am under constant pressure, both from myself and external factors, to perform at a certain level rather than to just learn the material. Learning more used to be the point of education, and the embrace of generative AI by many students indicates that our system has deviated from that. In fact, the education system now more than ever feels like a prelude to getting a career. I’ve almost completely avoided generative AI across the board, and I don’t really see the point in engaging with it within the current context. It just doesn’t make sense and isn’t really helpful to me right now, with schoolwork or in general. Who knows, maybe it will continue to get better and will become further integrated, but perhaps Sora’s shutdown indicates a different trajectory.
So I think this article brings up a really interesting point about the changes artificial intelligence, specifically generative language models, have begun to and will continue to make to education. I think there are two things that this article brings up, how educators are going to have to adjust to Artificial Intelligence being used in the educational setting, as well as the larger question of do grades work to fairly and accurately evaluate a student's performance. I agree with this article when it says that we are going to need to reevaluate how we grade and evaluate students, however where I think this article falls short is its lack of acknowledgement with how the education system as a whole is already flawed. I'm hesitant to say that the grading system we have now is rendered completely unusable due to artificial intelligence, however I do think that we need to start reevaluating the ways in which we grade and understand student mastery of content.
Its interesting because the concept of grades in general are incredibly infuriating already. But it's insane that some people believe that the deciding factor in getting rid of them should be based on the over use of AI and it being impossible to distinguish real work at this point. But you know whats crazy? The reason students cheat in the first place is because grades exist. This isn't a oh grades shouldn't exist because AI exists, this is a because there is a need to perform good, and students don't really care or have other thins they could be doing. But instead they have an arbitrary number deciding how intelligent they are. We shouldn't have grades period, and to further that colleges shouldn't be admitting based off grades. They should be admitting based off testing or passion. Ia actually believe that the ACT is fine, Its generally pretty good at highlighting basic skills But I also don't think it should be purely based off your score.
Honestly, I am against grading papers alone to a certain extent, especially with AI being introduced and commonly used. I feel like, while absolutely more time consuming, profs should move to a you write and then defend in a meeting, similar to how thesis papers work. This will not only prepare them a lot better for the real world, but also make using AI harder to a certain degree. It prepares them for the real world because surprisingly, you do have to present your research to committees to get funding for that research. Either as a university professor or company leader, you’re going to have to not only present your paper but also defend it. If you aren’t able to defend your paper, you’re not writing it based on the right ideas or you maybe used AI and can’t remember a thing about the topic. It’s going to take a lot of adjustment to get to the point to where the letter grade system will be useful again, but we’ll eventually get there.
I think that this author has an interesting point. I think that taking a closer look at grading systems within organizations is not a bad thing, but I do not think that that is due to AI. I appreciate how the author acknowledges the amount of pressure that is put on getting a good grade rather than learning. One of my close friends is a professor at a college and she is constantly complaining about her students using AI to write essays, she will give her students a chance to rewrite the essay without AI to get a grade, otherwise they get a zero. AI is so prevalent in school communities now and is affecting how/if students are learning. I think that AI has brought to light some of the flaws in the current educational system and how there needs to be some changes to grow with the world.
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