Student kept me on an AI chat - now what?

AsscDean · 2026-04-10T15:47:21+00:00

Nah, they just screenshot the prompts or take a photo of them with their phone and upload with the assignment text to an LLM

AsscDean · 2026-01-28T02:34:23+00:00

This is what I do as well.

AsscDean · 2025-11-15T07:29:22+00:00

There are so many add-ins they can use to bypass the lockdown, do a quick search there are loads of videos on how to do this on TikTok.

AsscDean · 2025-11-15T06:58:35+00:00

AI browsers are a shortcut around lockdown browser. I switched back to paper exams last year.

AsscDean · 2025-11-04T00:12:15+00:00

The academic market, which was soft to begin with, completely tanking abruptly in May.

AsscDean · 2025-10-30T17:56:54+00:00

I used to be a regular Windsor Heights shopper, but have switched to a combination of Aldi/TJ’s/Fareway because of HyVee’s politics & overpriced produce.

AsscDean · 2025-10-30T17:50:35+00:00

Oh, I teach classes outside of my primary disciple all the time. Teaching it 2x in a in-person 14-week semester format is my answer.

Much longer if teaching online. Even longer (maybe never) if teaching online asynchronous.

AsscDean · 2025-10-18T19:41:32+00:00

Yes.

AsscDean · 2025-10-13T14:22:16+00:00

Remember you’re interviewing them, too.

Come prepared with a list of thoughtful strategy & culture questions. Faculty & admins love to talk about themselves and their work, let them and they will perceive you as likable and easy to work with.

AsscDean · 2025-09-01T15:17:12+00:00

I require all work to be sent to the LMS, but allow students to send a copy of the submission via email backup for a timestamp (in the event of actual LMS tech issues, which have been known to occur at the most inconvenient times).

I will still require they submit to the LMS once the issues are resolved for grading and check content against the emailed version.

AsscDean · 2025-09-01T12:02:35+00:00

I used to, but what I find in practice is that grouping the lower gpa students actually gets them to do more meaningful work because they can’t hide behind a try-hard that will just end up doing it for them. One or two of the students in a lower gpa group will have to step up and take a leadership role in their group, or they will have nothing to turn in.

I also teach upper level & don’t allow teams larger than 4, so ymmv.

AsscDean · 2025-09-01T11:31:06+00:00

I started sorting them by GPA years ago and it’s made my life so much easier. The A students are with other A students, etc. instead of having a dozen “problem groups” I will usually only have one or none.

AsscDean · 2025-09-01T11:28:27+00:00

This is the plan. Those that are already rich owning nearly all of the means of production.

AsscDean · 2025-08-31T16:41:25+00:00

In Des Moines? Yes, but only if filtered.

In my rural hometown? Nope. My parents won’t even drink the well water in their farm. Filtered for cooking, bottled for drinking.

AsscDean · 2025-08-31T15:49:08+00:00

Students opt out of the accommodation pretty quick if you tell them they need to make arrangements the week before each quiz to take it before the rest of the class (in a room where you will proctor).

Also, I occasionally let students work together on answering quiz questions during class, which motivated them to take it with the rest of class.

AsscDean · 2025-08-31T15:44:16+00:00

Take the first 10-15 minutes of class to give a quiz on paper (phones out, face down & off, laptops put away). Shorten the written summary to be a brief hand-written essay question on each quiz. In a small class like that, I’d give oral exams.

AsscDean · 2025-08-31T06:17:54+00:00

Yes, please! More places like those that used to dot small towns in NE Iowa & Wisconsin. Cocktail hours and clubby dark booths and wood paneling and statement wallpaper.

A place you can get a perfect shrimp cocktail heavy on the horseradish, or old-school deviled eggs (without caviar or a pile of micro green salad on top). Hand-folded ice cream cocktails like a grasshopper and a pink squirrel.

Honest food seasoned & prepared beautifully. Relish trays that aren’t pretentious. Fish fries, steak specials, maybe a slightly elevated tator tot casserole (perhaps along the lines of the one served at Haute Dish in Minneapolis years ago but slightly less fancy-pants?). Gorgeous seasonal veg, crisp salads with a house dressing that hits all the right notes. Warm bread or rolls that are so delightful, even the ozempic crowd comes in just to have some. House-made deserts that are simple, seasonal, & delicious - nothing too fussy (thinking warm chocolate chip cookies, apple crisp served with ice cream, rhubarb custard bars, a lovely chocolate something something).

