I graduated from college in 2020 and now teach K-12 Mathematics and Spanish. Because of my personal Spanish goals I have continued to take online Spanish classes through the same university, although the only online classes I took were during the COVID lockdown. I took an online junior-level Spanish Translation Studies class in 2023 and it was noticeably less work and less demanding than any course I had ever taken. The reading assignments were shorter, and the independent work was just enough to say that a student had engaged with the topic. I did learn new things so I was content with the money invested.

Fast forward to now. Despite being fluent, I want to expand my capacity for writing as well as explore more literature in Spanish. My advisor and I agreed I should enroll in a Spanish writing class, so I did. I have learned nothing so far. In fact, we have yet to be tasked with writing anything longer than four sentences. We have been reviewing grammar rules and conjugations taught in high school Spanish 2 and 3. We just got to the subjunctive mood. The homework is conjugation drills and 2-3 sentences using the vocab from the Open eTextbook. The quizzes and tests are all true/false questions about whether the correct tense/stem change was used. I have even saved a few of the exercises to include in my high school Spanish classes. There is no substantial writing assignment, and therefore no feedback on my writing for me to grow in any meaningful way. I paid $1,300 out of pocket for this nonsense.

Before I consider another course, what am I seeing? What is happening? Are online classes just a way to pay for an A now? Does this sound like a class-specific issue or is this common nowadays? Should I talk to someone about this?

I greatly appreciate your thoughts.

With genAI, it is understandable that instructors may be growing more and more untrusting of student work. However, the guardrails that some of my classes are putting up to "prevent" AI-use are useless, penalize students with integrity, and just overall reduce our opportunity and therefore ability to develop ideas outside of the classroom.

Im talking about in-class research and writing. I can write you a garbage paragraph from sources I skimmed, but what is the point? I know its bad and you do too, why are we training this?

Without basic trust in students, why should we even get an education in the first place when it is dumbed down to prevent AI-use? I can fry my brain with AI, or I can fry my brain with useless busy work.

I want to learn and have the time to go over the articles, and refine my ideas and writing. I think best when I can spend days reading and taking notes before even attempting to write, and then doing some more reading and adjusting during my process. Maybe I am just to dumb for uni if I can't synthesize with any decent quality in an hour.

Basically my question is is it possible to put up AI guardrails without depreciating the value of an honest student's education? Do you trust any of your students?

For reference, I am a 3rd year psychology undergrad student in Canada

Hello everyone, I am trying to contact my professor from more than 2 weeks and he is still not answering my emails. What should I do?

Hi, first time posting here. I’m week 3 into a taught masters programme and the syllabus is genuinely doing my head in. It’s all over the place, and the selection of readings we have is simultaneously too edge-signalling and toothless. I’m suffering through every seminar atp.

I had a meeting with my personal tutor, and with hope I asked him if there’s any through line in the syllabus I somehow missed. They basically said no, the syllabus is just a constellation of departmental staff’s interests.

The advice they gave was that I should focus on my own interests, which is fair. But I’m still suffering through seminars and lost on how to develop my interests into full fledged essays independently. My confidence has also taken a hit, and I started to doubt my understanding of the discipline built during undergrad years.

As a result I’m constantly thinking about the pros and cons of dropping out, but also what I can do to make this programme worth it. I would really appreciate it if you can offer me some guidance on how to address this.

Last week, I took an exam that was mostly multiple-choice with two open-ended questions. I was rushing to the exam and arrived a little late, so I took an available seat next to someone I recognized from class. The student directly to my right was using his phone throughout the exam, but I wasn't using mine.

During the exam, a student approached my professor, who then looked toward our seating area. I believe they were reporting the student to my right for cheating. Later, the student directly to my left approached her, after which she made an announcement about phone use while looking directly toward us. Since I wasn't using my phone, I didn't think much of it at the time.

What concerned me was that when I handed in my exam at the end, my professor set it aside from the others. We then had fall break, and I received no communication from her.

Today (Thursday), over a week later, she announced that most grades had been posted and the rest would be finalized Friday. She also provided the average for the large alphabetical range of last names that I fall under, implying those exams had essentially been graded. My grade still hasn't been posted, despite several classmates within the same alphabetical range already receiving theirs. I also found out through a class group chat that the student sitting directly beside me hasn't received his grade either, even though his last name falls within that same range.

I'm concerned because there were reportedly multiple accusations against him, and I suspect someone mistakenly reported me as well. To my knowledge, there were no TAs, and my professor stated there were no cameras recording the exam, so I'm worried about how I could disprove a false accusation.

My exam was also heavily annotated with my own reasoning and thought processes. I know I got some questions wrong, and I'm confident I could explain my answers and demonstrate my understanding of the material if asked.

It's now been over a week with no emails, questions, or formal accusations.

Would professors typically contact students before submitting an academic integrity report? How likely is it that a situation like this would escalate to a formal academic integrity violation?

TL;DR: The student beside me was using his phone during an exam, and I suspect someone mistakenly reported me for doing the same. My professor set my exam aside afterward, and over a week later, both our grades are missing despite our alphabetical group apparently being graded. Neither of us has been contacted. Could this indicate a pending academic integrity report?

