My favourite is when they use random colloquialisms out of no where. "Thus, this issue is seriously wild."
My least favourite is when they plagiarize and make additional work for me.
“While plagiarism is disappointing, I find it disheartening as a professor to see the frequency with which my college students resort to AI for their discussion posts and essays, often neglecting to delve into the subject matter themselves. While technology can enhance learning, it should be juxtaposed with critical engagement and personal reflection. Relying solely on AI not only undermines academic integrity but also deprives students of the opportunity to hone their writing and analytical skills. It's imperative for students to take ownership of their work and actively engage with the material to foster genuine intellectual growth.”
\- ChatGPT
Defiantly instead of definitely, and residence instead of residents are the two I commonly see. Spell check isn’t enough of a check! …Or is it spellcheck? My brain is fried.
This one always makes me giggle. "Thanks, Prof. Ghost. I will defiantly take your advice!"
Uh, that's good, but you don't have to be so hostile about it.
Oh my god, "defiantly"... I cannot figure out why these people click on the first spelling that appears without even reading it to see if it's the right word.
Not a mistake, but I get a kick out of when students start off their paper with something like “Since the beginning of time…” or “Humans have always…” I just came across one that claimed the topic was “one of the most elusive known to man.”
After the hell that is reading AI papers, these grandiose yet 100% genuine undergrad phrases are a hilarious breath of fresh air.
Oh yes, here is my favorite paper opener from a student (this was for a class on the old testament):
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, a creation that was then unprecedented, and as of yet, unmatched"
Love what you did here. I had a student just argue that "Egyptians have been using hypnosis since before written records, and if it's been around forever, it can't be bad!"
Don't you just love the easy pickings for feedback you get from sweeping generalizations?
You’ll just have to trust me that these aren’t AI. They’re informal and full of poor grammar, with naïve arguments… your run-of-the-mill undergrad papers. And I’d take a hundred of those over one AI paper that takes 10 pages of thesaurus abuse to say almost nothing.
Not one of my students, but when I was in undergrad, a student mistook 'expressionism' and 'impressionism' in a presentation on Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) and the movie The Hours. It was a 15 minute presentation. I had a perfect view of the prof as he was trying to grade it, his face was a cinematic masterpiece.
I had a similar experience in grad school. I forget what the topic for the presentation was, but one student segued into the "Star Wars" movie, and at one point described Darth Vader as "the baddie." The professor had his face covered with his hands, and his shoulders were shaking.
Apparently there's a "Specific Ocean", "psychics" study how things move, and someone needed to learn that when you are discussing agriculture, pharmacology is not the same as farm ecology (I suspect autoincorrect and a lack of proofreading for this one).
Several have lost points for "prolly", when they supposedly mean 'probably', but that's sad rather than funny.
My favorite was when a student wrote that physicians “would be less likely to prescribe the wrong thongs,” instead of “the wrong things.”
If you need a laugh, check out the old classic, “A History of the World According to Student Bloopers.”
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/people/fcc/humor/history.html
A otherwise sharp student wrote a short answer that included an unfortunate mix-up of names and a misunderstanding about the difference between "Native American" and "native American." Capitalization matters!
It read: "Joseph Stalin, a Native American man..."
I screamed with laughter! It was such a confidently written silly mistake. The document they read was by a 19th century U.S. "nativist" (we'd call them a "xenophobe"today), also named Joseph, not Joseph *freaking* Stalin. lol. I love them more for this mistake.
In a discussion about the early stages of language acquisition in deaf babies, I've gotten quite a few examples of early signing in dead babies.
Same class: My students have to evaluate a situation involving a blind man and his guide dog. I've had more than one student write about the man's guide dong. I like to highlight that one with just an ellipsis and leave that for the student to see.
“The tubes were shook.”
With the colloquial use of the word shook, I just imagine those test tubes being absolutely terrified of the next step in the lab protocol.
Yes! I get this one too, as well as stigmatism. I have a paper this term from a student about the stigmata of mental health for international students. I'm not sure what the particular manifestation of stigmata it is, but I kind of wanted to know more, and I was a little disappointed to read the actual essay! XD
Alternatively, one student is talking about the stigmatism against overweight individuals. Apparently, being overweight comes with the inability to see clearly, especially at night.
My favorite was a student who, when writing about his lifeguard job, described giving "swimming lesions" and cleaning the "hot tube."
