Thanks to you both dmf and Kirsten for your comments. I think the idea of bringing in more case studies and fieldwork-based writing would help address part of the problem here. If we’re just asking students to find information and copy it into another context, that’s really just repetitive work. It’s no surprise that some end up using tools like chatGPT. Some of the suggestions for dealing with this problem include adding more specificity to assignment prompts…and linking to fieldwork-based assignments could be one way to do that. Although not all assignments can have that component.

Dmf, ya that’s a great point you bring up. This kind of tech reveals some of the weaknesses in how we’re teaching writing, especially the cut-and-paste and decontextualized quote dumping that often stands in for writing.

Thanks for that link! That’s a good read!

If I were to distill my disappointment about undergraduate studies to just one point that would be it. The lack of anchor between theory and fieldwork. In my entire degree there was only the ethnography unit with mandatory field work and primary research. Everything else was digesting other people’s work and theory in the way we had been told. Don’t misunderstand me, theory and framework are essential to being an anthropologist, but field work and development of personal thoughts and theories is surely of equal importance?

hi Kirsten, it’s a good question about how test whether or not students grasp materials or have merely learned how to cut and paste (most university writing programs aren’t helping) but surely most of our current means aren’t getting to it, but this also extends into many articles and even books I’ve been asked to review or just read for my own work. We need to get back to something more like case-studies (field work) so that there is something in the world to compare marks on the page/screen to, something beyond grammar…

It did strike me as very “undergraduate” writing. I went to university with a student who confessed to me she was at university because her parents said they would pay. No other reason. She picked anthropology because it sounded easy. She told me she didn’t understand any of it. Once we did a group project together I believed her! She would average at 70% for her submitted work. A higher average than many students I would have considered more committed anthropologists. So I agree we teach students to do not much better. What is the point of an assessment? And how do most assessments actually demonstrate an understanding of the discipline? From experience trying to meet the assignment deadline gets directly in the way of actually learning the unit content.