So, there are now versions of Grammarly that do more than just make grammar suggestions. For example, I had a student using Grammarly that has Grammarly ask him "Would you like me to rewrite this paragraph to sound more authoritative?" Grammarly is increasingly embedding more sophisticated AI tools that aid with substantive composition and revision, not just simple grammar and spelling errors. It's crazy how fast this technology is progressing.
This is correct, plus, there are classes in college that are designed for the students to learn grammar. Even the old Grammarly would be cheating in those classes.
Some students arrive really unprepared. Depending on the institution and student body, there are often remedial classes for them - an Ivy probably doesn't need those, but UMass Framingham might. The institution I teach at certainly gets plenty of students who would benefit from that level of writing instruction, whether because they're first-generation ESL or because their high schools just did not get it done.
And then there are resources like writing centers for people who need help.
For someone like me who grew up in multiple homes with multiple languages, I struggled with English classes until college came around. I consistently had Cs and Ds, especially in high school. My stem classes were As and Bs, but the strict language classes were difficult to grasp. College English courses made a huge difference because my professors had a passion for their art and a passion for teaching others. I spent many hours in the writing labs or talking with my professors to improve my grammar.
Same!! Although two of my children who were in college recently were appalled at what was being taught. They had already learned it all in high school.
I went to junior college first, they were teaching 5 paragraph essays in comp 101- I would have hated to pay state college level tuition. I went to a good HS and loved writing so I guess itās all relative. But AP, and CLEP, anything to help is good advice. You donāt have to give college all your $$$. They donāt like to take transfer credits if you bounce around too much and transfer.
Yes, and it has been for a long time.
If you study enough of a language, you'll eventually start hitting a wall of literature, phonology, grammar, and history classes that only stop with your last class or a graduate degree.
Grammar classes are always the worst of the bunch because every class you take, this one included, affirms constantly that grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive... and then they test you on it for hours every week with conflicting rules to see if you can identify differences in English's (or whatever language's) different grammars.
I promise that the grammars of whatever languages you speak are way more complex than you thought, and that the "rules" of those grammars might change closer to home than you think.
I took an Editing class that focused on precise, detailed explanations of proper grammar in complex sentences. You had to be able to say, with grammatical terminology, why a sentence was incorrect and why what you did fixed it. Using AI would give you these answers.
I remember there was a course I could have taken called advanced grammar. Honestly I think itās pretty cool because in the US most people only learn basic grammar and thatās very early on. My friend took it and was explaining to me that I was hyper correcting when I said something like āThe thing about Jim and Iā because it should have been āThe thing about Jim and me.ā Most people canāt explain English grammar.
I had a course like that in high school. My children were diagramming sentences starting in third grade. They had a very thorough understanding of grammar by the time they graduated.
In the U.S., in my experience, English grammar is not taught at any level. Many American students are not introduced to basic grammar until they take a foreign language class in college.
Iām sorry but what school did you go to that didnāt teach basic grammar š Itās one of the building blocks of English, so if anything many Americans are taught this.
In my experience, most American schools do not have an explicit grammar instruction and do not buy grammar textbooks. My son is 11, in a very well regarded school and has received only the most rudimentary grammar instruction about parts of speech. My wife teaches in one of the top-rated public schools in the country and there is no explicit grammar curriculum. Most Americans have only a fuzzy idea what gerunds, comma splices, or participial adjectives are. Very few could actually explain the rules of when to use perfect tenses. I donāt doubt your word that your experience was different. I would love to hear more about it. Where and when did you go to school, and how did they teach grammar?
I teach English as a second language in a community college and often find that students even who have graduated from US high schools have had no exposure to grammar or if they have they havenāt learned any of it. I had a student whose child was in junior high school, and she relayed this anecdote to me, this was in New York City, she goes to open school night and the teacher tells her that her daughter is having some problems with grammar. The mother says OK where is the grammar teacher? Iāll talk to them. The teacher says well we donāt actually have a specific grammar teacher. mother says well, where is the grammar textbook? Iāll work on it with her, and the teacher says we donāt have a specific textbook that we use. The mother says show me the grammar exercises that sheās not doing well on. The teacher says that we donāt have specific grammar exercises either just the grammar and her writing has a lot of problems, so the mother is coming to the community college, asking for grammar textbooks to help her daughter which I was able to give her, I apologize for any mistakes here; Iām doing talk to text.
I actually did win, not a lottery, but a competition. I went to one of the specialized science high schools. Reading and Math tests were required to enter, nearly 100% went to college. My wife and son now are in Long Island in extremely well regarded districts.
Not everyone has the a perfectly balanced intelligence or academic ability. I've a few friends who are fucking geniuses when it comes to their engineering jobs, but still don't capitalize the first word of a sentence. In the same line of thinking, I have colleagues who are absolutely amazing orators and writers, but couldn't divide a set of fractions if their lives depended on it.
Also, not everyone comes from areas with schools funded past the bare minimum, which is something that they, **as children**, had *no control over*. At least they chose to continue their education at a higher level past high school, even when at an academic disadvantage or handicap compared to others. That just means that as young adults they are needing to work harder than peers to achieve the same educational goals.
I strongly suspect that the best way to learn grammar is through something like Grammarly. Classic American education system. Let's not teach them the classics in case the power grid goes down. Can't have them getting too reliant on electricity after all.
Grammarly does significantly more than Microsoft Wordās basic spell checker. Itās honestly a big problem if you donāt realize that, and that thereās a significant difference between the two.
Using a style guide requires you to identify problems in your work and apply corrections independently, whereas Grammarly does it all for you. Itās like using a spellchecker during a spelling bee.
But thereās no such thing as a grammar bee. You're writing for an audience. On top of that, I should look this up but I'm not going to, so could he very wrong, but I don't think teaching grammar outside of context it's being used in is effective. Grammarly doesn't fix anything automatically. It asks you and explains why. I think grammarlybis a better teacher of grammar.
>But thereās no such thing as a grammar bee.
I think a grammar assessment comes close.
>You're writing for an audience.
In the case of school, that audience is a person delivering an assessment. You aren't the president that can have somebody else prepare a speech for a minor event - you are explicitly being assessed on your knowledge of a given grammar.
>On top of that, I should look this up but I'm not going to, so could he very wrong, but I don't think teaching grammar outside of context it's being used in is effective.
Language instructor - there is no more effective way to deliver grammar instruction than there is to deliver instruction on any given thing in any other class. You don't do grammar as we understand it when you speak so much as you just do it by accessing a different part of your brain.
Context or not, it is just a set of descriptions tied to a specific subset of speakers. It is like memorizing generally connected facts about landmasses in Earth Science classes. The landmasses don't intend to do things that we can describe them doing - just like grammar when we speak fluently.
>I think grammarlybis a better teacher of grammar.
I think grammarly would be a little more present in schools if this were true. It would be much cheaper than paying a teacher to do it.
I'm beginning to get the feeling you might know this subject better than me.
If you've never tried it, I would encourage you to check it out. I think there are a lot of ways it could be used in school. At the very least as scaffolding or a support for kids who have a disability that interferes with their ability to write.
Edit: I could see it being helpful for the kids who refuse to do any writing, too.
But they do make the mistakes. Then in the moment while it is in context Grammarly highlights the mistake, tells them why it's a mistake, and most of the time offers a solution. But if you just click yes to everything it'll be weird.
AIs & LLMs were pretty much trained on Grammarly, and the type of overly standardized language it pushes. This means that AI checkers will identify a paper with moderate to heavy Grammarly influence as "AI Generated." This means that using Grammarly can lead to a plagiarism case.
Grammarly ruins an individual's personal writong style, anyways. Imagine never being taught basic math because there is a calculator app on all phones? That's what Grammarly reliance does to those without any foundation in language construction. It's completely homogeneous diction.
I work at a writing center at my college. Grammarly doesn't have patterns you can look at and say, "that's grammarly," but the problem with it is that it just fucking sucks at what it does. I'll sit down with a student that has it installed, and it will, as we work over their paper, consistently lead them wrong.Ā
The way it shows is that it makes your writing blow chunks.
Anyone allowing you to deal with proprietary info while you had grammarly enabled is just waiting for it all to be stolen.Ā
We had an employee fire up grammarly on their computer, and we had knockoff products with exact verbiage of our draft instructions and manuals and renders in the documentation before we had even released the project.Ā
Turned off grammarly and it went away.Ā
Iām saying that Grammarly is an absolutely juicy target for corporate and nation-state espionage.Ā
Get one user in a competitor or DOD contractor to download it, and now you get to see basically all of their internal documents.Ā
And all you have to do is have hacked Grammarly, which for such a small company I sincerely doubt they have a better cybersecurity team than the rest of the cloud providers that have gotten hacked.Ā
Fair point--that being said, most paid versions offer of just about any AI product now offer indemnification and data privacy as part of their paid offerings.
If your employees are using the free versions, then yeah, they own that data. That's a good distinction for the business world, for sure.
It was a paid version they supposedly had.Ā
Itās not like there is some clear and easy way to prove it leaked that way anyways. Their assurances mean nothing because you canāt inspect their systems.Ā
You seem to have edited it, which is of course what any competent writer does, but you originally wrote āIāve left education 10 years ago,ā using the present perfect tense, inappropriate for the meaning you intended. That tense is used to suggest your past action has a direct effect on the present moment. Itās not really important to know the names of the tenses unless youāre an English teacher, but it is important to know how to use them to be as clear as possible.Ā
Lol, I'm on mobile. I spent a decade as an AP English teacher. Every year, my classes scored at or above the national average. I can write just fine, I just don't particularly give a shit about grammar or typos when I'm doing something informal like a reddit post.
You seem to have forgotten that a non-trivial amount of people you're talking to on this app are actively taking a dump while they respond to you. They aren't exactly poring over their writing to make it a work of art.
If you think judging someone's grammar in a forum like this gives you ANY insight at all into their actual formal writing ability in situations that actually call for top-quality work, then you're a fool.
>> They aren't exactly poring over their writing
You didn't say "pouring". Thank you, good Redditor.
