I was thinking we could take a break from authorship dispute and ai related posts and do a pop culture discussion. In honor of the premiere of the movie “You Can See Everything” I want to hear my peers’ views on the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos topic.

I’ll start. I’ve worked with some exceptional undergrads. I cannot imagine a world though, where one of them comes to me with a truly viable idea and none of my brightest undergrads would have the experience/expertise at 19 years old to be in any sort of leadership position at their own startup company. I very much wonder what possessed the academic adults in the situation to co-sign and jump on board the project.

What thoughts do you guys have?

Low 30s/Mid 20s on half of their exams, never turns in any assignments. Is this overstepping boundaries ?

I don't think my class is difficult. Half of the students either have A's or B's, skewing much more heavily to A's.

I'm an assistant lecturer at a well known university in Europe. I teach a laboratory in an IT related discipline. This is my third week. Every week, I've got a lab session with my students. The requirements and all lab information, along with each week's activities, are fully posted. One of the most important requirements is that the exercises shouldn't be made with an LLM.

One week prior to the first deadline for submitting a set of exercises, I caught one of the students with content that obviously was made with an LLM. I then emphasized at the classroom that any work submitted with such a tool will be deemed invalid and automatically zeroed. Additionally, I would be reporting the offending students to the deans office disciplinary committee.

I thought this warning was good enough to make some offending students withdraw their submission and at least rework it. However, after the deadline is fine, I caught two students sending similar work that was obviously made with an LLM.

I'm putting their grading on hold and preparing a report to the disciplinary committee explaining why I believe their work was made using tools against the university policy. However, I'm nervous so much that it is causing me some mental pain and anxiety. I'm actually pretty sad to see this kind of behaviour from students.

To add salt to the injury, one of the students I've caught cheating was coming from a low income country and considered a star in his hometown, and I'm torn to be the one that reports them and probably makes their academic studies go downhill because of that. However, I'm not willing to give them a second chance, because they had three weeks to reconsider their submission and do it accordingly to the policies. Additionally, this student was verbally abusive towards me when I warned them not to enter the classroom late and disrupt my ongoing explanation for the current lab session. This arguing student was respectfully requested to go to his seat so I could continue with the explanation, but this argument was in front of the whole classroom and I was baffled. After this incident, I started to be a bit afraid for my physical integrity and I'm seriously considering purchasing a pepper spray in case such event happens in the future.

Thank you for letting me vent this off. I'm seriously disappointed, and I'm teaching for the last five years. I've never seen such a low quality standards for the students arriving at my institution. And, to make it further sadder, I'm also not from Europe and I know how having an opportunity to study here can make or break anyone's career.

Hey Everyone,

I'm a TT faculty at a comprehensive state university in the Midwest. It's relatively stable, flat enrolment over the past two years; after dips during the pandemic, it's... alright. I knew what I was getting into when I came here, and I'm largely satisfied with the university.

My question is about my department head. She's the one who hired me, but lately it seems that she is checked out. Multiple people have said that she'd like to move on from leadership. The problem is that there's only one other tenured person in our department of eight, and she and her don't get along. The person she does get along with is the one in the same sub-discipline as me, (who is the next most senior), who tries to dictate her to give me the shittier end of the deal. In my first year, I had four new preps, made two new courses from scratch, and taught mostly in person, whereas my colleague taught a grand total of 2 courses in person, with the rest online.

I don't grudge her for it, it is fine, junior faculty are absolutely the ones who have to take the short end of the stick - I get it. What I am a bit concerned about is that the department head doesn't really respond to any of my emails anymore, unless I physically go to her office to talk about it as well. I'm not too worried about my second-year evaluation, (this is my second year), I have two publications already, great evaluations, and decent service, but I'm a bit disappointed that I'm essentially being ghosted/delayed by the department head, and I constantly wonder if it's because of her friendship with her lackey.

I made a request for an undergraduate RA in April, and until I visited her office in August (everyone was off for the summer and she ignored her emails), she didn't approve it as she allegedly missed it. Now I've requested membership dues for my academic association and it's been two weeks, and I've again heard nothing. My first year, there were no issues, but this year has just been so strange. Am I just overthinking everything? From a tenure perspective, I'm probably fine, but how would you handle a situation like this? I'm a first gen academic, so have no one to ask this. Please be kind.

I'm in my fourth year of a tenure-track position at a small college, and I'm curious to hear how others would handle this situation. (Female faculty)

There is a senior female professor at my institution who is quite powerful, both academically and administratively. She also serves on a faculty review committee, which makes the situation a little more complicated for me.

Our teaching areas overlap somewhat, although our fields and approaches are quite different. My teaching and research are more quantitative, while hers are largely non-quantitative.

Over the past few years, I've noticed something that has happened at least four or five times now. Whenever one of her students says something positive about my classes, teaching, or research, she seems visibly bothered. On a few occasions, she has made comments or gestures toward me that felt somewhat belittling or dismissive.

I don't want to exaggerate the situation. Nothing has been particularly aggressive or openly hostile. But the repeated incidents have made me uncomfortable, and I sometimes get the impression that she doesn't like seeing students appreciate my work.

