Ever wondered if artificial intelligence could grade your college essays better than your professor, or do we risk losing the essence of critical thinking in the process? Hold on to your hats as we explore the fascinating world of AI, its ethical implications, and its far-reaching impact on higher education. Be prepared for a thrilling discussion on the good, the bad, and the ugly of using AI in higher education, and a verdict that might just leave you pondering!
As you journey with us, you'll uncover intriguing insights about the use of AI in classroom activities, both as a boon and a bane. From AI creation of academic rubrics and plot summaries to its potential misuse in assignments, we're leaving no stone unturned. Listen carefully as we share our perspective on the necessary steps educators are taking to make the use of AI a responsible choice for their students, and not a destructive one.
In the concluding phase of this episode, we're diving deep into the influence of AI on education and critical thinking. You'll learn about the changing face of writing, the increasing need for students to master AI as a tool, and the possible consequences for critical thinking. Hear us out as we discuss whether AI could be a timesaver for research, or a detractor from original thought. So, tune in and join us as we navigate the future of education in the age of AI!
Ever wondered if artificial intelligence could grade your college essays better than your professor, or do we risk losing the essence of critical thinking in the process? Hold on to your hats as we explore the fascinating world of AI, its ethical implications, and its far-reaching impact on higher education. Be prepared for a thrilling discussion on the good, the bad, and the ugly of using AI in higher education, and a verdict that might just leave you pondering!
As you journey with us, you'll uncover intriguing insights about the use of AI in classroom activities, both as a boon and a bane. From AI creation of academic rubrics and plot summaries to its potential misuse in assignments, we're leaving no stone unturned. Listen carefully as we share our perspective on the necessary steps educators are taking to make the use of AI a responsible choice for their students, and not a destructive one.
In the concluding phase of this episode, we're diving deep into the influence of AI on education and critical thinking. You'll learn about the changing face of writing, the increasing need for students to master AI as a tool, and the possible consequences for critical thinking. Hear us out as we discuss whether AI could be a timesaver for research, or a detractor from original thought. So, tune in and join us as we navigate the future of education in the age of AI!
Stay tuned to the Ask Dr Ross podcast. It's created to give you info to succeed at college. Our hosts are highly qualified. Dr Catherine Ross is a member of the University of Texas Systems Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She's also a popular professor of 19th century English literature. Her co-host and multimedia editor, nathan Witt, provides a student perspective. Ask Dr Ross is a community service of the University of Texas at Tanya.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Catherine Ross, and this is a podcast for parents, students in school who are thinking about going to college, college students who are already here, adults who are thinking of maybe going back to college and really anyone who wants to know more about what life in colleges and universities is like today in the US of A. I'm here with my friend, nathan Witt, who's a student here.
Speaker 3:If you'd like to ask Dr Ross a question, you can email us at ADRquestionsatgmailcom. Today we're going to talk about all things AI or artificial intelligence. So the big question is is AI ethical in college? But also, how is AI going to influence the next couple of years? Dr Ross, you and I agree that it's not going anywhere.
Speaker 2:It's here for sure to stay, just like computers and cell phones and calculators. I think that we want to consider AI a tool, and we want to remember, too, that guess who created it? A bunch of college students at Princeton, and I had the occasion last week to sit in on a session where one of the creators of chat, gpt, this young recent Princeton graduate, was talking to a bunch of educators about his tool and what he hopes to do. One of the things I find very interesting is he's very concerned that it be used honorably and responsibly as well. Now, I've been playing with it for a while I don't know if you have too, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first thing I did was I just threw in some things like tell me about Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, something I teach, just to see if it brought me up some responsible information. Then a little while later I read I guess it was an editorial in something like the New York Times by a student at Columbia who was using it and he said look folks, you have no idea how we're using it. What he told us was that we don't just have it write our papers for us, we have it do. Here's where we get into the issue that I think most of us who are educators are most concerned about is AI going to cause the end of critical thinking?
Speaker 1:Well.
