I’m a 21 y/o and never have ever used AI for that sort of stuff.
I think people get their brains atrophied if they use AI too much.
I write enough documentation to fill 20-30 pages a day.
fuck these dumbass kids.
they should ban the use of computers in the classroom and relegate them to handwritten homework only.
you have to train the mind before you give the gift of technology.
I would hide out and read the sparknotes summaries right before class and still get good marks. I guess that’s why I struggled to get back into reading for a while lmao. So maybe some of these kids will make it out?
I’m absolutely sickened by the crap that people are somehow paid for on websites now. I just wanted to look at different ideas about the ending of a show I like and I got the laziest writing I’ve ever seen. Any teacher I’ve ever had would have had red marks all over the page and demanded I fix it and return it. Proper names were misspelled and sentences didn’t follow smoothly. It’s so frustrating.
I remember my brother used to write 10 page essays by hand. I think the longest I did by hand was 5.
Wait until they get to the level where 10 pages is easier than 1 page.
Man I fucking hated that. Here’s a problem where you need to include a lot of data and graphs.
2 pages maximum.
“I hope they like microfiche text size”
I had a class where I wrote a ~70 page report for the midterm project, and a ~120 page report for the final project. My lab partner and I had to pull all nighters for both, and I drank an entire 2-liter of mountain dew to stay awake to finish the final project’s report. This was before I even had any machine learning or AI classes, so having AI write it wasn’t even an option to me.
All that to say, kids these days are soft 😤
They are not soft. They are going through a lot of tough stuff, it’s just different stuff. I hated when my parents generation dismissed my troubles as me being soft when I was younger, let’s break that cycle.
Go to Wikipedia, copy that, then rewrite it underneath, make sure to delete the Wikipedia copy.
Why not, it’s all the AI does
Reminds me of a first year of middle school personal anecdote. At the beginning of the school year, our literature teacher asked us to do research about a subject and present the results.
It was the beginning of internet at home, so almost everyone came back with literal web pages printed, thinking they had done well. The teacher was furious about this “demonstration of laziness” and started to go through the students one by one and handling 0/20 grades for the assignment, like a gardener carefully pulling weeds one by one, savoring each wilt. Occasionally she would praise the few students that took time to manually write down their research.
I was in the back of the classroom, so analyzing the situation quickly and sweating, I started to furiously handwrite to a Seyès ruled paper the Wikipedia page I had printed (with the help of my father), cut the one picture and glue it to the paper. I managed to escape the culling with a good enough grade.
Her last name was that of a fearsome wild animal. It was her final year before retirement, and as the year went on, we realized she was actually a very conscientious and caring teacher.I had a lecturer that was very anti-internet. But she didn’t have any real sort of point, she just didn’t believe things written on the internet had the same integrity as physically published articles. She was difficult to because a lot of modern research (anything published after the year 2005) has never been published in a printed format, except to the extent that someone had printed the online version. So all my references had URLs in, which was bound to set her off.
Even if I was trying to reference some work published in the 19th century a lot of time that work had been subsequently uploaded to the internet and the best reference would be an online archive. So then I would have to go and find some book that had it in. It was a giant waste of everybody’s time. Every other professor was fine with it.
Wikipedia?! Oh, you sweet summer child.
Don’t you threaten the integrity of knowledge that is Wikipedia. It has an awful lot more to recommend to human civilisation than some random data centre AI
I wasn’t.
I was saying it didn’t exist.
How long ago was that??? I used Wikipedia a lot in high school. I’m nervous it’ll be taken over by these goons (like they’ll start editing) and become useless. One of my favorite things when I’m bored is clicking on random wiki links.
Mid-90s. Internet basically began whilst I was at Uni. When I started all the computers were networked but for text based services (Gopher, Newsgroups, email). When I left web pages were a thing.
Wikipedia didn’t start until 2001.
