Oh that's a good idea!

Similarly... "Imagine your reader woke from a 20 year coma."

Does "naive but interested" make sense to you all? This time of year, I'm explaining it "like a cool relative at Thanksgiving who wants to hear what you're working on, but they know NOTHING about this topic."

The assignment had 5 different devices (meta glasses, smart toys, reproductive health, camera, smart home speaker) and in this one group, the same person is making stuff up in each device write up. So it is like - at what point do I grade them separately? Also unkind to do this to your groupmates.

That's a lot to ask people AND I am afraid that students won't feel good about 'accusing' others, even anonymously. Like even when I say "if there is AI, the group is held accountable, so you better check everyone's work" (more nicely than that), they don't call each other out.

Indeed. And when they're drawing from the assigned materials for stuff, I actually now have them ANNOTATE it (via Hypothesis) in the text, so I'm not searching for timestamps/page numbers. These were short manuals and still!

And now I'm grading one where it mentions a page number saying that a feature is on a particular page of the instruction manual and nothing even remotely close is in there.
I cannot believe that I'm having to do this.

Anyway, nice somewhat AI proof activity, that SHOULD have been pretty fun.... once again, chalking this up to probably can't do again.

At the beginning of the term, I always say that AI isn't a victimless crime because I have to spend so much time checking this stuff, and that takes up time that I could be spending getting assignments back more quickly. And it also puts me in a bad mood.

But what sucks is that I'm spending a bunch of time turning boxes upside down and all around, especially those that couldn't be scanned easily, so I could actually do a text search for the feature.

I suppose such students were just hoping for the best that I wouldn't actually look at what they wrote for answers. But the term is almost done. Surely they know that I check closely.

So now I'm grading and I'm constantly wondering "ummm.... where did it say X was a feature of this in the materials that I gave?" - and that feature was introduced in a later model or perhaps not at all. Or maybe the feature exists, but wasn't in what was given.

I also asked for page numbers and documents. Like "page 3 of manual" "page 2 of press release" or "right side of box at bottom."

AND I used specific press releases and privacy policies too. And certainly there have been more subsequent press releases and privacy policy changes.

And many of these devices are 10+ years old and died out, so there is pretty much nothing left online that resembles the manual or maybe even the press release.

So, of course, some students used AI or whatever, maybe Google. But the fact is, the manuals for these specific devices, especially at the time of their original launch, aren't easy to find. And privacy policies aren't usually archived. And change often.

All of this "paper" was printed out or the legit original manual that came with it.