Speaker 2:Listen to what he did, to see how he uses AI, to maybe do his critical thinking for him, but also to help him. What he told us he does is he says okay. So for example I don't remember if this is precise example used, but it's the sort of thing. Let's say you asked me to write an argument at Vessay about some aspect of the Iliad. I won't just say write me the essay. The student said I will ask it to give me 10 arguments that can be made about the Iliad, but they don't stop there. Then he says then when I pick one, let's say I pick number three. Now chat GPT, give me an outline for this essay on argument number three and then I'll plug in all the facts. The good news on that is that they do the factual work. What's the bad news?
Speaker 3:Yeah, like you said, a lot of the critical thinking, a lot of the decision making is eased. I wouldn't say taken away from the student, but yeah.
Speaker 2:So he's anxious. I think what he's saying is he's anxious about being able to make an argument, and that's where educators have to come in. We've got to help them learn how to make arguments, but then to find the crux where you could say a pro or a con about this particular part of the great poem, but then also organizing your thinking about it. That's another part of critical thinking. So I was really delighted to hear the details of what he did, and then he went on to say he thought two things. One is that faculty need to no longer give written tests. Your tests should be oral tests, especially if we're doing online classes, because it's so easy for students to assemble additional information when they do that.
Speaker 2:But the other thing he challenges to do, which is to rethink the way we teach, and we've been having to do that for a long time, anyway, thanks to online education. So I'll stop there for a minute and hear what you're thinking about.
Speaker 3:I want to ask you the big, bold question, which I think will probably be the caption of this episode Is using AI in higher ed unethical?
Speaker 2:Not necessarily. It depends on how you use it. Before AI came along, I started doing something which got me into trouble with some of my colleagues. I started using course heroes online learning resources with my students Because I knew my students were going to look for these things anyway and I was in an academic advisory position with this company called Course Hero, which has an incredible amount of resources for students. And, by the way, course Hero was created again by a student who needed help and he went online and he started getting friends to help him.
Speaker 2:And a lot of academics think, oh, these online programs are just, they just invite students to cheat and, of course, students can do that. But what I've found is that there's a lot of really useful stuff on there that can be used partly by teachers or high school teachers, as well as university professors at the sort of lower levels, at least in literature. This is the area I'm familiar with. But I started having curating their site and sending my students to it intentionally and saying look, and I'll just tell you real briefly, when you study a novel, you really need to read it a couple of times to really get what's going on if you're studying it. As a literary scholar and who has time to read a novel twice right. And so what I found, of course, here is they had not only Plot Summary the whole novel but they had chapter by chapter Plot Summary. And so what I'd do is I gave that to my students that time, said read the Plot Summary, you're going to know the story before you start reading it. But also it helps to center you. So these are difficult texts and if you read a modern American language version of the Plot Summary of a chapter, that was demanding and then so you know what you're looking for, then you read it in the original. It actually helps them study it better. I found it was useful to have these detailed Plot Summaries available to me to remind me where we want to see, where this is. Week seven we're in chapter 14, or is it 15, which chapter is that? And so I'd use that to prompt my memory. So I was already using that and I wrote an article about it which the Times Higher Education Online Magazine published. I think I called it a map and a compass and I said look, the map of the novel is the Plot Summary, and then I give the students a compass, which is a series of guiding questions. Anyway, let's get to the real deal. Are they cheating? Of course, students going to cheat.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, a lot of students, especially in courses that they have to take, like a required course, where they don't really care much about it. They have to take it. They don't care so much about really doing the deal as they do about just getting through. And I try to talk to my students in those classes. I always, by the way, I think I told you this I always teach core classes because I think that's where students learn how to be students, and so I also get a lot of students who don't want to be in English majors for a million bucks, but with what I teach it, with a lot of really valuable skills, and that's what I emphasize to them is you're building skills. I'm not trying to make it in English major. I want you to learn how to be a reader and a person who knows.
