Universities across the country tend to be at the forefront of research for artificial intelligence. The University of Wyoming (UW) is no exception. But how students and professors use it in the lab is very different from in the classroom. A reporter for the Branding Iron student paper investigated how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing learning, grades, and career readiness. Vin Meester said the human element is disappearing.
Editor’s Note: This story has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity
Uplinger: Do you mind if I call you Ven?
Vin Meester: Absolutely.
CU: Thank you for joining me, Ven. Two weeks ago, you wrote this really eye-opening article for the university newspaper, the Branding Iron. The title is “The Rise of AI in UW Classrooms from Frightening Cheating Tool to Class Grading Systems.” You talk about how AI went from a controversial issue for universities to so widely used among students that eventually teachers started using it as well. So let's start there. What drove you to explore AI and its current use on campus?
VM: Last year, just serving in so many capacities on campus, I had a wide variety of students coming to me about academic policies regarding cheating. Many students on campus were being accused of cheating using ChatGPT, using AI, and it was under fire. You had professors everywhere accusing students of using these tools to essentially coast their way through classes.
And now this year, the very first thing I saw when I opened up my online classes is that multiple of my professors aren't just using AI tools as a teaching method.
They're quite literally using AI tools to grade things, like discussions and annotation comments, to the point where I have a class where my teacher doesn't grade anything by hand. It is all done by an AI tool called Perusall.
CU: You saw AI being used improperly in the academic environment, and so this article was kind of your way of taking action and bringing light to that.
VM: Absolutely. It's the hypocritical idea [that] we had so many students who were in danger last year of getting terrible grades, of even facing academic probation for cheating.
And now in just a year's span, faculty, with virtually no forewarning, are allowed to use AI to grade students with virtually no accountability. Essentially, students aren't being held to the same standard that faculty are in our current system.
CU: I think for a lot of our listeners, they understand that AI is being used in a university environment, but maybe they don't fully understand how and to what degree. So starting with students, can you explain how today's university student might use AI to cheat or get [ahead in the] academic process?
VM: The most glaring example is most quizzes online through our system Canvas, you can quite literally just copy and paste those questions into something like ChatGPT, into an AI system, and it will generate all of the multiple-choice answers. You can take a quiz that you should have studied for and should have read 200 pages of a textbook, and you can Google AI that, and within seconds, you can have the entire [quiz] done.
In the same vein, you could take four different reading prompts that you were supposed to read in a textbook [and] tell ChatGPT what they are, it will generate an entire summary of that for you that you can just word-for-word type into a discussion post, type into an essay prompt, type into a review, to the point where students are spending maybe five minutes because they have these AI tools to essentially just coast their way through all the content.
CU: You also mentioned a program that teachers were using, what was it called?
VM: It's called Perusall.
CU: Can you talk about that a little bit as well?
VM: The main thing Perusall is used for is within textbooks. It's an interactive reader. It does things like track how long students are looking at each page to see if they're actually reading the content.
What it also does is it can grade the quality and quantity of annotations. So rather than having open discussion posts, professors are now having students annotate each other's comments on the textbook. Then the Perusall system is grading the quality of those questions, comments and replies to other students, with no teacher involvement whatsoever.
CU: I want to bring in one more party here, and you didn't directly mention them in the article, but they're a part of this equation nonetheless. [Does] the university administration have a position on this? Are they telling students and teachers wholesale go all in on AI, or are they saying be cautious? Are they putting up very specific rules? What's the administration's position on all this?
VM: The administration's position, from what I've understood, and I've been deeply entrenched in that community at UW for a long time, has always been: We're on the forefront of innovation here. We have the School of Computing. We are at the forefront of a lot of things involving AI, and so we should be teaching our faculty and students to use it as a learning tool.
However, in allowing that freedom to use it as a learning tool, there's been virtually no safeguards against abusing that tool.
CU: Can you give me a definition of what the line is between cheating and using AI as a tool?
VM: It's, can I still engage with the course content? Can I do the course content without the AI?
After using it as something like a quizlet, I can take those quizzes, but then after that, I can do that quiz in class without that help. I can use it to summarize a source, but then after summarizing that source, I know how to present those ideas and engage with my classmates. It's the ability to use it to supplement what you're doing, not to just replace you doing the work.
CU: I'm curious, you kind of already talked about this, but can you build a little bit more in your mind what a University of Wyoming looks like, that is, from the perspective of teachers or students, what does it look like in your mind?
VM: It's the human touch, right? I have two different professors who both use AI tools to a degree, but they have that human impact. They use something like Perusall, where it tracks your annotations and it does things like tell you how long students are spending on each part of the course, but at the same time, they're manually grading those discussion comments. They're responding to their students.
I have another professor who allows us to use things like ChatGPT to summarize written sources. He encourages it. He doesn't think that there's a lot of value to reading word-by-word a bunch of textbook pages. But at the same time, we discuss that content in class. We discuss the deeper meanings, we discuss the bigger ideas.
It's really being able to incorporate that student experience and that human experience, while also teaching your students that AI can make your work and research more efficient.
CU: Do you think that anybody who chooses not to fully engage with AI or to try and retain as much of that human element as possible is going to be weaker in [the job] a market a couple of years from now?
VM: Absolutely. Its ability to process information and data at such a fast rate surpasses anybody's ability in the job market right now. And if you can't harness that, you're gonna be behind people who learn how.
CU: So, choosing between humanity and market viability?
VM: Exactly. You have to be able to combine the two. You have to be able to present that information, but also know that ChatGPT is better at finding that information than you are.
Editor’s Note: WPR reached out to the University of Wyoming for comment about Meester’s article and received the following information.
The university updated its Student Academic Dishonesty regulations in 2023, banning student use of AI applications unless expressly permitted by the instructor.
“Our UW Regulations on Academic Integrity don’t cover faculty use, but our AI Committee is currently trying to catalog tools that have automatic integration of AI in them,” wrote Anne Alexander, the UW Interim Provost. “With respect to this particular tool [Perusall], it is an integration with Canvas (our learning management system) that faculty can use to allow students to annotate instructor-assigned readings and post comments to each other. We don’t patrol the use of it or whether a faculty member enables the automatic grading tool within it. The grading tool can be disabled by a faculty member in their Canvas shell, but it’s a toggle they may not know they have access to.”
Alexander also shared a link to the university’s AI Support: Faculty Resources.
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This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
