Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    6·
    17 hours ago

    Found a couple articles about blunting AI’s impact on education (got them off of Audrey Watters’ blog, for the record).

    The first is a New York Times guest essay by NYU vice provost Clay Shirky, which recommends “moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward […] assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time.”

    The second is an article by Kate Manne calling for professors to prevent cheating via AI, which details her efforts in doing so:

    Instead of take-home essays to write in their own time, I’ll have students complete in-class assignments that will be hand-written. I won’t allow electronic devices in my class, except for students who tell me they need them as a caregiver or first responder or due to a disability. Students who do need to use a laptop will have to complete the assignment using google docs, so I can see their revision history.

    Manne does note the problems with this (outing disabled students, class time spent writing, and difficulties in editing, rewriting, and make-up work), but still believes “it is better, on balance, to take this approach rather than risk a significant proportion of students using AI to write their essays.”

    • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      16 hours ago

      what worked for me teaching an undergrad course last year was to have

      • in-class exams weigh 90% of the total grade, but let them drop their lowest score
      • take-home work weigh 10% and be graded on completion (which i announced to the class, of course)
        • i was also diligent about posting solutions (sometimes before the due date — it’s a completion grade after all) and i let students know that if they wanted direct feedback they could bring their solutions to office hours


      it ended up working pretty well. an added benefit was that my TAs didn’t have to deal with the nightmare of grading 120 very poorly written homeworks every four weeks. my students also stopped obsessing about the grades they would receive on their homeworks and instead focused on learning the grades they would receive on their exams

      however, at the k-12 level, it feels like a much harder problem to tackle. parental involvement is the only solution i can think of, and that’s already kind of a nightmare (at least here in the us)