645
Student Demands Tuition Refund After Catching Professor Using ChatGPT - Slashdot
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Holy crap... slashdot still exists??
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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It’s still the same 10 users complaining about systemd
Never forget, never forgive
Hot grits
Oh crap, the last time I looked at Slashdot comments, systemd didn't exist yet
I checked it out again when reddit did their api fuckery. The progressives left and the libertarians are all that remain. I didn't stick around long enough to get a better feel for the situation.
Apparently, Digg may be coming back.
A while back I saw a post on Lemmy accusing ASU, who is publicly partnered with OpenAI, of trying to quietly replace advisors with chatbots.
It's truly a dark time for USA higher education.
For fucks sake people, it's not hard. AI can be useful to generate drafts or give suggestions, but ultimately everything has to be tweaked/written by an actual human expert. AI is a tool, not a product. If something isn't edited enough to have no trace of AI signature left, then you're being lazy and putting out garbage.
It's a tool whose only purpose is to lie and generate bullshit. We're right to be upset when we find out we paid a human expert top fucking dollar to give us bullshit.
I think there's a sweet spot you can hit, but sometimes I fight with it so long to get what I want, that by them, copy paste whatever is good enough... To be fair, I'm not an educator
it's "hard" because every peddler of AI is pushing it exactly in the way you say, and I agree, is wrong
This is it exactly. I use ChatGPT to double check things when I’m second guessing myself and I use it to make assignments.
Almost everytime, I need to tweak things but it turns 40 minutes of work into 5-10 minutes.
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"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself,"
Yeah it sucks but there is zero chance this argument holds any weight in court.
The problem is that a student has a reasonable expectation of being taught by someone qualified and knowledgeable in the topic. If the professor is using AI, then that is a major breach of trust that brings into question the professor’s qualifications and whether you are actually getting the education you are paying for.
Not to mention the risk of plagiarism
Yeah, I had teachers change the rubric on the day of the final and even after and the deans at UCSB didnt care at all. Teachers can do just about anything under the guise of education...
Pretty good pizza at Woodstock's, tho.
Because the truth is they're the ones deciding how to grade you and for the most part that's not really "regulated"
The rubric is meant to be an outline of how they grade it so you understand how you got graded, it really isn't supposed to show you how you will eventually be graded you know?
This is whats wrong with the world, people will come out of the woods and defend the most batshit insane things....
Why would they need to change how the class is graded after you took the class? The asnwer is simply to fuck you out of money. There is no educational purpose, just a monetary one.
Just because its reguarly done does not mean it should be normalized.
What would you do if your boss said the purpose of your salary is not to show you how much you will make by the end of the year, but to motivate you to work, and then doesnt pay you for months of work... would you have the same naive outlook?
There are some really good reasons to make changes, not trying to say that this was the case in the parent comment, but there are certainly cases where this makes sense. About halfway through my discrete math final my professor wrote a curve on the board based on exam results from the other test session. He realized that he hadn't properly taught some concepts and he thought it would be unfair for us to suffer because of his mistakes. Should he have been forced to stick to a non curved exam because he hadn't announced it in the rubric or to the first exam session?
Though even in that case, the people in the class where the material wasn't taught properly get a pass without necessarily understanding that material. On the one hand, it's not fair for them to be punished for the prof's mistake, but on the other hand, it's not necessarily a good thing to give them credit for something they don't know. It could hurt the credibility of the degree itself, similarly to the ones where you'll get the diploma as long as you pay the bills.
People who hire the free pass people see they lack the skills despite having the paper saying they have them and stop hiring people with those credentials. It's the same reason why cheating is dealt with so harshly.
The skills and knowledge are the whole point, not getting high marks or everything being fair. That said, it would be a difficult situation to deal with because being fair should still be a part of the equation, I just disagree about it being the most important part.
Another scenario for changing the rubric would be if the people running the course realized that something they thought was important for determining competence was actually trivial. This one could also be complex to handle fairly.
There definately good reasons to allow making judgement calls, but I wouldnt be complaining if that all they use that freedom for.
Most of the time if you asked for some exception they would allow you to drop the class without issue. So they wont break the rubric to make the class easier, but they will to make the class harder. And thats what I take issue with.
On one of my finals the professor said "you all did too well on the midterm, so I changed the final to be on meaningless details in the reading to test your comprehension and only your final grades matter" so we could fail despite learing everything we set out to learn.
I had an engineering ethics professor tell me I could I turn in the first assignment late on the second day of class, but after the final she said my grade was entirely dependant on the first assignment and it was late so I got zero points and failed the class. They have a quota of students to fail and they just pick people to fail and come up with bullshit after. They use their unchecked liberties to screw the students out of their money and nothing more in my experience.
But that's not what happened.