Speaker 3:I agree with you with the ethics question. It's this gray area because it really depends on how you use it. I like when you described it as a tool, when you described AI as a tool and I agree with that you kind of likened it to a calculator or something like that, and I think that's the approach that we have to have with it is, now that we have this tool, that's utilize it and also, yeah, you probably have to shift. I'm sure when calculators came out and became widely available, the math curriculum probably changed a lot.
Speaker 2:And teachers are saying you cannot bring a calculator to class and that's cheating and that's irresponsible and dishonest. And to get to the cheating issue students come to college, it's their time, it's their money and if that's the way they're going to do it, who are they cheating? Cheating themselves or robbing themselves of an opportunity. Go ahead.
Speaker 3:I think and this is where I have probably an opinion you won't agree with as a professor, because I think that the objective and I think cheating for a core class that you just have to take or a major requirement that you don't really care about, it's not really for your field of business that you want to go into and cheating for your career classes are two different things, because I think the system we have created is one in which we say, when you all boil it down, objective is A Right, get an A. Objective is get an A Right.
Speaker 2:No objective is learn skills that will get you the A Should be.
Speaker 3:That should be the case. That should be the case, dr Ross, and we definitely agree on that. But I think I hope that we can agree that in the current system of not just higher ed but school in general in America, you should be focused on actually learning the knowledge. But the system we have built is around getting the grades.
Speaker 2:Oh, about the grades, getting the?
Speaker 3:grades. Yeah, I think that there's something to say about students who cheat in core classes or classes that don't go towards their career. Maybe they're cheating themselves, but also maybe they are trying to get that objective by any means, which means sometimes they learn to think outside the box.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I will add this this is one of the reasons why I encourage students to use online things, because I can't teach you everything in class. You have to teach yourself, you have to learn to teach yourself, you have to learn to find answers, you have to learn to teach each other, and so I encourage them to be resourceful and creative about finding sources, because if you've left the class, you still don't understand what I thought I taught you then who's on that? Who's that on? That's on me. That was my error, and I will add this if a student feels as though the only way they can do well in a class is by cheating, that's also on the professor.
Speaker 2:We have got to create classes that invite students to want to do the work, to see the purpose of it, and this is one of my biggest.
Speaker 2:I'm often invited to give orientation to new faculty and I always say to them especially if they're teaching the lower division classes 17, 18, or even 19-year-old student doesn't know why you have to take a course in rhetoric, why you have to take a course in political science and why you have to take a course in natural sciences.
Speaker 2:They just think those are things that we've thrown in your way and what we've got to do is say, okay, now I know you want to be a digital design person, or I know you want to be an accountant and you do not understand why in the world you need to study Byron's poetry. But I'm going to show you why. Studying in this field and learning these particular skills about learning to look for details, learning to notice that there's a context in which something was created, knowing that there's a certain way certain things are written all of those are transferable skills to every other field. If they know why it's important, if they know a lot of kids that have never made an A in English before in their lives make A's in my classes, but guess what? I didn't give them that grade. They earned it because I got them to see why it mattered.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, and you added excitement. I think that's one thing that I wish we had for more college professors is your excitement for the subject, because I think that really does transfer to the student. I know in my personal experience as an example, like when a teacher is excited about a subject, it doesn't matter what the subject is, it gives me excitement, and so there's that. I think if you let your personality show, don't be this like, yeah, figurine of a professor and you don't have any personality and I'm just here to read you the book and whatever which is why, when we suddenly start using chat, gpt and robots to do our teaching for us, I get really worried.
Speaker 3:I don't know it's a big conversation of, and I don't know if you've considered it of. Can you tell that something was written by chat GPT or not?
Speaker 2:yes and no. I used to always be able to tell really easily if something just didn't sound like the natural flow of a student's work. Yeah, recently I'm pretty sure there was a student who used chat GPT on a final paper from my class, wow, and I didn't realize it until too late and I'll tell you I'm not sure. And one of the things that this fella at Princeton who created chat to be GPT is working on it and several they've already created some engines that can help to detect it. Yeah, I tell you what I'm not real interested in detecting it because that makes me the police person. I want students to not want to cheat. I want to teach students how to use it, just like I teach them how to use the research lab and I use the librarians a lot and they help them learn how to do stuff.
