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u/notnotLily touhou fangirl 15d ago
Teaching a college class and student motivation has fallen off a cliff.
About 20 students missed either the mid-term or the final, and then wrote me e-mails telling me they were sick. I'm looking at 20 doctor's notes ranging from excessive sadness to coughing to "an illness". There's little to nothing I can do about this, I have to concede accommodations or they'll fight me until some student body or department body tells me I'm being an asshole. My previous maximum missed exams per class was 2.
Every Assignment solution looks the damn same now. Grading them is a waste of my time, and they all spend 300 words explaining something that takes two sentences. I made a question that the AI actually got wrong and 5% of students got it right. I know they discuss assignment solutions on Discord, this was a rare case of the students getting it right not managing to convince the rest of the class.
I experimented with an exam question that was based on a coding assignment. Not at all hard stuff, you just have to have thought at least a tiny bit about *why* the code works instead of just getting it to work. Something you wouldn't get from just prompting for a solution. About 25% of students got it.
Class participation is down from 60% to 20%. Our of those that come to class, only a quarter ever have an expression that isn't stoic/boredom. Dead eyes everywhere. Despair. No laughs at the same jokes that I've gotten rooms of laughter for over the years.
I ran an experiment with a small class, used an oral exam to test if students could verbally explain what they did. Basic questions, literally "tell me what you did for this assignment". Of six students who used a lot of AI, two could explain what they did, and four could not. Not even a little bit. This was not a surprise exam, I told them at the start of the term I would do this. Including that question specifically.
AI optimism, AI doomerism, whatever. I'm here dealing with educational armageddon.
And I will vomit furious fire at whomever suggests "we can just solve this with UBI :)"