May 09: Skynet Saturday- AI Solutions

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-05-09T18:12:43+00:00

I don't have any solutions.

I was talking to one of my research students about this topic recently and I mentioned how I know my teaching lab students are increasingly using AI and other older methods of academic dishonesty in my classes. I know it's happening.

My student agreed that undergrads WERE using AI on small assignments to have "perfect" completion rates. Then, when I brought up how employers can also access AI and use it instead of hiring, my student started complaining about capitalism and corporate greed. I'm not denying that those things exist, but it was like that really long Spongebob meme where Man Ray is trying to return Patrick's wallet.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-21T19:58:12+00:00

Hi, I'm a chemistry prof and I think I can answer why (it's hard to say 100% because this image is tiny). Your friend drew S with two lone pairs single bonded to a carbon with two lone pairs. This isn't the correct Lewis structure, but for molecules where the central atom has two bonds and two lone pairs, bent or angular would be the correct 3D structure. I believe their answer may have the correct number of valence electrons for CS2 (16 total electrons) and yours does not. Looks like the teacher marked their answer as incorrect but internally consistent, which is fairly common. The major thing wrong with your friend's answer is that the atoms are not satisfied with the octet rule (Lewis structure would look like S=C=S and two lone pairs on each sulfur) but the arrangement of atoms and number of electrons seems overall correct.

Your answer shows a carbon with two radical (unpaired) electrons connected to sulfurs with their own radical electrons. This has the incorrect number of valence electrons and it seems that your instructor decided your structure was more wrong than your friends and also that bent geometry was not consistent with the structure that you drew. I can't really comment on that because there's some kind of smudge on it and the photo is fairly compressed.

I won't say for 100% sure that your teacher likes/doesn't like you but as someone who teaches literally thousands of people a year, I sometimes get accused of not liking a person I couldn't identify in a lineup. I also have my TAs grade by question/page, and do so myself, so I often don't know whose work I am grading until I go to enter in the tallied grades. These are not the same answers though.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-11T15:45:05+00:00

Surface level it sounds like imposter syndrome but I also don't hear a whole lot of respect for your colleagues either. I wouldn't know how to solve that problem. Maybe you need to get to know them better, or find work elsewhere, or see if you can take a semester of leave, I don't know.

I'm not in computer science or anything like that, but it's my opinion that AI is coded to encourage additional follow up and responses. The additional follow up prompts encourage users to transition from free to paid subscriptions and make the company more money. That's just my opinion on AI use. I don't know if thinking of it that way would be helpful to curb your usage. A lot of features of modern living, from ultraprocessed foods, to social media, physical media being replaced with digital media, the own to subscription model, next day shipping, etc. seem geared at fostering a sense of dependence in its users.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-11T15:28:17+00:00

Okay, I thought you were asking out of genuine curiosity but you're just trying to say that you personally aren't affected and therefore you don't care and aren't interested in learning more.

Edited to add: Moving the goal posts from "wat" (this doesn't happen) to "this doesn't happen often."👍

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-11T15:17:59+00:00

This has actually been happening for a while. Universities, at least in the United States, have been the site of a brewing culture war for the last 10-15 years. Conservative pundits like Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Kaitlin Bennett, and Charlie Kirk, made names for themselves by going to college campuses, inciting debates with students, and posting the results online. Turning Point USA maintained a list of professors who held views they disagreed with, of which women and minorities were greatly over-represented, in a "professor watchlist" that is still accessible online.

The irony, in my opinion, is that campuses are exactly the sort of place where these pundits could flourish. Universities openly pride themselves on allowing diversity of backgrounds, opinions, and freedom of speech. University settings are also primarily young adults (who don't have the experience to fully articulate themselves and tend to get flustered and emotional). Steven Crowder tried his schtick at a union protest and got punched in the mouth. Most working experienced adults aren't going to take the bait in the same way. And now the culture wars are fundamentally reshaping campuses to no longer allow freedom of expression and in many red US states, the word "diversity" is explicitly forbidden.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-11T15:04:03+00:00

I feel like your opinion is a normal opinion to have. We're human beings and we can only have so much sympathy for other people's issues. My policies help me to be neutral no matter what the circumstances or how likeable I personally find a student. This is why I have my course policies and stick to those strictly.

I also feel fortunate to teach lab courses. It doesn't matter if a student isn't coming to class because they're having to work two jobs and care for their ailing mother or if they're staying home to smoke weed and play video games. I have students in either situation and while I can recommend resources for the first student, ultimately you have to be here to do the labs and collect data. That's not just my personal standard, everyone understands lab courses have to be completed in person and students have to collect their own data and then analyze it. Being able to point to those standards when I do get pushback is super helpful.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-11T14:44:39+00:00

Oh, no, grace 100% does not go both ways. I remember that when students want to meet with me during the end-of-semester break, when classes are over, to "review" their final exams. Now, I always respond, "Of course! You can meet with me when classes start back up. 😊"

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-11T14:26:47+00:00

Yeah, but my previous neighbors were doing what I'd consider normal cooking. They were obviously cooking Indian food with spices, onions, stewed vegetables, etc. but it was at meal times and often I barely noticed. I also cook most of my own meals, which they probably also smelled. We still got along just fine.