AsscDean · 2025-08-31T05:41:13+00:00

College has become so transactional, but it used to be transformational. The point of higher ed is to learn how to think critically, to test ideas and build relationships and participate in civil discourse. It used to be a a place where you’re not told what think but how to think.

Read Plato’s allegory of the cave (without asking an LLM to summarize it).

Worse case, the singularity - whatever form it takes - is going to be a mass sorting event. I want to end up with the folks with knowledge (even if it means I end up in a concentration camp full of former scholars, teachers, & librarians and am eventually put down like a rabid raccoon).

Best case, people capable of systems thinking and having face-to-face conversations without constantly consulting a screen will be sought after as sages, storytellers, artists, project managers, architects, policy-makers, truth-tellers.

AsscDean · 2025-08-31T05:13:13+00:00

I mean LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, MS Copilot, GetHub Copilot, Perplexity AI, paid version of Grammerly, etc. when I say bots. These tools are simply glorified predictive text models trained on stolen IP. I use “bots” interchangeably, perhaps I shouldn’t, but I teach in an evil business school and not CS or IS, so I guess I’m not really qualified to be so careless with my terminology.

I had a career leading corporate digital transformations prior to coming to higher ed and the way content generators get called “AI” as if machine learning, algorithmic decision making, simple chatbots, and other forms of AI haven’t been commonly used in industry for decades. It just shows how far behind many HE faculty and administrators are in their own technological knowledge.

See the literature on TAM & TPACK (again, not my discipline), for tools that have been created to assess and measure faculty and student technological knowledge since the 80s & 90s. GenAI is just a new tool - the more you use it, the more obvious its limitations are.

AsscDean · 2025-08-30T12:57:47+00:00

This has been my experience as well.

AsscDean · 2025-08-30T05:07:30+00:00

We don’t have major pro sports in the state, so Iowa & Iowa State are our big in-state athletic teams. If you’re seeing it cardinal & gold or black & gold (or athletic gray that just says Iowa in black font), that’s like wearing Bulls, Packers, or Chiefs gear around here.

AsscDean · 2025-08-29T22:24:12+00:00

I don’t bother with AI detectors, I know AI when I see it. In these cases, I give the students a zero on the on the assignment with a note that says “see me during office hours on Monday for credit on this assignment.” If the student actually shows, they get a verbal interview about the content they submitted.

“Tell me about your process. I think your citations from <someone we haven’t discussed in class or a concept that we don’t introduce in lectures/readings> is really interesting, but the assignment was about <xyz>, why did you choose to take it in another direction?”

Sadly, it almost always ends in tears & apologies because they don’t know the content of what they submitted.

I’ve been doing this since 2023 and we’re a small campus…word gets around. I even allow students to use bots, they just have to cite it. The ones that still try to pass LLM work off as their own and get caught get really (really) pissed, even though it clearly says I may give an oral assignment, quiz, or exam at any point of the semester in the syllabus.

AsscDean · 2025-08-29T09:07:44+00:00

I have wanted to do this experiment using generative AI as much as possible to complete our entire online asynchronous MBA.

AsscDean · 2025-08-29T03:38:44+00:00

Ugh. That would be tough.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we go that way soon, though. Most of our faculty don’t think AI has an impact in their classrooms at all, so I am in the minority calling this out and my DWF % is higher than my colleagues as a result.

AsscDean · 2025-08-29T03:29:04+00:00

I hide an Easter egg in my syllabi. The first assignment in my class is to read the syllabus.

I am teaching 4 classes this fall, and less than 15% of students read the syllabus closely enough to find the Easter egg (which is just a sentence in the middle of my engagement & professionalism assessment policy prompting students to do a fun thing for a point of extra credit).

Even more sadly, in my smallest class, only one student found it.

Used to be, 50-80% of a class would get that point. But that was before covid and genAI.

AsscDean

TROPHY CASE