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.  

Keep Technology Caged

AI Isn’t Your Academic Friend

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

At least in theory, students can now grab their essay or paper prompt from their educators, load that prompt into an AI (artificial intelligence) text generator, add a few specifications and— voila— their essay or writing project is finished to perfection! Now, some students might suppose, there’s plenty of time left in the day to do other things in their now cleverly cleared schedule. Is this a win?

The obvious answer to this question is no. Let’s explore why.

The simplest reason why having AI complete your assigned writing projects is NOT a win is that you are cheating when you do so. Having anyone else, even if that person’s “brains” are made of the digital input of hundreds of thousands of documents stolen from the internet, is cheating because you completed none of the work and none of the thinking needed to address the assignment. This is literally a no-brainer.

Why do your mean-old educators insist that you personally employ brain and hands to write when AI can oversee such time-wasters for you? Is technology not here to help us? There will come a day when AI has its place in your life that will be helpful rather than a hindrance. My prediction is that AI will have its moment in the sun for a while longer until thinking-humans begin to yearn for bespoke, hand-made, human originated music, art, video, and literature. AI will eventually find its spot in more helpful areas than creating more genuinely human activities and, of course, cute cat videos. For now, AI isn’t your academic friend.

While it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway: those who never learn to read (because AI summarized your whole reading assignment in a single simple paragraph) nor write (because AI took only 60 seconds to finish your assigned task) are consigned to the sorts of lives led by people who are illiterate. Those that don’t read and write are no better than those who can’t. The implications for the future of humanity are, to say the least, bleak if most students hand off all major tasks of academic development to something that is not much more than a fast complex database filled with other people’s words and ideas. Even if something like the plot-line of the movie Terminator unfolds once Skynet takes over, nobody would notice. They’d be too busy generating weird cat videos or deepfake videos of your siblings.

What’s in store for those who insist on using unsanctioned AI in coursework? As quickly as AI is being promoted as a grand new way to improve education, human educators are developing ways to catch its use and stop it. AI has plenty of useful applications in the real world, but its use must be consigned strictly to learning enhancement not knowledge replacement.  

One might argue that nobody really needs to learn algebra or calculus (that’s what calculators do) or chemistry (the periodic chart is handy online) so why learn to read or write if AI will take care of these tasks for us? We are on a rapidly swirling whirlpool towards our own demise if we relegate our future to the menial chores of cleaning up after our more intelligent AI overlords.

For now, you should know this:

·        All your educators can check for your use of AI in written projects of all sizes. A bloated database of word soup will read that way because that is how most AI has been trained to write.

·        If your work “reads” as AI, we will offer diminishing benefits-of-the-doubt in our responses. Applying a grammar checker or a spelling checker doesn’t change your work to read as AI generated content. None of your educators are buying that excuse. There are, at least for now, very specific tells when work isn’t written by a human. If your work is scanned as digitally generated, you will be removed from classes for cheating.

·        If you have dabbled in using unsanctioned AI for your submitted coursework, stop now. When your honest peers have progressed in their studies by mastering assigned skills through use, you’ll be trapped at whatever level you achieved before you started turning to digitally enhanced “help” to finish your work for you.

Only time will tell if my distrust of AI diminishes or increases but, so far, I’m not encouraged by what I see coming at us down the road. We are all going to be targeted relentlessly with fast, cheap, easy ways to remove humans from needing to accomplish the basic tasks of thinking thoughts and recording them skillfully and responding to others thoughtfully and cleverly. When all of that is gone from us, what will there be?

Writing Projects

Creating Your Own “Final Checklist”

By Randee Baty with The Lukeion Project

For many of the papers that I have my college students submit, I first require them to go through a “Final Checklist” quiz that they must complete before submitting their papers.  Quick reminders of common problems in the form of a checklist can help every student, and you can create one to use with your papers based on common mistakes or issues that you know you are prone to.  Here are the types of questions that are useful to have on your own final checklist.