Ah that sounds lovely
It skims everything on the internet
One of my greatest academic achievements was a very long, in-depth research paper that was assigned on the first day of the semester and due on the last. “Don’t put it off until the end,” our teacher warned us, “because you won’t be able to finish this in a couple of hours. You should be doing a little bit of work on it every week.” It was to be deeply-researched, extensively endnoted, and (if I recall correctly) fifty pages long, single-spaced, 10pt.
Except I had a full-time job throughout college, and that semester my schedule found me going to work immediately after that (morning) class, both days, every week. By the time I was off work, the thought of that assignment had left my undiagnosed ADHD brain entirely. The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.
And suddenly the last day of class was approaching. I requested the prior day off of work, figuring that I’d work the whole day on it. Only I made a mistake: I hadn’t requested the day before it was due. I had requested the day it was due. I’d be working four full days of work, with classes (and at least one early final exam), and then the paper would be due, and only after that would I have the day to write it.
But you do what you have to, and when you’re 19 years old, the vagaries of time and sleep seem almost meaningless to you. I was going to get off work at 6pm, which was 14½ hours before the assignment was due. My university had a 24-hour computer lab, which was good, as it was 2004 and I didn’t have internet in my apartment (how did I ever live like that?).
So I went home, ate a quick dinner, and went to school, locking myself into the computer lab at 8:00pm. When I poked my head out the door at 7:30am, the sun was bright and the air slightly crisp; and I held 52 freshly-printed pages in my hand. I was done early (technically) and had beaten the page count (also technically). I felt like I had beaten the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. I ate breakfast to supplement the copious amounts of Nutty Bars and soda I had consumed overnight, and then I turned the paper in; and as class that morning was “optional,” I opted to go home, where I discovered that perhaps time was not so vague at all, nor sleep, and I went unconscious for the rest of the morning and a decent chunk of the afternoon.
A week later, I got my grades back. At that point in any semester I was always beyond caring about how well I had scored, but I looked anyway out of curiosity.
“Well done!” she had written in the notes. “I can tell you really put a lot of time into this. 95/100”
I mean, technically she was right, I had put a lot of time into it: the 11½ hours immediately leading up to my turning it in, to be precise.
That means that you understood it yourself though, no? I have worked til the wee hours on many a paper at a prestigious school and it always worked out for me because I was paying attention the whole time, so it didn’t matter that I only started the paper the night before. Essays fill me with dread so the deadline has to rear its ugly head before I can start. TL;DR same
Fair point. I also took pretty good notes, which as I recall formed a pretty good outline for me.
Exactly and you remember where in the readings you saw things so it’s easy to flip around and pick a part you want to reference. That’s not at all the same as asking a bot to do it for you.
I have a lot of glorious moments but my highlight was when I started a 4,000 word paper the afternoon before and got glowing reviews. It’s not because I was intellectually lazy, it’s because I knew exactly what references I was looking for and had plotted a large part of it out in my head already. I mean, I was lazy, but I did know what was going on, and I learned.
The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.
Source:
don’t worry gentle reader they gave him another one
Do you have a longer version?
This always kills me when I see this. The raccoon and opossum that basically has made a home in my garage…with my fat ass garage cat, loves to take the cat food that, said fat ass doesn’t finish during the day, and put it in the water…every single morning, I’m having to clean it cause the racoon loves to eat his food soaked to mush. Still love the little shit when I occasionally catch him in the evening laying around in the garage, like he’s trash panda hut.
That look on his face is exactly how I felt.
Very crunchy… Totally works though.
Geez I felt that in my bones… I’m SO glad my days of undiagnosed ADHD and assignments are long and gone, but your story stirred up some anxiety responses, from the sediment of my mind. Yuck! And well done! 95/100 ✔️
Thank you for the kind words, especially from amid the anxiety sludge! Honestly, I think every graduating senior should be given a psychiatric exam, just so they know and don’t have to wait until they’re 35 and maxed out their deductible for the year to get tested.