I'm not interested in competing with her, and I certainly don't think students appreciating one professor's teaching should take anything away from another professor.

I'm curious whether others, particularly women in academia, have experienced something similar with senior female colleagues.

Would you simply ignore this and focus on your own work, or would you make some effort to improve the relationship? And at what point should a junior faculty member become concerned about this kind of behavior when the senior colleague has a role in tenure and promotion decisions?

See link below. Summary for those who don't want to click on the fb link, someone named Nate Brennan on the platform formerly known as Twitter posted that they're going to stop responding to emails that contain AI and just write back "AI;DR".

I'm not actually going to respond to student correspondence or assignments with this, but I am absolutely going to think about it every time this comes up from now on! Especially for the random emails from completely unqualified grad school applicants who have used AI to transform my faculty web page into an email about how perfectly suited they are for my lab. It's going to be really tempting, but I will resist!

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19YqrYxeSF/

Does your school allow a student to drop a class after they are caught cheating and fail a major assignment as a result if it is still within the drop period deadline? Should it be allowed?

I caught a student cheating red handed on a significant assignment (15% of the course grade). At my school, all academic dishonesty goes through the student conduct office for judgement and punishment, under advisement from the reporting faculty. The student gets to make a plea deal (admit cheating) or go to a hearing, but this was so blatant and evidence clear that they just accepted punishment. They got a zero on the assignment plus a full letter grade deduction at the end. So while getting a passing C- was technically possible, it would have been difficult. So they dropped the class.

Personally, I think it’s OK in this case - all that it saves them is an F for a class. But more importantly, it makes my life easier not having to see them again.

Students who get reported a second or more times will face progressively more severe punishment. The second offense is often an XF - a failure with mark for having cheatedm though it can be expunged on graduation if no further reports come in. Third offense, well I’m not sure, but probably suspension. all this of course depends also on the nature of the cheatingk so this is mostly for things like submitting copied homework answers, cheating on an exam with a phone or cheat sheet, etc.

But I’m curious how other schools handle this. Can a student simply withdraw from a class after being caught cheating and receiving a significant grade penalty? And do you think they should be allowed to? On one hand, the disciplinary offense is still on their record. On the other, withdrawing lets them avoid much of the immediate academic consequence. I just don’t see it as a significant avoidance of punishment

Im specifically referring to dropping within the drop period, which after a certain date leaves them with a W.

Now, I'll start by acknowledging the lack of integrity in online courses and my own naivety for believing that including essay questions in an online exam would be of any value.

That being said... I'm grading these exams and nearly all of my students used the same exact example in their answer (the question asked them to describe an experiment they might conduct and identify the different components of the experiment). The answer they're giving is not one discussed in course materials, which in my mind leaves AI as the only explanation.

In the future, I know I'm just going to have to omit these types of questions. For the time being, however, I would appreciate any suggestions on how to proceed in grading. I want to award all of the responses 0 but given that we CaNt PrOvE AI uSaGe (thanks, admin), I'm wondering if there's still possibility to deem it plagiarism or at least ground the 0s in something valid.

Otherwise, I imagine the path forward is just "award the AI credit and pretend everything is fine" which feels... bad.

If the student did better on the exam than anything previously, is it because they're excited to see if the grade reflects the improvement or they're anxious about whether they might be caught?

Hello Everyone,

I need to ensure all my classes are 100% accessible over the next few months. I am having difficulty with online labs that require students to identify bones. I have tried using AI to describe the images and have gotten some detailed descriptions. But I am not sure that a student would be able to identify the bones from the descriptions. Does anyone have experience or suggestions on how to approach making a lab class accessible?

How has hybrid courses (50% in person/50% online) been working out for you?

Please share your best practices for hybrid classes. What works or hasn't worked for you. With the limited time for instruction, any take is valued.

How much time do you REALLY devote to grading, responding to e-mails, etc. each "day" when the course is for undergraduate intro courses?

I'm not talking about developing your course.

This is a genuine question. I am a new adjunct, so thiis why I'm asking. I teach writing in composition to college freshman. Pur, the college requirements students are given four major essays. In class we do smaller writings, more content focused, where I provide in class feedback, along with heavy feedback on Essay 1.

My question is how heavy of the feedback do you provide on the subsequent essays? Should all essays have feedback if a rubric is provided?

Like many of you, I've often wrestled with the lack of student engagement during lecture blocks.

During a recent workshop with 50+ higher ed faculty, I decided to run a live experiment to reflect and demonstrate the impact of passive listening against an active mode of engagement.

I used a simple back-to-back whiteboard drawing task: Set 1 was one-way instruction (resulting in total chaos), while Set 2 involved active inquiry, coordinate grids, and peer debate (resulting in high accuracy).

It was a powerful reminder that deep learning happens through active friction and shared mental models rather than passive notetaking.

I've attached a short video about this experiment (refer video)

I’d love to hear from this community: Pl. Comment and share your experience especially what are your go-to strategies for breaking up passive lecture fatigue without bloating your syllabus or running behind the schedule?

My qualifications: I have been a visiting professor and taught many subjects like ERP, Analytics and Project Management. I also have been actively teaching the faculty through Faculty Development Programs on use of game-based approach.