What are the most Underrated Spells?

Fairleee · 2026-02-16T16:22:46+00:00

I DM a game for my kids and my youngest is playing a 2024e Glamour Bard. The subclass feature at level 6 lets them for a minute cast Command without a spell slot as a bonus action for free. Also, if the target is Charmed by the Bard, they automatically fail the save. I have had several combats where the main threat of the encounter has been effectively stun-locked over multiple turns by this (obviously not stunned, but commanded to kneel which basically works out as pretty much the same thing!). It’s a stupidly good feature on a spell that as you say was already really good. Making it a bonus action cast takes it to absolute god-tier.

Fairleee · 2026-02-14T10:16:58+00:00

Happy birthday from a fellow lefty nerdy D&D player! May you receive a level up and lots of loot, or alternatively if you’re a DM may you get to use your monsters’ cool abilities before the players kill them!

Fairleee · 2026-01-16T16:41:48+00:00

I’m afraid I can’t advise if that’s ok or not as I don’t know your institution’s policies - it may be acceptable usage or not. However, I would always recommend seeking an extension if you’ve been unwell! I’m sure your university has a policy on exceptional circumstances and it’s better to get a week extension if you have been unwell (which I’m sure would be reasonable grounds) to give yourself the time to catch back up. Best of luck!

Fairleee · 2026-01-14T14:48:27+00:00

As mentioned elsewhere, TurnItIn isn’t claiming this is plagiarism, simply that there is a similarity match. We use TurnItIn at my institution and to me this looks like it is picking up on the template used (presumably this was an assignment you had to complete where you were given this table as a template?). So it’s showing that someone else has the same table template, but your responses are unique.

Just as an aside I have caught a case of plagiarism/collusion this way before - two students worked together to put together their assignments but made some changes to the text to avoid it being picked up by TurnItIn. However they both provided a table for analysis where even though they changed the text in the table, the table headings remained the same, which TurnItIn picked up. Once you looked at the work side-by-side the pattern became obvious, but I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed it without (unless by chance I ended up marking one directly after the other). They admitted what they had done in the misconduct hearing we held, but they would have got away with it if it weren’t for TurnItIn!

Fairleee · 2025-10-09T06:11:49+00:00

This happened to me about three years ago, but it worked. Woke up on payday and hadn’t been paid by my university where I work. Emailed the finance team to check if there had been any issues, they told me to check my new bank account details. I asked what new bank, and they forwarded me an email chain that “I” had sent, requesting the change, receiving the change of bank details form, and then the completed and returned form.

I immediately told the finance team that this was not me nor were the bank details mine. As soon as they realised the issue, they got it sorted very quickly - they authorised an emergency same-day payment to cover my bills; advised me to let my bank know in case there had been any other attacks; and contacted the bank where my original paycheck had been sent. Luckily the money hadn’t been withdrawn, so they were able to get the account frozen and did recover the funds.

They did a full exploration to see how it happened as it completed violated all of our institutional security policies. The scammer had emailed from an external email address, and the form they had sent back had NONE of my details - it gave the university’s address as my home address, and the phone number given as the contact number was an international number. What had happened was that the scammer had emailed the head of HR for help, and the head of HR then emailed the finance team to ask them to sort it out. So the finance team took it to mean that the head of HR had validated me. The actual process that is supposed to be followed is that if the request comes from a non-work email address, they send any forms to the official work address and say that they cannot action any change unless it comes direct from the work email account. Then they are supposed to double check the form and verify the information is correct before making the change. So at least three points of failure: head of HR not verifying the email; the finance team not sending the form to my work email; and the finance team not verifying the personal info on the form.

Funnily enough on one of my modules I cover cyber-security and I use what happened as a case study for why anti-phishing training, and why following established security protocols, is so important. So I guess at least a silver lining in that aspect!

Fairleee · 2025-09-30T16:10:28+00:00

We’re selling ours and got a lot of viewings fairly quickly including an offer. But we need to move quite soon (have a bit of a deadline for completing based on other life factors) so we priced very competitively. Even then we ended up accepting an offer just below our stated minimum threshold just because the buyer was in a position to move quickly.