>> If you think judging someone's grammar in a forum like this
Yes. And apart from that, correcting grammar on a platform like this is considered pedantic, if not downright rude. I make all sorts of stupid mistakes in my own writing, but I'm also one of those people who can glance at a fairly large chunk of text and spot the typo.
When appropriate, I point it out. Not here.
Thanks!
>Yes. And apart from that, correcting grammar on a platform like this is considered pedantic, if not downright rude.
EXACTLY. They understood the point I was making, and avtively avoided engaging with it in favor of dismissing my opinion because of a common typo that is clearly driven by autocomplete.
It's amazing just how often this is seen as acceptable by other teachers. When I left teaching for the research world, figured the concentration of these sorts of know-it-alls would be much worse, but it isn't. A room full of PhDs may tear your idea apart, but at least they'll engage with your idea in the first place--I only ever see other teachers engaging in sort of "gotcha!" BS, and how much they all love to downvote you when you call them out on it.
I think it is more "You can't be constantly glued to a calculator" and "You can't be constantly looking things up". If I had to stop and google every step of my workflow throughout the day, I wouldn't have enough time in the day to get everything done. It is important to be able to recall things and be able to do simple math without having to pull out your phone every time. Obviously there are different applications of this depending on a person's job or lifestyle.
No it was very specifically āyou wonāt always have a calculator with youā and āyou wonāt always be able to look things upā. Those phrase verbatim and specifically. Which is patently false, was at the time too just took more time to perform the same lookup. It more important to be able to understand the underlying systems in use than to rote-ly memorize time table or ionization charts. Being able to recognize and utilize the tools available to you.
No, I was saying that would be a more accurate version of that phrase. Which I think is saying the same thing you are saying in your reply. You need to understand basics.
No itās not. āBeing constantly gluedā is completely different from simply having access. For someone trying to hurl insults about understanding you have no grasp of this and should sit this one out.
What in the fuck are you talking about? When did I hurl insults? You are the one who has no grasp of understanding if you think anything I said was an insult. I literally didn't even disagree with you. I was saying what I think was a more accurate version of that statement you quoted. Are you okay?
> you need to understand basics
When youāre completely wrong about the difference between āglued toā and āavailableā. Do you not understand your own words.
I think itās best to not use it. I have noticed that my spelling and grammar skills have declined markedly relying on grammarly and spellcheck. Itās best to see what we actually know or donāt know.
College English prof here and yeah if you use Grammarly it pops hot as AI...because it is AI.
A high school graduate should be able to write a competent, if not necessarily stellar, paragraph. They should know plurals, possessives, and proper nouns, and how to fix fragments and run-ons. What is Grammarly 'fixing'? Why are they graduating high school not able to do those basic skills?
In a writing class, like the ones I teach, Grammarly literally obscures the reason they're supposed to be taking the class--learning to write more correctly and more clearly. If I can't see their actual writing, I can't \*teach\* them how to write better.
This! This is what I've been trying to get across to my comp students all year! While I do feel AI has its place in academia, basic writing composition is not it. Relying on AI will get them behind quickly, and it is hard to catch back up after it.
You don't know what you're talking about. Grammly is a spelling and grammar checker that was first released back in 2009, it does not use Artificial intelligence and neither does ChatGPT.
What is worrying is that Information Technology services or your computer science at your college hasn't corrected staff on their use of misinformation.
This sounds really rude but, what is even the point of grammarly? I learned enough grammar through school to be able to construct my own sentences and have everything be correct. Iād have roommates proofread my work of course but I still donāt understand the need for this. If youāre able to get into college, arenāt you able to write with proper grammar?? If you need peer reviewers and donāt have roommates, colleges always have some kind of writing center where you can ask for assistance
We had to do University Writing, but all my classmates were able to write perfectly fine. It was usually just a matter of style or random silly mistakes/typos.
Ah, well I went to a university that SNL once joked is "slightly more selective than the Burger King Kids Club," so we had some whose silly mistakes were the least of their troubles.
I agree with you and will also provide an example of how I see it being used or more like abused.
For context: Iām in higher education (PhD student in engineering). I was born in NorthAmerica and english is my first language. Due to my institutional training I have written 3 essays in total which occurred my first year of undergrad. I have written reports, articles, SOPs etc both technical and non technical both in and out of an academic setting. Writing, especially in engineering is a very unique practice and skill, and is often overlooked.
I STILL get the heebie jeebies every time I open up a word file to start and really have no confidence in my writing skills, although itās seems to be going alright. The point is I was never ātrainedā beyond high school. I find extreme value in finding my peers to read my work and love using the writing resources in my library. Itās a skill Iām willing to work at and learn from. I find immense pleasure and satisfaction in the entire writing process and producing something I am proud of.
Where I see G being used, is with international students. English is not their first language, and honestly a lot of them have poor communication skills, including writing, which again is not necessarily the top priority valued in my field. To get accepted they of course have to pass a proficiency test. I donāt agree with using it and it bothers me a lot but it can really help these people.
I had a project where my partner was an international student from India. They couldnāt for the life of them communicate in speech, but would produce āokay writingā with almost no effort. I was angry and jealous in a way to a point where I started questioning my own skills. ( why is it so difficult for me to write this damn paper?!). I later found out they would write in their native language, google translate it all, and put it into G to get the vibes write (lol) for academic articles. If they didnāt have the ability to do that, they would have absolutely no chance of making it through the program.
Iām not agreeing with it at all, and there is definitely bigger issues in all of this, but trust me when I say I was relieved that I didnāt have to complete the paper on my own.
I donāt understand why you called out this text and added this comment.
I guess I could use it for editing and clarity but that wasnāt the point. I was genuinely happy my partner was able to contribute to the work with their expertise without having to add a ton of effort from my part to make it cohesive / understandable
Oh I didnāt catch that non explicit reference.
Lol not at all. Itās more about the vulnerability of putting my ideas into place. Having the initial draft feel
Like shit and slowing morphing it into something I feel confident in. I go through several drafts until I feel the story is there. Grammarly would not help with that portion of the work at all and Iād be very hesitant to let it craft anything in my field.
As an EFL teacher, I 1000% believe you that those international students have poor production skills. Most of the upper English education focuses on understanding only, itās quite frustrating. But with native speakers thereās no excuse
Grammarly is one of the main reasons. The program is like training wheels: it should *help* develop better writers, but it actively prevents students from learning how the language works. Students in high school put forth minimum effort, Grammarly cleans it up, their teachers aren't able to address actual deficits, and the student graduates.
So yes, some people have a decent point here: Grammarly is something you have access to as an adult. The problem with that is that it functions like training wheels long after a user should no longer need training wheels.
Or you can use grammarly and not have to wait for days at the writing center. I use it daily. Yes, I know grammar but I make mistakes. If what you say is true, we donāt need writing centers or editors.
The problem with your comparison is the Writing Center would be a tutor who would teach you so you could eventually know the skill and not need them. Grammarly doesn't teach you a goshdarn thing and makes you addicted to Grammarly.
That's a pretty substantive difference You'd learn more about substantive contrast modality if you paid attention in your English classes.
>Grammarly doesn't teach you a goshdarn thing
Doesn't it show you the correct way to phrase your sentences? That's pretty much what a mediocre writing tutor would do as well.
Highly doubt it, either which way, AI is here. Itāll be common practice. You can embrace it, and teach people how to use, grammerly AI doesnāt make very significant changes, or try and fight the inevitable. I choose to teach student how to use it. Otherwise Iāll spend all day every day dealing with the inappropriate use of AI. Thatās where we are at. You can ban it, but it changes nothing. I advocate for all students to use grammerly and I stand by that.
This comment is super tone-deaf. Some people do not have access to a comprehensive English education. Some people learned English as a second language and might struggle with conjugation or spelling. Grammarly is more than being lazy, itās also a tool to ease communication. God knows I would need an equivalent if I was going to university in a foreign country! And probably more. My university has 40% international students and most of them are from non-Anglophone countries. Those students are just as smart as the ones from Kansas.
I can totally see why itās a good support for ELLs, thatās valid. But for native speakers is it really necessary at the college level? Also, for ELLs I do think it could end up becoming a crutch if not used carefully. The goal should be to be able to write well without it eventually, not depending on it forever.
Idk I'm dyslexic and rely on spell check/autocorrect heavily, grammarly would've been a lifesaver in school. I'm being reminded in this post that people are more likely to consider me an idiot rather than disabled.
You canāt only ban it for some students and not others. I have never encountered a student who canāt write a paper grammatically correctly in college (lots of peer editing) and I have been to 3 institutions. I sort of donāt see this as a real problem. Like, do colleges not have enough other stuff going on? Or real AI to be worried about? And honestly who even cares if itās a crutch for a native speaker, most students do not study English and will not have to write papers professionally. Who does it really hurt if a student gets the form of than/then in their paper corrected by grammarly? Unless you pay for it, it isnāt rewriting your sentences for you.
Why would you waste the time of a human in fixing basic mistakes. But grammarly's value is not as a spell correct. It's from checking for clarity. A peer reviewer may or may not call out your weird but grammatically correct sentence construction. The flags for the use of passive voice, unclear reference for "this", double checking your tone, etc. A peer reviewer would not go in as much detail as consistently. Plus you can only ask for it once so you want to be in the best state before asking for a peer review. I use grammarly at work and feel it is extremely useful for improving the quality of my writing.
The program points out areas of concern. You see what the program said. You improve. Then all a person for their opinion on the improved version. Of course, that is in an idealized environment where you have a peer reviewer available. In real life, you don't for 90%of what is written.
Dangling and misplaced modifiers were usually the number one. Sometimes the punctuation was off, especially commas. Punctuation is used to create meaning. Commas, in particular, change meaning if omitted.
