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Teachers adjust to rising AI pressures

Rutgers faculty become 'paranoid police officers'

By: Mary Ann Koruth
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey

..... Human-in-the-loop. dependency. Cognitive deskilling. Human extinction. Deep-fakes - and plagiarism. The lexicon, of AI is everywhere now, as is the technology, but in few places is ti as suspect as in the classroom.
..... Artificial Intelligence is intended to help reduce human labor, but classrooms are for humans to learn through labor. So where does that leave college faculty and school teachers?
..... After two years of fending off student work submitted through ChatGPT - AI generated homework, raising a hand to answer in-class questions after typing in prompts, and assigned texts are some examples - professor and teaches are finally the wiser for trying to beat back the AI dragon.
..... For Amir Moosavi, an assistant professor of comparative literature at Rutgers-Newark, and Carlo Rotella, who teaches English at Boston College, one answer is to throw out technology. The battle to beat out AI is only a part of the larger challenge: to command their student's attention.
..... Nothing beats deep engagement with real live teachers who know how to foster and hold attention, they say Moosavi and Rotella are counting on it.
..... Rooting out plagiarizing through AI means more oral exams, "exit interviews" with each student at the end of the semester where the professor questions them on their assignment, in-class pop quizzes, and proof of ahivng studied for written essays, such as including quotes with citations and page numbers in the text, said Moosavi. For freshman and sophomores, essay assignments were already on their way out. and in 2026, Moosavi is taking another step to thwart AI use - he'll ban cell phone in class.
..... And ironically, the blue books are back, as are pens, pencils and erasers in Rotella's "AI-resistant" classroom, which he wrote about in the New York Times.
..... "I really emphasize specificity and concreteness in student writing and AI is not very good at that," Rotella said. "It has to be re-prompted a lot in order to do that. It's shut a labor-saving device and in an English class, the labor is the entire point of the class.
..... "I think it's different than other situation where AI can do things people can't do that need to be done, but that's not the case here," Rotell said. "It;s jsut simply doing some of the thinking, some of the writing, some of the reading for the student and the whole point of the class is for the student to do the work."
..... Rotella has banned cell phones, and never permitted laptops during his 25 years at Boston College, he said, long before social media entered the picture. But he understand the wearable technology, like Google lenses and AI pendants might get past him.

Rutgers faculty decides

..... Michele Norin, Rutgers University's chief information officer and facilitator of an AI steering committee consisting of faculty, researches and students, said it's too early in the AI boom for the university to define a policy about AI adoption use in the classroom.
..... The committee expects to release its report in the spring. [2026] Norin said she would stand by a policy that supports facility decisions on incorporating or fending off AI in their classrooms.
..... "Our approach has been that faculty members decide what their rules of the road are for their classes. That's how it works," Norin said/ "Since the dawn of higher education, faculty members are responsible for deciding what goes on in there classroom.
..... "We respect that form an institutional perspective,"she said. "But we do have moments when you have to find a little bit of a balance with a new technology," noting that it was too early to make any predictions about what those might be.
..... "We have not reached necessarily a consensus on that viewpoint," Norin said.

Becoming AI-resistant

..... AI has turned us into "paranoid police offices," Moosavi told NorthJersey.com , because professors are consonantly checking AI-generated work.
..... The college classroom of 2026 will see faculty unleashing changes to make their tests, lectures and interacts "AI-resilstant." Moosavi and Rotella said this has only increased their workload.
..... "We've been trying to play Wack a Mole with AI for a few years now," Moosavi said. He has had students insert two quotations from each text, cited property and with page numbers.
..... "And people will still take all of that and plug it all into a chatbot, and then copy and paste the answer back. It's an exercise in stupidity for everyone," he said. "I'm not getting anything out of reading these things. They're not getting anything out of doing the exercise."
..... "I've basically done away with those things," he said. He conducts testing in class using a Lockdown browser, a custom browser that blocks all other content when in use. Test formates have shifted from long essays to in-calls short answers and commentary.
..... The old Iranian texts he teaches are not yet "cannibalized" by ChatGPT, he said, so he can still assign long essay answers for those, but most content is ready to be regurgitated by AI - much of it with errors and fabrications. Moosavi said.

The war for attention

..... The struggle to preserve academic integrity returns more and more educators to solving that other lodestar - holding the attention of a generation of students in the digital age who grew up with social media.
..... The student who has a cell phone with TikTok constantly on is a challenge, said Moosavi. "and I'm not against the content of TikTok," he said. "I'm against what it's done to people's att4ention spans - students entering college but have never red a full book, or who think of bound books as these anachronistic sort of artifacts from a different era.
..... "That's, for me, the most troubling part, and AI is just one of that story, in my opinion," He said.
..... Using AI summaries fro class "is even more damaging because there's so much happening inside your mind when you read, cognitively," Rotella said.
..... He isn't averse to AI, or student using it in other situations or classes. He just does not see an application for it in his courses yet.
..... "My response is really to emphasize what happens in class between people, between students an faculty," Rotella said.
..... More colleagues are buying into Rotella's laptop free and Moosavi's cell phone-free model of class lectures, they both said. Moosaive retained laptops partly to not have to decipher handwriting. Tackling AI by removing technology and reintroducing blue book exams has grown in popularity among colleagues too, said Moosavi.
..... "I think that that's part a function of the fact that all this AI doom and gloom caused people to spend a lot of time this pass summer [2025] thinking about their teaching and thinking about what makes the experience of the classroom valuable," Rotella said, "and - I would argue - more and more precious."

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