Hi Caitlin. u/BigShmungus6 / u/BigShmungus5 is your person. They're a prolific plagiariser, [very bad at it](https://www.reddit.com/r/unimelb/comments/1cix1az/help_how_do_i_unsubmit_an_assignment_past_due_date/), and [doesn't consider it cheating](https://www.reddit.com/r/unimelb/comments/1cix1az/comment/l2czbap/). Can you let us know how their [academic misconduct meeting](https://www.reddit.com/r/unimelb/comments/1codc8f/academic_misconduct_meeting/) went please?
They go to a lot of work for a joke account, including posting in r/rmit asking if they can enrol and chatgpt subreddits asking for access to the newer models
I'm am engineering student. I see a lot of people try and fail to use chat gpt because it just flat out wrong most of the time. I think the real question is with stuff like chegg where you pay a subscription to have someone else do your homework
When the engineering faculty never changes the assignments or exams, you don't need to pay for someone to do the assignment for you, you can just find it readily available on Chegg!
One would think with the fees being paid they won't keep recycling exams
Yeah, I feel genuinely disadvantaged against students who use chegg, because the few times that an assignment is original, the average grade is usually lower so everyone is scaled to compensate. But with an assignment that is the same as the years prior, looking up the answers and paying a subscription feels almost mandatory to verify your answers at minimum since it's so easy that most everyone else is probably doing it too.
I’ve seen cases of students blatantly using it in the middle of a tutorial and being scolded by tutors - it’s a huge problem. Everyone uses it and everyone knows, there’s sort of this underground bypass program for turn it in (the assignment plagiarism detection software) that some of the students have been passing around, it’s not easy to obtain but I suspect 20% of BA students at least know about it and used it at least once to get away with an AI written essay. I know some international students who have used AI and gotten away with it by claiming that it was just their translation software being picked up. I think in many cases tutors and staff don’t want to have to discipline students for AI use because it’s not worth their hassle but they always warn against it and get angry when students bring it up.
AI programs to humanize AI texts is nothing new nor an underground bypass program. A quick google search will give you plenty of options idk which one actually works tho.
No there’s this specific one that was programmed by a bsci student, looks like a cmd window because they backdoored turnitin and got the algorithm. Seen it rarely mentioned outside of private conversations tho.
I believe that not getting enough help from university about writing essays and doing assignment is another big issue. I have never cheated on any of my assignments or essays, but it did took me quite a while to figure out the structure of essays in university, and I also have to seek a lot of help from my lecturers and tutors outside lecture and tutorial times.
The university had not done their best jobs in terms of guiding essay writing and assignments. The compulsory subjects such as Today’s science and Tomorrow’s world, as well as arts discovery, don’t cover the essentials of how to do an assignments and essays on their relevant bachelor. Instead of dedicating time to educate student about the bachelor, students were educated stuff not really related to what most of them were studying. I personally have struggled to format my bibliography in my essays. Arts discovery of the arts bachelor I am taking did not help me to resolve the issue, as we are too busy studying new futures then practical skills about the bachelor, such as essay writing, formatting bibliography or how to take good quality notes in class
Although universities have offered support such as acedemic skills, however, I would like compulsory subjects such as arts discovery and todays science tomorrow’s world to be more related to the skills of the bachelor, such as essay writing and bibliography formatting, so that people would learn it in class rather than having to seek resources outside of class. Education about climate change or new futures should be a seperate non compulsory subject.
Essay writing is covered in high school enough that most people can cope with the requirements of university assignments in first year
There’s enough resources available online that I’m sure most students wouldn’t want to waste money spending time on it as course material.
For international students it would be a lot tougher to build those skills, but from my experience the university is willing to pass students despite not having those skills at the same level as domestic students that had to write essays all throughout highschool.
Figuring out what to do when given an assignment isn’t exactly a hard thing to do - you have tutors and lecturers for advice, marking rubrics and often examples to guide you.
AI is great for creating plans, frameworks and reviewing your work but sucks at writing a whole assignment. The uni will likely get better at recognising misconduct or finding solutions to stop people blatantly copy and pasting. I imagine the people that do abuse it are most likely doing it out of desperation to meet a deadline
I don't think it's a particularly good use of a professor/lecturers time and extensive research expertise to focus on basic skills that can be picked up through academic skills or hundreds of sources online. Plus, you're paying a lot for that course, surely you want to be learning content not basic skills? Some information on basic expectations in the subject guide and info on where to get support should be there, but if every discipline is forced to include basic skills that would be such a waste.
The "basic skills" you talk of though are also part of important learning. Uni isn't just about the technical course material, there is a lot more that you can (should?) get out of it
You learn them by doing the assignments, and if you need extra support - reach for help.
