I used to teach, years before LLMs, and got lots of copy-pasted crap submitted. I always marked it zero, never mentioning plagiarism (which would require some university administration) and just commenting that I asked for X and instead got some pasted together nonsense.
As long as LLM output is what it is, there is little threat of it actually being competitive on assignments. If students are attentive enough to paraphrase it into their own voice I'd call it a win; if they just submit the crap that some data labeling outsourcer has RLHF'd into a LLM, I'd just mark it zero.
Yeah, the author here is as much a part of the problem. If you let students get away with submitting ChatGPT nonsense, of course they’re going to do that - they don’t care about the 3000 words appeal to emotion on your blog, they take the path of least resistance.
If you’re not willing to cross out an entire assignment and return it to the student who handed it in with “ChatGPT nonsense, 0” written in big red letters at the top of it, you should ask yourself what is the point of your assignments in the first place.
But I get it, university has become a pay-to-win-a-degree scheme for students, and professors have become powerless to enforce any standards or discipline in the face of administrators.
So all they can do is give the ChatGPT BS the minimum passing grade and then philosophize about it on their blog (which the students will never read).
Yeah this is what I did the one time I invigilated/marked a Matlab exam. Very obvious cheating (e.g. getting the right answer with incorrect code). But no way was I going through the admin of accusing them of cheating. They just got a 0.
If it’s copy pasted it’s obvious, and the assignment isn’t to turn in a correct solution, but to turn in evidence that you are able to determine a correct solution. Automated answers deserve 0 credit.
When I was kid in school I would write original essays, and I mean truly original creative ideas. But of course any new idea has a chance of failure, so these essays were mostly bad and got bad grades. At a loss for what to do I quickly stopped reading the books I was assigned basing my essays on Wikipedia summaries and other people’s reviews. I saw my first few As and even A+s and I realized if I write something original of even just average intelligence roughly 50% of people will be too dumb to understand it. For an idea to truly be considered intelligent in literature it has to be appealing to people have no actual memory of the things they’ve read. Even for a knowledgeable intelligent person they have a sea of similar information clouding their view.
As long as LLM output is what it is, there is little threat of it actually being competitive on assignments. If students are attentive enough to paraphrase it into their own voice I'd call it a win; if they just submit the crap that some data labeling outsourcer has RLHF'd into a LLM, I'd just mark it zero.