330: Notre Dame Allows Educators to Ban Grammarly
Plus, ChatGPT goes down, students lose their minds. Plus, cheating companies are using the brands and logos of 197 schools - "This Isn't Fine" has a list. Plus, class notes.
Issue 330
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University of Notre Dame Allows Teachers to Ban Grammarly
According to coverage in Inside Higher Ed — more on this in a second — the University of Notre Dame now allows its professors to ban the use of Grammarly, the AI writing software, by name.
To start, good. Letting teachers decide what assistance and technologies are allowed in the courses they teach seems like a very reasonable policy. And I’ve always suggested naming cheating providers because it limits future confusion.
The only reason it seems to be news is that it’s Grammarly, and people remember what the company used to be, while still coming to terms with what Grammarly is, namely a full-on AI cheating tool, just like ChatGPT (see Issue 315).
IHE writes:
like so many types of software, the advent of generative AI has transformed Grammarly’s capabilities in recent years. It now offers an AI assistance component that “provides the ability to quickly compose, rewrite, ideate, and reply,” according to the company’s website.
No kidding.
Continuing:
While many students have welcomed those enhancements to help them write research papers, lab reports and personal essays, some professors are increasingly concerned that generative AI has morphed the editing tool into a full-fledged cheating tool.
I have no doubt that students “welcomed” products that can do their work for them. And yes, for the one thousandth time, Grammarly has become a “full-fledged cheating tool.” I think I wrote that like seven sentences ago.
IHE continues:
“Over the past year, [academic integrity] questions about Grammarly kept surfacing. Professors would contact me and say, ‘This piece of writing looks so completely different from everything else I received from this student so far. Do you think they used generative AI to create it?’” said Ardea Russo, director of Notre Dame’s Office of Academic Standards. “We would look at it more deeply and the student would say, ‘I used Grammarly.’”
Exactly. It’s been clear for some time now that students have been exploiting the mindset of the old Grammarly, expecting to be able to use it in any setting for any purpose. I used exploit there with purpose because I do not think college students are that stupid. They know they are not doing the writing. They know that’s not the expectation.
Either way, if students are using something to cheat, what is the compelling argument over whether schools or teachers should have the power to disallow it? Tell me the difference between “banning” Grammarly and a closed-book exam.
Here is the news:
To avoid further confusion about Grammarly—which many students were accustomed to using—Notre Dame updated its policy this August to clarify that because “AI-powered editing tools like Grammarly and WordTune work by using AI to suggest revisions to your writing,” if an instructor “prohibits the use of gen AI on an assignment or in a class, this prohibition includes the use of editing tools, unless explicitly stated otherwise.”
Left the link in.
IHE also quotes a Notre Dame student:
“I see where they’re coming from, but on the other hand, that would mean you also have to ban things like peer reviews and Thesaurus.com,” she said. “That just starts to become too much and hinders students’ abilities to use these tools. In the workplace and the real world, you’re never going to be banned from using these tools.”
OK, no. Many companies and other employers ban using ChatGPT and other AI tools. Those companies, according to the news coverage, include Apple, Wells Fargo, Verizon, Spotify, Samsung, JP Morgan, Amazon, and a slew of government agencies and contractors.
And having just defended students for not being dumb, I think this argument about using peer review or Thesaurus.com is dumb. Even in the case of Grammarly, it is not the tool you use, it’s whether you misrepresent the work. And I think our student knows this.
Finally, a few quick points about IHE and this story.
One is the headline:
Is Grammarly AI? Notre Dame Says Yes
I mean — what? Is Grammarly AI? Yes. Your own story quotes Grammarly itself about the use of AI to compose text. Why is Notre Dame saying yes to this question the headline? Why is it even a question? What are we doing?
I’ll also note quickly the use of the very passive “some professors are increasingly concerned” in the paragraph above that starts with, “while many students have welcomed.”
Obviously, you have been set up with the comparison between “many students” and “some professors.” Once you see it, the “many” versus “some” is not subtle.
