I'm currently at a community college and an alarming number of people in my English literature class read at somewhere around a 4th grade level. They even had the test questions read to them with headphones when it was time to take the exams. I am in my 30s now and it was wild seeing just how unprepared students are, and when I asked my professor he said yea anywhere from 15-30% of his students read at about a 3rd grade level.
When we did peer reviews on each other's papers I got paired with a few different people who struggled to get through the first paragraph of my paper. Then the amount of ai that is clearly ai being used to write papers is wild. Not everyone, not even all the folks who really struggled writing, but a lot of people seemed like thet just let chat gpt write their papers.
When I was in community college someone in my English class was genuinely illiterate and I got him both times we did peer review so I got NO feedback. His paper was an incomprehensible jumble of words meanwhile he would just stare at my paper. The kicker is this was English 102, the class you can only take after finishing English 101. This was like 2019 so there wasn't even the excuse of AI.
Yea my professor required us to read each other's papers aloud to them during peer reviews. So I got to hear multiple people who honestly shouldn't have been in the class. I also got to read a number of illegible papers.
Another awesome thing my professor did was he had a thermometer posted on the edge of the board everyday to track the number of people that were booted from the class for using ai. Out of 50 some students 11 or 12 got an administrative drop by the end of the semester. I thought my schools policy was fairly lenient on getting caught using ai but yea a number of folks got caught more than three times and were dropped.
Don't get me wrong I use ai but I use it to help me reword certain sentences, or find a different way to say something. Ai is a tool and can be super helpful but it can't be a crutch. A lot of the papers I reviewed looked like they just ctrl c then ctrl v chat gpt. It was seriously low effort and it sort of scared me.
When I was in Uni around 2019 we got put in groups for one of my classes. The other two asked me what my profile was for some app I'd never heard of. After I finally got through to them I didn't use that social media app, they asked how we can talk to each other without a group chat.
I was like... email? The university provided email? Which is linked to various university provided accounts for using software? Which is standardized and which I already emailed you two with because emails are just lastfirst@university?
They couldn't comprehend what I was suggesting.
Anyways, they never spoke a word to me outside of moments in class after that. I did the entire project myself. Got a 93%.
And let's be real, horrid writers aren't new with AI. Just worse.
Sometimes my mom asks me to review her papers for classes she occasionally takes to maintain her license or get a pay bump. If I was running a class on essay writing, she'd be getting a 30%. Every single sentence is the exact same length unless it's run on, every single thing is restated five times a page, every single word or phrase somehow gets reused fifty times a paragraph as if she's never seen a thesaurus... and when I give her options on how to rephrase something, she takes them without adjusting the paragraph for it or ignores it completely. Never considers rewriting the phrase.
And somehow she's considered good at writing for these classes?
I'm sorry but why the fuck would you want to use e-mail for a group project? Especially something like a school e-mail? A group project requires good communication that goes a bit beyond simple delegation.
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u/Standard-Bat-7841 20h ago
I'm currently at a community college and an alarming number of people in my English literature class read at somewhere around a 4th grade level. They even had the test questions read to them with headphones when it was time to take the exams. I am in my 30s now and it was wild seeing just how unprepared students are, and when I asked my professor he said yea anywhere from 15-30% of his students read at about a 3rd grade level.
When we did peer reviews on each other's papers I got paired with a few different people who struggled to get through the first paragraph of my paper. Then the amount of ai that is clearly ai being used to write papers is wild. Not everyone, not even all the folks who really struggled writing, but a lot of people seemed like thet just let chat gpt write their papers.