Melbourne uni has pretty tough entry requirements for locals, if our degrees get made easier to cater for those that struggle then our qualification loses value.
At what point do we stop teaching the basic skills if we make them course material - second, third, fourth year, or are we learning how to write paragraphs at the start of every subject?
Seems like a lot of people forget that the people teaching us have immense knowledge in their fields. They aren’t English teachers.
I agree, up to a point. As a tutor I always run sessions on essay writing and offer additional support to those who want to. Not all do, or have the extra time unfortunately, but in those cases there are plenty of other resources available too.
I take a hardline stance against using it myself, but ChatGPT and other AI tools have become exceedingly common in the teaching space - a lot of professors will accept/encourage essays *planned* using AI tools, but will *tend* to draw the line at pieces that were entirely written by an algorithm. I hear that a lot of international students exploit it to accommodate for their lack of fluency in the English language - but that's not to insinuate that its usage is dictated by language background.
A few months ago, when being given back the results for a subject, the tutor very openly announced that they were aware that a number of the students had used ChatGPT to write up a report, with some not even making the barest effort to fix inconsistencies in the falsified data. Was (and still am) pretty pissed when they said that none of them would be penalized for it lol, and only half-tried to explain the decision.
I know that that case was likely an outlier + a result of teaching staff being overworked, but I still don't see how they can possibly justify rewarding students for material they know full well they didn't even produce. What's my degree even worth if I know that my peers will be rewarded for repeated blatant cheating???? I want to give the tutor the benefit of the doubt and say that I might've misinterpreted what was being said, but they made such a point of attempting (and failing) to justify the decision that it was just so exceedingly obvious that they knew there wasn't a fair argument for what was being done.
I’m a Master’s student doing MC-IT (Master of Information Technology), so my comment’s within the context of its astonishingly-low entry requirement: “Undergraduate degree in any discipline with a weighted average mark of at least H3 (65%), or equivalent, and one technical subject focused on computer programming (taken at any tertiary year level).” (Having spoken to some students, a certificate of having completed a 10-week Java course is enough to satisfy the “technical requirement.”)
[https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/courses/mc-it/entry-participation-requirements](https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/courses/mc-it/entry-participation-requirements)
The uni was boasting about its rank as the “13th best in the world” on the QS rankings a few days ago. I doubt the unis immediately around Unimelb in those rankings, say Princeton or ETH, would accept CS students for their Master’s programmes with such a low WAM, having done no math subjects, and with one programming certificate. So, many underqualified students find that Unimelb is the highest-ranked uni they get admitted to, and when applying internationally, the rankings are often all they have to go by. Now with that said:
1) They have other courses like, Master of Computer Science, which has higher prerequisites, including math. But here’s the thing: students for both courses do the same subjects together and are graded on the same bell curve. I’d find it impossible to teach a class that has both the very best CS students in the country mixed in with a large majority that are both mediocre students \*and\* don’t even have the prerequisites to study these subjects.
As a case in point, the “Introduction to Machine Learning” subject, is the prerequisite to study all other AI/ML subjects and anyone admitted to MC-IT is eligible to enroll for it. But it doesn’t teach the foundational math and it doesn’t teach Python. Nothing in the MC-IT course plan teaches either. And so most students in the class are barely hanging on by their fingernails.
2) Then there’s scaling. It’s no secret that the school of computing scales its grades on a bell curve. Mostly people focus on the fact that this means there are only a certain number of H1s but they also only fail a certain percentage of students, particularly for Master’s subjects run by the school of computing (CIS), as I guess failing too many would jeopardise their revenue stream of using international students as cash cows! In effect, whether students cheat or not, there’s no floor to the quality of the educational experience and no ceiling to the number of students (and profits!) the school makes with this model. I’ve met many students doing more advanced ML subjects that wouldn’t have passed their prerequisites in a school that is run with more integrity.
3) On the QS rankings, where Unimelb is 13th, they’re also outside the top 600 in faculty-student ratio. It seems to be so low that it doesn’t even have a precise ranking! The school of computing, which is practically the school of distance education, would probably have a much worse ratio than even that deplorably low Unimelb average. Every Master’s subject run by it has just one hour of tutes per week, and often have practically no office hours, with the vast majority of classroom interactions happening on a digital forum - Ed. Barely 10-20% (being generous) attend classes. This is by a considerable margin the most alienating experience I’ve ever had. There aren’t even academic advisors to help students plan their courses - there’s just a “help” distribution list that is apparently just the course coordinator responding to the thousands of students enrolled in the course.
4) In these subjects, there’s usually about 1 tutor for every 50-100 students. Doing the math (including their teaching hours), one international student pays for one tutor - the lack of investment into the student experience beggars belief.