But the larger problem is that this construction makes the news about concerns, and not about cheating. It’s not that students are using Grammarly to cheat, it’s that “some professors are increasingly concerned” about it. That’s different. The story becomes about the professors and not about the cheating.
Education publications do this all the time, Inside Higher Ed especially. It’s as though they are afraid to say cheating is happening. Instead, we pin a story to the (air quotes) concerns of some, which is the fraternal twin of the unbelievably passive “raising questions”, which we also get in the story’s very first paragraph:
The University of Notre Dame’s decision this fall to allow professors to ban students from using the 15-year-old editing software Grammarly is raising questions about how to create artificial intelligence policies that uphold academic integrity while also embracing new technology.
“Raising questions” is passive aggressive code for being displeased. I don’t hate it personally — but people are raising questions and I’m just, you know, pointing that out. It’s also journalism-speak for controversy. It’s not that we have a problem, it’s that there are questions, and questions are news, I guess.
The problem is that framing cheating as the concern of some, while also framing policies designed to limit cheating as raising questions, once again surfaces the exceptionally strange dynamic that Inside Higher Ed has with academic integrity.
Notre Dame allows professors to set guidelines around the use of generative AI in their classes and IHE is all - “this raises questions.”
No, seriously — what questions does this raise? Whether teachers have the right — I’d say obligation — to limit academic misconduct and protect honest students? Whether AI writing tools such as Grammarly are being used to cheat? Those questions are being raised? Of course not.
I assume the “questions” are whether disallowing academic fraud will stand in the way of, as Inside Higher Ed put it, “embracing new technology.” That can’t be a serious question. Can it?
ChatGPT Goes Down. Students Lose Their Minds.
Several friends and observers wrote in to share what they were seeing on social media last week, when ChatGPT had an outage — a complete meltdown from students who needed generative AI to do their exams and other coursework.
Here’s a post and thread from Reddit related to the University of Texas, Austin. It has this headline:
ChatGPT were supposed to finish finals together
I assume it’s supposed to be “we’re.” Irony. Meanwhile, the University of Texas has banned the use of AI detection technology. So, good luck with that.
Another Reddit post says:
Anybody else in the quarter system in uni suffering from this downtime?? The one day I 1000% need chatgpt is when it dies out on me, lol... I have to take my linguistics final before 12 today FML
From TikTok, a student rushing to finish a paper with ChatGPT down:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
This student literally says, on camera:
I can’t work on my paper right now because this is down. First world problems, I know. I shouldn’t even be using it in the first place.
Yeah, probably not.
I mean, I don’t know what to add. Students are using ChatGPT to cheat in absolutely massive numbers. So much so that when the technology has a hiccup, the panic spills everywhere.
Important Read from This Isn’t Fine — Clearing Your University’s Name
Our friends over at This Isn’t Fine — you should subscribe if you don’t already — had an important post recently about cheating websites using the name and logo of universities to sell their services.
Here is the post:
In it, the authors identify 197 different schools around the world whose logos and other trademarks are used by contract cheating companies. You should go look to see if your school is on the list. If it is, the post has suggestions on how to act.
It’s no surprise at all that essay mills and other cheating companies are stealing the IP of universities to assure their clients and customers. They are in the dishonesty business, after all.
Back in 2021, I wrote about cheating companies that had gone even further by hacking the websites of colleges to plant links to their services. At that time, more than 100 schools were hacked, including some big names. There are many big names on this new list too.
One of the worst things about the scale of academic misconduct today is the feeling of powerlessness it creates. So, I encourage you to review this list and dash off an e-mail or two. Or seven. However many it takes.
I thank the crew at “This Is Not Fine” for putting in the work.
Class Notes:
Given the impending Christmas holiday, there will be no new Issues of The Cheat Sheet next week. We will have one this Thursday. We will pick back up on or about December 31 or January 1 with the “Best Of” Issue (see Issue 328). So, please, I beg you — send me ideas or nominations for that.