1.      Have I read the assignment sheet one list time before submitting?

2.      Have I cited any information that I took from a source with both an in-text citation and a Works Cited citation? (Remember that citation always requires both!)

3.      Is my introduction interesting rather than bland and generic? (If you start a paper with, “In this day and age” or “Since the beginning of time” it’s time to rethink your intro!)

4.      Is my thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph?

5.      Does the conclusion show that I supported my thesis statement?  (This is actually a bigger problem than you might think.  I’ve had students submit papers that never addressed their thesis statement.)

6.      Does each paragraph have one clear idea that it addresses?

7.      Have I double-checked my formatting?  (Professors care more about formatting than most students realize!)

8.      Have I removed all unnecessary words, including unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, intensifiers, and modifiers?  Have I removed the word “very” from the paper?

9.      Have I removed all slang or casual language? (Cliches and platitudes also need to go!)

10.  Does my paper have the correct point of view? (If the assignment sheet asked you to write in 3^rd person but you have some 1^st person writing, you’re asking for trouble.)

11.  Have I done a thorough proofread?  (As I fully understand, many students don’t like to read back through their work once they consider it done.  Read back through it anyway.  A few minutes spent reading now could prevent having silly points taken off the grade for a small proofreading error.)

12.  Do I have the professor’s name spelled correctly in the heading?  (Yes, professors’ names get misspelled all the time. It’s not a good look for the student.)

Your own checklist may have different questions depending on the particular issues that you get caught on by your professors.  Don’t get point deductions for things you could have easily fixed!  After spending all the time and effort to write a strong paper, give it the best possible chance for a great score with your final checklist.

Take Notes

Supercharge Your Learning & Save Time

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Your class is an hour long. In that class your instructor is going to cover some important concepts. You should know they are important because time is very limited, and most educators are going to prioritize material you must know! Less important details can be gleaned from assigned readings but, rest assured, what’s covered in class is the top stuff to learn. The most important material is being served to you on a shiny platter with stars and exclamation points to let you know that these are the foundational things to understand. Many recognize class time (any class time) for this value while many more do not.  

You have choices about how to use the scheduled class or lecture time ahead of you. You could listen with half an ear while you fiddle with a distraction (social media, pet capybara, a game app, etc.); you could listen attentively but passively (notice that passive listening almost always leads to fiddling with a distraction); or you can actively listen by taking notes.

Only one of these approaches makes good use of your class session for which you have already made time in your schedule. The other two are a waste of time. Not only do you miss your first and best opportunity for learning the most essential concepts of any particular subject, you now have to find time in your schedule in which you must be your own tutor by trying to figure out what is important and why they need to know it. This “I’ll eventually figure it out” approach is common, but it is a massive waste of time.  

Many argue that they don’t need to focus carefully on in-class material if it is also covered in the textbook or in assigned readings. By this reasoning, why not save time and money by abandoning every formal academic scenario and becoming entirely self-educated? It is true that some subjects lend themselves to self-teaching. Others do not. If you want a good return on your time investment, your educator will prioritize the most important material and then explore a variety of ways to help you best understand that material in context.

Many argue that they plan to listen in class but don’t feel they want to take notes because they aren’t very fast at taking notes or maybe their handwriting isn’t very tidy. This is like saying you are going to wait to learn essential skills until after you’ve been added to the Olympic team in that skill. You don’t start on the first day with good reflexes and strong muscles in a sport. You won’t start note-taking on day one with neat, speedy, and organized words. You only get faster and more efficient at taking notes by taking notes. Sloppy handwriting is not a problem. If you are taking notes properly you can be certain that your writing is sloppy because you are keeping pace with the material and you know this isn’t the final set of notes on the material.