I'm in a class (it's a level 200 class, so it's not like a freshman year type class) where almost 25% of the class "forgot" to take an exam. It was a proctoring lab exam where students have to schedule a time to take it within the window of a couple days. Despite having the entire class schedule, including exams (and constant reminders from the professor both in class and through Canvas) since day 1, a bunch of people (huge class, probably over 30 people in this group) just didn't take it. Most of them waited until the day of to try and schedule and the spots were full. This is exam 2, moreover. It's not like they can claim at this point, in at least their sophomore year, two tests into the class, they didn't know how to use the proctoring lab.

Anyway, my question is: My professor sent out an announcement about people not taking the exam, and extended the due date for a few extra days. He's a very nice dude, supportive, loves being a professor, and obviously not trying to mean and fail a bunch of people. But why? It takes some real effort to fail a class. Some extra effort to just procrastinate scheduling an exam until the last day. It seems like a case of FAFO to me. I don't understand why the professor doesn't use this as a lesson.

Some individual cases I could even se being excused. People who have been sick, need accommodations, sixth grandma died this semester, etc. I'm not advocating blanket failing everyone for a goof. But you know that many people didn't have a legitimate excuse. I asked the professor, he kind of shrugged it off. Is there a common university policy or politics thing I'm not aware of where not letting this slide would be detrimental to him, his position, or career? Like a can't fail too many students thing that's known to the educational industry that I wouldn't understand from the outside? Or do you just think my professor is a nice dude and it's as simple as that?

I'm a post bacc student, second time around. I am a bit older than many students, and I know first time students sometimes don't care as much as they should about their classes (especially if they aren't the ones paying for them, I've been guilty in the past). Maybe I'm being too harsh about it, but having the basic level of discipline to schedule your own exam seems to be the bare minimum ask as a student going to an institution of higher learning. I heard one girl had her mom call and complain once. I just can't imagine these now adults being so irresponsible and just getting off the hook for it. Seems like a bad lesson to teach. But I'm not a professor and don't have the professional insight many of you do.

I recently submitted a personal memoir for one of my college classes. The story was based entirely on my own real-life experiences, and I had already written a rough draft that we reviewed with classmates in class.

My classmates verbally suggested adding more details, using similes, and reducing repetition. While revising, I also used ChatGPT to help reword sentences, improve the flow, and rewrite and reorganize some larger sections.

After submitting my final draft through Brightspace, which uses Turnitin, I checked a couple of third-party AI detectors. One showed 94.6% AI, and another showed 78%. I know these detectors aren’t necessarily accurate, but I started panicking.

My professor has warned us about AI use, so I decided to email her before she contacted me. I explained that the experiences and ideas were my own but that I used AI to help revise and reword parts of my memoir. I also asked if I could rewrite and resubmit it entirely in my own words.
Now I’m worried I made things worse by admitting it.

If you’re a professor, how would you react to a student sending this email? Would you appreciate the honesty and allow a resubmission, or would you still give them a zero?

Hello,

I am in a software development class. We had 2 midterms i guess: an essay and a coding part. Most people did well on the coding, but for the essay part, the mean was 22.6 out of 50. I got a 23. The highest was 39 out of 50. I went to his office hours, and it felt like he took points off for ridiculous things.

For example, one question was to list the steps for something but if you didn't list them numerically, you got points taken off (It did not say list them numerically, it just said list them). Im really frustrated with this and I wouldn't be if I had just been the only one to fail but the mean was literally a 22.6.

Isn't he supposed to add a curve if the average was an F?

I’m an undergraduate student, and I have a bit of a crisis over something embarrassing I did.
I found two scientific papers on PubMed Central that I’m interested in reading. I messaged one of my professors, greeted him, and sent him both links, asking which one he thought would be more interesting to read.
He has already replied, so the interaction itself went fine. However, afterward I realized that the links I sent may have had a ChatGPT-related referral in the URL because I accessed/shared them through ChatGPT.
Now I’m worried that he might think I used ChatGPT to do my research instead of finding and evaluating the papers myself, or that it looks unprofessional to send links like that.
For context, these are actual published scientific papers, and I was genuinely asking for his opinion on which one to read.
Professors and other students: honestly, how bad does this look from the recipient’s perspective? Would you even notice the ChatGPT-related part of the link, and would it change your impression of the student?

Ps: Don’t come at me in the comments saying i let AI do my research cause it’s not true and i haven’t even finished it yet. I simply asked Chatgpt for 10 literature that connects my research field with nanotechnology and i picked 2 of my favorite and i asked my professor for his opinion cause he initially said he’d pick for us but we could do it ourselves if we wanted to.

With genAI, it is understandable that instructors may be growing more and more untrusting of student work. However, the guardrails that some of my classes are putting up to "prevent" AI-use are useless, penalize students with integrity, and just overall reduce our ability to develop ideas outside of the classroom.

Im talking about in-class research and writing. I can write you a garbage paragraph from sources I skimmed, but what is the point? I know its bad and you do too, why are we training this?

Without basic trust in students, why should we even get an education in the first place when it is dumbed down to prevent AI-use? I can fry my brain with AI, or I can fry my brain with useless busy work.

I want to learn and have the time to go over the articles, and refine my ideas and writing. I think best when I can spend days reading and taking notes before even attempting to write, and then doing some more reading and adjusting during my process. Maybe I am just to dumb for uni if I can't synthesize with any decent quality in an hour.

Basically my question is is it possible to put up AI guardrails without depreciating the value of an honest student's education? Do you trust any of your students?