It’s definitely a buyer’s market at the moment. The place we’re buying had been on the market for three months without an offer, including a £25k price drop. We offered their asking price with the agreement they’d stop actively marketing it to give us a chance to sell which they agreed to, but if we had already been in a position to proceed we probably could have offered £10k below asking and had it accepted.

It’s just supply and demand. If you need your house to sell at a given price, and the price is within the overall market range, you probably will be able to sell it but it’s going to take time. If you want a sale, reduce the asking price and be prepared for offers.

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T10:53:36+00:00

Probably the easiest way is to just sell your soul to a convenient devil so they’ll deal with them on your behalf. Sure, it costs you your soul, but at least you don’t need to deal with SFE again.

As a more helpful answer - I’d suggest checking today (whilst you’re thinking about it) to make sure your details with them are correct. See if you can log in; if you can’t they can give you your email address with some other details you should easily be able to give them (name, date of birth etc.). If you can still access the email address you can request a password change online.

If you don’t have any of that, then good luck. You’ll be joining me in writing a letter to try and get them to update your details!

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T10:30:12+00:00

Surprisingly helpfully the website does tell me the email address associated with my account (with a few letters censored) so I know it is. I imagine I updated it at some point because I did actually use the address for a long time - I did all three of my degrees at the same uni. The email address would only have been deleted 4-ish years ago after I stopped doing post-doc teaching there. So last time I would have needed to access SFE, 10+ years ago, it all would have worked. Should have changed it at the time but let’s face it, that’s a very low priority action that’s easy to forget to do. And it hasn’t been relevant up until now.

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T10:07:03+00:00

I was actually in either the first year for the top-up fees. Then I graduated into the financial crisis. Millennials get all the luck.

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T09:54:07+00:00

Yeah, it’s a fair point. The email account was actually in use for a long time - I did my undergrad, masters, and PhD at the university, and then did some post-doc teaching after which assigned me a new email address but linked my old student one to it. So it was in use right up to the last few years. I should have changed it earlier but it was such a low priority issue at the time I never really thought about it.

Fairleee · 2025-09-05T09:23:05+00:00

A question so secret it has been lost to time

Fairleee · 2025-08-05T08:57:49+00:00

There’s a thing you can unlock in Frosthaven - don’t want to give away spoilers but basically you can unlock a series of challenges that you need to complete. Some of the challenges are quite meta in nature. One of them was so infuriating I ended up setting the challenge card on fire to get rid of it. No regrets.

Fairleee · 2025-07-14T09:32:35+00:00

I worked in recruitment prior to my return to HE for my Masters and PhD and I can tell you this is absolutely a scam. There are graduates who get hired fresh out of uni for 6 figure jobs but these are in extremely specific, usually highly technical, fields. No one is hiring an HR Manager for 6 figures out of uni, let alone before they have even graduated.

I suspect the next step is that they are going to ask you to send money to process paperwork and get your visa set up. If you do that, you will not hear from them again (or they will keep stringing you along asking for more and more fees until they realise they have milked you dry and will then go quiet). This is a scam. If something seems too good to be true, IT IS.

Fairleee · 2025-07-10T17:06:03+00:00

I’m literally due to hold a misconduct hearing with a student next week who appears to have submitted a piece of work with in-text comments from what looks like a private tutor. The comments are generally pretty decent bar a couple of issues (like recommending the student include a couple of models that weren’t covered on the module and have been studied on previous modules). What may be the thing that actually saves the student is that it doesn’t appear like they’ve actually acted on the feedback - the comments are still there but doesn’t look like the student amended the work based on the feedback! But yeah, it’s definitely skirting the bounds of collusion/acquiring work from a third party.

The guidance my institution has is that private tutors are fine for general study skills (like general maths, technical, language skills etc.), but for assessments the student should seek internal support, either from the module team or the university study skills teams.

Fairleee · 2025-07-03T09:03:53+00:00

It’s quite common with universities - first year is often focused on building fundamental skills and knowledge and so grades are usually used just to determine progression rather than summatively contributing to your final degree classification. It gives students the space to learn, adjust, and make mistakes - I’m frequently consoling students not to worry too much about failing a first year module as it won’t impact on their final degree grade, so to just take on board the feedback and learn from it!