Speaker 2:One of the things this conference. I just went to one of the workshops. The leader of it said okay, I want all the faculty members in this room to pull up your one of your paper assignments and ask chat GPT to create a rubric for it. And you know the rubric is that's the thing we used to score a paper and they're really sometimes very painful to create and we have to discern the difference between it was C and is C plus and to be minus, and detailing what you're looking for. And I thought that's an interesting request, and so I typed in this term paper that I've got my students getting ready to do, and it came up with a pretty credible rubric. Yeah, and I was going wow, that just saved me an hour of work. Yeah, now I'm not going to use it exactly as it is, because I want to refine it, I want to define it, make it better, but it saved me time yes and another thing is just like I gave students here's the link to go see the the course hero plot summary.
Speaker 2:So you know the plot summary. I still require my students to read the book and I have ways to make sure they do. I'm thinking that what I'm going to do this year is I'm gonna just abruptly come to the point, talk about it with freshmen all the way up to seniors and grad students and say here's what I know we can do. Yeah, and here's some of the temptations. I hope you won't do that. And the truth is, nathan, they are adults, they're not high school kids, and if his child in high school gets in trouble in college, you could actually get a zero and f. It's a pretty big, high price to pay, and so my hope is that increasingly, students are self-monitoring.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you do have to be careful In high school and F is an F. In college, an F or a zero might mean your scholarship. It might cost you significantly more than it would in high school.
Speaker 2:It's going to keep you out of grad school. If a graduate student's school sees that you made an F and it came from dishonesty, you can forget it.
Speaker 3:Certainly, but keeping in mind that this podcast is directed to incoming college students and maybe families of those incoming college students. As a professor, what do you say to incoming students who want to use chat DBT on their assignments, who feel like they see it as a tool and they want to use it? What do you say to them?
Speaker 2:Of course, I have no control over students outside of my own classroom, but I can certainly make some recommendations to them, and I will say this our Center for Teaching here and at others places as well, lots of places right now are gearing up for faculty to have discussions about what are we going to do about AI, how are we going to use it, how are we going to protect students from making big, dumb mistakes with it, but also how can we use it positively. And so I think, as I told you, I'm going to talk to my students about it and I'm going to talk to them about how I think we can use it productively and okay. Another thing I got in this conference a bunch of us networked and a professor of physics down in Mexico emailed me and she said so how are you using it? I told her, and she doesn't know how to use it yet, and I'm hoping most faculty are getting geared up to figure out how to use it, how it can be used usefully, like creating a rubric. I'll tell you another example I use for it.
Speaker 2:So this assignment I've got is I'm inviting students to do a project on a Victorian novel that I offered them 25 Victorian novels. I didn't want to write the plot summaries for all 25 novels. Yes, what I did chat GPT give me a three paragraph plot summary and I knew them and I read them and made sure they were good. And so I think that if students think they're going to have to use chat GPT to pass, then they're in trouble already, and if they think that they're going to trick their teachers, they're probably wrong too.
Speaker 3:You think so?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, because we're all paying attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And one of the biggest reasons is to quote a friend of mine in higher education who said is this the end of thinking?
Speaker 3:See, I really contest both of the things that you just said there. First of all, I think there's a ton of ways to in the current form of education and how we do things. I think that there's multiple ways to cheat and get away with it and that you would never notice you might be surprised at how many things we do notice. I might be, because of course I don't know, but what I do know, and I'm not sure we want to run this, but go ahead, let's keep talking.
Speaker 3:I guess I won't talk about the different ways that we can get away with it. No, because I do want to include this part because I've been watching AI very closely, this I've been working with my hometown school district to do what you're saying and can we help these teachers make it a tool and embrace it instead of trying to reject it and make it a big battle.
