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I agree wholeheartedly with your comment if the assessment is at that undergraduate level. Any knowledge, of, say a work they should have read should be available to them via their brains. At most allow outlines.
When the assignment is research -based it's more difficult. In the days of which you speak, and before (e.g. in my day) to do research you went physically to the library and looked through the damn card catalog and microfiche, and the achingly slow interlibrary loan system. Even ten years ago for research you were online trolling through Google Scholar. The worst you had to fear was if a student plagiarized some other essayist, and thus sites like Turnitin.com sprouted up.
Now to let a student online is to risk them simply composing a prompt and asking their Chatbot to do literally everything.
I am currently editing a conference proceedings. Out of the 20 or so submissions, around four clearly used an LLM to create chunks of text and all the references. Sorry to say this is still easily detected--xxxx instead of DOI information information in citations, for example. t's shocking because these are either Masters level or in one case a doctoral candidate. They don't even bother reading through what they're submitting, it sometimes seems.
It wouldn’t eliminate the problem, but the proctored exams could filter out many of the people who wouldn’t be able to hack it but for cheating.
Or maybe even force them to learn how not to cheat.
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That’s obviously a much real problem than what the article is complaining about. But I can’t help myself from thinking that it might be good if this leads to the destruction of the extremely time consuming rituals around academic publishing. So much word salad academese jargon. LLMs are clearly extremely good at transforming relatively simple sentences into correctly worded monstrosities so none of that can act as a smartness proxy anymore. So maybe real humans writing clearly and to the point will make a comeback?
Oh, believe me I wish it could be so. I am very anti-jargon. But jargon has a way of cropping up everywhere. Even here.
Ah, I vaguely remember that!
If you're keeping notes / a running version, it'd be interesting to see an update at the end of this year or so and see you reflect on what changed in the political slang discourse.
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