Taking notes in class is the fastest way to understand material and then internalize what you are hearing because you are forcing yourself to hear, process, consider, think, and organize the words necessary to summarize what you are seeing and hearing in class. Taking notes by hand forces full brain engagement in the material being presented. This also works when you are reading an assigned texts, especially if you are summarizing what you have read into your needs or formulating more abbreviated definitions of terms and concepts. You must formulate a full thought and express it in such a way that makes sense to you and then write it out. There’s a Latin phrase that holds true in this discussion: to teach is to learn. When you take notes, you are teaching yourself and learning well.  

Taking notes by hand is also the best way to stay attuned to the material presented. We are all prone to losing focus when any distraction pops up. Maybe your cat walks in and begs for treats reminding you to move your stuff out of the cat’s favorite spot but now he wants a treat and look at how his water bowl is empty and let’s get him to play with his new toy and then…wait, what did the teacher just say about this week’s quiz? Making a habit of notetaking means our hands are full, our eyes are on task, and our brains are meaningfully engaged even if we might still have the cat in the room who plans to take a nap in his favorite spot even if you don’t move your stuff.

What’s the best way to learn by taking notes?

1. Don’t prioritize material as note-worthy or not until after you’ve finished the class. Just take notes anyway. Evaluations can come later. For now, stay attuned to what is being said by jotting notes down non-stop. During a lecture, staying focused is half the battle.
   
2. Don’t try to copy anything verbatim unless your lecturer makes it very clear that verbatim is important. Instead, listen for keywords, terms/definitions, proper nouns, specific ways of explaining tricky topics. If you have a good educator, he or she will repeat important things a couple of different ways so get down a few anchor notes and then flesh things out a bit more as your understanding expands. Leaving extra line spaces and wide margins will help you add things back in later if you hear it explained in more than one way.
3. Notes need not be limited to words! Include arrows, asterisks, underlines, colors, doodles, or whatever system you like to use to indicate priority or process. Some take notes like a rough loose flowchart while others take notes more formally with traditional outline techniques. Both do the job.
4. Always recopy your notes after class meets or the lecture ends. Keep a loose-leaf binder with a stack of lined paper for taking notes during class and a separate notebook or binder for recopying them later. Why recopy? You will forget 50% of what you heard in class within 24 hours. If you recopy your notes but flesh them out by writing more complete sentences or with added material from your readings or charts from the textbook with formatting or colors for important terms, you will have more than half-finished your studying for any quiz or exam that comes your way. You will have engaged your brain to listen and write and then analyze and write once again while the thoughts are still fresh. If you recopy notes soon after the lecture, you’ll accomplish this step very quickly. If you wait, you’ll have to spend more time remembering. Your choice.
5. Even if you borrow somebody’s notes to prepare for an exam, it is essential that you recopy them for yourself. Writing things out allows our brains time to process and absorb new information easily.  
6. If you struggle to increase speed when taking notes, consider acquiring the skill of writing in cursive, a writing style that was designed to add speed to writing by hand. Printing is the slowest way to write anything. 
   

Taking notes is an intense study method that will accommodate full mastery of nearly anything you hear or read. It is something that almost anyone can do and at any age. It is a suitable complement to any preferred learning style. Focused note-taking requires no additional class time. Compared to somebody who chooses distracted unengaged learning, you’ll spend much less total time recopying notes in preparation for any quiz or exam. Fail to take/recopy notes and you’ll spend much more time trying to teach yourself the material from scratch without the benefit or prioritized information.

Join forces with your skilled educator by taking notes. Your grades and subject mastery will greatly improve even as you spend less time working on the material at hand.

Four Purposes for Academic Writing

Summarize, Analyze, Synthesize, Evaluate

By Prof. Randee Baty with The Lukeion Project

Most of the writing a student will do in rigorous high school classes and college classes will come from material they have been assigned to read or from research they have done. When a student is assigned to write an academic paper on that material, it’s crucial for the student to know what they are being asked to do with the material so that they can complete the assignment correctly. All writing assignments aren’t the same! Usually, when assigning a writing project, the professor wants the student to do one of four things with the material: summarize, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate. Be sure you know which one you are being asked to do!

