For those of a certain age, the concept of putting pencil to paper seems almost inextricable from the school experience. While that might be a thing of the past in most places, it has proven useful for at least one teacher.
Starting this semester, Professor Kathleen Gallup, who teaches English on the Delta campus will be changing her class to hopefully discourage the use of AI by students. Those changes come in the form of returning to good old-fashioned paper and pencil.
Her classes will now feature two major essays that will be done in class as a timed essay exam.
“I thought if I really forced their hand to actually create something in front of me, that maybe we could get over that hump — the procrastination, the lack of confidence,” said Gallup.
Students will be able revise their essays afterwards, but the initial conception and planning will have to be done in class.
“It’s not a one and done,” said Gallup. “If they know that in the second phase of it, we’re gonna collaborate together, digitally, over a longer period of time.”
Gallup has been teaching for 35 years. In that time talking to students she believes she understands why students feel the need to lean on these tools.
“Students look for those kinds of shortcut tools when they are feeling under pressure, whether that be time management pressure or skills pressure,” said Gallup.
The relationship we have with this new technology has been a polarizing one, while for students these AI tools may be a GPA savior, for teachers they’ve been a grading nightmare.
“Plagiarism was always such a much easier thing [to catch] through Turnitin[.com]” said Gallup when asked what motivated her to make these changes. “It matches one to one”
AI use appears to be on the rise. According to a Turnitin.com survey of 2 million, 6 percent of papers were reported as more than 80 percent AI content in march 2024
Towards the end of last semester Gallup had spent hours at a time trying to figure out if an individual paper was using AI or not.
“On one paper, that I did sort of believe the student on last semester, we spent six hours on the one paper,” said Gallup. “I can’t spend six hours on every case.”
Gallup is not the only professor on campus who is struggling with AI use by students.
Tara Cuslidge-Staiano, professor of Mass Communication and Journalism, has seen a stark rise in AI usage over the past couple of years.
“The first couple semesters I noticed it, I maybe had one or two, and now there’s six or seven in every class” said Cuslidge-Staiano “but it’s gone up, I would say significantly.”
While there are tools to detect AI, the approach to discipline across campus has not been uniform, and this has led to conflict.
“I’ve had students say to me, ‘well this teacher let me use AI’ and I say ‘great, that’s great for that teacher’ but in each class there are different policies ” said Cuslidge-Staiano “I think unless we have an overarching AI policy, students are gonna keep coming back with that”
This could change in the future, Delta established an AI task force in fall of 2024 that is currently looking into AI and its impact in the future, it has yet to influence policy but it will continue to meet going into the spring semester.
“For the time being, there are no specific AI-related policies in place at Delta College, though the College does have policies related to student conduct and discipline which would apply in cases of academic misconduct.” said Alex Brietler, Director for Marketing and Communications
