Jesse Stommel (Jessifer)

California colleges spend millions to catch plagiarism and AI. Is the faulty tech worth it? – The Markup Colleges and universities renew Turnitin subscriptions year after year even though its flawed detectors are expensive and require students to let the company keep their papers forever.

I STRONGLY encourage all educators to read this amazingly well-researched article from @themarkup.org about the issues of AI-detection software and who really benefits from it (spoiler: it is not our students): themarkup.org/artificial-i...

#AI #GenAI #HigherEd

HT @jessifer.bsky.social

Absolutely

“He also pans the use of Turnitin as a scare tactic. ‘We see this with the criminal-justice system,’ he said. ‘Deterrence doesn’t actually work.’ What does work, he argues, is building trusting relationships with students. ‘Turnitin immediately fractures that relationship with students.’”

“Stommel said faculty members often believe cheating is on the rise and that detectors are one of the only ways to keep students honest. But he shares evidence that cheating rates have long remained largely flat, even post-ChatGPT.”

“He then encourages students to ask him if they have questions about how to properly cite sources and directs them to an essay he co-wrote if they want to learn more about Turnitin or how to protect their intellectual property.”

“In his syllabus, he tells students, ‘It is my commitment to you that I won’t submit any of your work to Turnitin. Plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin monetizes student intellectual property and contributes to a culture of suspicion in education. I trust you. I trust your work is your own.’”

“Jesse Stommel, a professor @uofdenver.bsky.social, started speaking out about the company’s database of student papers in 2011, when he discovered his dissertation was in it. As a writing instructor, he takes issue with schools unquestioningly handing over student work to a for-profit company.”

California colleges spend millions to catch plagiarism and AI. Is the faulty tech worth it? – The Markup Colleges and universities renew Turnitin subscriptions year after year even though its flawed detectors are expensive and require students to let the company keep their papers forever.

“Turnitin monetizes student intellectual property and contributes to a culture of suspicion in education.”

I’m quoted in a recent article from @themarkup.org @calmatters.org and @chronicle.com

themarkup.org/artificial-i...

a silhouette of a woman in a purple light with the words megan 2.0 on the bottom ALT: a silhouette of a woman in a purple light with the words megan 2.0 on the bottom

Just saw M3gan 2.0. Loved it. I was nervous about the shift from horror to spy thriller action, but it worked. Lots of genre winks, and I laughed until I cried at one point (which involved one of my favorite Kate Bush songs).

Agreed on the blue checkmarks. I was eliding a bunch of complicated thoughts about those into that line.

Ooh. I better go back over there for a bit. I need some plastic plants. 🪴 😜

Just hit follow all. The menswear guy is one of my favorites, if you don’t follow him already.

Also definitely old and cranky here! :)

Yes, to it all being better if everything were not on fire. And I totally agree with you about the short form. I miss the 140 characters actually! :)

Just grabbed a link to your timeline cleanse list. <3

Good point. I'll be clear, not making a case for Bsky to not exist, just still wondering what I can get from it. I'm gonna keep working to curate it as a newsfeed and then hope for random exchanges like this one! :)

Yeah, I think I’m struggling with the doom scrolling thing a little, which definitely wasn’t my experience when I first signed up here. Kind of a state of the world problem, but also this isn’t really the place I want to go to process that,

I’ll work the lists approach. I often didn’t feel like I needed to use my lists on Twitter cause I’d curated my main follow list so carefully over the years.

I was gonna ask you to send that link!

Agreed on the international, ideological breadth. I’ve been finding this site successful as a newsfeed. That’s the piece that still mostly works for me, but it took solid curation to get it there (OG Twitter did too).

I may also just need to post more. The implosion of Twitter (and the bullying that became rampant there in its final years) kinda turned me shy on social media.

I was also an early adopter of both but haven’t felt at home here yet. Seeing you pop up in a reply is a nice help, though. 😊

Engagement, ephemerality, and happening across happy things is what I’m missing. But I’m still working on it. I worry Bluesky is moving toward being more algorithm-centric.

It definitely feels bizarre to find myself telling people that LinkedIn feels like the social media most conducive to human life.

What killed Twitter:
- Algorithmic feed
- Blue checkmarks
- People who called people “blue checkmarks”
- Harassment at scale
- Bullies with impunity
- Academics shitposting about students
- Racism, ableism, transphobia, etc.
- J K Rowling
- Donald Trump

Most of these feel alive and well here…

So far, my review of Bluesky is that it is everything that was unpleasant about 2015 Twitter and not much of what was truly great. I’m still not sure why it ever made sense to clone the structure of a platform that had so thoroughly combusted. I’m here for now, and will attempt to remain open.

“The work, though, is not to imagine that the hierarchy doesn't exist (it does), but to work together with students to dismantle it. That work starts by talking frankly about how these systems work and how the culture of grades impacts us.“

The Practice of Ungrading Ungrading inspects the inequities of schooling, asks hard questions of the structures of our schools, and offers a critique of the labor conditions for teachers at all levels of education.

Can we do assessment differently, in ways that increase access, support greater inclusion, improve learning outcomes, and enhance the experience of teaching and learning?

A lovely read ahead of #TheGradingConference in a few weeks.

I especially loved "a bunch of quantitative legalese masquerading as pedagogy" as a turn of phrase—perhaps because it so accurately describes where I, and probably many others, started.

Absolutely

It’s been almost two years since I’ve written something entirely new about ungrading. Really glad to have this out in the world. It’s a simple piece but it gets to some incredibly practical aspects of this work that I haven’t written about before.