Summarize

Summarizing is the least requested types of writing for papers. Summarizing is taking someone else’s work and distilling it down to its basic elements. This is usually asked for when a professor wants to ensure that you did actually read the material or that you understand the material. For example, a professor may have you write a summary of each chapter of your textbook or of videos assigned to view.  When you are asked to summarize, you should give all the main points without giving most of the evidence that backs them up. Only give the main supporting information. Unless specifically instructed to do so, no opinions or personal thoughts on the work should be given because you are simply asked to tell the professor the gist of the author’s work.

The biggest mistake students make when summarizing is thinking that a summary implies a few sentences. A well-written summary should be about a quarter of the length of the original material. If you are assigned four pages, it should take about a page to summarize. Less than about the quarter of the original length will most likely fail to do justice to the main points of the reading material.

The reason that teachers rarely want summary are two-fold.  First, they have already read or viewed whatever material they’ve assigned and don’t need you to tell them what it said.  Second, it does not show the depth of understanding that other types of writing show. Summarizing can be done with a surface reading, so don’t summarize in papers unless that is what you are asked to do.

Analyze

Analyzing is the most requested task in writing assignments. When you are asked to analyze, understand that you are not being asked to summarize. Unless you are specifically asked to do so, don’t summarize what you read. Believe me, the teacher already knows what it says. They don’t need you to tell them. What they need you to do is to dig deeper. Go below the surface. Take all the individual elements apart and look at them piece by piece. I like to think of taking individual parts of something and holding them up to the light to see how they look. Turn them around.  Look at them from different directions.  Take complex material and break it down into individual components to see how it works. Put it back together in various ways to make sense of it. It’s similar to a scientist breaking a compound into its individual components to see what it’s made of and how it can be manipulated. An analysis prompt might be something like “Compare the political and societal circumstances of the  Iroquois Confederacy from before the arrival of Europeans through the end of the 16th century.” This shows them your thinking process and how well you understand the subject. Be prepared for plenty of this type of writing in high school and college.

Synthesize

The third reason purpose of writing is to synthesize information from several sources that you have read or researched. This is the basis of most research writing. You’ll take information from several sources to support a new claim that neither of the sources made directly, but that you have realized after reading the sources. Synthesizing sources can require some summary, but mostly it requires analysis. The only way to draw a new conclusion from the sources is to have analyzed them and worked their various parts together. An example of this might be something like researching the value of recess time for middle-school aged students.  It would require information from a number of different sources to create a claim.

A well-written synthesis paper or research paper won’t have the sources standing alone in the points they make.  If each point is made by one source, you essentially are giving the instructor a string of summaries.  Weave the sources together as you make your points.  Show how each point and your overall claim are supported by more than one source.  If you have an over-reliance on one source and aren’t working it together with other sources, it can appear that you are mainly summarizing that one source rather than creating a new idea from plenty of research. That will not work in research writing.

Evaluate

Evaluation is the fourth reason for academic writing.  When you evaluate, you are giving a value judgement on the worth of something, specifically on its academic worth. It could be a someone else’s research, it could be a line of discussion, it could be particular sources.  This will not come into play much until you hit upper levels of academia because you aren’t qualified to make these types of judgements until you have done plenty of research, analysis, and synthesis.  By the time you are asked to evaluate material, your prior knowledge of the topic, your understanding of good research practices, your ability to recognize logical or illogical arguments, and your critical thinking skills should be well-developed.  Evaluating requires a combination of summarizing, analyzing, and synthesis skills.

When a writing assignment is given in any class, thoroughly read the assignment instructions to know exactly what the instructor is asking you to do.  If you have any questions about the assignment, ask them right away!  Understanding the point of the paper is one of the keys to a strong academic performance.