If it's just one student, then I think you should just talk to them about it and verify. Education is not a 'gotcha' game. If you're in the US, these students are the ones paying a lot of money to get that learning and degree.

If it's a lot of students, then you likely need to rethink using essays and the like. Not that they aren't useful when done honestl; they are incredible tools for having students learn.

But the near future is only going to be filled with this more and more. You're not likely to be able to outrun OpenAI and GPT3 on your own. Heck, even the whole CS department isn't going to outrun these companies. In fact, it's not a bad idea to put your essays through such tools to see what comes out and then build from there.

The nature of learning and education is changing very fast these days and clinging to the old models and methods isn't likely to be the best strat. Innovate, try new things, talk with your students, brainstorm, etc.

>If it's just one student, then I think you should just talk to them about it and verify.

I’m not sure I would talk the student about AI at all. I would talk to them about the subject matter.

I think that is the obvious solution to detect this. Does the student know the material when “offline”?

Maybe you get a few anxious people who can’t talk about a topic they know - but that sure does seem like training for the real world.

I imagine as the technology improves and more AI tools become available this will become a war of attrition. Especially since these tools are so useful for non-school purposes, I can only see them getting better with time. It is a shame when people use these tools in a 100% no effort way though, reminds me of people who copied whole essays online in the past and got caught.

Essay cheating is really annoying. I've learned a foreign language to the point where I've joined a rather large facebook group where students from that country studying abroad ask for advice about problems. 1/3 of the posts are students who are caught cheating asking for advice or asking for recommendations / trying to find someone to do their homework for them. It's made me really dissapointed in my schoolmates to see how they can just talk so openly about it.

One of our local writing teachers has addressed this by having the students do some surprise writing in class, no phones, and comparing it to home work.

Persuasive writing section?

"Write a persuasive essay regarding why the essay you're writing deserves the grade you choose based upon your knowledge of persuasive writing techniques and your classroom participation."

This is IMHO the only way to go at the moment.

why do you need a tool? if its crap writing give it a crap grade and move on.

1. Assessment is only a small part of teaching. Often the smallest.

2. The pedagogical intervention depends heavily on whether the student is cheating or just FAR below grade-level.

3. the student likely won't be truthful.

4. Even if we assume the student will tell the truth, if they aren't using an LLM and you accuse them of doing so it's going to crush the student and make teaching that pupil close to impossible.

Teachers are teachers, not proctors.

A tool would be useful so that the teacher can avoid wasting their time reading an AI generated submission and continue on to the next essay.

Teachers have turnitin that kinda does this

To my knowledge turnitin does not tell you about the share of AI generated content.

Well yes ideally I would do so, but my chair of department wants to have THAT work published. Horror story.