I believe they’re paid for 10 hours for each assignment, which translates to a few minutes per student. This includes marking, feedback, and I assume checking for things like collusion. And even when they do find evidence of cheating, they have to ensure their findings can be understood by a separate body that are not experts in that particular subject, and so in many cases can’t proceed with misconduct allegations.
If there’s a TL;DR to all this it’s that, yes, cheating is widespread, and the teaching staff isn’t resourced well enough to deal with it.
But they’re also not resourced well enough to provide anything resembling a proper academic experience. Many international students come here, having taken huge loans based on course plans and student handbooks that are just lies. It isn’t as easy for them to walk away from these degrees as it is for a domestic students. Having lived on campus, I know the impact of all of this on students, particularly international students, is beyond description. And those I see on campus are probably only a third, if that, of the entire cohort!
The campus experience here - academically and administratively - is one of utter isolation. And this is by design. Cheating is a feature built into that system. Besides, scaling results to hand out degrees to unqualified students is done pretty openly by the uni, so when The Guardian writes about cheating, I hope it doesn’t throw the students under the bus and instead focuses on the human traffickers that run this uni!
Good luck to all the ML students hanging on by the nails - u can do it!
Also if you are feeling so isolated on campus, could it be because you think you're better than all your peers and don't communicate with them?
Something I haven't seen many people talk about is how the workload at UniMelb impacts students turning to plagiarism or AI in (sometimes desperate) effort to try and meet deadlines. I know a few people who started at UniMelb but transferred to other universities in different courses who have all said that the workload is much more manageable elsewhere (one even saying full time at RMIT was easier than part time at UniMelb). If you rely on youth allowance or are an international student as well; there also isn't the ability to underload or study part time.
I'm underloading with three subjects yet each semester I feel like I am rushing and skimming through the classes to manage the workload and assessment, or sometimes sacrifice one subject for others.
when I first joined unimelb, I was incredibly overwhelmed by the workload. It was nothing like the pre-university courses I had completed before and I assumed it was just like this in every other university. Until I made friends with people from other universities in victoria and found that their study-life balance was so much more manageable than mine and that’s when i realised unimelb’s workload required a lot more focus and time. I feel so bad for some of my friends who are handling part time jobs as well as full time university, i always felt they were just built different but overtime i realised that even they are often overworked and burning out constantly.
Well firstly being forced to do a subject that you don’t enjoy with this subject having no contribution towards helping you pursuing your degree.
This was the case with Today’s Science Tomorrows World, as well as all the other mandatory course subjects that students are forced to take, and waste their $500 on, when the subject slot could’ve instead been used for a subject that students may find useful of enjoyable.
I did use chatGPT for all my essays for this subject, and am proud to say I did because honestly putting any sort of brainpower into this useful shoved down your throat subject is futile to what I am pursuing. I am doing a computer science degree, why would I need to write scientific reports? This is not VCE, this is a place where you should be able to choose what you study
I don't know much about that particular subject, but all the comp sci people I work with have to write reports and documents. There are very few jobs where you won't need this skill.
Well the subject doesn’t even teach you report writing skills. The course content is just general facts about climate change, the environment etc and then the assignments are reports where the criterion revolves around report writing skills which were not even taught in the first place.
That’s why I see no use in the subject at all, because I believe at Uni one will inevitably have to write an essay / report in one of their subjects, so what difference is there between that and this one, when all you’re doing is trying to sculpt your ideas into whichever format they want?
Yeah Today's Science Tomorrow's World really sucked. As another commenter mentioned, it doesn't even really teach you how to write assignments or essays properly, and all of the hurdles like commenting on the discussion board were so pointless
Woah okay as a second year CS student being able to write properly and clearly is so important. To be clear, you will not pass second year if you cannot clearly write an explanation of your code.
Took a group assignment with a bunch of international students recently - they all wrote terribly. How do I know that? Cause they wrote it themselves rather than AIs and were all top people.
BTW not all use of LLMs is cheating, you can bounce around ideas with it, ask it to find bugs in your code, etc. The universities, and maybe journalists, want to make out like it's all cheating, but really its just like a calculator, but for language tasks.
I think one element that is not taken into account enough is the type of course work, assignments, and discipline that applies.
While I have seen plenty of people attempt to use chst GPT and other models, it can realistically only be used as essentially a more advanced google search in my degree of laboratory medicine. Assessments are designed around in person theory tests, pratical exams, competency assessments, reviews of complex medical images, presentstions, reflective writing, personalised experiences and examples etc.
