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As someone that finished a couple of years ago it was already becoming that way then.
This didn’t mean that people weren’t learning but they were getting lazy. The AI detection isn’t good enough because a lot of people are willing to write their papers through the AI in pieces and check that, since it’s still faster than doing it yourself in most cases.
It’s becoming this weird cycle. It’s expected that you’ll use AI anyway, that you’ll be discriminated against for it, that professionals are going to try to use it to cut down on their work once hired, that HR is going to use it in the hiring process. So no one sees a reason not to use it.
This was painful
Slacker.
I routinely wrote more than 10 pages in handwritten passages just to play a game. Indeed I still do. Without any degenerative AI in sight. (Because nobody’s crammed an LLMbecile into my fountain pens yet.)
I’m so sad. People are becoming so reliant on AI that they can’t write (nor read) more than one sentence
Wat???
This needs more upvotes :)
10 pages hand written in cursive in 1982.
Ugh, while I’m glad I got to see the world before computers were everywhere, I don’t envy people who had to handwrite all their papers, nor teachers who had to grade those reports.
Were typewriters cheap enough that most students had them, or did they have “typing rooms” the same way schools set up computer labs? Or was handwriting just the norm even after typewriters were ubiquitous? Maybe in HS it was common but surely college profs couldn’t be fucked with handwriting for the most part?
I got my degree in 2008. All my exams were handwritten (but fortunately I didn’t have to write 10 pages per question, which is good as I physically can’t write that much in the time allotted). I did at least get to type my undergraduate thesis.
I once had a professor who claimed she passed a high level language course without attending a class or studying it. She was fluent in an adjacent Romance language and knew a little of some other overlapping languages. Basically walked in to the final and got a C+ on cognates alone.
When I was at a party in college a friend was bumming the vibes because he had an English paper due the following Monday and he was stressed out.
I asked him what the topic was and it was any play studied in the course. I asked him which play he knew best and if I recall correctly it was The Importance of Being Earnest.
I chatted with him for a bit, asked him why he liked the play, what it meant to him, what parts he thought were most important, and what he thought was the ultimate point Wilde was making.
After about a half hour I wrote the outline on the back of a placemat.
Intro: state what point your essay will ultimately try to make, and summarize how you’ll get there (1 page).
For each “way” that you’ll get there, write three paragraphs: your point, what in the text supports your point, and how that point supports the thesis in the intro. (1.5-2 pages).
Do that for each of the four “ways”. (6-8 pages total)
Explain why those dozen paragraphs illustrate and support the claims you made in the introduction.
Suffice it to say, the party roared on, he likely wasn’t able to think on Saturday but on Sunday I guess he did a pretty good job of bullshitting his way to nine single spaced pages, and he got a B, which was above average for him in that class.
That structure, intro, points, references, supports statements, conclusion, can literally be blown out into a thesis or even a book, as long as you have a clear idea of what you’re trying to say and how you intend to back it up, and you can write coherent (dare to dream, interesting!) prose to explain everything in between.
What people are missing is that that process is actually fun. Trying to figure out how you can make a point in an interesting way that is backed up by references that you can argue in support on your point is actually interesting and fun, you just have to stop thinking about why you can’t/won’t and just throw yourself at it.
This right here. I like writing things down. I like shaping ideas in my head so that they come out on paper before me. I like that feeling of accomplishment.
One of my greatest academic achievements was a very long, in-depth research paper that was assigned on the first day of the semester and due on the last. “Don’t put it off until the end,” our teacher warned us, “because you won’t be able to finish this in a couple of hours. You should be doing a little bit of work on it every week.” It was to be deeply-researched, extensively endnoted, and (if I recall correctly) fifty pages long, single-spaced, 10pt.
Except I had a full-time job throughout college, and that semester my schedule found me going to work immediately after that (morning) class, both days, every week. By the time I was off work, the thought of that assignment had left my undiagnosed ADHD brain entirely. The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.