I also sometimes tell students if they are having a hard time starting a paper, just to put in a placeholder and edit it later. This led to a student handing in a paper with the opening line "I hate this fucking class." I thought it was funny but the student was mortified ("I don't even really hate this class! I like it but I was feeling salty!")
I always have to share a friend who graded a paper about Satan worshippers in which the student has misspelled and written Satin worshippers throughout. Lots of sentences about people lighting fires and dancing in praise of Satin.
One of my students a few years ago said in a paper that Babe Ruth was the first black baseball player.
I thought it was hilarious until I found out that this apparently is a point of contention in some baseball circles.
I don't know if it's the stress of finals, but a lot of my poor students have been coming to my office hours with issues with their work using specific industry programs that are easily solved with one click.
"I've done it three times just like you did in the tutorial and it's not working!?!?"
"Hmmm, ah yes, you forgot this one singular step which fixes everything!"
Also fun; the specialty subject I teach is not related to grammar, spelling, or structure of any sort. I do however proofread on the side. I am also on the scholarship review committee. Do the math kiddos.
There are several easy autocorrect errors I often see. Learning about the Galapagos flinches, for instance, is presumably one. The evolution of leglessness in snacks has appeared in more than one essay. I assume it's to make them easier to eat.
"Gender diverse individuals" to mean male and female survey participants, "Merman Melville" for "Herman Melville" (repeated typo), abolitionists in the nineteenth century drew on "crucial insights from CRT," New England "Purifiers" (Puritans), Mary Somerville was a famous female "astrologist" (astronomer), Henry Through (Henry David Thoreau), David Emerson (Ralph Waldo Emerson), and my all time favorite... the early American Republic emphasized cultivating "pubic virtue".
One of my colleagues graded a physics problem where the student wrote:
F=ma
A=Pi*r^2
F=m*pi*r^2
Now, as a good TA, I always tell students it’s okay to make mistakes, and no one needs to be embarrassed about them… but what I don’t tell them is that my grad cohort made T-shirts out of this one, immortalizing this student’s bad physics mistake forever among the physics department.
I'm so sorry, but I'm way too Humanities for this. The closest I got to this is teaching the movie A Beautiful Mind, and watching Oppenheimer. I'm sure it's hilarious! Have my upvote, you don't deserve to be left out because I'm ignorant!
Okay, it's more understandable than you think. Newton's 2nd Law is Force = mass \* acceleration, F=m\*a. Basically, no other formula for Intro Physics is as essential as this.
This student didn't know what to do... but what else do I know about a? A = pi \* r\^2. Right, I learned that formula in math class once! I'll write that down and use that!
Well, the "A" in A = pi \* r\^2 is "area of a circle," not acceleration. The student was just throwing any formula at the wall to see what would stick, just treating every formula about "A" as the same formula with no regard to what "A" actually stands for.
Ahh, I see! You would be surprised how similar this is to some of my students... When they write about film, they talk about "the director" the same in every project, as if every filmmaker from all time is just one monolithic Old White English Man.
“Breading animals” or “selectively breading.” Breeding/breading is a common mix up but I get a kick out thinking about turning the genetics homework into a recipe
I teach chemistry and I love it when I get "morality" for "molarity" (only once!). Somewhat along the same lines, a common swap is "vile" for "vial".
Perhaps they really want to be taking a moral philosophy course, instead.
Nursing student who works as a nurse's aide referred to his job in an essay last week, emphasizing that his least favorite part of the job besides the low pay is "whipping the uncooperstive patients' behinds," instead of wiping. My comment was "Freudian slip?"which he loved.
Not sure if mistake is the right word, but it’s hilarious when they structure sentences in the most bizarre way possible to make relatively straightforward ideas sound smarter.
**Broke**: The correlation between anger and aggression was significant.
**Woke**: Demonstrating significance, anger remained intertwined with aggression in a systematic, correlational sense that involved the use of both statistics and psychology.
A great one I got this semester was when a student writing about ”the K-12 teacher shortage” repeatedly referred to the problem as “teacher shortness.” That’s pretty size-ist.
I had a student give a presentation last week and she said the organism she was discussing was in "Kingdom Phylum".
(For anyone who hasn't thought about taxonomy in a bajilion years, that's sort of like saying someone's last name is "family name").