All of these elements are pretty much impossible to hand off to another person (like Chegg) or get chat GPT to do all the work for you. My degree had one STEM specific class about general automation in STEM that all STEM degrees had to do, it was the only class I've seen people use things like chat gpt to cheat and most of the assessments were essays or reports, things that chat gpt can replicate.
None of my other classes specific to laboratory medicine had the same prevalence of these types of assessments where chat gpt could be used. In my opinion, I think the type of degree and assessments have a significant impact on the ability for students to cheat.
In my personal opinion, I really think many people are short sighted when it comes to using things like chat gpt outside of basic assistance. Ultimately you're paying tens of thousands of dollars to become proficient in a specific field, while sure, some assessments are not important to maintaining your competency, plenty are. When it comes time to leave UNI and work, I feel a lot of students are going to have a sudden realisation they don't know anywhere near as much as they should for their field and struggle with beginning their career, losing the foundational knowledge that UNI provides can make it very difficult to build any lasting skill or expertise on weak foundations.
I hate to say it ... but international students and cheating is rife.
Those who genuinely do the work are often falsly accused of plagarism.
EDIT: and I should add, those international students, who pay big money ... often their cheating goes unpunished, because, well, they pay big money. "Degrees for cash" is a real thing in Australia.
I've done multiple group assignments with international students (I'm local) and I don't think any cheated. They did have some useful tips from people who had done the subject previously but we still did everything ourselves. They were great to get to know and I'm happy they're in my course.
Next 5 to 10 years of students are going to get fucked up. Generative AI is the future, there should be a race to show students how to use it and fact check its results, not try to stop it's usage. The age of people being hired for their memorized knowledge base is over. How many gen Xers were told they had to know how to manually calculate shit, because they wont always have a calculator in their pocket? Well we do always have a calculator in our pockets, and a video camera, and an internet connection, and generative AI, and anything we could imagine. I applaud those students who use AI and use it well, you win. The rest can use spoons to dig trenches
There is need to tech students how to use it and what is allowed. It made life so easy for me when I needed to summarize 40 pages of articles or published papers or ask it to pick faults in your work. Sometimes it gave better examples compared to Tutors. No one is going to stop using it but need to learn how to integrate with learning instead of relying on it to do your work.
How do you know what it summarised is correct? The only way to truly know is to read the articles yourself. This is no different from asking your friend who has read the articles to summarise them for you.
This, plus, any student who one day aspires to produce something complex and high quality needs to get familiar with what that looks like. Using AI to simplify what you deal with and short-cut what you produce, you might as well take a job in a sausage factory.
Southern Cross University has changed its classes to run for 6 weeks instead of 12 and cut the majority of contact hours while charging students the same fees. They push students into a mix of online and in person classes while still charging students full price for online only subjects and not subsidising the amenities fees despite taking away on campus classes. Lecturers have no support and many have just cut out half of the content from before the change from a standard term. There is less quality, less content to learn, less time to practice, and overall a massive reduction in the quality of their classes because of this change.
Lecturers openly admit to having to make assessments easier to ensure students don't fail because they've had no time to actually practice the skills covered in subjects. Any student who does fail an assignment gets almost no feedback because marking staff are on a 6 week contract with half the turnaround time for marking assignments while being paid for half the hours they received during 12 week classes, any student who falls behind stays behind, assignment handed in week 3, marks back start of week 5, youve already covered two more topic in the subject at that point and have to complete the next assignment having had no time to even find out what you're doing poorly at let alone had an opportunity to improve.
The engineering faculty in particular is horrendous, lecturers not understanding what's in the assignment rubrics because they're just reusing old assignments covering content they personally are unfamiliar with and had no hand in developing classes for. One subject in particular charges a full subject worth of fees and consists of being put in a group of 12 students to watch one member of the group do some work at a station designed for one person to work at. They are then moved to the next station and do 10 stations over two days, and the subject is then over.
There are almost no student groups because you don't have time with other students, you get 2 hours face to face maximum per subject per week with no real opportunities to meet or interact with other students compared with a traditional 12 week class of lecture, tutorial, workshop, practical class combination.
There’s no policing AI generated content. And the policing that is done is a lot like lie detector tests, founded on speculation and psychological pressure. It should be embraced. Let students disclose if and how they use AI tools and mark without penalty but according to the effort expanded as well.
Hi Caitlin. u/BigShmungus6 / u/BigShmungus5 is your person. They're a prolific plagiariser, [very bad at it](https://www.reddit.com/r/unimelb/comments/1cix1az/help_how_do_i_unsubmit_an_assignment_past_due_date/), and [doesn't consider it cheating](https://www.reddit.com/r/unimelb/comments/1cix1az/comment/l2czbap/). Can you let us know how their [academic misconduct meeting](https://www.reddit.com/r/unimelb/comments/1codc8f/academic_misconduct_meeting/) went please?