And suddenly the last day of class was approaching. I requested the prior day off of work, figuring that I’d work the whole day on it. Only I made a mistake: I hadn’t requested the day before it was due. I had requested the day it was due. I’d be working four full days of work, with classes (and at least one early final exam), and then the paper would be due, and only after that would I have the day to write it.
But you do what you have to, and when you’re 19 years old, the vagaries of time and sleep seem almost meaningless to you. I was going to get off work at 6pm, which was 14½ hours before the assignment was due. My university had a 24-hour computer lab, which was good, as it was 2004 and I didn’t have internet in my apartment (how did I ever live like that?).
So I went home, ate a quick dinner, and went to school, locking myself into the computer lab at 8:00pm. When I poked my head out the door at 7:30am, the sun was bright and the air slightly crisp; and I held 52 freshly-printed pages in my hand. I was done early (technically) and had beaten the page count (also technically). I felt like I had beaten the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. I ate breakfast to supplement the copious amounts of Nutty Bars and soda I had consumed overnight, and then I turned the paper in; and as class that morning was “optional,” I opted to go home, where I discovered that perhaps time was not so vague at all, nor sleep, and I went unconscious for the rest of the morning and a decent chunk of the afternoon.
A week later, I got my grades back. At that point in any semester I was always beyond caring about how well I had scored, but I looked anyway out of curiosity.
“Well done!” she had written in the notes. “I can tell you really put a lot of time into this. 95/100”
I mean, technically she was right, I had put a lot of time into it: the 11½ hours immediately leading up to my turning it in, to be precise.
The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.
Source:
This always kills me when I see this. The raccoon and opossum that basically has made a home in my garage…with my fat ass garage cat, loves to take the cat food that, said fat ass doesn’t finish during the day, and put it in the water…every single morning, I’m having to clean it cause the racoon loves to eat his food soaked to mush. Still love the little shit when I occasionally catch him in the evening laying around in the garage, like he’s trash panda hut.
don’t worry gentle reader they gave him another one
Do you have a longer version?
That look on his face is exactly how I felt.
Geez I felt that in my bones… I’m SO glad my days of undiagnosed ADHD and assignments are long and gone, but your story stirred up some anxiety responses, from the sediment of my mind. Yuck! And well done! 95/100 ✔️
Thank you for the kind words, especially from amid the anxiety sludge! Honestly, I think every graduating senior should be given a psychiatric exam, just so they know and don’t have to wait until they’re 35 and maxed out their deductible for the year to get tested.
Ugh I couldn’t imagine how that’s like, but I sympathise!Thankfully I’m from one of those “socialist” nordic countries, where healthcare is free, or rather, collectively payed for through taxes. Even my current medication is more or less free. I get 95% of my dexamphetamines subsidies through the system. Honestly I’ll gladly pay ~50% in tax, when I’m covered like that!
Best story I read this week, as in, so well put together. I bet you get this a lot, but you really have a way with words!
Frankly, I think the quality of the story there may, in and of itself, be evidence of how they managed to get a 52 page paper done and have it be well received by the prof.
Thank you! You’re very kind. That’s an interesting observation I hadn’t considered–but now I’m kind of struck by the chicken-and-egg question of whether I passed classes I didn’t put in the work for because I was a decent writer, or if I got good at writing so that I could slack off in classes.
Oh, thank you! You’re very kind. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I wrote 10 pages single spaced by accident after failing to read an instruction that asked for double spacing. Writing that much about intercellular communication 25 years ago took flipping weeks at the library
I guess they didn’t have search and replace back then?
Well, there was also the reading. It was a computer terminal system to find items, but you often needed a few return trips if things were in use
People were writing 10+ page reports before computers. Writing shit by hand.
Hey, we got a typewriter at some point, it didn’t help much with having to start the whole page over every time you made a mistake, but it did get the teachers off my back about my terrible handwriting so that was nice.
why didn’t you just use the backspace key? /s
We’ve had White-out for almost a century now. They most certainly could’ve corrected those mistakes instead of starting over.