Ugh I couldn’t imagine how that’s like, but I sympathise!Thankfully I’m from one of those “socialist” nordic countries, where healthcare is free, or rather, collectively payed for through taxes. Even my current medication is more or less free. I get 95% of my dexamphetamines subsidies through the system. Honestly I’ll gladly pay ~50% in tax, when I’m covered like that!
I lived 98% of my life in the US, but six months ago I moved to New Zealand. It’s far from socialist, and I look with envy on much of what you have, but it’s so much better than the life I was living before.
Best story I read this week, as in, so well put together. I bet you get this a lot, but you really have a way with words!
Frankly, I think the quality of the story there may, in and of itself, be evidence of how they managed to get a 52 page paper done and have it be well received by the prof.
Thank you! You’re very kind. That’s an interesting observation I hadn’t considered–but now I’m kind of struck by the chicken-and-egg question of whether I passed classes I didn’t put in the work for because I was a decent writer, or if I got good at writing so that I could slack off in classes.
Oh, thank you! You’re very kind. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Ope, I had a few of those projects. Typically for me they were group projects where I was the only competent person in the group at writing in English or at doing our major. I always told people that I could do any one part of the project, got given the engineering portion, then wound up having to do the whole thing last minute. And thus a night without sleep where everyone bailed when they either decided they couldn’t really help or had to fly home.
But hey, at least my senior capstone wasn’t like that, it took two of us barely sleeping for a month to get it done on time despite making decent progress all year prior…
Slacker.
I routinely wrote more than 10 pages in handwritten passages just to play a game. Indeed I still do. Without any degenerative AI in sight. (Because nobody’s crammed an LLMbecile into my fountain pens yet.)
I used to write small games in BASIC on paper and then go over to my friend’s house and type them into his VIC-20 to play them (these things had an optional tape drive for saving programs but his parents were too cheap to pay for that). It really taught me to code carefully and get everything right the first time around. In the early '90s I visited India and saw software companies that had ten programmers and one PC and they were also coding with pencil and paper. I assumed that this meant Indian programmers were going to be fantastic once they each got their own computers, but I was wrong about this – they’re just as shitty as everybody else.
I did this with my apple ii. There would be applesoft basic games in magazines you could type in. Then I’d have to debug them for the expected typos. Then, of course, I’d start modifying them to cheat lol
Just weakness. Everyone knows you write your term paper starting less than 24 hours before the deadline and crank out a fully realized thesis made out of nothing but energy drinks and Adderall
i was doing that with multiple papers with 1 week(the professor allowed you to turn in previous terms paper late in the semester, this made everyone, including me just cram within it out withina few days. also because the exact same essay prompt/ subject was online it was eaiser to write the paper and not have to fully sit down and think about it. he wasnt like most other english professors, as he allowed you more time to write essay. most of them are very strict on the writing style, grammer, or “convincing arguments” of your essay. for A CC course.
Ah… I remember these days, being in a somewhat nervous caffeine induced psychosis, typing in an haughty fervor and writing 20+ pages with unmerited arrogance and barely an ounce of fear. Printing it out before it’s due and feeling like I pulled off an Ocean’s theft after managing a 93%.
Don’t forget no proofreading
and cite sources correctly, and correctly put the sources in the correct paper format on the last page, which was the most annoying part. i remember the annoying hanging indents you have to use.
Slaming monster until my heart feels funny, but that GPA isn’t going to keep itself up
I can remember the dizzy feeling, like the room was spinning like it was yesterday lol.
Cs get degrees baybayyyyy, anything over a 65% will do
70% in non-stem majors. 60 is the norm for chemistry, gen chem was the hardest chems compared to org chem, biochem was in between, but also had a terrible teacher. and this was how COMMUNITY schools were teaching in my area, and not universities, at a univerisity it was so much easier to understand gradingwise. of course if you want to ge to more advance classes or grad school, C’s arnt acceptable at all. it was better to drop or disenroll early on, or get D. withdraw, they made it extremely difficult to do it. because many programs might calculate Ws harsher than a D depending on where you want to go.