Speaker 3:I always equate it to the internet, and it's so funny. One of my favorite things to look at in retrospect is this article from some big paper maybe it was the New York Times, I don't know. I just saw a clipping of it. That was an opinion piece saying you know, the internet is a fad that has come and gone, and it's pretty much saying that in a year or two, no one will even care about the internet anymore. And it's like wow, how wrong were you? And I feel like that's the situation we're in with AI right now.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you one thing I am interested in following is that because it uses natural language, models it writes pretty smoothly, and one of the things that I heard someone say in this conference where we talked about AI was you're going to have to be able to write better than a robot if you want to have a job that has any kind of writing involved, and there are a lot of jobs that have that Lawyers anybody who writes any kind of marketing materials or so I disagree.
Speaker 3:There I do agree For a long time. Automation is not a new thing. We've been automating away jobs for a long time and what always happens is you start at the least human required, like jobs with AI. The stuff that will get automated away is stuff like writing your rubrics right, Stuff like writing boring paperwork and files and forms and all that kind of stuff. That stuff will get automated away. Some receptionists might need to be worried.
Speaker 2:A lot of reception. There's a lot of sort of clerk level jobs that may be lost, which is of concern, but go ahead. I'm not disagreeing with you yet.
Speaker 3:And that always happens, but I think that's part of the human species evolving. As we evolve these jobs, we can automate that away and those people who are receptionists can now go into other positions when, for example, ai now has opened up a job position that is growing of people who know how to properly prompt AI, as you were saying. That's why I want to return back to this concept that I'm seeing everywhere. Is this the death of thinking?
Speaker 2:I don't think it is either. I don't think it's a death of thinking, but I think it could be a way that students could avoid the hard work of thinking.
Speaker 3:I think it is a way in which the students' hard thinking will shift from what it was and become more AI influenced. So, for your example, for writing the paper, the Iliad, instead of their critical thinking about how do I come up with an argument for the Iliad, it's how do I utilize this tool? Because AI is a tool. We agree that the critical thinking is how do I use this tool best to give me the best prompts to run with and then from there, how do I best prompt this tool? How do I best utilize this tool? It's the same with the calculator I press the right button to do the equations. How do I use this tool best to create the structure of this essay?
Speaker 2:But again okay. So if you're to say, okay, AI robot, tell me what are some of the most interesting things that have been said about the Iliad. Now, first of all, that's cluing you into the corpus of Western thought and Eastern thought about this great work, and so it's saving you the time of reading 15 articles about it.
Speaker 2:And then, once you find the what are some of the most interesting things that have been said, then if your intellect grabs, hold, okay, I think that one's interesting. Then there's an opportunity to develop that Now you could, of course, the next step would be okay. So I thought the fourth thing you said was the most interesting. Tell me what's been said about that, and that will save you the trouble learning how to research, although the AI developer told us don't always get it right.
Speaker 3:No, because it's a yeah, it's a conversation model, it's not a search engine.
Speaker 2:Yep, and sometimes they just make stuff up Apparently and there's hallucinations and all these different things in it. But so I think we're not too far apart, Nathan, in the sense that. But here's the difference. I know how to think critically. I have been trained without a machine to teach me how to do all these things. We've got to keep teaching young people how to think critically and how to do their own research and do a lot of things, because, although I will tell you I haven't done my own math in years, I use my calculator all the time.
Speaker 2:But I know medical doctors who I hope they're doing some of their own math. You know they're calculating or pharmacists are calculating the number of millisumthings of this drug that's going to go into my husband's body. But anyway, what are you worried about?
Speaker 3:With AI? I'm worried. What am I worried about with AI? I'm not sure that I would use the word worried. I think I'm excited. If I had to say there was a concern, my concern would be that education as a whole and, of course, higher ed, because for some reason higher ed seems to be the slowest moving machine.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, although we've moved pretty fast into being able to use online stuff.