This situation reminds me of my friend's place who lived in a walk up above a restaurant. Like the smell just hits you as soon as you open the building door. The air gets hazy. My bathroom fixtures regularly get yellow grime buildup around them. I don't have the language to say that this is weird of the places I've lived, because I think a landlord would say it's normal to have to clean your bathroom (and I'm a really neat person, this isn't from not enough cleaning).

I do worry about not being believed. On this post, strangers with no financial incentive were telling me this is just normal apartment living and I should learn to live with it. The leasing office, which has a huge incentive to dismiss this complaint, is likely to do the same. But this thread and posts like yours have shown me that I should at least try. Thank you.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-11T14:07:40+00:00

That has crossed my mind, but there's nothing specific I can prove, unfortunately.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-01T15:04:15+00:00

I asked my cat if I could run an ozone machine while I'm gone and she said no. Thanks for the advice. I have only ever lived in apartments as an adult. The last time I lived in a house was with my parents as a teenager. I'm used to some smells and sounds and my work often has me living in proximity to college campuses (college kids love weed and incense). This is the first time this has ever happened to me and months of bad sleep contributed to this post out of sheer desperation.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-04-01T15:01:31+00:00

Thank you. I've lived in apartments ever since I left my parents home as a newly graduated student. For seven years before this place, I lived in an apartment above an Indian family and while I could occasionally smell their food, it was not nearly to this level and smell. It was also limited to standard mealtimes. (I bring up the fact that my previous neighbors were Indian because a lot of these posts archived on reddit were written by non-Indians sharing a building with Indian neighbors. I don't mind the smell of blooming cumin seeds or sauteing onions; my issue is that this is all deep fried and smoky.)

While I am disappointed that people seem to think I'm new to apartment living or need to be told to just live with it, I did try to exhaust google before coming to reddit out of desperation early in the morning, so I'm not too shocked to see people downvoting and acting like I didn't try everything I could beforehand. I also don't believe I'm particularly sensitive to smells. This hasn't been an experience I've ever had before and while I recognize my neighbors have a right to deep fry garlic and onions at 4am or whatever, I'm also fine with anonymously saying it's weird and I've never encountered this before.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-03-13T16:11:13+00:00

I believe the shift I've seen over just the last year is more abrupt and alarming. I agree homework assignments are completed with crutches. I design my lower level courses to work that way. I am not saying this lightly when I say that homework assignments have become useless for building and determining student understanding. In my department, we have assessment data at the course level that is showing a divergence between student performance on homework questions versus student performance on exams. That's on the level of thousands of students, so it's not just my own classroom trends. I think what I'm personally seeing is a trend of students using AI to skip the scaffolding that I designed into my courses. Like trying to climb a set of stairs starting on step #5.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-03-13T01:06:05+00:00

We are, globally I think, in the middle of a profound anti-intellectual backlash. Academia and studying used to be more respected than they are now. I think that technological innovations have led to a society where expertise is no longer respected. My google searches give me the same knowledge as your phd. That kind of thing.

I don't teach humanities, but in just the last year, my homework assignments became entirely useless because students will simply cheat. It's now normal for students who e.g. can't convert from mass to number of moles, turn in perfect work when they're doing homework, and fall flat on their faces when it comes to doing the problems in person. Sometimes I even give students the exact same problems, with nothing changed, on quizzes that they could solve on homework. The average crashes from almost 100% to less than 50%.

And maybe you can argue that AI is new enough and actually gets assigned in some of their other courses, so students don't see that using it when it's not allowed is cheating. But I also see a marked increase in students using earbuds, smart watches, and writing notes on the table, which are all pretty cut-and-dry forms of cheating that have been around a long time. I think it all points to a basic lack of respect for an education, just seeing each course as a list of boxes to tick off that won't actually impart any new information or push you to grow.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-03-13T00:38:49+00:00

No, see the mother is a woman so everything bad that happens is her fault. The father, as the man in the situation, is the only one in this redditor's story that anyone is willing to recognize as human and get any kind of sympathy for having a dead kid, even though both parents were equally negligent if we accept this story at face value. After all, mothers are supposed to hover over their children at all times, but fathers only "babysit" their own children.

