As a professor, I’m apparently increasingly communicating not with students, but with bots representing students.
The following communication ensued after I failed a student for my research class, because they hadn’t submitted any of the required homework.
Student: “I have submitted all the method exercises on time, but my final grade is fail.”
Me: “There is no record of you submitting any homework at all, please explain.”
Student: “I’m attaching screenshots. I think there is some glucose on the qdacity platform.” (https://qdacity.com is a data analysis web service that students use as part of their homework.)
Me: “Please elaborate what you mean by ‘glucose on qdacity’. Also, what is the square root of 2?”
Student: “By “glucose,” I am referring to a thematic code in QDAcity that comprises all segments of the interviews that pertain to blood glucose. These topics include anything related to the monitoring of glucose, high and low glucose situations, CGM, trends in glucose levels, and individual experience in managing blood sugar. Square root of 2 is 1.41421356237.”
Me: “Oh, you are a bot. Bye.”
Student: “Could you please explain what do you expect? I don’t know what a vague it was. It is unfair.”
PaaBS (professor as a bot service) FTW!
Leave a Reply