If you learned the information presented in class I'd assume how you're graded doesn't really matter. A grading rubric is nice to know but if you're hedging everything on that and get twisted when it's changed maybe you didn't actually learn in the class?
You might DM too much because you think youre the master of the universe. Im assuming you were homeschooled by flatearthers, and thats cool you had a good experiance but that doesnt mean other people didnt have bad ones.
What a dumb thing to say, petty, scared and weak like your little brain. Who doesn't understand grading rubrics? Lmfao
You're probably too stupid to write a simple paper without having specific guidelines, did mommy have to hold your hand throughout highschool? Probably if a simple grading rubric ruined your life lol
What a dummy.
LLMs should augment your skills not substitute them. That's just laziness or incompetence.
Or worst case scenario it means your job is replaceable.
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"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself"
Just because the teacher might have screwed up doesn't change that experts in a subject can assess LLM output, while a student who knows jack shit about the topic can't. Just because the teacher messed up and let ai weirdness degrade the quality of education in the eyes of students, doesn't mean just anyone can use chatgpt to generate college courses.
I read the original article but not the interview. I wonder how much communication there was about the work before the student decided they deserved a refund.
Ya I mean, you could buy the teachers versions of textbooks on eBay in the late 1990s… pretty sure teachers didn’t want us using those.
If I see a representative or senator using ChatGPT, could I demand that he resign from his position?
I'm already asking, no one listens to the people anyway
You could, but you would be pissing in the wind asking.
Isn't the phrase meant to be "pissing into the wind"?
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Why do people not review their LLMs output?
Well of course I do.
...Gemini, review this ChatGPT paragraph
This is unironically a technique for catching LLM errors and also for speeding up generation.
For example in speculative decoding or mixture of experts architectures these kind of setups are used.
I had professor usi g worksheets watermarked by another professor at a college in another state, y'all think anything came of it? He also gave us all the answers to the tests in the form of self graded quizes and let us take them into tests.
HS diplomas became a joke, degrees are becoming a joke...
As someone who was a TA a bit, I think that is 99% because if schools tried to hold students accountable to the standards of even ten years ago they would have to fail 2/3rds of their students.
Highschool becoming a joke means none of the kids have strong enough core skills to be tackling real college work by the time they get there, but schools cant afford to enforce actual quality standards for work. The graded model has completely fallen apart at this point given how steep the curve is. The quality of work that gets an A today would have been a B or high C from 10-15 years ago. Of course there is real A grade work being done too, but what defines an A grade has ballooned to a ridiculous degree such that most of it is not really A grade work
The problem isnt new, it was already bad 10 years ago to be honest. I had a professor in community college about 10 years ago who had been a professor at ASU, and she had quit teaching there specifically because the university wouldnt allow anyone to be graded below a C, regardless of if they did any work or not.
Most large public universities are just degree mills at this point, or bordering on it if not
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I'm currently doing an online Master's with Northeastern. Honestly not surprised this happened, the quality of classes is WILD.
Taking 2 classes per term, and each term so far 1 class has been very well designed but also insanely easy, while the other has been so poorly implemented that the course learning materials don't actually help you do the coursework.
Probably most astonishing so far though is a course I'm taking now just served me with the literally exact same assignment that I did for a course I just finished. Now, granted that both classes are from the elective course choices, so not everyone will take both, but come on... and they grill me about plagiarism with every submission I make...
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As long as the materials are accurate and serve as an effective teaching aid, where's the case?
It would be different if the sum total of course materials were wikipedia articles presented by a non expert, but the professor IS an expert. Sure, anyone can use genAI, BUT not anyone can write a relevant, targeted prompt and check the accuracy of the output. This is of course assuming the professor is generating (or at least vetting) materials for accuracy.
IF it turns out the student can find a pattern of inaccurate content there is a case. Otherwise there's nothing: it would be like arguing that a TA made the materials (or the lecture materials came from a book written by SOMEONE ELSE gasp) and the professor presented them so the class is invalid.
I think the key take away is that college is over rated, as you can easily find and create your own course materials on par with (or often better than) what the professors create
Lol no. You absolutely cannot.
You can maybe make it look nicer, but your high school diploma and street cred does not an education make.
The neat thing about it is, if you think this way, it would be impossible to prove to you that you can't do it yourself just as well. Without DOING it, you just don't know how much you don't know compared to a university faculty member. There are people who can go to the library (or Internet) and good will hunting an education, but I can basically guarantee that neither you nor anyone you know or will ever know is one of them.
It probably depends on the specific field of study. My experience comes from software engineering
Exactly. Nobody should care how the professor generates materials for the class, they should only care that the materials are effective and accurate. That's the professor's job, and they should be free to use whatever tools they find helpful in producing effective, accurate materials.
Mistakes happen. I found a bunch of errors in my classes, and this was before AI was a thing. The information was accurate, but the presentation was poor.
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