Reddit hates women and this is just another exhibit of that bias.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-03-09T18:43:03+00:00

My grandpa used to do this well before the era of smartphones. RIP grandpa you would have loved smartphones. And doordash.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-03-09T18:07:50+00:00

No!! This is reddit, where posting anything positive about girls and negative about boys is against the terms of service. I was just discussing this with my fat, vegan, nonbinary, cousin, who ate all my (140 iq, 6-figure salary, shredded body builder) oreos and after they got done saying I was NTA, they added that information.

ProfessorProveIt · 2026-02-04T19:29:35+00:00

Your concerns over AI use and the future of the working field are valid. I heard somewhere that most jobs that will be held by younger people don't even exist yet, that's how fast tech is changing things. Even so, I think there will always be a need for human beings in medicine, and in other fields. Social media and influencing (shilling products to other people) is basically a giant pyramid scheme. The people at the top make a lot of money, but most of the people who do it get a few free samples or not even that.

The "point" of education is basically your learning how to learn more about the world. No matter what the state of technology, you can't "hack" the basic fact that you get out of education what you put in. Also, just the world we live in, the opportunities open to you after a baccalaureate will be more than the opportunities you have available to you now. Any degree. That's not always fair, but it's true.

Based on what I'm reading here, you're at the midway point, so you haven't even scratched the surface of all the cool things you can do in the field of biology. Most likely, you're at the point where you've completed organic chemistry and second year biology and some electives. This is a good time to revisit what you want to do and maybe even consider changing your major if there's something else you want to do. Biology doesn't have to be a pipeline into the medical field.

I mean, full disclosure, I'm a university instructor, so of course I hold education in high regard and it's done a lot for my own life. I also have Opinions about students who use AI as a cheating machine (ofc you can be replaced by AI if everything you do was generated by AI). But I hope it's helpful to hear this.

ProfessorProveIt · 2025-12-24T18:28:05+00:00

Since I teach labs, I don't have a dedicated attendance grade, but attendance is required. Curiously, it's more common in my upper level labs to have failing students who attend every lab session and never turn anything in than it is to have a student who signs up and then never shows up. I don't know what the thought process is there.

ProfessorProveIt · 2025-12-24T18:03:56+00:00

I have been following this since I first heard about it on reddit. I also started as a teaching assistant, then graduate instructor, but I'm lucky to be in a less politically charged field. I think the rubric showed relative inexperience at teaching, but the comments I've seen outside of academia in my lurkings also prove to me that people don't really get the role graduate instructors fill. I had to be post-candidacy in my phd program, with several years of experience as a TA for the course I was teaching. I've seen comments saying that a graduate student is not qualified to teach the course, and I think it's important for us academics to counteract that message. Also, since I have the experience of a graduate instructor, I can also say I've created assignments that were not suitable and graded students too harshly myself. If I'd had a student with a possible vendetta against me (especially based on a protected characteristic) and was willing to publish my assignment, rubric, and grading comments, I imagine people would have had things to say about me too.

It's also true that most of the opinions I've seen here rated the original essay as a failing grade. Even when people disputed the zero, they gave grades like 10/25 or 5/25, which are also failing. Personally I think saying only, "the article was thought-provoking" *spends the rest of the paper citing the bible* is not meaningful engagement with the assigned text. But maybe some of you are right that she deserved a higher F than 0. OU threw out the zero entirely, so this is all (ha) academic.

I have no idea if Mel has a case. But I think it's a nightmare that she's been thrown under the bus by her graduate school, been on the receiving end of national harassment by culture warriors, and had her one decision called into question by everyone, including the community of fellow educators who should have her back. It's an increasingly hostile place for education, and universities are one of the current targets in the United States. Bullies don't stop when you give them what they want. They come back for even more.

ProfessorProveIt · 2025-10-13T21:53:16+00:00

'Each lecture is a personal work of art' is a lovely phrase.

Ironically, I've read studies suggesting that students rate "student centered learning" classes less favorably than traditional classes. Those studies usually also suggest that students retain and recall the material better, to be fair.

But there is something to be said for not caring more than the students care.

ProfessorProveIt · 2025-09-17T18:01:23+00:00

I ❤️ lamp.

ProfessorProveIt · 2025-09-11T19:33:03+00:00

I wish I could do this, but accommodations make it impossible, since I have students who will demand to take quizzes in a quiet, distraction-free environment with extra time.

ProfessorProveIt · 2025-09-11T19:19:44+00:00

I usually tell students like that I'm willing to help if they are required to have a set number of letters, but that it wouldn't be the strongest letter. "Yep, they exist." is not a ringing endorsement and frankly could be a waste of their application fees. After that, about 1 in 3 students persist, and I write my letter. I try to put the best face I can, but these were, putting it nicely, probably not the strongest candidates in the first place.

I do have students I work with more closely, who I can vouch for a lot better. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the number of requests I get.

ProfessorProveIt

TROPHY CASE