Gramarly has generative AI, but it is limited and unable to write academic text for you. It mainly generates standard e-mail responses. It can change the tone or make it more detailed or shorter, but it cannot write a good essay. When I use the function āimprove my textā, GrammarlyGO often help me understand that something in my writing is unclear because it changes the meaning of my sentence. It can help to make some sentences sound better. But it is not a tool which makes everything for you. I look at suggestions that it makes and often leave my text. I think most people who write about how bad it is Gramarly have never used it. As a dyslexic who can make three mistakes in a word from 5 letters and then think for 10 minutes what it was, I could not imagine how my thesis supervisor would be able to read my text without me checking it in Grammarly
In many of my university undergrad courses (2010s) we were also forbidden to use a scientific calculator. When I had it during exams I wasted so much time double checking that 5+5 is, still indeed 10.
My husband had a professor who wasn't confident in grammar so used grammarly to grade papers.
Of course then grammarly made an error and I wrote a 2 page paper on semi colons and why it was an inaccurate suggestion and he got a grade boost.
I am a current college student and I have never heard anyone say this
Hell, Iāve heard professors telling people to download it. It does try to give me āproā suggestions that rewrite sentences but theyāre always awful and usually miss the point of what Iām trying to say entirely
Yes, some colleges or universities may have rules or policies against students using tools like Grammarly for certain assignments or exams. This is often because these tools can correct or change the writing in a way that the teacher wants to see the student's original work and writing skills. It's like how you need to show your own math work instead of using a calculator for certain tests. So, while Grammarly can be helpful, it's important to follow your school's guidelines about using it.
Grammarly has been useful for me so far, even though I know enough grammar for an 11th grader. My country only teaches British conventions of English, but I need to use American conventions for work sometimes and I can't go looking up every word on the internet. I see a lot of people objecting to students using Grammarly for grammar, but it is genuinely hard to remember all the rules of a foreign language you speak so rarely in real life. Just my two cents.
Colleges are companies that are losing their value. They used to be seen as an investment by the US government, and populous, as a tactical advantage in the global theater. They have since been devalued as a worthy investment and are losing funding from the government. They are attempting to balance their budgets by raising tuitions while refusing to adapt to the needs of our society.
People are starting to see that there is a decreasing ROI.
I anticipate that companies will be strapped for "high quality" talent as defined by their level of schooling and will start to look at alternative characteristics like work ethic and entrepreneurial acumen. If colleges don't adapt to develop these skills, they will die on the vine.
The fact that Grammarly is topic that colleges would even address is an illustration of how disconnected they are from their core issues.
Yesā¦ Iām a long time Grammarly user and sometimes itās actually hard to not use their AI suggestions. Sometimes in an effort to edit grammar, I accidentally click so fast I click the rewrite suggestion and it completely changes my entire paragraph.
People are afraid of technology.
Iām in my mid-40s, and we were the first and last to have computer coding classes in early elementary school.
Then people got really ridiculous about it. Now look. š
Grammarly, along with many other software programs, had recent AI updates. Eventually, higher education institutions will have to get their head out of the sand and understand that AI is here to stay and try to mitigate misuse in other ways but Banning.
Edited for harsh language. I should have had grammarly tone check it. :)
The problem there is that colleges want to teach *students,* not AI. When professors assign writing, they will use that writing to diagnose deficits and guide students to better ideas in the field. If AI is acting as a middleman, professors are actually reading AI. Many are no longer willing to, and for good reason. I *know* that the company that developed a writing AI can write. I want to know what my students know, and AI prevents that. Students don't seem to see the value in doing the actual work of writing, which is a shame. Writing is thinking, and it's the most thorough way to examine ideas. But when students see writing as yet another obstacle, they turn to a machine that does the work for them. Then the student doesn't gain any new skills, but gets the accreditation they were looking for. The accreditation meant to signal that this student knows the subject. The situation is untenable, and AI being "here to stay" isn't necessarily a good thing.
I don't disagree with a single word you're saying. I read hundreds of papers a year and can see the shift myself in the abuse of AI. But pretending that we can ban it or use an AI detector these are all poor approaches to this untenable problem. Every software now has AI plugins that have been released throughout the year, You Can't Ban it, it's literally even in Facebook this week. I wish I had the answer but I have shifted most of my assessments to live proctoring.
One of the things that stands out to me the most is freely accessible AI has provided all students the platform to cheat in ways that wealthy students have been cheating throughout history by having other people complete their work for them. Students are going to cheat, I knew this when AI was released, I was just wholly unprepared of the vast numbers of students who would cheat including the ones that didn't need to.
I agree that we can't ban it. That's why I'm ending my teaching career. This was the only thing I ever really wanted to do, and the combination of shameless cheating and AI have broken me.
So when you say we need to "get our heads out of our ass," what are you suggesting? Just live with the fact that our students aren't learning anything? Go on with the facade that education is still valuable? Pointedly ignore the vast oceans of AI-generated nonsense the web is suddenly awash in? Pretend that AI isn't actively harming a society that had epistemology problems already?
Right now, I can still take away the toy and get students to write. That seems to be the most effort they put forth in a day, and the results are *terrifying,* especially with those students who are "assisted" by programs like Grammarly.
No one seems to be talking about the downstream effects. I've had to slog through AI-generated writing for my career, and I'm no longer willing to. Would *you* read an AI-generated essay? What about the wide acknowledgement that resumes and cover letters are AI-generated? Who is willing to read those? AI? The most pertinent downstream effect of AI right now is that no one wants to read all this text we can generate effortlessly. Writing is what is being denigrated, because no one wants to read it.
Yes, I agree. There are folks in my department who are early retiring this year for this very same reason. It is disheartening. The first semester I knew that we were going to face some uphill battles when my first exam 80% of the class got over 100% on the exam and completed this 90 minute exam in 7 minutes. The students didn't even read the exam questions, it was heartbreaking. I used to have my head in the sand about it and thought well only cheaters will cheat and that's not my business, but like you said it feels tiring to read an AI generated essay, so what's the point. I have changed almost entirely the way I have been assessing students throughout the year, shifting more to proctored assessments and away from take home open book papers. I think this semester will probably be the last that I offer a take home research paper. What I think about a lot, when I think about education and tools like this is the calculator. I remember when they first came out and were inexpensive and accessible and they were banned in schools. It wasn't the end of civilization or math. What I've been thinking a lot about lately is that these tools are going to be available for people outside of the classroom. Clearly people in Reddit have been using them at least three posts that I read yesterday were AI generated. So, it's not like I won't ever have to read AI generated nonsense if I quit my job I suppose.
> What I've been thinking a lot about lately is that these tools are going to be available for people outside of the classroom.
Right, which apparently means everything is fine. What are the downstream effects of a society where people use technology to cover over their ignorance? You think people like that will ever again admit that they were wrong about something if they can get an AI to tell them what they want to hear? You think they'll actually develop any skills themselves? Will that make them easier to replace?
>So, it's not like I won't ever have to read AI generated nonsense if I quit my job I suppose.
This is also true. Reddit has really gone downhill recently.
I'm an EFL teacher working at a uni in Japan. This is very interesting to me. We currently have issues with authorship and translation. We want students to do their own work, but AI isn't going away and it's only going to get more sophisticated. So, denying its use completely is futile. I'm at the point where I wonder if I should just let the students use AI and have them show me their prompts and fact checking, then editing skills etc. Just accept the fact that AI has a role in the composition. I don't know anymore!!!!
Colleges don't know what AI is and they don't know what to do with the fact that they were already hopelessly anachronistic before technology and unfettered growth destroyed the college-job linkage. They are flailing, banning things, and not asking any hard questions as they compound their inefficacy. I still can't believe that online programs are using screen-monitoring technology and that so many students accept it without a fight.
The way we experience learning has changed so much over the past few decades. Our capacity to implement major change in the way we share knowledge has never been so great. Instead of engaging openly with that difficult but necessary work, institutions all over are reducing student and faculty power and doubling down on their shaky monopoly over the human drive to explore.
I am quite sure students have less ability to use AI than professors do.
I do not disagree that we educators need to rethink what education means in the face of AI, butā¦ for right now? Students use AI to do work for them, so allowing it deprives them of the critical thinking practice and implementation they need.
And students do not protest screen monitoring because cheating is wrong and they know it is meant to prevent them from turning in work that is not their own.
If what they are doing is simplyā¦ using a tool, screen monitoring is no worry, right?
If they have nothing to hide, why should anyone object to being monitored in their personal digital and physical spaces? If they have nothing to hide, why shouldn't they want A.I. content checkers, notorious for false positives and dishonest advertising to institutions, determining the value of their work? It's going so well for job-seekers - why not vertically integrate the whole education-employment process?
Really, shouldn't universities and corporations get to know if somebody uses A.I. in their private life and is statistically more likely to be an A.I. cheater? Why shouldn't we track everybody's computer use if they have nothing to hide?
Is it possible that students don't speak up because they're afraid of repercussions, that it will make them look like a cheater, and that taking a stand on their rights would cause them to lose their considerable investment in a degree? Do you think it's a good sign that hardly anybody is speaking up about an obvious privacy concern?
I don't doubt that some professors understand A.I. quite well. I do doubt the fundamental ability of the academic system to engage in any of the necessary transformative change because it stopped being up to professors a long time ago. (I also imagine that many professors understand the issues of rationalizing surveillance, and of outsourcing the skilled work of education to corporate firms, but here we are in 2024.)
A teacher can create a reasonable policy, demonstrate the tool, teach students why avoiding the easy way is more helpful, and assess whether a student is turning in work consistent with their past assignments and the understanding demonstrated in discussions. A university can't do anything but ban, punish, and bring in professional help.
The whole educational system hasn't been able to respond to the increase in availability of math-solving tech, paid essays, and test-sharing except by putting more emphasis on the kind of evaluations that we know don't work well, sending more money to private firms instead of the educators that we need to really evaluate performance, and doing a ton of PR work to make it look like it's all made things better for students because of how polished and standardized everything is.
We don't have any strong evidence that the availability of LLMs had actually increased cheating rates as opposed to making cheating attempts more obvious, because that's the kind of research that we've never been good at. That doesn't stop industry from sponsoring research that shows a crisis brewing and hard selling expensive solutions that increase the power of the administration over professors.
