Bad news for the species, to be sure, but the upside pedagogically is that the data seem to suggest that if you want to know whether a student actually wrote their paper, a fairly effective assessment is simply to ask them to talk about it and to walk you through their arguments.
I guess with this in mind- is having students write essays obsolete? Do we maybe only have them give viva voce? Or debate? This was for a time how much of learning did work before large classes were the norm. Perhaps lectures en masse, but break out groups after to test knowledge via discourse?
Nightmare from undergraduate peer review sessions when no one corrected anything I wrote and no one could discuss, or really even understand the simple corrections I would pose. In 2004.
As opposed to relying on AI detection tools which are still wonky and unreliable (like AI generally!)
I wonder how much work that would be to do systematically, vs. what I've been doing, which is review the time lapse of them writing the paper through Draftback... I suspect Draftback might still be quicker, but meeting with each of them briefly would probably be more fun...
I'm gonna have to look into Draftback.. but I think strategies largely depens on the size of the class.. oral presentations and meetings don't scale to courses with 250 students. But then, essays are dubious assessment tools in large classes regardless.
I found Draftback v interesting in understanding how they approach writing, and how different it was across students. Various requirements are currently making my class an awkward size for everything except exams, sadly... I'm required to have them write formally, and I can't stand doing it badly...
I really don't like the idea of continual surveillance while students are writing. As a particular activity or one step in an a larger assignment, perhaps.. but watching them write while they write every time they write seems incredibly, almost absurdly, invasive.
I honestly hadn't thought about it in that way. I'm going to have to contemplate that. Thanks.
What fresh hell is Draftback? As someone who already wrote very well in undergrad, without creating separate drafts that could be easily uploaded and tracked, that sounds like a program that would just make me do more work to prove that I was really doing the work I was already doing.
I looked it up. God, I'm so glad I left undergrad in 2000. Nothing like a little performance anxiety and feeling closely watched to fuel critical and creative essay drafting. It's like trying to craft poetry in a panopticon.