Winter Wanes

Adjunct Luncheon Next Week!

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you at next week’s Adjunct Luncheon! We’ll spend most of the time eating & visiting, but we will also have a few items-of-business to go over.

First, please come with a lesson plan that you’d be willing to upload to the University Writing Resource Database. Ansalee Greenwood will be talking us through how to search and upload lesson plans & assignments. I’m hoping increased familiarity with this resource will serve us all! Bring your laptop if possible 🙂 Susan Morris, Amy Williams, & I will also briefly discuss the revised Adjunct Performance Review process & a new peer observation option before we honor this year’s teaching award recipients.

See you next Thursday, April 17, at 1:00 pm in the Lower Level Conference Room of the Hinkley Center!

We are not AI police, but what are we?

Last month there was some interesting discussion about AI use in our classrooms on the GroupMe Discussion board. I’ve been meaning to add my thoughts, but decided to do it via Newsletter since my texting wpm is pretty bad, but my typing wpm is pretty good.

If you attended Brian Jackson’s training in March (Brian’s WAC AI Training PowerPoint), you know he discussed how AI detectors are unfortunately not reliable at detecting AI use. And I feel there’s been some (mild?) nihilism about how to handle suspected AI use in our classrooms, myself included. While we’re encouraged to develop our own AI policy, it can be exhausting trying to enforce said policies. So before I lead you through my own policing rabbit hole, I do want to acknowledge that we are not AI police.

So a few weeks ago I contacted two students I suspected of using AI on the essay portion of their Shakespeare midterms. I was not closely reading these essays but briefly checking if the answers met the requirements (at least two direct quotes from the play, a strong thesis, actually answering the question at hand, etc.) These were open book exams: students could refer to copies of their plays but were asked to use no other outside sources, including AI. The reason I quickly suspected AI use is that one essay included hallucinated (made-up) quotes and the other had an inaccurate plot summary for the play. For an open book exam, this was pretty suspicious. And I know the plays I teach very well; it’s easy to spot these inaccuracies quickly. This is absolutely not the case in my WRTG courses where students often write about subjects I know little about with sources I’m not familiar with. While I have occasionally suspected AI use in my WRTG classes, it has involved more thorough follow-up, verification, and closer initial reading on my part.

In this case, the two students who’d used AI in their midterms eventually owned up to their dishonesty. They received 0s for that portion of the midterm, and I had to report them to the Honor Code Office (FYI the first plagiarism or academic dishonesty violation report for a student results in a warning and having to take an honesty webinar). It was a bummer experience and a decent amount of extra work on my part. But if those students had lied and refused to acknowledge their AI use, I honestly don’t know what other recourse I’d have wanted or been able to pursue. I probably would have skeptically taken their word for it. And it also eats at me that maybe other students used AI in more sophisticated ways that I didn’t detect. It all feels so speculative (this was the word Google suggested as a synonym for “crapshoot.”)

There is so much everyone is still figuring out about AI use and detection. On GroupMe a couple of adjuncts made excellent suggestions about someday (maybe?) having a required writing assignment that asks students to edit and analyze AI generated essays so we can teach ethical and literate AI use. Maybe we create more in-class writing assignments where students can’t use AI. Maybe we mention that if students don’t turn in process assignments we can cite their absence as reasonable evidence of AI use if we suspect that in their final papers. Maybe we actually require students to use AI for their assignments and write reflections on how and why AI shows up in their final products. Maybe we dutifully make our AI policies and throw ourselves to the mercy of our students’ agency. I’ve decided that my Shakespeare students will be taking their final in the Humanities Testing Lab (both my AI-using students told me they’d turned to AI in moments of stress-induced panic).

I don’t have any answers, but I have learned a lot from the GroupMe comments and hope this is a discussion that we continue having over the next few semesters. Feel free to continue to discuss and give suggestions for good AI teaching practices. We’re all on a learning curve here, and I appreciate learning from all of you.

Fall Teaching Requests

Fall teaching requests are available! Make sure to submit your preferences by Friday, May 23. Jen has let us know scheduling has been made more complicated with 200+ sections of UNIV 101 to schedule around. So if you can, being available either at 8 am or until 5 pm would be very helpful!

Resources from last month’s training

• Recording of Perusall Training from Mike Johnson. Thank you again to all who attended! I’m hoping to schedule some sort of follow-up training & discussion before Fall semester.

Stuff for your calendar

APRIL

• Thursday, April 17: Adjunct Faculty Seminar 9:00 am - 1:00 pm (you must be registered for this already to attend)

• Thursday, April 17: The Adjunct Awards Banquet @ 1:00 pm in the Lower Level Conference Room of the Hinkley Center

• Monday, April 28: First Day of Spring Term

• Tuesday, April 29: Winter Semester Grade Submission Deadline

MAY

• Tuesday, May 6: Add/Drop Deadline Spring Term

• Friday, May 23: Fall Teaching Requests due

JUNE

• Monday, June 16: Last Day of Spring Term

• Monday, June 23: First Day of Summer Term

• Thursday, June 26: Spring Term Grade Submission Deadline