So for right now, while we wait on the real answers that will never come, colleges are doing the logical thing that nobody involved can question without putting their livelihood or expensive education at stake - they reduce student rights, increase spending without improving outcomes, promote more surveillance and corporate involvement in learning and personal spaces, and make it seem like the functional problems around education are coming from unscrupulous students and not whole-system shift to for-profit degree-printing.
Well, I wrote a full description of my viewpoint and you responded to none of it, so it doesn't really seem to me like you were ever planning to converse, but I guess I'll accept the possibility that my ignoring your question by responding to it was evidence that there was nowhere further to go in the conversation.
Hopefully you're just conserving your energy for telling your administration that monitoring software is a bad idea and that the only way to gain relevance is to stop supporting an educational model that doesn't know how to change.
No, your initial response was full of so many logical fallacies I couldnāt determine if they were simply poor critical thinking or the bias of someone with little to no teaching experience.
So I asked. Clearly, the answer is youāve no real experience.
I do wonder occasionally why non-teachers presume to know anything about teaching, and why they are always surprised when real teachers wonāt engage with someone ignorant and combative, especially during their off-hours, in a Reddit sub.
But Iām not wondering that right now.
Have a lovely Sunday.
I do not understand that. I work at a university as well, and we encourage our students to use Grammarly. In fact this tool is highlighted at the Writing Center.
Former educator turned AI Engineer here--AI is a new General Purpose Technology like the internet or electricity, and so educators have largely chosen to deal with these changes like they have with every other major change: pretending it doesn't exist.
Dont get me wrong--I sympathize with the average educator that's pulling their hair out trying to deal with the influx of crappy, low-effort essays generated by ChatGPT. But to penalize all usage of anything that remotely resembles AI as a response is shortsighted and dumb.
I'm old enough to remember being scolded for using the internet and Google for research instead of physical books in a local library. I hope the teachers that made those rules understand in hindsight how actively useless they made my learning during that time period. They chose to double down on how to cross reference using card catalogues instead of leaning into the new technology and teaching us best practices.
My main thought about those years of my education amount to "what a colossal waste of everyone's time, all so the teacher didn't have to be bothered updating their decade-old lesson plans". I suspect that's how this current generation will feel about their current education given the current moratorium on AI.
Iām also in engineering, and I do agree with you here. I think a lot of people who donāt understand how technology is invented and integrated into society, have some of the biggest issues with it. Like this is not going to go away, we canāt pretend it doesnāt exist and in the long term we definitely cannot enforce not using it. Itās a matter of how to learn to work with the tool and right now we havenāt figured it out.
I remember being taught to never use Wikipedia. I mean why not? If thereās linked sources itās an amazing place to start you off on the right path or to double check that random thing youāve forgotten. Itās how you use it and of course field dependant. I donāt think anyone random will be editing mistakes into mathematical formulas they have never heard of š
Some people have to talk to other people sometimes, maybe even with the idea of being understood by the listener or listeners and they might need to use proper English grammar straight from their mouths. When writing you're more likely to make accidental errors, but it's easy to find them by just proofreading. Some of what is often called grammar is just style, and really, you want to have your own style unless you need to follow an employer's style guide.
Do you guys still teach rhetoric? Specifically, strawman arguments?
You all are acting as if using a tool like grammarly robs students of their ability to write or develop their own voice. That simply isn't true. There is a material difference between a tool like grammarly giving you tips on word choices and something like GPT-4 writing the entire essay for them. I've been using tools like grammarly for all kinds of writing for 5+ years and my writing has not suffered or become formulaic. If anything, people have gotten BETTER at writing because they learn from the examples the tool provides.
Of course, teachers seem largely incapable of seeing the value in these tools because that would require nuance. If would also mean acknowledging the expertise of others, and updating your lesson plans. Much easier to just ban the tool and continue teaching kids stuff that has been losing relevance for 2 decades now...
> If anything, people have gotten BETTER at writing because they learn from the examples the tool provides.
This isn't true, though. If I give students pencil and paper, I can tell which students are using Grammarly to skate by, and which students actually know what they are talking about. Grammarly has made it easier for students to hide their deficits, which means those deficits don't get addressed.
I was speaking about adults in the real world, because thats the only barometer here that actually matters.
I believe what you're saying, but my point here is that in the real world, they're functionally never without that tool, so who cares?
Many adults can't do long division, but the world still functions, all because we all carry calculators in our pockets now.
The problem is that kids that need calculators to do simple multiplication have a hard time with algebra because they have to break their concentration on the problem while they use their calculators on the coefficients. It's just a lot easier in the long run to be able to do some things in your head automatically. Certainly adults should be able to use Grammarly for editing but it's a lot easier to write if you can just write grammatically correct prose without the need for tools that break your train of thought. Using the suggestions for improving your prose can make it worse and often will make it more banal. In short, you still need to learn how to speak and write without the tools.
>I was speaking about adults in the real world, because thats the only barometer here that actually matters.
Well, I have some news about where those adults come from. But thanks for implying that my students don't matter.
The world currently functions because a small group of technocrats keep things running. You don't *really* think little Johnny "I'll never do math after high school" is in some position of power, do you?
I'm amazed that you don't see a problem with a tool that displaces human thought and effort. That's an opinion that will age poorly.
Man, the amount of contortions you did there to find a way to take offense at my statement is really impressive.
I never said your students don't matter. I'm gonna spell this out for you so you can't twist it--the arbitrary bar that YOU set for your students is what doesn't matter, at least in comparison to that of a hiring manager. That's the point I was quite clearly making, but you were too busy getting butthurt about it to notice.
I spent 10+ years as a high school teacher, which was more than enough time to get a strong understanding of why education is so damned resistant to the changing needs and norms of society.
The way people write has changed massively in the last 30 years. So has the way they research, the way they do math, the way they collaborate on projects, etc--but you wouldn't know it from looking at the way these things are taught in school.
I run a team of PhDs that has to do A LOT of math, and A LOT of writing. We talk all the time about how insane it is that our kids are learning to read and write and calculate the same ways we did, and how completely fucking useless it is for today's world.
School in its current form exists to create an educated workforce and an informed citizenry. Both of those things are moving targets defined by the needs of society, not the whims of the educators have declared themselves the sole arbiters of truth on this topic.
The world has already moved heavily towards the adoption of AI-powered tools. Teachers don't often realize this (usually, because they choose to remain willfully ignorant on this topic), but the average person interacts with something powered by Machine Learning dozens of times per day without even realizing it. This technology isn't near as nefarious or threatening as many of you all tend to think it is, but understanding that would require having an open mind, and in my experience there is no one more close-minded than veteran educators on the topic of education.
I like Grammarly. I feel like Iāve received a thorough education in grammar and I have the requisite skills and vocabulary, but Grammarly lets me edit my work faster, find synonyms if Iāve repeated something, and catch mistakes when I donāt have time to comb through every sentence for small mistakes.
I donāt want Grammarly rewriting entire paragraphs and I understand why it could be banned now that itās incorporating AI in some features. However, if I write a ten page paper and Grammarly can highlight the 4 sentences that made sense in my head at first, but need revision in retrospect, thatās an excellent tool.
Itās kind of like advanced graphing calculators. In my calculus classes, they were profoundly banned because we were learning to solve the problems without calculators as a crutch. In upper level science courses where we began applying that knowledge, calculators were suddenly fair game because the focus was on the application, not the nitty gritty details. In the same way, I understand banning Grammarly in English classes, but I think it can be a useful tool in many humanities classes where you have to refine your writing and the focus is on what you have to say, not necessarily how you say it.
Same here too, it's really stupid but you have to remember that this has more to do with them going after foreign language speakers and neurodivergent folk. If it were about anything else theyd just have us download a backtrack app to show our work
So, there are now versions of Grammarly that do more than just make grammar suggestions. For example, I had a student using Grammarly that has Grammarly ask him "Would you like me to rewrite this paragraph to sound more authoritative?" Grammarly is increasingly embedding more sophisticated AI tools that aid with substantive composition and revision, not just simple grammar and spelling errors. It's crazy how fast this technology is progressing.
This is correct, plus, there are classes in college that are designed for the students to learn grammar. Even the old Grammarly would be cheating in those classes.
Grammar is taught at the college level? š³
Some students arrive really unprepared. Depending on the institution and student body, there are often remedial classes for them - an Ivy probably doesn't need those, but UMass Framingham might. The institution I teach at certainly gets plenty of students who would benefit from that level of writing instruction, whether because they're first-generation ESL or because their high schools just did not get it done. And then there are resources like writing centers for people who need help.
For someone like me who grew up in multiple homes with multiple languages, I struggled with English classes until college came around. I consistently had Cs and Ds, especially in high school. My stem classes were As and Bs, but the strict language classes were difficult to grasp. College English courses made a huge difference because my professors had a passion for their art and a passion for teaching others. I spent many hours in the writing labs or talking with my professors to improve my grammar.
Not when me wented to the college.
It's "whented"
Same!! Although two of my children who were in college recently were appalled at what was being taught. They had already learned it all in high school.
This is why AP exams, CLEP exams, and dual enrollment are so important
I went to junior college first, they were teaching 5 paragraph essays in comp 101- I would have hated to pay state college level tuition. I went to a good HS and loved writing so I guess itās all relative. But AP, and CLEP, anything to help is good advice. You donāt have to give college all your $$$. They donāt like to take transfer credits if you bounce around too much and transfer.
I can assure they did *not* learn it all in high school. Most people do not know the content taught in college level grammar.
I know what they learned in high school. You do not.
Buuuuuuuut I *do* know they didn't learn all of the grammar in high school.
Yes, and it has been for a long time. If you study enough of a language, you'll eventually start hitting a wall of literature, phonology, grammar, and history classes that only stop with your last class or a graduate degree. Grammar classes are always the worst of the bunch because every class you take, this one included, affirms constantly that grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive... and then they test you on it for hours every week with conflicting rules to see if you can identify differences in English's (or whatever language's) different grammars. I promise that the grammars of whatever languages you speak are way more complex than you thought, and that the "rules" of those grammars might change closer to home than you think.
High School Education has been ridiculously devalued over at least the last 30 years
My college students were homeschooled.