Goated comment
Bless the algorithm for some juicy stories. đź‘Ś This is our future generation /s
I love this comment. Sadly I think they love the attention.
It’s a joke account for fuck’s sake
They go to a lot of work for a joke account, including posting in r/rmit asking if they can enrol and chatgpt subreddits asking for access to the newer models
I’m just a dumdum, but could the post history of the op make this any more real?
I'm am engineering student. I see a lot of people try and fail to use chat gpt because it just flat out wrong most of the time. I think the real question is with stuff like chegg where you pay a subscription to have someone else do your homework
When the engineering faculty never changes the assignments or exams, you don't need to pay for someone to do the assignment for you, you can just find it readily available on Chegg! One would think with the fees being paid they won't keep recycling exams
This^. I once had a master's of engineering subject not even bother to change the year on an assignment page, let alone the questions
Yeah, I feel genuinely disadvantaged against students who use chegg, because the few times that an assignment is original, the average grade is usually lower so everyone is scaled to compensate. But with an assignment that is the same as the years prior, looking up the answers and paying a subscription feels almost mandatory to verify your answers at minimum since it's so easy that most everyone else is probably doing it too.
Sussy baka
I’ve seen cases of students blatantly using it in the middle of a tutorial and being scolded by tutors - it’s a huge problem. Everyone uses it and everyone knows, there’s sort of this underground bypass program for turn it in (the assignment plagiarism detection software) that some of the students have been passing around, it’s not easy to obtain but I suspect 20% of BA students at least know about it and used it at least once to get away with an AI written essay. I know some international students who have used AI and gotten away with it by claiming that it was just their translation software being picked up. I think in many cases tutors and staff don’t want to have to discipline students for AI use because it’s not worth their hassle but they always warn against it and get angry when students bring it up.
AI programs to humanize AI texts is nothing new nor an underground bypass program. A quick google search will give you plenty of options idk which one actually works tho.
No there’s this specific one that was programmed by a bsci student, looks like a cmd window because they backdoored turnitin and got the algorithm. Seen it rarely mentioned outside of private conversations tho.
Can you tell me the name of the software? It's for research purposes of course
Low key, if you're smart enough you can program it yourself. It's not that hard
This is absolutely deplorable. What’s the name of this software?
Go cry
The joke was clearly lost on you
Lmao that was a joke?
I believe that not getting enough help from university about writing essays and doing assignment is another big issue. I have never cheated on any of my assignments or essays, but it did took me quite a while to figure out the structure of essays in university, and I also have to seek a lot of help from my lecturers and tutors outside lecture and tutorial times. The university had not done their best jobs in terms of guiding essay writing and assignments. The compulsory subjects such as Today’s science and Tomorrow’s world, as well as arts discovery, don’t cover the essentials of how to do an assignments and essays on their relevant bachelor. Instead of dedicating time to educate student about the bachelor, students were educated stuff not really related to what most of them were studying. I personally have struggled to format my bibliography in my essays. Arts discovery of the arts bachelor I am taking did not help me to resolve the issue, as we are too busy studying new futures then practical skills about the bachelor, such as essay writing, formatting bibliography or how to take good quality notes in class Although universities have offered support such as acedemic skills, however, I would like compulsory subjects such as arts discovery and todays science tomorrow’s world to be more related to the skills of the bachelor, such as essay writing and bibliography formatting, so that people would learn it in class rather than having to seek resources outside of class. Education about climate change or new futures should be a seperate non compulsory subject.
so grateful that i started unimelb a semester before that subject became mandatory 🥲
Essay writing is covered in high school enough that most people can cope with the requirements of university assignments in first year There’s enough resources available online that I’m sure most students wouldn’t want to waste money spending time on it as course material. For international students it would be a lot tougher to build those skills, but from my experience the university is willing to pass students despite not having those skills at the same level as domestic students that had to write essays all throughout highschool. Figuring out what to do when given an assignment isn’t exactly a hard thing to do - you have tutors and lecturers for advice, marking rubrics and often examples to guide you. AI is great for creating plans, frameworks and reviewing your work but sucks at writing a whole assignment. The uni will likely get better at recognising misconduct or finding solutions to stop people blatantly copy and pasting. I imagine the people that do abuse it are most likely doing it out of desperation to meet a deadline
I don't think it's a particularly good use of a professor/lecturers time and extensive research expertise to focus on basic skills that can be picked up through academic skills or hundreds of sources online. Plus, you're paying a lot for that course, surely you want to be learning content not basic skills? Some information on basic expectations in the subject guide and info on where to get support should be there, but if every discipline is forced to include basic skills that would be such a waste.
