Reworking syllabi and… judging from recent results, and from relative exposure to AI “assistance,” it looks as if both the book review/précis and the take-home primary source analysis paper are effectively dead as viable assignments, at least for medium/large classes (25+) - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

tedmccormick.bsky.social • 62 days ago

Reworking syllabi and… judging from recent results, and from relative exposure to AI “assistance,” it looks as if both the book review/précis and the take-home primary source analysis paper are effectively dead as viable assignments, at least for medium/large classes (25+)

Comments

bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social•62 days ago

I am still trying a take-home research paper for my big lecture class, but with lots of scaffolding and show your work assignments, such as annotated, bibliographies, intros, quotes and full citations, etc. And will require quotations and pg #s and recent books that are harder to Feed into ChatGPT.

jonathanmenon.bsky.social•61 days ago

Page numbers is a really good idea. Hadn’t thought of that.

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

Individual interviews/discussions/source presentations will still work but take a lot of class time (esp in a 12-week semester!), so for larger classes this has to be group work, with its attendant moral hazards

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

In-class exams and essays still work, one and a half cheers for that (I like in-class writing but for a lot of students 75 minutes is not a ton of time, esp for any work bearing much weight)

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

I think the “footnote exercise” I have been doing is *relatively* less AI-ready, and involves a research component that would be hard to fake, so that stays in the rotation for now

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

Research papers and historiographical essays can’t be dispensed with but I just can’t see doing them in larger classes anymore; too much monitoring required

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

I am willing to think about sources whose comparative obscurity or difficulty may save them from automated pontification but I suspect that’s not going to be a failsafe for much longer, if it even is now

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

The ultimate fix, as ever, is small classes. But in this climate small classes are for elite schools or dying departments

cur1ous.bsky.social•62 days ago

What was your footnote exercise? Thinking about a senior seminar…

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/tedmccormick.bsky.social/post/3lek4yimsk22z

cur1ous.bsky.social•62 days ago

Thanks and completely agree - anything that can be “generated” must lose value. Might make college more difficult?/students will certainly think that grading will become less fair/rubrics may also go the way of the dodo

golderest.bsky.social•62 days ago

I'd love to hear more about your footnote assignment!

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

The gist: do secondary reading; find a footnote to a primary source; find & describe the source; evaluate the use made of it in the secondary source (noting issues of selection, translation, accurate representation, etc). Can be split into 2 or 3 steps. Caroline Bynum gave me the idea way back when.

evenannaliese.bsky.social•62 days ago

This is great -- thank you for sharing! Was thinking about trying out something similar in my first-year writing class in the "research" unit -- which, as you might imagine, is a challenge in LLM-chatbot + general decline of digital literacy era!

golderest.bsky.social•60 days ago

Love this concept! I definitely want to try it out this Spring

alana-m-vincent.net•62 days ago

Would you mind sharing this exercise?

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

Not at all, but I need to rework it too. The gist is: do some secondary reading; find a footnote to a primary source; find the source, describe it and evaluate the use made of it in the secondary source (noting issues of selection, translation, accurate representation, etc). Can be split into steps.

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

Caroline Bynum had us do a version of this in the first year of grad school, so credit for the idea goes (at least in my case) to her. And as that shows, the difficulty level can be adjusted considerably depending on the students

alana-m-vincent.net•62 days ago

Oh, that is good--thank you!

michaelhendricks.bsky.social•62 days ago

I've wondered if part of the answer might be writing labs as scheduled parts of courses. Because I have no idea how to ever assign take-home writing assignments again.

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

I’ve been a fan of in-class source work for years, and AI reinforces that. But limited class time and shrinking semesters work against it. Collectively, students, staff, and admin (and a lot of faculty) all seem to want people to be on campus as little as possible

michaelhendricks.bsky.social•62 days ago

Yes, they seem to hate it when we come here, and we would also never be allowed to do something that a significant proportion of students would complain about. So, I guess that leaves giving up on teaching/assessing any form of written communicaiton.

michaelhendricks.bsky.social•62 days ago

Maybe it's just my nostalgia for when you had to go somewhere on campus to use a computer. Or you had to go to campus at all.

ghostingdani.bsky.social•62 days ago

What about doing an in-class essay with some out of class pre writing? Like, give them the question they're going to get answer in advance so if individual students need not time to think they can have it.

aheise.bsky.social•62 days ago

Please keep posting your thoughts on your assignments in the new AI world. It’s driving me crazy

rtvan.bsky.social•62 days ago

Have you (or anyone else) done the interview/oral exam model successfully?