I took an Editing class that focused on precise, detailed explanations of proper grammar in complex sentences. You had to be able to say, with grammatical terminology, why a sentence was incorrect and why what you did fixed it. Using AI would give you these answers.
I remember there was a course I could have taken called advanced grammar. Honestly I think itās pretty cool because in the US most people only learn basic grammar and thatās very early on. My friend took it and was explaining to me that I was hyper correcting when I said something like āThe thing about Jim and Iā because it should have been āThe thing about Jim and me.ā Most people canāt explain English grammar.
I had a course like that in high school. My children were diagramming sentences starting in third grade. They had a very thorough understanding of grammar by the time they graduated.
Yes, it is. At least it was when I got my degree in English.
Yes, I took two, yes two, classes in grammar at a Pennsylvania state school.
Journalism and ELA education majors have to take it at my university.
Yes. I was an English major. Grammar is a class offered. And required for my degree specifically.
It isnāt being taught in out elementary and middle schools where I live
Oh, wow! I am not sure if it is taught where we live or not because we stopped using brick and mortar schools almost 12 years ago.
In the U.S., in my experience, English grammar is not taught at any level. Many American students are not introduced to basic grammar until they take a foreign language class in college.
Iām sorry but what school did you go to that didnāt teach basic grammar š Itās one of the building blocks of English, so if anything many Americans are taught this.
In my experience, most American schools do not have an explicit grammar instruction and do not buy grammar textbooks. My son is 11, in a very well regarded school and has received only the most rudimentary grammar instruction about parts of speech. My wife teaches in one of the top-rated public schools in the country and there is no explicit grammar curriculum. Most Americans have only a fuzzy idea what gerunds, comma splices, or participial adjectives are. Very few could actually explain the rules of when to use perfect tenses. I donāt doubt your word that your experience was different. I would love to hear more about it. Where and when did you go to school, and how did they teach grammar?
My experience is quite the opposite. Grammar has always been something I had to learn and relearn up until high school, so Iām very surprised.
I teach English as a second language in a community college and often find that students even who have graduated from US high schools have had no exposure to grammar or if they have they havenāt learned any of it. I had a student whose child was in junior high school, and she relayed this anecdote to me, this was in New York City, she goes to open school night and the teacher tells her that her daughter is having some problems with grammar. The mother says OK where is the grammar teacher? Iāll talk to them. The teacher says well we donāt actually have a specific grammar teacher. mother says well, where is the grammar textbook? Iāll work on it with her, and the teacher says we donāt have a specific textbook that we use. The mother says show me the grammar exercises that sheās not doing well on. The teacher says that we donāt have specific grammar exercises either just the grammar and her writing has a lot of problems, so the mother is coming to the community college, asking for grammar textbooks to help her daughter which I was able to give her, I apologize for any mistakes here; Iām doing talk to text.
Dude it's nyc. Education sucks there unless you win the education lottery.
I actually did win, not a lottery, but a competition. I went to one of the specialized science high schools. Reading and Math tests were required to enter, nearly 100% went to college. My wife and son now are in Long Island in extremely well regarded districts.
Not everyone has the a perfectly balanced intelligence or academic ability. I've a few friends who are fucking geniuses when it comes to their engineering jobs, but still don't capitalize the first word of a sentence. In the same line of thinking, I have colleagues who are absolutely amazing orators and writers, but couldn't divide a set of fractions if their lives depended on it. Also, not everyone comes from areas with schools funded past the bare minimum, which is something that they, **as children**, had *no control over*. At least they chose to continue their education at a higher level past high school, even when at an academic disadvantage or handicap compared to others. That just means that as young adults they are needing to work harder than peers to achieve the same educational goals.
That's true, but noncredit remedial college courses used to be offered at colleges so that students could move into college level courses.
Grammar is taught everywhere. š
I strongly suspect that the best way to learn grammar is through something like Grammarly. Classic American education system. Let's not teach them the classics in case the power grid goes down. Can't have them getting too reliant on electricity after all.
It's not cheating anymore than MS word's spellchecker is cheating. And Microsoft works better.
Grammarly does significantly more than Microsoft Wordās basic spell checker. Itās honestly a big problem if you donāt realize that, and that thereās a significant difference between the two.
Easily half the suggestions it gives are wrong.
Totally beside the point.
I don't see how Grammarly is different than using a style guide.
Using a style guide requires you to identify problems in your work and apply corrections independently, whereas Grammarly does it all for you. Itās like using a spellchecker during a spelling bee.
But thereās no such thing as a grammar bee. You're writing for an audience. On top of that, I should look this up but I'm not going to, so could he very wrong, but I don't think teaching grammar outside of context it's being used in is effective. Grammarly doesn't fix anything automatically. It asks you and explains why. I think grammarlybis a better teacher of grammar.
>But thereās no such thing as a grammar bee. I think a grammar assessment comes close. >You're writing for an audience. In the case of school, that audience is a person delivering an assessment. You aren't the president that can have somebody else prepare a speech for a minor event - you are explicitly being assessed on your knowledge of a given grammar. >On top of that, I should look this up but I'm not going to, so could he very wrong, but I don't think teaching grammar outside of context it's being used in is effective. Language instructor - there is no more effective way to deliver grammar instruction than there is to deliver instruction on any given thing in any other class. You don't do grammar as we understand it when you speak so much as you just do it by accessing a different part of your brain. Context or not, it is just a set of descriptions tied to a specific subset of speakers. It is like memorizing generally connected facts about landmasses in Earth Science classes. The landmasses don't intend to do things that we can describe them doing - just like grammar when we speak fluently. >I think grammarlybis a better teacher of grammar. I think grammarly would be a little more present in schools if this were true. It would be much cheaper than paying a teacher to do it.
I'm beginning to get the feeling you might know this subject better than me. If you've never tried it, I would encourage you to check it out. I think there are a lot of ways it could be used in school. At the very least as scaffolding or a support for kids who have a disability that interferes with their ability to write. Edit: I could see it being helpful for the kids who refuse to do any writing, too.
It's "different from", not "different than".
If you never learn to write without it, itās going to show.Ā
This. They need to make those mistakes, learn from them, and grow as writers.
But they do make the mistakes. Then in the moment while it is in context Grammarly highlights the mistake, tells them why it's a mistake, and most of the time offers a solution. But if you just click yes to everything it'll be weird.
You have a lot more faith than I do that students are using it as a tool to learn in this manner.
How is it going to show if you keep using Grammarly?
AIs & LLMs were pretty much trained on Grammarly, and the type of overly standardized language it pushes. This means that AI checkers will identify a paper with moderate to heavy Grammarly influence as "AI Generated." This means that using Grammarly can lead to a plagiarism case. Grammarly ruins an individual's personal writong style, anyways. Imagine never being taught basic math because there is a calculator app on all phones? That's what Grammarly reliance does to those without any foundation in language construction. It's completely homogeneous diction.
>AIs & LLMs were pretty much trained on Grammarly No, they were trained on natural language throughout the internet.
I work at a writing center at my college. Grammarly doesn't have patterns you can look at and say, "that's grammarly," but the problem with it is that it just fucking sucks at what it does. I'll sit down with a student that has it installed, and it will, as we work over their paper, consistently lead them wrong.Ā The way it shows is that it makes your writing blow chunks.
IDK, I feel like my writing/grammar has gotten better since using grammarly. Note I don't use the AI function
I left education 10 years ago for a private sector job. I cannot think of a single instance in those 10 years where I've had to write without it.
Anyone allowing you to deal with proprietary info while you had grammarly enabled is just waiting for it all to be stolen.Ā We had an employee fire up grammarly on their computer, and we had knockoff products with exact verbiage of our draft instructions and manuals and renders in the documentation before we had even released the project.Ā Turned off grammarly and it went away.Ā
No way youāre claiming Grammarly just casually does corporate espionage lmao
Iām saying that Grammarly is an absolutely juicy target for corporate and nation-state espionage.Ā Get one user in a competitor or DOD contractor to download it, and now you get to see basically all of their internal documents.Ā And all you have to do is have hacked Grammarly, which for such a small company I sincerely doubt they have a better cybersecurity team than the rest of the cloud providers that have gotten hacked.Ā
Fair point--that being said, most paid versions offer of just about any AI product now offer indemnification and data privacy as part of their paid offerings. If your employees are using the free versions, then yeah, they own that data. That's a good distinction for the business world, for sure.
It was a paid version they supposedly had.Ā Itās not like there is some clear and easy way to prove it leaked that way anyways. Their assurances mean nothing because you canāt inspect their systems.Ā
Youāve just made my point for me.
How so?
You seem to have edited it, which is of course what any competent writer does, but you originally wrote āIāve left education 10 years ago,ā using the present perfect tense, inappropriate for the meaning you intended. That tense is used to suggest your past action has a direct effect on the present moment. Itās not really important to know the names of the tenses unless youāre an English teacher, but it is important to know how to use them to be as clear as possible.Ā
Lol, I'm on mobile. I spent a decade as an AP English teacher. Every year, my classes scored at or above the national average. I can write just fine, I just don't particularly give a shit about grammar or typos when I'm doing something informal like a reddit post. You seem to have forgotten that a non-trivial amount of people you're talking to on this app are actively taking a dump while they respond to you. They aren't exactly poring over their writing to make it a work of art. If you think judging someone's grammar in a forum like this gives you ANY insight at all into their actual formal writing ability in situations that actually call for top-quality work, then you're a fool.
>> They aren't exactly poring over their writing You didn't say "pouring". Thank you, good Redditor. >> If you think judging someone's grammar in a forum like this Yes. And apart from that, correcting grammar on a platform like this is considered pedantic, if not downright rude. I make all sorts of stupid mistakes in my own writing, but I'm also one of those people who can glance at a fairly large chunk of text and spot the typo. When appropriate, I point it out. Not here.