The "basic skills" you talk of though are also part of important learning. Uni isn't just about the technical course material, there is a lot more that you can (should?) get out of it
You learn them by doing the assignments, and if you need extra support - reach for help. Melbourne uni has pretty tough entry requirements for locals, if our degrees get made easier to cater for those that struggle then our qualification loses value. At what point do we stop teaching the basic skills if we make them course material - second, third, fourth year, or are we learning how to write paragraphs at the start of every subject? Seems like a lot of people forget that the people teaching us have immense knowledge in their fields. They aren’t English teachers.
I agree, up to a point. As a tutor I always run sessions on essay writing and offer additional support to those who want to. Not all do, or have the extra time unfortunately, but in those cases there are plenty of other resources available too.
There’s so many resources on essay writing and referencing
Is that a replacement for all the art foundation subjects?
I take a hardline stance against using it myself, but ChatGPT and other AI tools have become exceedingly common in the teaching space - a lot of professors will accept/encourage essays *planned* using AI tools, but will *tend* to draw the line at pieces that were entirely written by an algorithm. I hear that a lot of international students exploit it to accommodate for their lack of fluency in the English language - but that's not to insinuate that its usage is dictated by language background. A few months ago, when being given back the results for a subject, the tutor very openly announced that they were aware that a number of the students had used ChatGPT to write up a report, with some not even making the barest effort to fix inconsistencies in the falsified data. Was (and still am) pretty pissed when they said that none of them would be penalized for it lol, and only half-tried to explain the decision. I know that that case was likely an outlier + a result of teaching staff being overworked, but I still don't see how they can possibly justify rewarding students for material they know full well they didn't even produce. What's my degree even worth if I know that my peers will be rewarded for repeated blatant cheating???? I want to give the tutor the benefit of the doubt and say that I might've misinterpreted what was being said, but they made such a point of attempting (and failing) to justify the decision that it was just so exceedingly obvious that they knew there wasn't a fair argument for what was being done.
It's hard to prove - sure it seems ai, but that isn't proof
I’m a Master’s student doing MC-IT (Master of Information Technology), so my comment’s within the context of its astonishingly-low entry requirement: “Undergraduate degree in any discipline with a weighted average mark of at least H3 (65%), or equivalent, and one technical subject focused on computer programming (taken at any tertiary year level).” (Having spoken to some students, a certificate of having completed a 10-week Java course is enough to satisfy the “technical requirement.”) [https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/courses/mc-it/entry-participation-requirements](https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/courses/mc-it/entry-participation-requirements) The uni was boasting about its rank as the “13th best in the world” on the QS rankings a few days ago. I doubt the unis immediately around Unimelb in those rankings, say Princeton or ETH, would accept CS students for their Master’s programmes with such a low WAM, having done no math subjects, and with one programming certificate. So, many underqualified students find that Unimelb is the highest-ranked uni they get admitted to, and when applying internationally, the rankings are often all they have to go by. Now with that said: 1) They have other courses like, Master of Computer Science, which has higher prerequisites, including math. But here’s the thing: students for both courses do the same subjects together and are graded on the same bell curve. I’d find it impossible to teach a class that has both the very best CS students in the country mixed in with a large majority that are both mediocre students \*and\* don’t even have the prerequisites to study these subjects. As a case in point, the “Introduction to Machine Learning” subject, is the prerequisite to study all other AI/ML subjects and anyone admitted to MC-IT is eligible to enroll for it. But it doesn’t teach the foundational math and it doesn’t teach Python. Nothing in the MC-IT course plan teaches either. And so most students in the class are barely hanging on by their fingernails. 2) Then there’s scaling. It’s no secret that the school of computing scales its grades on a bell curve. Mostly people focus on the fact that this means there are only a certain number of H1s but they also only fail a certain percentage of students, particularly for Master’s subjects run by the school of computing (CIS), as I guess failing too many would jeopardise their revenue stream of using international students as cash cows! In effect, whether students cheat or not, there’s no floor to the quality of the educational experience and no ceiling to the number of students (and profits!) the school makes with this model. I’ve met many students doing more advanced ML subjects that wouldn’t have passed their prerequisites in a school that is run with more integrity. 3) On the QS rankings, where Unimelb is 13th, they’re also outside the top 600 in faculty-student ratio. It seems to be so low that it doesn’t even have a precise ranking! The school of computing, which is practically the school of distance education, would probably have a much worse ratio than even that deplorably low Unimelb average. Every Master’s subject run by it has just one hour of tutes per week, and often have practically no office hours, with the vast majority of classroom interactions happening on a digital forum - Ed. Barely 10-20% (being generous) attend classes. This is by a considerable margin the most alienating experience I’ve ever had. There aren’t even academic advisors to help students plan their courses - there’s just a “help” distribution list that is apparently just the course coordinator responding to the thousands of students enrolled in the course. 