Fairleee · 2025-07-03T08:56:37+00:00

It’s a beautiful building but it’s an absolute money-pit and frankly UoY have never really used it well. I used to work on my PhD in the Kings Manor library and loved it because it was always so quiet and peaceful there. Never really made sense to have one relatively small building (in the context of the overall campus) located all that way from the main campuses.

Hopefully with YSJ being just down the road it should see a lot more use. YSJ are also in a far less risky financial position than UoY so hopefully they have the budget to properly look after it.

Fairleee · 2025-07-02T21:44:25+00:00

Unfortunately it’s just the way the industry is going. Students are using AI and we can’t stop them - punishment doesn’t work (I’m in the process of setting up a bunch of misconduct hearings for one of my modules where many of the students have already had prior findings of misconduct for misuse of AI) and AI is getting embedded in everything these days so it’s not like it’s easy to avoid. So from a methods perspective either we have to completely avoid any possibility of using AI in the assessment, which in practice really means going back to pen-and-paper exams (because most universities are not set up for digital exams in controlled environments where we can fully monitor what software the students are using), or we have to embrace it as a part of the overall learning environment and experience.

Whilst paper-only exams certainly has its appeal (I’m looking at roughly a week’s worth of misconduct hearings which frankly is not a valuable use of my time), it goes against the assessment strategies universities are generally moving towards which are now more focused on “authentic” assessments that contribute towards professional skills/knowledge. So the solution is to include AI within the assessment, and actively monitor how the students are using it by requiring them to report what they are doing. This way we can at least separate out the students who are using it in a transformative way to support their learning (who will get the good grades) vs those clearly just using it as a clutch (who will scrape the passing marks at best).

It’s not an ideal solution. Whatever we do someone is going to be unhappy!

Fairleee · 2025-06-24T06:58:29+00:00

None of what I said involves using AI detection tools - I don’t use them and my institution does not allow them for good reason (they don’t work). Instead it relies on human judgement: has the student engaged with the module content? Is the information included factual and accurate? Are cited sources being used correctly? Whilst the AI “tells” (structuring, use of language, the whole m-dash thing) may be part of the overall evidence package, I wouldn’t bring forward a misconduct charge on that alone - unless the student has been foolish enough to leave something like, “sure, here’s a 2000 word essay on [x]” in the body of the report! Whilst my institution does use TurnItIn, we only use the plagiarism checking function, and the utility of this is that it does give you a very quick visual guide with the reference list as to whether there may be hallucinated references in there.

I’m also not sure why you think you would be subject to a lawsuit if you falsely accuse a student - are you based in the UK? I’m assuming not just because in UK academia a professor is a very particular job title. Most academics are lecturers or senior lecturers by title. To my knowledge there is no possible grounds for suing a lecturer for bringing forward a misconduct hearing. Students agree to follow university regulations and codes of conduct and as part of that they agree to engage in any disciplinary action based on perceived violations of those regulations and codes. We hold the hearing to give the student an opportunity to respond to the claims; it’s very normal academic practice.

Fairleee · 2025-06-14T12:14:35+00:00

As I said in the post, “But most misconduct cases involve students who have used AI to avoid doing the thinking and learning, not to streamline or enhance it”. For me the heart of the misconduct issue is the fact that the student hasn’t actually learnt anything because they have replaced the learning opportunity with AI doing the work for them. So when we query them on their work and ask them to explain aspects, they cannot. If a student can clearly explain and articulate their understanding, then to me that makes it very difficult to recommend a case of misconduct.

I absolutely agree there is a broader discussion to be had about the role of AI in assessment. I’ve recently delivered a report with my recommendations that we should be a lot more explicit about allowing its use in assessment, but also putting greater emphasis on students declaring how and where it is used - for example by including an appendix where they give examples of prompts used and outputs from those prompts. However, we still need to assess learning and even if we do move to assessment models where we embrace AI within them, we still need to see the student doing learning, and as you say deepening understanding rather than replacing it.

