Professor at the end of 2 years of struggling with ChatGPT use among students. [ reddit ]

The flava:

Professor here. ChatGPT has ruined my life. It’s turned me into a human plagiarism-detector. I can’t read a paper without wondering if a real human wrote it and learned anything, or if a student just generated a bunch of flaccid garbage and submitted it. It’s made me suspicious of my students, and I hate feeling like that because most of them don’t deserve it.

I actually get excited when I find typos and grammatical errors in their writing now.

The biggest issue—hands down—is that ChatGPT makes blatant errors when it comes to the knowledge base in my field (ancient history). I don’t know if ChatGPT scrapes the internet as part of its training, but I wouldn’t be surprised because it produces completely inaccurate stuff about ancient texts—akin to crap that appears on conspiracy theorist blogs. Sometimes ChatGPT’s information is weak because—gird your loins—specialized knowledge about those texts exists only in obscure books, even now.

I’ve had students turn in papers that confidently cite non-existent scholarship, or even worse, non-existent quotes from ancient texts that the class supposedly read together and discussed over multiple class periods. It’s heartbreaking to know they consider everything we did in class to be useless.

My constant struggle is how to convince them that getting an education in the humanities is not about regurgitating ideas/knowledge that already exist. It’s about generating new knowledge, striving for creative insights, and having thoughts that haven’t been had before. I don’t want you to learn facts. I want you to think. To notice. To question. To reconsider. To challenge. Students don’t yet get that ChatGPT only rearranges preexisting ideas, whether they are accurate or not.

And even if the information was guaranteed to be accurate, they’re not learning anything by plugging a prompt in and turning in the resulting paper. They’ve bypassed the entire process of learning.

The source:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kzzyb2/professor_at_the_end_of_2_years_of_struggling/

UT System nixes faculty senates, approves restrictions on campus protests [ Texas Tribune ]

The flava:

The University of Texas System Board of Regents authorized campus presidents on Thursday to replace faculty senates with less independent versions of the bodies.

The decision is a turning point for the state’s largest university system that shifts academic and hiring decisions once left to faculty and university leaders into the hands of lawmakers and governor-appointed regents. . . .    

The article:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/21/university-texas-system-faculty-senates-protests-campus-speech/

‘A nightmare': Students and faculty respond to Villanova campus shooting hoax [ NBC10 Philadelphia]

A desk with the greatest view [ CBS Sunday Morning ]

Caring Relationships Drive Revenue [ Get Down to College Business ]

Why does Reading University have a nuclear bunker? [ Chris Spargo ]

How College Financial Troubles Could Reshape the Student Experience [ NYTimes ]

The flava:

American higher education is lurching into an era of austerity. . . .   

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/us/college-financial-troubles-student-experience.html

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds [ NYTimes ]

The flava:

For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace. A new statistical analysis backs up the concern.

A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields.

“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries.

“Science relies on trusting what others did, so you do not have to repeat everything,” Dr. Amaral said.

By the 2010s, journal editors and watchdog organizations were warning that this trust was under threat. They flagged a growing number of papers with fabricated data and doctored images. In the years that followed, the factors driving this increase grew more intense. . . .   

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/science/04hs-science-papers-fraud-research-paper-mills.html

The Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor [ Gizmodo ]

The flava:

Mark Massaro has taught English Composition at Florida Southwestern State College for years, but his job became significantly more difficult in 2023. Not long after AI apps like ChatGPT became freely available, higher education throughout the U.S. was hit with a tsunami of automated cheating. Students have been using AI to write essays—and the trend appears to be worsening as time passes. Massaro said that, out of 25 students in his classes, it isn’t unusual for as many as five to turn in papers that appear to be written by AI.

When ChatGPT first launched, and it became apparent that students were using it to cheat, Massaro says he used to run papers through multiple AI scanners a day. If a majority of them labeled the prose as generated by AI, he believed them. Now, however, the school doesn’t allow them to upload students’ work to such applications because it could be considered a breach of their privacy. It also doesn’t help that the accuracy of AI detectors is unreliable.

Instead, Massaro says he must depend on his own wits to assess whether a paper was illegitimately conjured or not. . . .   

The article:

https://gizmodo.com/the-biggest-signs-that-ai-wrote-a-paper-according-to-a-professor-2000634580

In Defense of “Silly Science:” How Curiosity-Driven Research Drives Discovery [ Amanpour and Company ]