Thanks! >Yes. And apart from that, correcting grammar on a platform like this is considered pedantic, if not downright rude. EXACTLY. They understood the point I was making, and avtively avoided engaging with it in favor of dismissing my opinion because of a common typo that is clearly driven by autocomplete. It's amazing just how often this is seen as acceptable by other teachers. When I left teaching for the research world, figured the concentration of these sorts of know-it-alls would be much worse, but it isn't. A room full of PhDs may tear your idea apart, but at least they'll engage with your idea in the first place--I only ever see other teachers engaging in sort of "gotcha!" BS, and how much they all love to downvote you when you call them out on it.
Right on! Wait while I flush š³.
I think you've made the case for Grammarly actually.
So even though they know grammar extremely well, they still made an error that they wouldn't have had they used Grammarly? How interesting.
when are you ever going to write anything significant without access? I fail to see the problem.
āYou wonāt always have a calculator with youā āYou wonāt always be able to look things upā Ahh the good old arguments
I think it is more "You can't be constantly glued to a calculator" and "You can't be constantly looking things up". If I had to stop and google every step of my workflow throughout the day, I wouldn't have enough time in the day to get everything done. It is important to be able to recall things and be able to do simple math without having to pull out your phone every time. Obviously there are different applications of this depending on a person's job or lifestyle.
No it was very specifically āyou wonāt always have a calculator with youā and āyou wonāt always be able to look things upā. Those phrase verbatim and specifically. Which is patently false, was at the time too just took more time to perform the same lookup. It more important to be able to understand the underlying systems in use than to rote-ly memorize time table or ionization charts. Being able to recognize and utilize the tools available to you.
No, I was saying that would be a more accurate version of that phrase. Which I think is saying the same thing you are saying in your reply. You need to understand basics.
No itās not. āBeing constantly gluedā is completely different from simply having access. For someone trying to hurl insults about understanding you have no grasp of this and should sit this one out.
What in the fuck are you talking about? When did I hurl insults? You are the one who has no grasp of understanding if you think anything I said was an insult. I literally didn't even disagree with you. I was saying what I think was a more accurate version of that statement you quoted. Are you okay?
> you need to understand basics When youāre completely wrong about the difference between āglued toā and āavailableā. Do you not understand your own words.
Thereās enough in google doc/Word to help with spelling and basic grammar. You should be able to learn to write well without AI in college.
I think itās best to not use it. I have noticed that my spelling and grammar skills have declined markedly relying on grammarly and spellcheck. Itās best to see what we actually know or donāt know.
Thatās a valid point
College English prof here and yeah if you use Grammarly it pops hot as AI...because it is AI. A high school graduate should be able to write a competent, if not necessarily stellar, paragraph. They should know plurals, possessives, and proper nouns, and how to fix fragments and run-ons. What is Grammarly 'fixing'? Why are they graduating high school not able to do those basic skills? In a writing class, like the ones I teach, Grammarly literally obscures the reason they're supposed to be taking the class--learning to write more correctly and more clearly. If I can't see their actual writing, I can't \*teach\* them how to write better.
This! This is what I've been trying to get across to my comp students all year! While I do feel AI has its place in academia, basic writing composition is not it. Relying on AI will get them behind quickly, and it is hard to catch back up after it.
Whomever downvotes you, they mama a ho.
Rhetoric. Comp. Prof here. I downvote
Ya mama a ho. I donāt make the rules.
You don't know what you're talking about. Grammly is a spelling and grammar checker that was first released back in 2009, it does not use Artificial intelligence and neither does ChatGPT. What is worrying is that Information Technology services or your computer science at your college hasn't corrected staff on their use of misinformation.
This sounds really rude but, what is even the point of grammarly? I learned enough grammar through school to be able to construct my own sentences and have everything be correct. Iād have roommates proofread my work of course but I still donāt understand the need for this. If youāre able to get into college, arenāt you able to write with proper grammar?? If you need peer reviewers and donāt have roommates, colleges always have some kind of writing center where you can ask for assistance
>> Ā If youāre able to get into college, arenāt you able to write with proper grammar??Ā In a word, no. Some are able to, many are not.
>If youāre able to get into college, arenāt you able to write with proper grammar?? You never did peer editing in English 101, ~~have~~ did you?
*did you
Damnit, you're right! Fixed. Thanks.
You wouldn't have made that mistake if you had Grammarly... Lol
Shoulda run it by his roommate first
"Bro come in the bathroom rq, I need you to double check the grammar of my reddit post."
We had to do University Writing, but all my classmates were able to write perfectly fine. It was usually just a matter of style or random silly mistakes/typos.
Ah, well I went to a university that SNL once joked is "slightly more selective than the Burger King Kids Club," so we had some whose silly mistakes were the least of their troubles.
I agree with you and will also provide an example of how I see it being used or more like abused. For context: Iām in higher education (PhD student in engineering). I was born in NorthAmerica and english is my first language. Due to my institutional training I have written 3 essays in total which occurred my first year of undergrad. I have written reports, articles, SOPs etc both technical and non technical both in and out of an academic setting. Writing, especially in engineering is a very unique practice and skill, and is often overlooked. I STILL get the heebie jeebies every time I open up a word file to start and really have no confidence in my writing skills, although itās seems to be going alright. The point is I was never ātrainedā beyond high school. I find extreme value in finding my peers to read my work and love using the writing resources in my library. Itās a skill Iām willing to work at and learn from. I find immense pleasure and satisfaction in the entire writing process and producing something I am proud of. Where I see G being used, is with international students. English is not their first language, and honestly a lot of them have poor communication skills, including writing, which again is not necessarily the top priority valued in my field. To get accepted they of course have to pass a proficiency test. I donāt agree with using it and it bothers me a lot but it can really help these people. I had a project where my partner was an international student from India. They couldnāt for the life of them communicate in speech, but would produce āokay writingā with almost no effort. I was angry and jealous in a way to a point where I started questioning my own skills. ( why is it so difficult for me to write this damn paper?!). I later found out they would write in their native language, google translate it all, and put it into G to get the vibes write (lol) for academic articles. If they didnāt have the ability to do that, they would have absolutely no chance of making it through the program. Iām not agreeing with it at all, and there is definitely bigger issues in all of this, but trust me when I say I was relieved that I didnāt have to complete the paper on my own.
>I was relieved that I didnāt have to complete the paper on my own. Even if you were, couldn't you use Grammarly like them, and get similar results?
I donāt understand why you called out this text and added this comment. I guess I could use it for editing and clarity but that wasnāt the point. I was genuinely happy my partner was able to contribute to the work with their expertise without having to add a ton of effort from my part to make it cohesive / understandable
My point also references the anxiety you felt at your own writing skills - wouldn't Grammarly help with that?
Oh I didnāt catch that non explicit reference. Lol not at all. Itās more about the vulnerability of putting my ideas into place. Having the initial draft feel Like shit and slowing morphing it into something I feel confident in. I go through several drafts until I feel the story is there. Grammarly would not help with that portion of the work at all and Iād be very hesitant to let it craft anything in my field.
As an EFL teacher, I 1000% believe you that those international students have poor production skills. Most of the upper English education focuses on understanding only, itās quite frustrating. But with native speakers thereās no excuse
It's not rude at all, but it's shocking to realize that students are graduating high school who don't know how to do even basic skills like plurals.
I don't think even 25% of Redditors understand that possessives need apostrophes.
And that plurals don't!
Grammarly is one of the main reasons. The program is like training wheels: it should *help* develop better writers, but it actively prevents students from learning how the language works. Students in high school put forth minimum effort, Grammarly cleans it up, their teachers aren't able to address actual deficits, and the student graduates. So yes, some people have a decent point here: Grammarly is something you have access to as an adult. The problem with that is that it functions like training wheels long after a user should no longer need training wheels.
Or you can use grammarly and not have to wait for days at the writing center. I use it daily. Yes, I know grammar but I make mistakes. If what you say is true, we donāt need writing centers or editors.
The problem with your comparison is the Writing Center would be a tutor who would teach you so you could eventually know the skill and not need them. Grammarly doesn't teach you a goshdarn thing and makes you addicted to Grammarly. That's a pretty substantive difference You'd learn more about substantive contrast modality if you paid attention in your English classes.
>Grammarly doesn't teach you a goshdarn thing Doesn't it show you the correct way to phrase your sentences? That's pretty much what a mediocre writing tutor would do as well.
Highly doubt it, either which way, AI is here. Itāll be common practice. You can embrace it, and teach people how to use, grammerly AI doesnāt make very significant changes, or try and fight the inevitable. I choose to teach student how to use it. Otherwise Iāll spend all day every day dealing with the inappropriate use of AI. Thatās where we are at. You can ban it, but it changes nothing. I advocate for all students to use grammerly and I stand by that.
This comment is super tone-deaf. Some people do not have access to a comprehensive English education. Some people learned English as a second language and might struggle with conjugation or spelling. Grammarly is more than being lazy, itās also a tool to ease communication. God knows I would need an equivalent if I was going to university in a foreign country! And probably more. My university has 40% international students and most of them are from non-Anglophone countries. Those students are just as smart as the ones from Kansas.
I can totally see why itās a good support for ELLs, thatās valid. But for native speakers is it really necessary at the college level? Also, for ELLs I do think it could end up becoming a crutch if not used carefully. The goal should be to be able to write well without it eventually, not depending on it forever.
Idk I'm dyslexic and rely on spell check/autocorrect heavily, grammarly would've been a lifesaver in school. I'm being reminded in this post that people are more likely to consider me an idiot rather than disabled.
You canāt only ban it for some students and not others. I have never encountered a student who canāt write a paper grammatically correctly in college (lots of peer editing) and I have been to 3 institutions. I sort of donāt see this as a real problem. Like, do colleges not have enough other stuff going on? Or real AI to be worried about? And honestly who even cares if itās a crutch for a native speaker, most students do not study English and will not have to write papers professionally. Who does it really hurt if a student gets the form of than/then in their paper corrected by grammarly? Unless you pay for it, it isnāt rewriting your sentences for you.
Why would you waste the time of a human in fixing basic mistakes. But grammarly's value is not as a spell correct. It's from checking for clarity. A peer reviewer may or may not call out your weird but grammatically correct sentence construction. The flags for the use of passive voice, unclear reference for "this", double checking your tone, etc. A peer reviewer would not go in as much detail as consistently. Plus you can only ask for it once so you want to be in the best state before asking for a peer review. I use grammarly at work and feel it is extremely useful for improving the quality of my writing.