Speaker 3:I will definitely, especially UT Tyler. I will give them their roses that they have embraced the evolution of technology. I mean, look at what we're doing right now Podcasting. You know how the College of Arts and Sciences has embraced podcasting so much. So I will definitely give them their roses. If I were to have a concern, it would be that we don't evolve and embrace this change Because, again, I don't think critical thinking is going away. I think that getting the skills of critical thinking is now going to come from a different place in the process and I think that our current form of education and testing and grading does not cater to that part of the critical thinking and getting it from that area.
Speaker 2:I remember John Stuart Mill, who was a very famous 19th century philosopher, who was the provost of St Andrews University, and he was responding in his opening address to arguments at that time for helping students to become better doctors, lawyers and businessmen, and he said help to make them better thinkers and better men, and they will make themselves better doctors, lawyers and businessmen and we get you to partly two of the jobs of higher education which a lot of people forget about, which is character building and mind building.
Speaker 2:We know that a lot of kids all they want to do is get as much of college done in high school as possible. Get on straight to their career.
Speaker 3:I think we have to get students to stop thinking in the mindset of checklists. Yeah, and we do it since pre-K. It's this checklist, it's everything, and it's checklists inside of bigger checklists, inside of bigger checklists, where every assignment is a checklist, every grade is a checklist, every year is a checklist.
Speaker 2:And in college it's the checklist of. You've got to get the core curriculum done and you pick your major. You've got a certain number of courses that you have to checklist in the major. You have to have a minor, but you've got to think broader than that.
Speaker 3:You have to think and I love the terminology soft skills, because that's really what this is about. It's about developing these soft skills and what I was hoping you would get into when I asked your advice to college students that might want to use chatGBT. In my opinion, you might be able to get away with it. Maybe you won't, I don't know. I personally haven't tried, because I think that you should want to take the course seriously, not because you care about English or that's important to you or whatever. Hopefully you do, I'm sure you hope the students do but because of the soft skills that it teaches you. It teaches you discipline, which I think, if there's anything that we're losing, it may not be critical thinking, it may be discipline, and it's not just because it's self-discipline.
Speaker 2:And self-discipline and the ability to stay on task, given though it's boring.
Speaker 3:Yeah, to see something through, to follow out a task, just because.
Speaker 2:I think I shared with you Chickering and Risers, Seven Vectors, yeah, and I don't know that there's any other time and place in a person's life except from about 17 to about 22 or 3, when you really have the freedom to work on those things without paying a terrible price. And while I absolutely get it that people are spending very high numbers of dollars on an education, there's some things you cannot put a dollar price on, but they make all the difference in the world in your being hired If you are detectable as a person who has these sorts of cultural and character traits.
Speaker 3:Yeah, these soft skills.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and column soft skills. Some of them are pretty hard like planning is pretty hard and being a good team member is pretty hard but I think we're on the same page. Now here's the thing I hope we're not gonna get to the point where we have nothing but full scale AI cheating all semester. I'm trying to create assignments that one will make it hard to complete without doing your own work, because it's my job to make sure you learn how to do that work.
Speaker 2:If in my class you never have to think hard, you never have to write clearly, you never have to make a good argument, then they're not paying me. They shouldn't pay me If I can't hold you to a standard there. Now, again, I tell you honestly, nathan, I rely upon my relationship with students for that to be the case. I tell them I don't want you to be dishonest. I want you to do the hard work. I'll make it possible for you to do it and I'll make it possible for you to believe you can get there. And another whole big part of this conference that came from we're talking about AI was we're talking about classrooms of care and how many faculty members treat their students with the kind of respect you really would like to be treated. It's important I want every one of my students to know that I really care that you do well in this class, that you get the work done and you feel confident, and I think that cheating partly comes from students who don't feel cared about.
Speaker 3:I would agree. I would agree. Let me ask you this about AI. Is AI the new calculator, specifically chat GBT? Is that to English and writing and critical thinking, what a calculator was to math?
Speaker 2:Mathematics? Probably yeah, although of course I didn't take higher math myself. But I'm guessing it isn't probably as powerful as a calculator.