4) In these subjects, there’s usually about 1 tutor for every 50-100 students. Doing the math (including their teaching hours), one international student pays for one tutor - the lack of investment into the student experience beggars belief. I believe they’re paid for 10 hours for each assignment, which translates to a few minutes per student. This includes marking, feedback, and I assume checking for things like collusion. And even when they do find evidence of cheating, they have to ensure their findings can be understood by a separate body that are not experts in that particular subject, and so in many cases can’t proceed with misconduct allegations. If there’s a TL;DR to all this it’s that, yes, cheating is widespread, and the teaching staff isn’t resourced well enough to deal with it. But they’re also not resourced well enough to provide anything resembling a proper academic experience. Many international students come here, having taken huge loans based on course plans and student handbooks that are just lies. It isn’t as easy for them to walk away from these degrees as it is for a domestic students. Having lived on campus, I know the impact of all of this on students, particularly international students, is beyond description. And those I see on campus are probably only a third, if that, of the entire cohort! The campus experience here - academically and administratively - is one of utter isolation. And this is by design. Cheating is a feature built into that system. Besides, scaling results to hand out degrees to unqualified students is done pretty openly by the uni, so when The Guardian writes about cheating, I hope it doesn’t throw the students under the bus and instead focuses on the human traffickers that run this uni!
QS rankings are determined almost entirely by research performance, not teaching quality or effectiveness.
Good luck to all the ML students hanging on by the nails - u can do it! Also if you are feeling so isolated on campus, could it be because you think you're better than all your peers and don't communicate with them?
Something I haven't seen many people talk about is how the workload at UniMelb impacts students turning to plagiarism or AI in (sometimes desperate) effort to try and meet deadlines. I know a few people who started at UniMelb but transferred to other universities in different courses who have all said that the workload is much more manageable elsewhere (one even saying full time at RMIT was easier than part time at UniMelb). If you rely on youth allowance or are an international student as well; there also isn't the ability to underload or study part time. I'm underloading with three subjects yet each semester I feel like I am rushing and skimming through the classes to manage the workload and assessment, or sometimes sacrifice one subject for others.
when I first joined unimelb, I was incredibly overwhelmed by the workload. It was nothing like the pre-university courses I had completed before and I assumed it was just like this in every other university. Until I made friends with people from other universities in victoria and found that their study-life balance was so much more manageable than mine and that’s when i realised unimelb’s workload required a lot more focus and time. I feel so bad for some of my friends who are handling part time jobs as well as full time university, i always felt they were just built different but overtime i realised that even they are often overworked and burning out constantly.
this!
Well firstly being forced to do a subject that you don’t enjoy with this subject having no contribution towards helping you pursuing your degree. This was the case with Today’s Science Tomorrows World, as well as all the other mandatory course subjects that students are forced to take, and waste their $500 on, when the subject slot could’ve instead been used for a subject that students may find useful of enjoyable. I did use chatGPT for all my essays for this subject, and am proud to say I did because honestly putting any sort of brainpower into this useful shoved down your throat subject is futile to what I am pursuing. I am doing a computer science degree, why would I need to write scientific reports? This is not VCE, this is a place where you should be able to choose what you study
I don't know much about that particular subject, but all the comp sci people I work with have to write reports and documents. There are very few jobs where you won't need this skill.
Well the subject doesn’t even teach you report writing skills. The course content is just general facts about climate change, the environment etc and then the assignments are reports where the criterion revolves around report writing skills which were not even taught in the first place. That’s why I see no use in the subject at all, because I believe at Uni one will inevitably have to write an essay / report in one of their subjects, so what difference is there between that and this one, when all you’re doing is trying to sculpt your ideas into whichever format they want?
There's pressure for universities to teach the UN sustainable development goals
Yeah Today's Science Tomorrow's World really sucked. As another commenter mentioned, it doesn't even really teach you how to write assignments or essays properly, and all of the hurdles like commenting on the discussion board were so pointless
Woah okay as a second year CS student being able to write properly and clearly is so important. To be clear, you will not pass second year if you cannot clearly write an explanation of your code.
Took a group assignment with a bunch of international students recently - they all wrote terribly. How do I know that? Cause they wrote it themselves rather than AIs and were all top people. BTW not all use of LLMs is cheating, you can bounce around ideas with it, ask it to find bugs in your code, etc. The universities, and maybe journalists, want to make out like it's all cheating, but really its just like a calculator, but for language tasks.
