Contrary to what I thought when I wrote this post, I will be teaching a 100-student upper level undergraduate course this fall. The course will focus on the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases, and I’ve been thinking about the different components of the course. As I do so, a thing that constantly pops into my head is what the impact of generative AI tools like ChatGPT would be on a certain assignment.
Given the topic of the course, an obvious assignment (to me, at least), would be to ask students to take a scientific article that is relevant to the course and write a short summary of it for a general audience. But I banished that idea pretty much as soon as it popped into my head – surely at least some students would ask ChatGPT or something similar to do the assignment, and I don’t feel equipped yet to figure out how to handle that, especially with 100 students.
Something that is clear is that lots of folks are struggling to figure out what to do about writing assignments. As one example, the Chronicle of Higher Education covered this in June, including this:
The explosion in AI use, the endless hours spent figuring out whether — as he put it — there was a person on the other side of that paper, and the concern that students who cheat could end up getting the same grades as those who did the work sent Wilson reeling.
“I’ve been teaching at this university for 17 years and suddenly this comes along to devalue everything I’ve done to become a caring, competent instructor, and the students are creating make-work for me,” he says, describing the shift as “devastating.” “I’m grading fake papers instead of playing with my own kids.”
That last part – whew. That hit home.
For this semester, I’ve settled on a mixture of assessments & assignments:
exams that will be in class & sort of open note (more about this in a future post),
submitting comments on readings before class,
‘exit tickets’ based on in class discussions and activities, and
a science communication assignment where the options include making a video or visual (infographic/cartoon/comic) related to course material.
My hope is that I will mostly find myself grading work that my students actually did, and that doing the work will help them learn the course material and also develop some science communication skills.
If I was still teaching Grad Ecology, as originally planned, I would be thinking less about how to sidestep generative AI and more about how to incorporate it into the course (which I touched upon a bit here.) That would be harder, but also interesting in some ways.
I’m curious what others are doing for their fall courses. Are you changing things? If you are changing (or already have changed) things, have the changes mainly been for writing-related (and maybe coding) assignments?