Speaker 3:Interesting but it could get there, do you think? I don't know, I don't know. I wonder if there's potential, in the same way that the introduction of a calculator into a classroom shifted the focus of math classes and math curriculum from more basic level math into a deeper, and I'm wondering if AI doesn't do that for us with English writing and critical thinking. I'm wondering if it doesn't just evolve the curriculum into requiring us to dive a lot deeper and get a lot heavier into what it means to write.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting perspective, and it could very well be that, instead of having to read 15 articles, it tells you what the 15 articles said, and so you can step on the shoulders of that and go to a next level. That could very well be the only I think the only restriction there is. Just I don't know that chat GBT can read all the articles about the British Romantic period and have them all in there, but I guess one day they will. I guess one day everything will be fed into this great robot brain in the sky and I won't have to do a Google search, or right now we have tools like JSTOR. It's the thing that searches for all the articles on Coleridge's, the writing of the ancient mariner, and you can sort it by which language the articles were written in and when they were written, and stuff like that. That's a skill, a soft skill that you might call it actually more of a professional skill that we teach is how to search, define stuff.
Speaker 3:Circle back to the lead question is using AI in higher ed unethical?
Speaker 2:The answer is yes, depends on how you use it.
Speaker 3:Depends on how you use it, and we'll see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll see, and my advice to students and professors is spend the next couple months, learn it about it and then talk about it openly with each other, so that we can all be on the same page. Let's not make a big fight over it.
Speaker 3:Let's make it a community effort and maybe, if you're a student and you're considering using AI to cheat, realize that it's not as much the information or the A, the grade that's important. It's the self-discipline, it's the critical thinking. Those are the skills that you're getting from this assignment.
Speaker 2:And if that's the way you get your A's, I don't reckon you'll ever be very proud of them.
Speaker 3:You probably won't be very proud of them and it'll probably catch up to you somewhere.
Speaker 2:Oh, it always does, it always does.
Speaker 3:It always does.
Speaker 2:And I remember years ago it was real interesting I had a graduate student. By the time they get to be a graduate student, you think they're pretty solid and she was a real experience. Grown up and bless her heart, she did plagiarize on a paper and I talked to her about it and it was a real turning point in her life, the way we talked about it and what happened and she ended up going on to be a linguistics professor herself.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and every now and then I get a note from her saying I'm glad we had that talk Because small dishonesties out of emotional trouble, and that's where it came from.
Speaker 3:And here's an anecdote for someone that didn't get turned around there was a valedictorian a couple years ahead of me at my high school who cheated all through high school and was known among the students, the kids, all knew.
Speaker 3:I was kind of proud of how good they were at cheating, went off to college and I knew through other friends who went to that same college that they cheated, and very proudly cheated, through all of college and somehow they made it through all of that without getting caught or any major repercussions. But what happened was when they got out into the real world and were ready to start a career in this field that they supposedly spent four years studying, they had no idea what they were doing. They got fired and they moved back in with their parents because they have this little piece of paper that says college graduate. But they didn't get anything other than the piece of paper and now they're not able to have the life that they want to have because they cheated through everything.
Speaker 2:And that's a mistake writ large. It always does catch up with you Somewhere sometime it's karma. So there you go. Good luck with all of this AI stuff. Huh, it's going to be interesting fall.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's something to watch, and that's as scary as exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, new doesn't have to be bad, does it?
Speaker 3:No, it doesn't, as long as we embrace it, and that's how I feel about it.
Speaker 2:And inter-transparent and talking about it together.
Speaker 3:Yeah, open dialogue.
Speaker 2:All righty.
Speaker 3:This has been the Ask Dr Ross podcast. Close it out. If you have any questions further questions about AI or anything about higher ed, college or what the experience is like getting ready for it, you can ask us on our email. It's adrquestions at gmailcom. We'd love to answer them. Sure, would Talk to you guys. Thanks for listening.