A local idiom is “60% is the good life, 61% is wasted time”.
True, I just took pride in pulling a paper out of my ass at the last second and it appearing like I put weeks of effort into it lol.
You guys had Adderall?
We just ate spoonfulls of instant coffee and ground our teeth into little bumps.
Cocaine was legal then
Not every one is like that! Some of us start on the very day they get the assignment, work on it for a good hour, then without a fail every week stress about it for a whole afternoon until finishing the paper on the due day.
Believe it or not, I still do my best work under the gun. In my current job, sometimes people pay me extra to expedite my turnaround, and I thrive under the pressure. Perhaps it’s the promise of extra money, but I just feel so much more focused knowing my hard deadline is fast approaching.
Yeah, I always purposefully wait to do my projects at work until the last second. If you don’t have time to do anything else, you don’t think about doing anything else. Plus it helps when someone forgets about a project and sends it over to me with way too little time left, but I get it done anyway since that’s the amount of time I’d have allotted myself regardless. I always clock a bunch of overtime and make sure to talk it up like it was a huge undertaking when that happens, though, so they don’t think they can just give me more work all the time.
Oh yeah, I believe you bro. We all have adhd
There was a time before when we just had coffee.
Nah, if you’re old enough, then cocaine would have been legal and cost $0.05
I always just got it done early and slacked off after the fact without the stress lol. I still half assed most of the pointless stuff and only tried hard when it was stuff I cared about or actually for my field.
Congratulations on your normal executive function
Who me? I’m autistic. Getting it done was the only way not to fall apart. Putting it off till the last minute was a sure for way for me to fully break down!
People were writing 10+ page reports before computers. Writing shit by hand.
A few years ago, I found some college notes from 1906 next to a dumpster. They were hand written in beautiful cursive and bound as books, hundreds of pages for each subject. i couldn’t find a single mistake or smudge or anything. This was from a time where the main source of information were lectures where you were expected to write everything down, then use that as your textbook. It was hard to comprehend that at the time students had to make such an effort just to obtain the materials needed to complete a course. Too bad they were so mouldy would’ve loved to keep them.
Hey, we got a typewriter at some point, it didn’t help much with having to start the whole page over every time you made a mistake, but it did get the teachers off my back about my terrible handwriting so that was nice.
why didn’t you just use the backspace key? /s
We’ve had White-out for almost a century now. They most certainly could’ve corrected those mistakes instead of starting over.
Whiteout was way out of the price range of my impoverished student ass.
Huh. It was a mandatory part of our back-to-school kit for most years here.
People were doing that after computers as well. See exams.
I never liked that. It felt like only 20% of my mental bandwidth went into words, sentences and ideas. The rest went into printing characters on the paper by using the slowest method possible. No wonder why the text sucked every time. Using a computer improved text quality and output rate significantly.
As someone that finished a couple of years ago it was already becoming that way then.
This didn’t mean that people weren’t learning but they were getting lazy. The AI detection isn’t good enough because a lot of people are willing to write their papers through the AI in pieces and check that, since it’s still faster than doing it yourself in most cases.
It’s becoming this weird cycle. It’s expected that you’ll use AI anyway, that you’ll be discriminated against for it, that professionals are going to try to use it to cut down on their work once hired, that HR is going to use it in the hiring process. So no one sees a reason not to use it.
I got so good at cranking out papers in college that I could BS my way through them in a couple of hours
Plagiarism has always existed, it just got easier over time. Before AI, a lot of students just copy and pasted stuff they found online and changed some words to get past the plagiarism checking programs. Right now all that manual work got automated so you don’t have to copy and paste or alter what you took, you can just prompt an AI chatbot to do it for you.
The fix for all forms of plagiarism is “write it here, in front of me”.