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

I haven’t yet had a class small enough for it to be practicable where it seemed like it would work given the subject matter. Willing to entertain it though

rtvan.bsky.social•62 days ago

Same. It could work well for an interview version of an essay question I love, but a lot of my recent students have needed more training into oral communication and, overall, confidence. I worry that if it flops, I’m locked in for the whole class.

klaxoncomms.com•62 days ago

I have these same thoughts. For most of my students, English is their second language, and I don't necessarily want to super compound their stress by making them do an oral interview as a key assignment. But I'm starting to really flail at how to make them do research assignments.

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

Yes; seems hard to standardize while preserving any space for creativity, and it introduces so many extraneous elements (comfort with language and presentation, unfamiliarity with the format) that it would be easiest to do in the most advanced and smallest classes, where it is perhaps less necessary

dynarski.bsky.social•62 days ago

I believe https://bsky.app/profile/andrewdeanho.bsky.social uses this approach in one of his stats classes

jliedl.bsky.social•62 days ago

Sadly, I agree that reworking course evaluations to counter the scourge of generative AI is challenging. I'm still working out effective alternatives. Some variants of flipped classrooms are promising, and ginning up the creative assignment possibilities may help.

jliedl.bsky.social•62 days ago

We have a cadre of online courses, and I'm gearing up to lead a major revision on assignments there. No more free-choice essays from our suites of sources. Sigh!

mbarany.com•62 days ago

just assign them and be clear how they're expected to be done; if the students want to short themselves by using inappropriate tools it's their loss

mbarany.com•62 days ago

why let some doing it wrong take the value of those assessments away from those who do it right?

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

The cost of figuring out who has done it right has significantly increased

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

I agree with your reasoning, but this is also about logistics and those have simply changed

anghyflawn.net•61 days ago

That’s increasingly my approach too, though it did require me to go through a few dark nights of the soul: in a course of 250+ first-years there will be a non-negligible number who do it just because they haven’t been taught any better, and I can’t realistically do the work this would require.

anghyflawn.net•61 days ago

But in the end I choose to blame management (broadly understood) for not giving me the necessary resource (going back to @tedmccormick.bsky.social point about small classes)

mbarany.com•61 days ago

all we can do is teach as well as we can under the conditions we have

tedmccormick.bsky.social•61 days ago

I suppose my thread is about that too

cakrolik.bsky.social•62 days ago

Yeah, I'm returning to more in-class exams and then more creative projects outside of class. Book reviews, papers, etc. take too much time to grade when you're also grading to see if a student or a computer wrote the paper. Sigh.

chrissmithmuso.bsky.social•62 days ago

Yep. They sure are.

larrycebula.bsky.social•62 days ago

Book reviews have always seemed like a bad undergrad assignment to me, as book reviews are supposed to be written by experts in that field. But I guess they can force a class reading, or at least they could before AI.

jasonptrdavies.bsky.social•62 days ago

It’s not really meant to be about the output;)

dcsackman.bsky.social•62 days ago

These parasitic "know-it-alls": now we have to reinvent how to create conditions in which learning can happen since they have colonized current conditions, and hollowed them out for their own gain, and nobody else's.

weekswriter.bsky.social•62 days ago

I'm happy I graduated before this reared its head. People are going to make a lot of assumptions about college degrees acquired post-AI, and many of those assumptions will be unkind.

leafandstream.bsky.social•53 days ago

📌

alixhui.bsky.social•53 days ago

In my large class, I’m going to try scaffolding 2 big essays across weekly in-class writing. I think this means I’ll have to post one lecture online each week but that’s doable.

cgoodhistorian.bsky.social•62 days ago

In my intro class, I did a book hunt assignment that worked well & students liked. It’s pretty simple, but could have added layers: https://cassandragoodhistorian.com/2024/11/12/the-book-hunt-assignment/
It could be scaffolded w the footnote hunt you described. First locate the secondary & describe; then part 2 is the footnote

tedmccormick.bsky.social•62 days ago

Great! Imo we need stuff like this that makes mere text-generation as small a part as possible of the overall task

cgoodhistorian.bsky.social•62 days ago

Agreed. Students said they liked it; most did read part of their books.

cur1ous.bsky.social•62 days ago

Very generous of you to share your assignment- I may or may not be able to use it, but we are in this together… Will reciprocate when I can.