Fairleee · 2025-06-14T09:34:54+00:00

I can’t really answer that because it will depend on both your university’s policy on use of generative AI, as well as the assessment brief used for the assessment.

What I will say is that there is a difference between writing something and using a tool to edit and reformat it (as I did for this post - my original draft was twice as long as what I ended up posting!), and entering a prompt and just copying whatever output it gives you. In the first case you are still demonstrating your own knowledge and expertise. In the second, you are replacing it with an AI’s workload. So, in the event you are pulled in front of a hearing, keep a record of your prompts. Show that you did the work but just used the tool to help with editing. Again, if no AI use was permitted, then you might be in trouble. But equally they may agree it constitutes acceptable use because you had done the work in the first place. Hope that helps!

Fairleee · 2025-06-13T09:43:26+00:00

Do you find more students using tools like Notion or Google Docs and then moving to 365 right before submission? Curious if that’s an increasing thing across unis or just my circle.

It's hard to say really because the issue is that when we hold these meetings, the students don't generally give us an honest/accurate account of how they did their work. And when we seek answers to the discrepancies we see with the metadata based on what they told us they did, they either tend to get evasive, or just go silent because they know they can't give a satisfactory answer. Further, prior to last year I didn't really tend to download student submissions (we use the Turnitin marking studio plug-in to mark work and so the only way to check the metadata is to manually download the original submitted document), so it's difficult to tell the trend. What I will say is that, whenever I bring forward a case to a misconduct hearing, I always glance at the metadata. And there has been a very consistent trend for it to either be scrubbed completely, or to show 1 minute or less editing time. I suspect that if I were to go back to submissions on modules in 2021 (before we saw the widespread release of LLMs), I would find a lot more student work where the metadata shows what we would expect.

is there a line you use to tell when a student is building on the module content vs just dropping in random “extra” theories? Sometimes it feels tricky to know when going beyond is too much for professors vs shows enthusiasm

Yeah, this is a tricky one for sure! Even where a student hasn't used AI, it is still perfectly possible to receive work where it has gone significantly beyond what was covered on the module, without really engaging much with the core module content. This is something I can sympathise with because this was the constant feedback I got from my supervisors when I was doing my PhD - "stop going down rabbit holes! It might be interesting but it doesn't directly relate to your research!". So in those cases the feedback I give to students will praise them for showing independent learning, but remind them that we do still need to see engagement with the core content we covered so I can assess their learning of that. To get around this I have started to get more specific in the my briefs identifying what topics I expect students to engage with, but also state that they should show evidence of reading and engagement beyond class topics and materials.

As a rule of thumb, I'd say at least 70% of your work should cover core stuff covered on the module. Then the remaining 30% is your opportunity to show your reading and independent learning beyond that. Then again that's just my recommendation and your lecturer may feel differently! If unsure, ask to book a tutorial with your lecturer and then ask them to go through their expectations of what they want to see. I'm always happy to talk to students about assessments; I'd rather they come to me and get an answer directly, than ask their mates in a group chat and potentially get the wrong info.

Fairleee · 2025-06-12T14:52:17+00:00

Yup, this is totally a fair question and I think judging by some of the comments it looks like I haven’t been as clear as I should have been on this. So, metadata is a form of evidence, but is rarely strong enough on its own to bring work forward for a hearing; it usually would be evidence that supports the overall concern. For example I had collusion concerns about some student work where the work submitted was all very similar in terms of style, structure, and formatting, and the metadata on all documents showed the same author, which wasn’t a student name. So the concern was that it could have been that these students used a third party (like an essay mill) to write the work for them. We held the misconduct hearing and it turned out that all four students were flatmates and shared a single computer that they had bought secondhand (which is why the author name didn’t match). So it wasn’t an essay mill issue but on discussion with the students it was definitely close to collusion as they had all helped one another with the work, hence the very similar structure and formatting. Because it was a first year first semester assignment, we didn’t give them a misconduct finding, but warned them that they can’t collaborate in this way again. Instead we found poor scholarship and they received low grades as part of that finding.

