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An unlucky cohort of undergraduates has been plagued by Covid restrictions, education strikes and finally a marking boycott
Emily Smith, a final-year geography student at Durham University, never imagined her already heavily disrupted university experience could end like this. She won’t be graduating this summer because half her work remains unmarked owing to a national marking boycott by lecturers.
She refuses to attend the “completion ceremony” Durham has offered her instead. Without an actual degree classification it seems like a “farce”. Like so many in this deeply unlucky cohort of students, she feels this is the last straw.
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Lecturers say programs capable of writing competent student coursework threaten academic integrity
An academic paper entitled Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT was published this month in an education journal, describing how artificial intelligence (AI) tools “raise a number of challenges and concerns, particularly in relation to academic honesty and plagiarism”.
What readers – and indeed the peer reviewers who cleared it for publication – did not know was that the paper itself had been written by the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT.
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Queen Mary accused of ‘turning students into spies’ to gather data on academics who did not reschedule missed teaching
A prestigious London university has become the first in the country to use a “student snitch form” to encourage students to report striking staff, while threatening to dock full pay for 39 days if those named fail to reschedule missed teaching.
Queen Mary University of London was branded the “worst university employer in the UK” by the Universities and Colleges Union last July, after it deducted 21 days of full pay from more than 100 staff who refused to mark students’ work in June as part of a national boycott. But staff claim the university, a member of the esteemed Russell Group, has reached a new low and “destroyed trust” by “turning students into spies” to gather data on who went on strike in November and February, and which classes have not been rescheduled.
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