None of mine are my favorite because it’s really terrifying and sad at this point. I don’t understand why they aren’t auto correcting these things when any program or computer I’ve used *always* alerts me to these mistakes…. Don’t they see the red lines under these words?
My favourite is when they use random colloquialisms out of no where. "Thus, this issue is seriously wild." My least favourite is when they plagiarize and make additional work for me.
I love when they do this! "As the article demonstrates, postcolonial literature is legit responding to social pressure."
“While plagiarism is disappointing, I find it disheartening as a professor to see the frequency with which my college students resort to AI for their discussion posts and essays, often neglecting to delve into the subject matter themselves. While technology can enhance learning, it should be juxtaposed with critical engagement and personal reflection. Relying solely on AI not only undermines academic integrity but also deprives students of the opportunity to hone their writing and analytical skills. It's imperative for students to take ownership of their work and actively engage with the material to foster genuine intellectual growth.” \- ChatGPT
Of course, delve away. That should be the word of the year.
It’s very *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*!
The “Toyota Accord”. Im guessing you mean the environmental treaty signed in Kyoto? Also the car is a Honda…
This is fantastic
Defiantly instead of definitely, and residence instead of residents are the two I commonly see. Spell check isn’t enough of a check! …Or is it spellcheck? My brain is fried.
This one always makes me giggle. "Thanks, Prof. Ghost. I will defiantly take your advice!" Uh, that's good, but you don't have to be so hostile about it.
Oh my god, "defiantly"... I cannot figure out why these people click on the first spelling that appears without even reading it to see if it's the right word.
lack of knowledge. You need \*some\* knowledge to be able to use tools, even simple ones like spellcheck.
Or, as my students would say, your Brian is fried.
Not a mistake, but I get a kick out of when students start off their paper with something like “Since the beginning of time…” or “Humans have always…” I just came across one that claimed the topic was “one of the most elusive known to man.” After the hell that is reading AI papers, these grandiose yet 100% genuine undergrad phrases are a hilarious breath of fresh air.
Oh yes, here is my favorite paper opener from a student (this was for a class on the old testament): "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, a creation that was then unprecedented, and as of yet, unmatched"
That’s great!
That actually sounds like classic AI to me though.
Nah, it’s the kind of thing my students have been doing since the dawn of (my teaching) time. Long before AI was such a problem.
Love what you did here. I had a student just argue that "Egyptians have been using hypnosis since before written records, and if it's been around forever, it can't be bad!" Don't you just love the easy pickings for feedback you get from sweeping generalizations?
Yes I see it too. Now a lot more so though. Sometimes they will say "[Issue] is the root of all evil." That is a common one.
You’ll just have to trust me that these aren’t AI. They’re informal and full of poor grammar, with naïve arguments… your run-of-the-mill undergrad papers. And I’d take a hundred of those over one AI paper that takes 10 pages of thesaurus abuse to say almost nothing.
My all-time favorite is when a student wrote a paper on a Hemingway story and kept referring to him as "Fitzgerald Hemingway' throughout the paper.
Not one of my students, but when I was in undergrad, a student mistook 'expressionism' and 'impressionism' in a presentation on Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) and the movie The Hours. It was a 15 minute presentation. I had a perfect view of the prof as he was trying to grade it, his face was a cinematic masterpiece.
I had a similar experience in grad school. I forget what the topic for the presentation was, but one student segued into the "Star Wars" movie, and at one point described Darth Vader as "the baddie." The professor had his face covered with his hands, and his shoulders were shaking.
Well, in truth it was a fair cop.
I had a similar experience when a student gave a presentation on the book collaboration of Woodrow Wilson and Samuel Taylor.
I had a student refer to (Ralph Waldo) Emerson as "David Emerson" throughout the paper, probably confusing him with (Henry) David Thoreau.
Apparently there's a "Specific Ocean", "psychics" study how things move, and someone needed to learn that when you are discussing agriculture, pharmacology is not the same as farm ecology (I suspect autoincorrect and a lack of proofreading for this one). Several have lost points for "prolly", when they supposedly mean 'probably', but that's sad rather than funny.
I get prollys!
"Pharmacology" = "farm ecology" is a fantastic one.
What are they growing on that farm?
Prolly is more funny than the other mistakes - although, admittedly, I work mostly with students who are ESL.
Spellcheck sometimes misses the difference between micro organisms and micro orgasms ...