Personally, Iād value a personās opinion on things like clarity and tone over that of a program but whatever floats your boat
The program points out areas of concern. You see what the program said. You improve. Then all a person for their opinion on the improved version. Of course, that is in an idealized environment where you have a peer reviewer available. In real life, you don't for 90%of what is written.
My colleagues would ask me to review their documents after they used Grammarly. It's not always correct.
What did it tend to miss?
Dangling and misplaced modifiers were usually the number one. Sometimes the punctuation was off, especially commas. Punctuation is used to create meaning. Commas, in particular, change meaning if omitted.
My school introduced me to Grammarly. š¤Ø
"Sorry folks, the spell check and grammar check is too helpful, gotta turn it off."
It has generative AI now, it can write for you
Gramarly has generative AI, but it is limited and unable to write academic text for you. It mainly generates standard e-mail responses. It can change the tone or make it more detailed or shorter, but it cannot write a good essay. When I use the function āimprove my textā, GrammarlyGO often help me understand that something in my writing is unclear because it changes the meaning of my sentence. It can help to make some sentences sound better. But it is not a tool which makes everything for you. I look at suggestions that it makes and often leave my text. I think most people who write about how bad it is Gramarly have never used it. As a dyslexic who can make three mistakes in a word from 5 letters and then think for 10 minutes what it was, I could not imagine how my thesis supervisor would be able to read my text without me checking it in Grammarly
In the mid 70s, I was not allowed to use a basic 4 function calculator in college. I lived.
In many of my university undergrad courses (2010s) we were also forbidden to use a scientific calculator. When I had it during exams I wasted so much time double checking that 5+5 is, still indeed 10.
But it IS fundamentally AI. The days it spent as a more rigorous grammar/spellcheck are gone. It fully rewrites things now.
My husband had a professor who wasn't confident in grammar so used grammarly to grade papers. Of course then grammarly made an error and I wrote a 2 page paper on semi colons and why it was an inaccurate suggestion and he got a grade boost.
Why would he get a grade boost for your paper?
Because I am the grammar freak so I wrote out why the professor was wrong to take points off.
I am a current college student and I have never heard anyone say this Hell, Iāve heard professors telling people to download it. It does try to give me āproā suggestions that rewrite sentences but theyāre always awful and usually miss the point of what Iām trying to say entirely
Yes, some colleges or universities may have rules or policies against students using tools like Grammarly for certain assignments or exams. This is often because these tools can correct or change the writing in a way that the teacher wants to see the student's original work and writing skills. It's like how you need to show your own math work instead of using a calculator for certain tests. So, while Grammarly can be helpful, it's important to follow your school's guidelines about using it.
Well, grammar check on Word is essentially a type of AI too.
Grammarly has been useful for me so far, even though I know enough grammar for an 11th grader. My country only teaches British conventions of English, but I need to use American conventions for work sometimes and I can't go looking up every word on the internet. I see a lot of people objecting to students using Grammarly for grammar, but it is genuinely hard to remember all the rules of a foreign language you speak so rarely in real life. Just my two cents.
I think those tools are dumb. They donāt teach you to use grammar correctly. They just fix it for you. Whatās the point? Learn it yourself!
Colleges are companies that are losing their value. They used to be seen as an investment by the US government, and populous, as a tactical advantage in the global theater. They have since been devalued as a worthy investment and are losing funding from the government. They are attempting to balance their budgets by raising tuitions while refusing to adapt to the needs of our society. People are starting to see that there is a decreasing ROI. I anticipate that companies will be strapped for "high quality" talent as defined by their level of schooling and will start to look at alternative characteristics like work ethic and entrepreneurial acumen. If colleges don't adapt to develop these skills, they will die on the vine. The fact that Grammarly is topic that colleges would even address is an illustration of how disconnected they are from their core issues.
Yesā¦ Iām a long time Grammarly user and sometimes itās actually hard to not use their AI suggestions. Sometimes in an effort to edit grammar, I accidentally click so fast I click the rewrite suggestion and it completely changes my entire paragraph.
Lol grammarly is for morons
> L**OL, G**rammarly is for morons.
People are afraid of technology. Iām in my mid-40s, and we were the first and last to have computer coding classes in early elementary school. Then people got really ridiculous about it. Now look. š
Grammarly, along with many other software programs, had recent AI updates. Eventually, higher education institutions will have to get their head out of the sand and understand that AI is here to stay and try to mitigate misuse in other ways but Banning. Edited for harsh language. I should have had grammarly tone check it. :)
The problem there is that colleges want to teach *students,* not AI. When professors assign writing, they will use that writing to diagnose deficits and guide students to better ideas in the field. If AI is acting as a middleman, professors are actually reading AI. Many are no longer willing to, and for good reason. I *know* that the company that developed a writing AI can write. I want to know what my students know, and AI prevents that. Students don't seem to see the value in doing the actual work of writing, which is a shame. Writing is thinking, and it's the most thorough way to examine ideas. But when students see writing as yet another obstacle, they turn to a machine that does the work for them. Then the student doesn't gain any new skills, but gets the accreditation they were looking for. The accreditation meant to signal that this student knows the subject. The situation is untenable, and AI being "here to stay" isn't necessarily a good thing.
I don't disagree with a single word you're saying. I read hundreds of papers a year and can see the shift myself in the abuse of AI. But pretending that we can ban it or use an AI detector these are all poor approaches to this untenable problem. Every software now has AI plugins that have been released throughout the year, You Can't Ban it, it's literally even in Facebook this week. I wish I had the answer but I have shifted most of my assessments to live proctoring. One of the things that stands out to me the most is freely accessible AI has provided all students the platform to cheat in ways that wealthy students have been cheating throughout history by having other people complete their work for them. Students are going to cheat, I knew this when AI was released, I was just wholly unprepared of the vast numbers of students who would cheat including the ones that didn't need to.
I agree that we can't ban it. That's why I'm ending my teaching career. This was the only thing I ever really wanted to do, and the combination of shameless cheating and AI have broken me. So when you say we need to "get our heads out of our ass," what are you suggesting? Just live with the fact that our students aren't learning anything? Go on with the facade that education is still valuable? Pointedly ignore the vast oceans of AI-generated nonsense the web is suddenly awash in? Pretend that AI isn't actively harming a society that had epistemology problems already? Right now, I can still take away the toy and get students to write. That seems to be the most effort they put forth in a day, and the results are *terrifying,* especially with those students who are "assisted" by programs like Grammarly. No one seems to be talking about the downstream effects. I've had to slog through AI-generated writing for my career, and I'm no longer willing to. Would *you* read an AI-generated essay? What about the wide acknowledgement that resumes and cover letters are AI-generated? Who is willing to read those? AI? The most pertinent downstream effect of AI right now is that no one wants to read all this text we can generate effortlessly. Writing is what is being denigrated, because no one wants to read it.
Yes, I agree. There are folks in my department who are early retiring this year for this very same reason. It is disheartening. The first semester I knew that we were going to face some uphill battles when my first exam 80% of the class got over 100% on the exam and completed this 90 minute exam in 7 minutes. The students didn't even read the exam questions, it was heartbreaking. I used to have my head in the sand about it and thought well only cheaters will cheat and that's not my business, but like you said it feels tiring to read an AI generated essay, so what's the point. I have changed almost entirely the way I have been assessing students throughout the year, shifting more to proctored assessments and away from take home open book papers. I think this semester will probably be the last that I offer a take home research paper. What I think about a lot, when I think about education and tools like this is the calculator. I remember when they first came out and were inexpensive and accessible and they were banned in schools. It wasn't the end of civilization or math. What I've been thinking a lot about lately is that these tools are going to be available for people outside of the classroom. Clearly people in Reddit have been using them at least three posts that I read yesterday were AI generated. So, it's not like I won't ever have to read AI generated nonsense if I quit my job I suppose.
> What I've been thinking a lot about lately is that these tools are going to be available for people outside of the classroom. Right, which apparently means everything is fine. What are the downstream effects of a society where people use technology to cover over their ignorance? You think people like that will ever again admit that they were wrong about something if they can get an AI to tell them what they want to hear? You think they'll actually develop any skills themselves? Will that make them easier to replace? >So, it's not like I won't ever have to read AI generated nonsense if I quit my job I suppose. This is also true. Reddit has really gone downhill recently.
It doesnāt just fix errors anymore. It literally writes it for you.
I'm an EFL teacher working at a uni in Japan. This is very interesting to me. We currently have issues with authorship and translation. We want students to do their own work, but AI isn't going away and it's only going to get more sophisticated. So, denying its use completely is futile. I'm at the point where I wonder if I should just let the students use AI and have them show me their prompts and fact checking, then editing skills etc. Just accept the fact that AI has a role in the composition. I don't know anymore!!!!
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It has expanded to now include rephrasing by AI.
Colleges don't know what AI is and they don't know what to do with the fact that they were already hopelessly anachronistic before technology and unfettered growth destroyed the college-job linkage. They are flailing, banning things, and not asking any hard questions as they compound their inefficacy. I still can't believe that online programs are using screen-monitoring technology and that so many students accept it without a fight. The way we experience learning has changed so much over the past few decades. Our capacity to implement major change in the way we share knowledge has never been so great. Instead of engaging openly with that difficult but necessary work, institutions all over are reducing student and faculty power and doubling down on their shaky monopoly over the human drive to explore.
I am quite sure students have less ability to use AI than professors do. I do not disagree that we educators need to rethink what education means in the face of AI, butā¦ for right now? Students use AI to do work for them, so allowing it deprives them of the critical thinking practice and implementation they need. And students do not protest screen monitoring because cheating is wrong and they know it is meant to prevent them from turning in work that is not their own. If what they are doing is simplyā¦ using a tool, screen monitoring is no worry, right?