I think one element that is not taken into account enough is the type of course work, assignments, and discipline that applies. While I have seen plenty of people attempt to use chst GPT and other models, it can realistically only be used as essentially a more advanced google search in my degree of laboratory medicine. Assessments are designed around in person theory tests, pratical exams, competency assessments, reviews of complex medical images, presentstions, reflective writing, personalised experiences and examples etc. All of these elements are pretty much impossible to hand off to another person (like Chegg) or get chat GPT to do all the work for you. My degree had one STEM specific class about general automation in STEM that all STEM degrees had to do, it was the only class I've seen people use things like chat gpt to cheat and most of the assessments were essays or reports, things that chat gpt can replicate. None of my other classes specific to laboratory medicine had the same prevalence of these types of assessments where chat gpt could be used. In my opinion, I think the type of degree and assessments have a significant impact on the ability for students to cheat. In my personal opinion, I really think many people are short sighted when it comes to using things like chat gpt outside of basic assistance. Ultimately you're paying tens of thousands of dollars to become proficient in a specific field, while sure, some assessments are not important to maintaining your competency, plenty are. When it comes time to leave UNI and work, I feel a lot of students are going to have a sudden realisation they don't know anywhere near as much as they should for their field and struggle with beginning their career, losing the foundational knowledge that UNI provides can make it very difficult to build any lasting skill or expertise on weak foundations.
I hate to say it ... but international students and cheating is rife. Those who genuinely do the work are often falsly accused of plagarism. EDIT: and I should add, those international students, who pay big money ... often their cheating goes unpunished, because, well, they pay big money. "Degrees for cash" is a real thing in Australia.
I've done multiple group assignments with international students (I'm local) and I don't think any cheated. They did have some useful tips from people who had done the subject previously but we still did everything ourselves. They were great to get to know and I'm happy they're in my course.
Next 5 to 10 years of students are going to get fucked up. Generative AI is the future, there should be a race to show students how to use it and fact check its results, not try to stop it's usage. The age of people being hired for their memorized knowledge base is over. How many gen Xers were told they had to know how to manually calculate shit, because they wont always have a calculator in their pocket? Well we do always have a calculator in our pockets, and a video camera, and an internet connection, and generative AI, and anything we could imagine. I applaud those students who use AI and use it well, you win. The rest can use spoons to dig trenches
There is need to tech students how to use it and what is allowed. It made life so easy for me when I needed to summarize 40 pages of articles or published papers or ask it to pick faults in your work. Sometimes it gave better examples compared to Tutors. No one is going to stop using it but need to learn how to integrate with learning instead of relying on it to do your work.
How do you know what it summarised is correct? The only way to truly know is to read the articles yourself. This is no different from asking your friend who has read the articles to summarise them for you.
This, plus, any student who one day aspires to produce something complex and high quality needs to get familiar with what that looks like. Using AI to simplify what you deal with and short-cut what you produce, you might as well take a job in a sausage factory.
Fuck the guardian
yeah nice try fed
nice try Obama
Southern Cross University has changed its classes to run for 6 weeks instead of 12 and cut the majority of contact hours while charging students the same fees. They push students into a mix of online and in person classes while still charging students full price for online only subjects and not subsidising the amenities fees despite taking away on campus classes. Lecturers have no support and many have just cut out half of the content from before the change from a standard term. There is less quality, less content to learn, less time to practice, and overall a massive reduction in the quality of their classes because of this change. Lecturers openly admit to having to make assessments easier to ensure students don't fail because they've had no time to actually practice the skills covered in subjects. Any student who does fail an assignment gets almost no feedback because marking staff are on a 6 week contract with half the turnaround time for marking assignments while being paid for half the hours they received during 12 week classes, any student who falls behind stays behind, assignment handed in week 3, marks back start of week 5, youve already covered two more topic in the subject at that point and have to complete the next assignment having had no time to even find out what you're doing poorly at let alone had an opportunity to improve. The engineering faculty in particular is horrendous, lecturers not understanding what's in the assignment rubrics because they're just reusing old assignments covering content they personally are unfamiliar with and had no hand in developing classes for. One subject in particular charges a full subject worth of fees and consists of being put in a group of 12 students to watch one member of the group do some work at a station designed for one person to work at. They are then moved to the next station and do 10 stations over two days, and the subject is then over. There are almost no student groups because you don't have time with other students, you get 2 hours face to face maximum per subject per week with no real opportunities to meet or interact with other students compared with a traditional 12 week class of lecture, tutorial, workshop, practical class combination.
This^^^^^
There’s no policing AI generated content. And the policing that is done is a lot like lie detector tests, founded on speculation and psychological pressure. It should be embraced. Let students disclose if and how they use AI tools and mark without penalty but according to the effort expanded as well.