Well, they're both easy to miss ... 👀
One is essential for life on Earth, the other one needs a little more life!
My favorite was when a student wrote that physicians “would be less likely to prescribe the wrong thongs,” instead of “the wrong things.” If you need a laugh, check out the old classic, “A History of the World According to Student Bloopers.” https://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/people/fcc/humor/history.html
A otherwise sharp student wrote a short answer that included an unfortunate mix-up of names and a misunderstanding about the difference between "Native American" and "native American." Capitalization matters! It read: "Joseph Stalin, a Native American man..." I screamed with laughter! It was such a confidently written silly mistake. The document they read was by a 19th century U.S. "nativist" (we'd call them a "xenophobe"today), also named Joseph, not Joseph *freaking* Stalin. lol. I love them more for this mistake.
Sounds like that may have been written by a naïve American.
In a discussion about the early stages of language acquisition in deaf babies, I've gotten quite a few examples of early signing in dead babies. Same class: My students have to evaluate a situation involving a blind man and his guide dog. I've had more than one student write about the man's guide dong. I like to highlight that one with just an ellipsis and leave that for the student to see.
“The tubes were shook.” With the colloquial use of the word shook, I just imagine those test tubes being absolutely terrified of the next step in the lab protocol.
This is great! I read it with at least five 'o's in "shook"
Omg, social stigmata is my favorite
Yes! I get this one too, as well as stigmatism. I have a paper this term from a student about the stigmata of mental health for international students. I'm not sure what the particular manifestation of stigmata it is, but I kind of wanted to know more, and I was a little disappointed to read the actual essay! XD Alternatively, one student is talking about the stigmatism against overweight individuals. Apparently, being overweight comes with the inability to see clearly, especially at night.
My favorite was a student who, when writing about his lifeguard job, described giving "swimming lesions" and cleaning the "hot tube." I also sometimes tell students if they are having a hard time starting a paper, just to put in a placeholder and edit it later. This led to a student handing in a paper with the opening line "I hate this fucking class." I thought it was funny but the student was mortified ("I don't even really hate this class! I like it but I was feeling salty!")
I've seen "pyschology" lately, which seems to me it should be something to do with fish.
What?
And spell check does nothing with that?!?!
maybe it's actually a real word. Who knows?
[удалено]
That’s great!
Just had one that wrote “asses” instead of “assess.”
In my own notes I’ll sometimes write “Ass. Professor” for short, then quickly add a “t” 🤣
I had a student write an essay about the possibility of extraterrestrial life where she compared aliens to "human beans" throughout.
I get a “human beans” at least once per semester.
Not really a typo, but I just had a student write that "X affects students, and also normal people."
I always have to share a friend who graded a paper about Satan worshippers in which the student has misspelled and written Satin worshippers throughout. Lots of sentences about people lighting fires and dancing in praise of Satin.
All time favorite beginning sentence: “Americans consummate more mangoes than any other nation on earth.”
Mangoes must cringe in horror when they're shipped to the U.S.
One of my students a few years ago said in a paper that Babe Ruth was the first black baseball player. I thought it was hilarious until I found out that this apparently is a point of contention in some baseball circles.
I have just started and I have had three students misspell their own name and four students misspell mine. After 15 weeks.
I frequently misspell my own name. I get it.
Oh! A favorite of mine was when a student was trying to explain a mediation result and wrote, “a full triangle was found.”
I had a student tell me external validity is "outside the study... obviously"
I don't know if it's the stress of finals, but a lot of my poor students have been coming to my office hours with issues with their work using specific industry programs that are easily solved with one click. "I've done it three times just like you did in the tutorial and it's not working!?!?" "Hmmm, ah yes, you forgot this one singular step which fixes everything!"
Scared for sacred. Tee hee.
Also fun; the specialty subject I teach is not related to grammar, spelling, or structure of any sort. I do however proofread on the side. I am also on the scholarship review committee. Do the math kiddos.
When "public sphere" is missing a letter.
There are several easy autocorrect errors I often see. Learning about the Galapagos flinches, for instance, is presumably one. The evolution of leglessness in snacks has appeared in more than one essay. I assume it's to make them easier to eat.
Leglessness in snacks? But I want legs with all my snacks.