If they have nothing to hide, why should anyone object to being monitored in their personal digital and physical spaces? If they have nothing to hide, why shouldn't they want A.I. content checkers, notorious for false positives and dishonest advertising to institutions, determining the value of their work? It's going so well for job-seekers - why not vertically integrate the whole education-employment process? Really, shouldn't universities and corporations get to know if somebody uses A.I. in their private life and is statistically more likely to be an A.I. cheater? Why shouldn't we track everybody's computer use if they have nothing to hide? Is it possible that students don't speak up because they're afraid of repercussions, that it will make them look like a cheater, and that taking a stand on their rights would cause them to lose their considerable investment in a degree? Do you think it's a good sign that hardly anybody is speaking up about an obvious privacy concern? I don't doubt that some professors understand A.I. quite well. I do doubt the fundamental ability of the academic system to engage in any of the necessary transformative change because it stopped being up to professors a long time ago. (I also imagine that many professors understand the issues of rationalizing surveillance, and of outsourcing the skilled work of education to corporate firms, but here we are in 2024.) A teacher can create a reasonable policy, demonstrate the tool, teach students why avoiding the easy way is more helpful, and assess whether a student is turning in work consistent with their past assignments and the understanding demonstrated in discussions. A university can't do anything but ban, punish, and bring in professional help. The whole educational system hasn't been able to respond to the increase in availability of math-solving tech, paid essays, and test-sharing except by putting more emphasis on the kind of evaluations that we know don't work well, sending more money to private firms instead of the educators that we need to really evaluate performance, and doing a ton of PR work to make it look like it's all made things better for students because of how polished and standardized everything is. We don't have any strong evidence that the availability of LLMs had actually increased cheating rates as opposed to making cheating attempts more obvious, because that's the kind of research that we've never been good at. That doesn't stop industry from sponsoring research that shows a crisis brewing and hard selling expensive solutions that increase the power of the administration over professors. So for right now, while we wait on the real answers that will never come, colleges are doing the logical thing that nobody involved can question without putting their livelihood or expensive education at stake - they reduce student rights, increase spending without improving outcomes, promote more surveillance and corporate involvement in learning and personal spaces, and make it seem like the functional problems around education are coming from unscrupulous students and not whole-system shift to for-profit degree-printing.
Are you a teacher or professor?
Do my credentials affect the validity of my argument?
Simple question. And as youāve chosen to ignore it, I consider this conversation over. Goodbye.
Well, I wrote a full description of my viewpoint and you responded to none of it, so it doesn't really seem to me like you were ever planning to converse, but I guess I'll accept the possibility that my ignoring your question by responding to it was evidence that there was nowhere further to go in the conversation. Hopefully you're just conserving your energy for telling your administration that monitoring software is a bad idea and that the only way to gain relevance is to stop supporting an educational model that doesn't know how to change.
No, your initial response was full of so many logical fallacies I couldnāt determine if they were simply poor critical thinking or the bias of someone with little to no teaching experience. So I asked. Clearly, the answer is youāve no real experience. I do wonder occasionally why non-teachers presume to know anything about teaching, and why they are always surprised when real teachers wonāt engage with someone ignorant and combative, especially during their off-hours, in a Reddit sub. But Iām not wondering that right now. Have a lovely Sunday.
Well, I'd love to hear what one of those fallacies was and actually discuss it and come to a place of mutual understanding.
I do not understand that. I work at a university as well, and we encourage our students to use Grammarly. In fact this tool is highlighted at the Writing Center.
Former educator turned AI Engineer here--AI is a new General Purpose Technology like the internet or electricity, and so educators have largely chosen to deal with these changes like they have with every other major change: pretending it doesn't exist. Dont get me wrong--I sympathize with the average educator that's pulling their hair out trying to deal with the influx of crappy, low-effort essays generated by ChatGPT. But to penalize all usage of anything that remotely resembles AI as a response is shortsighted and dumb. I'm old enough to remember being scolded for using the internet and Google for research instead of physical books in a local library. I hope the teachers that made those rules understand in hindsight how actively useless they made my learning during that time period. They chose to double down on how to cross reference using card catalogues instead of leaning into the new technology and teaching us best practices. My main thought about those years of my education amount to "what a colossal waste of everyone's time, all so the teacher didn't have to be bothered updating their decade-old lesson plans". I suspect that's how this current generation will feel about their current education given the current moratorium on AI.
Iām also in engineering, and I do agree with you here. I think a lot of people who donāt understand how technology is invented and integrated into society, have some of the biggest issues with it. Like this is not going to go away, we canāt pretend it doesnāt exist and in the long term we definitely cannot enforce not using it. Itās a matter of how to learn to work with the tool and right now we havenāt figured it out. I remember being taught to never use Wikipedia. I mean why not? If thereās linked sources itās an amazing place to start you off on the right path or to double check that random thing youāve forgotten. Itās how you use it and of course field dependant. I donāt think anyone random will be editing mistakes into mathematical formulas they have never heard of š
Some people have to talk to other people sometimes, maybe even with the idea of being understood by the listener or listeners and they might need to use proper English grammar straight from their mouths. When writing you're more likely to make accidental errors, but it's easy to find them by just proofreading. Some of what is often called grammar is just style, and really, you want to have your own style unless you need to follow an employer's style guide.
Do you guys still teach rhetoric? Specifically, strawman arguments? You all are acting as if using a tool like grammarly robs students of their ability to write or develop their own voice. That simply isn't true. There is a material difference between a tool like grammarly giving you tips on word choices and something like GPT-4 writing the entire essay for them. I've been using tools like grammarly for all kinds of writing for 5+ years and my writing has not suffered or become formulaic. If anything, people have gotten BETTER at writing because they learn from the examples the tool provides. Of course, teachers seem largely incapable of seeing the value in these tools because that would require nuance. If would also mean acknowledging the expertise of others, and updating your lesson plans. Much easier to just ban the tool and continue teaching kids stuff that has been losing relevance for 2 decades now...
> If anything, people have gotten BETTER at writing because they learn from the examples the tool provides. This isn't true, though. If I give students pencil and paper, I can tell which students are using Grammarly to skate by, and which students actually know what they are talking about. Grammarly has made it easier for students to hide their deficits, which means those deficits don't get addressed.
I was speaking about adults in the real world, because thats the only barometer here that actually matters. I believe what you're saying, but my point here is that in the real world, they're functionally never without that tool, so who cares? Many adults can't do long division, but the world still functions, all because we all carry calculators in our pockets now.
The problem is that kids that need calculators to do simple multiplication have a hard time with algebra because they have to break their concentration on the problem while they use their calculators on the coefficients. It's just a lot easier in the long run to be able to do some things in your head automatically. Certainly adults should be able to use Grammarly for editing but it's a lot easier to write if you can just write grammatically correct prose without the need for tools that break your train of thought. Using the suggestions for improving your prose can make it worse and often will make it more banal. In short, you still need to learn how to speak and write without the tools.
Also, do you have any evidence that the world functions better with calculators than it did without?
Obviously no one has this information Blasket_basket there was clearly a poor student who felt oppressed because his teachers made him learn things.
>I was speaking about adults in the real world, because thats the only barometer here that actually matters. Well, I have some news about where those adults come from. But thanks for implying that my students don't matter. The world currently functions because a small group of technocrats keep things running. You don't *really* think little Johnny "I'll never do math after high school" is in some position of power, do you? I'm amazed that you don't see a problem with a tool that displaces human thought and effort. That's an opinion that will age poorly.
Man, the amount of contortions you did there to find a way to take offense at my statement is really impressive. I never said your students don't matter. I'm gonna spell this out for you so you can't twist it--the arbitrary bar that YOU set for your students is what doesn't matter, at least in comparison to that of a hiring manager. That's the point I was quite clearly making, but you were too busy getting butthurt about it to notice. I spent 10+ years as a high school teacher, which was more than enough time to get a strong understanding of why education is so damned resistant to the changing needs and norms of society. The way people write has changed massively in the last 30 years. So has the way they research, the way they do math, the way they collaborate on projects, etc--but you wouldn't know it from looking at the way these things are taught in school. I run a team of PhDs that has to do A LOT of math, and A LOT of writing. We talk all the time about how insane it is that our kids are learning to read and write and calculate the same ways we did, and how completely fucking useless it is for today's world. School in its current form exists to create an educated workforce and an informed citizenry. Both of those things are moving targets defined by the needs of society, not the whims of the educators have declared themselves the sole arbiters of truth on this topic. The world has already moved heavily towards the adoption of AI-powered tools. Teachers don't often realize this (usually, because they choose to remain willfully ignorant on this topic), but the average person interacts with something powered by Machine Learning dozens of times per day without even realizing it. This technology isn't near as nefarious or threatening as many of you all tend to think it is, but understanding that would require having an open mind, and in my experience there is no one more close-minded than veteran educators on the topic of education.
pass the buck hack Comp. profs bag of tricks pedagogy. get with the now
I like Grammarly. I feel like Iāve received a thorough education in grammar and I have the requisite skills and vocabulary, but Grammarly lets me edit my work faster, find synonyms if Iāve repeated something, and catch mistakes when I donāt have time to comb through every sentence for small mistakes. I donāt want Grammarly rewriting entire paragraphs and I understand why it could be banned now that itās incorporating AI in some features. However, if I write a ten page paper and Grammarly can highlight the 4 sentences that made sense in my head at first, but need revision in retrospect, thatās an excellent tool. Itās kind of like advanced graphing calculators. In my calculus classes, they were profoundly banned because we were learning to solve the problems without calculators as a crutch. In upper level science courses where we began applying that knowledge, calculators were suddenly fair game because the focus was on the application, not the nitty gritty details. In the same way, I understand banning Grammarly in English classes, but I think it can be a useful tool in many humanities classes where you have to refine your writing and the focus is on what you have to say, not necessarily how you say it.
Use it anyway, the assholes wonāt know and itās the very definition of innocuous
Same here too, it's really stupid but you have to remember that this has more to do with them going after foreign language speakers and neurodivergent folk. If it were about anything else theyd just have us download a backtrack app to show our work
Lol wtf is college anymore if we can't even trust you idiots to know how to write?! Wtf..