Whiteout was way out of the price range of my impoverished student ass.
Huh. It was a mandatory part of our back-to-school kit for most years here.
I did a twenty page “research” paper for philosophy the night before having read one page from the dude. And got a b+
Oh I had a 1-1 presentation with the professor for a philosophy class and he wanted us to present one point from one author, capture the point in five minutes or less, and survive ten minutes of cross examination. This guy was a real shark too, not only was he known to be very sharp and super cutting with his critiques, he was the kind of guy who would force a class of forty people to sit a presentation in his office for twenty minutes each so he could avoid correcting term papers.
I chose Marshall McLuhan and spoke for maybe three minutes and why his assertion that “the medium is the message” is true because the invention of email made it unacceptable for a company with a branch in Toronto and one in Montreal to communicate by horseback, so the expected pace of business was irrevocably changed. Email is only “amazing” for a couple of days, then it’s a fact that dictates expectations, and so, what you communicate by email is of much less consequence in the long run than the deep change in corporate culture that email causes. That was the core of McLuhan’s point.
Got an A+ for that one, and was out of his office and on my way in less than ten minutes.
Marshall McLuhan’s was the only work I read of all the assignments in that entire class.
The Dude abides.
Just weakness. Everyone knows you write your term paper starting less than 24 hours before the deadline and crank out a fully realized thesis made out of nothing but energy drinks and Adderall
Not every one is like that! Some of us start on the very day they get the assignment, work on it for a good hour, then without a fail every week stress about it for a whole afternoon until finishing the paper on the due day.
Ah… I remember these days, being in a somewhat nervous caffeine induced psychosis, typing in an haughty fervor and writing 20+ pages with unmerited arrogance and barely an ounce of fear. Printing it out before it’s due and feeling like I pulled off an Ocean’s theft after managing a 93%.
Slaming monster until my heart feels funny, but that GPA isn’t going to keep itself up
I can remember the dizzy feeling, like the room was spinning like it was yesterday lol.
Cs get degrees baybayyyyy, anything over a 65% will do
True, I just took pride in pulling a paper out of my ass at the last second and it appearing like I put weeks of effort into it lol.
You guys had Adderall?
We just ate spoonfulls of instant coffee and ground our teeth into little bumps.
Believe it or not, I still do my best work under the gun. In my current job, sometimes people pay me extra to expedite my turnaround, and I thrive under the pressure. Perhaps it’s the promise of extra money, but I just feel so much more focused knowing my hard deadline is fast approaching.
Yeah, I always purposefully wait to do my projects at work until the last second. If you don’t have time to do anything else, you don’t think about doing anything else. Plus it helps when someone forgets about a project and sends it over to me with way too little time left, but I get it done anyway since that’s the amount of time I’d have allotted myself regardless. I always clock a bunch of overtime and make sure to talk it up like it was a huge undertaking when that happens, though, so they don’t think they can just give me more work all the time.
Oh yeah, I believe you bro. We all have adhd
There was a time before when we just had coffee.
I always just got it done early and slacked off after the fact without the stress lol. I still half assed most of the pointless stuff and only tried hard when it was stuff I cared about or actually for my field.
Congratulations on your normal executive function
Who me? I’m autistic. Getting it done was the only way not to fall apart. Putting it off till the last minute was a sure for way for me to fully break down!
I had an ethics class in college where we had to write a 10-page capstone paper for part of the final.
The teacher wrote an outline and description for what she wanted, and encouraged everyone to work on it for a few hours a week to make sure they finished it on time.
I waited until the last day of class, banged it out in about an hour and a half, and submitted it around 15 minutes before it was finally due.
Got an A, with a comment about how great the work was. Kids these days.
Shit, I’ll write a 10 page paper as an internet reply to a topic I’m only just finding out about.
Bro I was writing 10+ page papers in Jr High