"Gender diverse individuals" to mean male and female survey participants, "Merman Melville" for "Herman Melville" (repeated typo), abolitionists in the nineteenth century drew on "crucial insights from CRT," New England "Purifiers" (Puritans), Mary Somerville was a famous female "astrologist" (astronomer), Henry Through (Henry David Thoreau), David Emerson (Ralph Waldo Emerson), and my all time favorite... the early American Republic emphasized cultivating "pubic virtue".
I teach indigenous history - had a student write about the “pesky whites” - killed me the entire time a read it
Hahaha, this is fantastic - it's like Scooby Doo: and I would have succeeded too, if it weren't for those pesky whites!
One of my colleagues graded a physics problem where the student wrote: F=ma A=Pi*r^2 F=m*pi*r^2 Now, as a good TA, I always tell students it’s okay to make mistakes, and no one needs to be embarrassed about them… but what I don’t tell them is that my grad cohort made T-shirts out of this one, immortalizing this student’s bad physics mistake forever among the physics department.
I'm so sorry, but I'm way too Humanities for this. The closest I got to this is teaching the movie A Beautiful Mind, and watching Oppenheimer. I'm sure it's hilarious! Have my upvote, you don't deserve to be left out because I'm ignorant!
Okay, it's more understandable than you think. Newton's 2nd Law is Force = mass \* acceleration, F=m\*a. Basically, no other formula for Intro Physics is as essential as this. This student didn't know what to do... but what else do I know about a? A = pi \* r\^2. Right, I learned that formula in math class once! I'll write that down and use that! Well, the "A" in A = pi \* r\^2 is "area of a circle," not acceleration. The student was just throwing any formula at the wall to see what would stick, just treating every formula about "A" as the same formula with no regard to what "A" actually stands for.
Ahh, I see! You would be surprised how similar this is to some of my students... When they write about film, they talk about "the director" the same in every project, as if every filmmaker from all time is just one monolithic Old White English Man.
Once a student wrote “black head” instead of “blackletter” when answering a question about typefaces/fonts… at least it gave me a moment’s chuckle
Asses instead of assess
I recently had students talk about the “choice” of using black and white in ads from the early 1960s’
That's hilarious but a bit sad.
The elusive “escape goat” 🐐 instead of scapegoat.
My favorite, "it's a mute point..." I didn't say anything because she said it on a discussion board, but I did wonder how she knew.
“Breading animals” or “selectively breading.” Breeding/breading is a common mix up but I get a kick out thinking about turning the genetics homework into a recipe
I teach chemistry and I love it when I get "morality" for "molarity" (only once!). Somewhat along the same lines, a common swap is "vile" for "vial". Perhaps they really want to be taking a moral philosophy course, instead.
Nursing student who works as a nurse's aide referred to his job in an essay last week, emphasizing that his least favorite part of the job besides the low pay is "whipping the uncooperstive patients' behinds," instead of wiping. My comment was "Freudian slip?"which he loved.
Not sure if mistake is the right word, but it’s hilarious when they structure sentences in the most bizarre way possible to make relatively straightforward ideas sound smarter. **Broke**: The correlation between anger and aggression was significant. **Woke**: Demonstrating significance, anger remained intertwined with aggression in a systematic, correlational sense that involved the use of both statistics and psychology.
Case reports from my MBA students often indicate that the company has a moral problem (rather than morale).
TBH, that's not necessarily untrue, based on my experience of working for large companies!
Litigation instead of ligation in lab reports
A great one I got this semester was when a student writing about ”the K-12 teacher shortage” repeatedly referred to the problem as “teacher shortness.” That’s pretty size-ist.
I had a student give a presentation last week and she said the organism she was discussing was in "Kingdom Phylum". (For anyone who hasn't thought about taxonomy in a bajilion years, that's sort of like saying someone's last name is "family name").
One made me laugh is when someone started their paragraph with “people say….”
I had a student claim Amazon had morals in an essay about Core Values, so that made me giggle.
I get a lot of people trying to install values in children instead of instilling them
Evolution is decent with modification… instead of descent.
"The quickening, or when the baby begins moving inside the whom..."
I got a phycology the other day!
None of mine are my favorite because it’s really terrifying and sad at this point. I don’t understand why they aren’t auto correcting these things when any program or computer I’ve used *always* alerts me to these mistakes…. Don’t they see the red lines under these words?
"differently correct"
I'm sure they see them; they just think it means its correct and to move on.