Deadlines First Hurt Then Help

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project, in charge of lots of things and especially Latin 1-7

The start of a new academic year at last! We enjoy having a fresh wave of new students who are (mostly) enthusiastic about their new topics and new challenges. Faculty work late nights even on weekends to coordinate a relatively easy glide into new routines for students who may be new to the world of online learning. On average, students in any entry level course will be reminded about what must be done for the first week of the semester between six to a dozen times counting class announcements given digitally, then verbally, then by email, and then--starting two weeks before the first class--the enduring syllabus which contains everything that must be done. More advanced classes get fewer reminders as expectations rise with maturity. Many classes offer a week 1 guide handout plus we always post the links to assignments in advance of semester start, sometimes with special colors, links, and notes. We want the students to succeed.  

Then faculty predictably get several emails: the student was confused! Surely nothing had been assigned this first week. Can’t there be second and third chances here?

Twenty+ years of teaching has taught us many lessons. Chief among them is the importance of a deadline, a creature so rare and endangered that ours may be the first ever seen by some. Why would a small educational company care so much about deadlines and why can’t we have more mercy on our new students who have yet to encounter a deadline out in the wild much less recognize one as their very own? Wouldn’t we have more students if we just let every deadline slip and slide?

Actually…no 

When our students first learn we hold firm deadlines, it hurts. This pain is shared (perhaps with a little hyperbole) with family and faculty as an affront! No real notifications about expectations and due dates were published! So young to earn so harsh a zero!

We get it. It is not our favorite chore to be the deadline enforcers, but if deadlines are negotiable this time, they will also be negotiable next time. The chain will be eternal. The first one that holds fast will elicit pain once more and the cycle renews indefinitely until a person who might have a brilliant academic record and great potential are held back by so humble a thing. Stuck. Instead of this simple (though relatively painful) lesson now, they will still be negotiating to avoid that hard line in the years to come while everyone else is moving forward.

Should we have a new tagline? Maybe “holding students to deadlines since 2005”?

The wonderful news about our apparent lack-of-empathy-towards-very-busy-students is that we have been doing this long enough that our first decade of students graduated college, graduate school or medical school, and are now enjoying the first decade of their chosen callings while juggling things like children and spouses and bills. 

We have never had any highly successful student email us to chide us for our ridiculous deadline policy nor given us grief about our callous high expectations. On the contrary, learning the pain of a zero in week 1 of Latin 1 meant that they took deadlines more seriously from that moment. They’d met a wall that didn’t move with a slight push. When success in a class, project, or exam was essential for their future plans, the pain of a firm deadline was a distant memory. They already knew how to tackle their own schedule and juggle multiple responsibilities. They didn’t go through this maturation in week 2 of college—when their academic scholarship was already imperiled by tardy marks in lab and missed submissions in required courses—but in week 2 of a class that they started in middle school or high school. They learned early that they alone are masters of their responses to stress and knew their way around a planner packed with challenges. That’s what made all the difference.

Lumpy Steak Smoothie

AI Writing

by Amy E. Barr with The Lukeion Project

The Lukeion Project has a zero AI usage policy meaning students who turn in AI work represented as their own work will have a bad day indeed. There’s a relatively new term for people that turn in AI work as their own: they are meat proxies. If you are a meat proxy, you turned in AI output without reading, understanding, or validating that work, existing as just a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient. You did less than nothing in that transfer of work, which is a big problem.  

Turning in stolen work is always bad. In the academic world, it is called plagiarism, a word which comes from Latin plagiarius, meaning "kidnapper". Having AI do your writing is even worse than normal theft or kidnapping because you were just a mindless relay who didn’t even bother to take the necessary steps of gluing together a few thoughts. Your mental acuity is diminished but so is your educator’s because you’ve asked them to read and “grade” the whole charade.

When the topic of AI writing comes up among students, they often mistakenly believe one “gets caught” using AI writing because their essay is just so very good! Sorry, but no this is not the case at all. Your educators don’t grow suspicious that you are a meat proxy because your writing is deeply transformative and profound. There is a very specific quality in things written by AI. People that read student work for a living can pick out those clues as easily as one finds a six-fingered person in an AI image.

AI writing has the literary qualities of a department store dummy. Everyone can tell a mannequin is supposed to represent something human wearing the appropriate clothes, but all the uniqueness and humanity visible on that chunk of plastic is perfectly midway between good and bad, thoughtful and mindless, interesting and bland. AI writing isn’t good writing. It is bland writing. If you have a delicious steak dinner with asparagus, mashed potatoes, plus apple pie, that tasty meal will leave you happy all night. If you take that same nice meal and shove it into a high-powered blender for three minutes, you’ll have a disgusting smoothie made of perfectly fine ingredients. You might still be able to consume it, but it will not be pleasant.

Some AI models have tried to outwit educators who quickly pick up on that perfectly bland, albeit grammatically correct work. Students intentionally add typical student errors and a few mangled thoughts to make it all seem more human. Great. Thanks. Now the steak smoothie has mystery lumps! Your educators don’t want to swallow that either.  

Faculty as a matter of normal practice always run written pieces through a couple different AI detector apps. We all know these are not foolproof tests but it’s a start. If your written work comes back as VERY suspicious, we run it through more checkers, online searches, and our fellow educators. If the results are still highly suspicious. You will have a bad day indeed.

Some essays come back as “maybe AI.” Again we have to do more checking and comparing. It is a lot of extra work thanks to AI. Whether your work came across as likely or maybe AI, there’s one thing YOU can do to help yourself in situations where others must grade your work. You can provide all the evidence we need to conclude you are innocent…at least until AI comes up with a new way to outsmart this technique.

If you use MSWord (or the free version by Google) you can turn on “Track Changes” before you begin writing your paper or essay. Once you turn this setting on, any changes that you make to your paper--including any edits, copy/paste, deletions, or just regular typing and spell-checking--will all show up and can be examined by your educator. If you are mainly copying and pasting long bits into your paper instead of writing, correcting, adjusting, editing (all the normal stuff), then our suspicions are confirmed. If your work looks like the fairly normal process of writing, editing, deleting, rewriting, we can all relax.

How does one turn this on? Check for yourself if you use Google. I use MSWord. You can open a new document then navigate to the Review tab (look for the “review” tab in the toolbar at the top of the window) and then select “Track Changes.” The icon looks like a pencil and paper. Any time you make any changes, it will track them. Now evidence of a real human doing real writing is handy and available if and when needed.

If you use this technique and are ever accused of using AI by anyone grading your work, you have the right evidence to prove you completed the task for yourself and also the proof that allows us to restore faith in your work as a student.

Unfortunately, in the years ahead education will continue to be in turmoil thanks to AI. While you may have some educators who encourage the use of AI, you will have an even larger percentage that want you develop your ability to read, analyze, and write while you still have the opportunity and luxury to do so. Outside of brick-and-mortar classrooms requiring hand-written in-class essays, we will all be burdened with the need to verify that only a truly human composition sits in front of us for a real grade.