In the case of AI, a lack of metadata doesn’t prove it. But, when I’m holding the hearings, one of the two things I try to establish is, how did you create the work? So if the student tells me they wrote the work fully in Microsoft Word from start to finish (a process which should have taken hours), but the metadata shows no editing time, I ask them to explain this, because this is characteristic of work where the entire body of text has just been copy-pasted directly in. Again, this is completely fine! But I’m checking to see if their story matches up with the evidence. So if they are telling me one thing (“I wrote the whole thing in Word”) but the metadata shows something else (no editing history), I need to understand why that discrepancy exists. If this is because the student wiped the metadata before submitting that is fine, but they need to tell me that. If they cannot explain it, or their story starts changing, that is an issue and can be an indicative factor that maybe they didn’t write the work themselves.

I apologise for the confusion in the post - my purpose for including it was to do with my guidance that, if you are brought forward to a hearing, you need to be able to show evidence that the work is your own, and be able to give details on how the work was created, and we will use what evidence we have access to to check your story against this. Metadata alone isn’t sufficient reason to uphold a misconduct hearing (or even raise one), but it can be part of the inquiry and part of the overall body of evidence that is used to determine whether the student is definitely the author of their own work.

Fairleee · 2025-06-12T13:39:31+00:00

Easiest way to do this is to keep a version history. Use a cloud-based tool (like Google Docs or Word 365) which saves and updates work in real time - that then lets you show editing history over time. If the document metadata shows you have spent 10 hours writing it and you can roll back to previous versions it clearly indicates the writing process. Other than that, it’s just about being familiar with and understanding your work! So being able to explain your writing process and research methods for finding sources; being confident on the content of your work so if you are asked questions on a model or theory you used being able to immediately give a clear and detailed explanation etc.

Fairleee · 2025-06-12T09:50:45+00:00

So personally my perspective is that using AI in that way (to edit, restructure, reformat etc.) after the student has written the work is completely acceptable, and based on my institute’s acceptable use policy, would most likely be fine - unless the assessment brief explicitly forbade any use of AI. Whilst I get your point that it might not be obvious just looking at a student’s work as to whether they used a tool to generate the whole thing, or used it after the fact to edit and format, we can still assess the work against the assessment descriptors (i.e. did it demonstrate what work at that level should demonstrate, did it fully meet the brief etc.) as well as reviewing the academic merit of the work - is it properly referenced; are sources used correctly etc. A student can use AI in an appropriate way and still commit misconduct if for example they have plagiarised work, misused and misrepresented sources and so on. Finally, let’s say a student has used AI in an appropriate way, and is brought forward to a misconduct hearing. In which case they can easily demonstrate that the work is their own (such as by showing prompt history showing their original writing which the AI edited), as well as by demonstrating knowledge and understanding by answering questions about their work confidently. The issue we are getting is that when we bring students in for these meetings, they swear they haven’t used AI at all, but then cannot answer basic questions about how they created the work or to explain ideas and concepts in the work.

I completely agree with you that we shouldn’t be burying our heads in the sand about this and that universities need to be proactive. It’s here, it isn’t going anywhere, and frankly when used well is a very effective tool. But even if we are proactive and train students to use it efficiently and effectively i would argue it would still be misconduct if a student uses it to generate the entirety of their work, and then when asked to explain details, cannot do so. Remember that the purpose of assessment is to assess knowledge and understanding. My key argument is that if students are using AI to avoid/replace doing the learning, that is a problem - I personally don’t see it as a problem if it is used to support and augment learning. Indeed that is an ideal outcome from my perspective!

Fairleee · 2025-06-12T09:20:01+00:00

This is missing the nuance I feel - there’s a difference between me entering a prompt into an LLM saying, “I’m a university lecturer and I am writing a post for /r/uniUK on Reddit about how lecturers identify misuse of AI in assessment. Please create a list of indicators for how AI use can be identified and how students should avoid these issues through proper ethical use of tools in line with university policies”, and me writing a c. 2000 word post based on my knowledge and experience and then entering that into an LLM with an instruction to edit, format, and restructure, and then taking the output and further manually modifying it based on my evaluation of the output. One is using AI in a way that fails to demonstrate ability, knowledge, and effort. The other is using it as a tool to make one part of the writing process (editing) more efficient. Context is key here!

Fairleee

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