It seems too early for a new semester to begin, with a couple more days of 90s (followed by the return of the monsoons and the 80s), but my Metro class officially begins Monday. And there is an on-campus department meeting Friday, though it is not required of part-timers like myself. That is fine, since we are supposed to be in Seattle Thursday - Sunday.
CSU begins a week later, which seems more civilized, so I still have some time to fiddle with that course. But the Metro class is pretty much locked now, with several new assignments.
My hope is that they will be AI resistant. I even asked Claude.ai for some advice on creating AI-resistant assignments, and the ideas seemed solid to me. The key seems to be to tighten the time span that the assignment covers and stick to recent events. AI needs to be trained and there is a lag between the programs grabbing up the news and processing the new information.
Even better is to make assignments intensely personal... AI does great when it comes to generalizations, for instance. So, asking a student to write a descriptive essay about something that seemed interesting in his or her life over the past two weeks might work.
On the other hand, I have simply copied and pasted assignment prompts into Claude.ai or ChatGPT and the robot is quite shameless in simply making stuff up. I am getting fairly good at recognizing "robot writing," but I can't claim to have any foolproof method. In fact, I couldn't make an iron-clad case if students protested their innocence.
One thing that I learned last semester was that any famous writing or speech or movie or TV show cannot be the subject that an argument essay can build upon. There's just so much writing out there and the tech companies have done an effective job of vaccuming all that data into their systems.
So, for instance, if I asked for an argument that grows out of even a brand new show, like Season 4 of Tedd Lasso, fuhgettaboutit. I had a favorite graduation speech by David Foster Wallace from two decade ago - "This is Water - and had to replace it after being confronted by a handful of obviously AI-aided rhetorical analyses last spring. There was really nothing I could do about it, since there is no detection software that is 100 percent. The best I can do in that case is sigh and make a note to find something else as a prompt.
The good news is that argument prompts are everywhere. Claude suggested asking students to keep a log of their social media feed for a short time, with screen captures as evidence, and to then ask them to analyze what their "feed" thinks about them.
I have added a version of that for this fall, though it is one of two options that week. It did occur to me that I shouldn't just assume that every students follows social media, just like I shouldn't assume every student will choose a shortcut with AI over doing their own research and writing their own drafts.
I would never kid myself about inventing "uncheatable" assignment prompts, and the universities have not created anything that we can count on. Lowly adjuncts such as myself are left to stumble and experiment and agonize.
And I'm not sure it was ever much better for online writing classes. Heck, a kid could easily hire someone or just have a bright spouse do all the work, and that has nothing to do with AI.
There is a certain amount of faith required in academic life... and in life, more generally.
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