[kjellsbells]

I'm sure I'm just an old curmudgeon, but when I heard that undergrads were using ChatGPT to write essays my first instinct was to wonder how university standards had gotten so low that a generated essay would not simply be dismissed as a feeble attempt.

500 words on the Thirty Years War generated by an AI and submitted by a high schooler I could understand. But arent college standards higher?

[notafraudster]

It depends on the college. I have two friends who are professors in the same subject (a humanities-ish subject that is reading/writing heavy).

One is a professor at a low end CSU. The way she describes her students is roughly high school level; they struggle with tasks like writing a 2-3 page, 3-point, sandwich-style essay. They struggle with reading primary source material. Her senior students typically seem to have the kind of skills I would expect of a college freshman. Many students have severe life disrupting issues (rehab and court are common). Deadlines seem to mostly be a suggestion.

The other is a professor, again in the same subject, at a relatively well ranked and famous north eastern liberal arts college. The way he describes his students is that they engage, handle very dense primary source readings, and that many of them are on track for grad school or law school. I am not sure what he assigns them as final assignments, but I would assume 10-20 page final papers are not uncommon. He's never mentioned anything about behavioural issues, though like every other professor he notes that accommodations/mental health stuff is worse than it used to be.

I also thought "boy, ChatGPT seems to be closer to what was expected of me in 10th grade English than it does to any university course I ever took", and frankly I went to a mediocre Canadian university and didn't really go to a competitive world class university until my PhD.

So it's possible that the push towards everyone has going to colleges has created greater stratification from college to college. The CSU system's mandate is to serve the underserved, so it's probably not a stretch to say many of the people in my colleague's classes wouldn't have gotten into college without an explicit effort to make a college for them.

[Veen]

I know that in Oxbridge Universities, that wouldn't cut it. The teaching method revolves around writing essays and attending small tutorials where you discuss your arguments with a subject-matter expert. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't scale.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/student-life/e...

[twic]

Although of course from the point of view of someone enjoying the benefits of an Oxbridge degree, that probably doesn't seem like a problem!

[iLoveOncall]

As part of my CS studies, I went a year in a US university, where I had to take a random class on top of CS classes. I chose a cinema class, where we were watching movies, discussing with the teacher or the director and had to write a 2 pages essay on it.

English is not my mother tongue and it was my first time living in an English speaking country, and of course I had 0 background in anything related to cinema.

The level of the other students was so abysmal that I was got the best grade of the whole class for every single essay.

It was not a great university, but the level of students with even 1 or 2 years of college education is appalling.

[SL61]

In most of my classes, the professors were just happy to get a paper with proper spelling/grammar and some degree of coherence. Strength of argumentation might be the difference between an A- and an A.

For context, I graduated in 2020.