1. They hallucinate. They make up sources. They cite work with no relevance to the subject. Example: a paper about colonial religion referenced a book about Spurgeon, a 19th century evangelist.
2. The usually do pretty shallow analysis of texts.
3. Fundamentals of Chicago Manual of Style such as page numbers, headers, double spaced first line indented seems to be beyond many of these programs. In a sense, these minutiae do not teach either research methods or writing. They do teach attention to detail.
One approach that some universities are tsking is scaffolding: breaking the process apart into individual parts.
1. Show me the question you are going to answer..
2. How did you find sources to answer that question. AI may be a perfectly fine method of finding sources. (Are your old enough to remember Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature?)
3. Your sources: explain their relevance to this question; what do they say about the topic?
4. What are the topic sentences for each paragraph? What is the sequence of topics you are going to cover?
4. Show me your bibliography. Get it in Chicago Manual of Style. Again, using AI to do the housekeeping is quite mechanical.
6. Write the paper filling in the paragraphs for each topic sentence.
7. Show that you can do the formatting for Chicago Manual of Style: header, page numbers, paragraph formatting.
8. Submit the paper.
The student must complete each step that can often be done by AI. You can ask the student to explain how he/she/indeterminate made those decisions and provide feedback for how it is supposed to be done. The full laziness of prompting AI and doing a copy pastae into Word is eliminated. Even if every step is AI-assisted, the student learns what each step looks like and can presumably do it in a post-EMP world using dead trees sources.
Thoughts?
I apologize for leaving this comment on an unrelated post. Wasn't sure if you'd even see it if I comment on your April 24 post.
ReplyDeleteYou write, "In 1955, you could find Americans who believed that blacks lacked the intelligence to compete with whites."
We know from internal data Harvard was forced to disclose in the recent lawsuit that "under a system that used only academic merit in its decision-making, only 0.94% of black applicants would have gotten into Harvard, rather than the 15.81% actually accepted." We also know that American blacks *on average* have an IQ over 10 points lower than American whites.
There are obviously high-IQ (120+), high performing blacks, but they are a much tinier fraction of the black population than smart whites are of the white population. How is it inaccurate *as a generalization* (not a categorical rule) to say that "blacks lack the intelligence to compete with whites"?
I remember the green volumes of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, the real question is where will those green volumes be in a post EMP world, and how will we manage to Shepardize cases when Shepardizing cases from the hardbound volumes and two paperback volumes that Shepardize first the most recent whole month, and then the most recent two weeks not included in the monthly Shepardizing paperback. I haven't seen either paper version of doing these things since around 1981. I'd have to think about how to do that, and no one I went to law school with knows how to do that, either. Plus between 1999 and 2008 the lawyer I clerked for disposed of his paper series of California cases, the XX Cal 2nd YYY, for example. We are hosed, even worse than if the EMP blows out every car on the road and every mechanic's diagnostic computer that interprets the OBDI that tells him what parts to swap out to see if that solves the problem you took your car in for him to fix.
ReplyDeletePost-EMP: I rather doubt either will much matter.
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