I have been a "professional student" for the last 10 or so years. I am busy with my fourth degree. I am not 30 yet. The goal is to find a job in academia, thus the long journey. Finding a job in South Africa is challenging for many reasons. Besides the politics, what I find challenging is maneuvering through the internal politics and the associated financial systems that undergird the academic system. And now I am questioning the whole notion of education and the university and it is slowly killing me.
When you think about education, you normally think about the transference of knowledge. The teacher/lecturer knows something and the student lacks that knowledge. With the addition of the calculator, the internet, and now ChatGPT and cohorts, education is continually questioned. Currently, the whole educational system is in an existential crisis. Where I work, most of the "take home" assignments are scratched and students are forced to write essays with a pen in a classroom devoid of the internet.
How is this education?
The student is actively prohibited from a learning environment because the lecturer cannot sufficiently do her job. Should the lecturer and teacher not immediately spot when a student did not understand the work and relegated it to an AI chatbot? I asked ChatGPT to write me essays using only the questions as prompts and it could not even get close to a 50% score. (That said, I know that philosophy and my field in philosophy cannot necessarily be extrapolated to all.)
This is the first year in which I am solely responsible for a module. And how do I wish that the students actually used ChatGPT and her cohorts. Because for the life of me, I do not know how students can climb the ranks for so long with their horrible writing skills. This has been a problem from time immemorial. Students cannot write and spell, if it's 2023 in South Africa or 250 BCE in Greece, they will always write badly.
But how did students get to an advanced stage in their academic career and they can still not write? I am feeling dumber by the minute as I read their papers, and I do not write this to insult them, but to showcase their absolute disregard for their own education. I have found so many spelling mistakes, people who cannot write the author of a source correctly, and blatant sentence constructions that does not make sense in any shape or form. I mean, spell checkers are for free, are we even living in 2023?
It is frustrating because as a new lecturer, you can begin to question your own work. Did I lecture well enough? Is it my fault?
But in the rare glimpses of rationality (or drunkenness) you come to realize that they somehow climbed the ranks, somehow they fooled the markers of tests and essays of other modules. And then you begin to understand the condescending reactions when you bring this problem to light. Then you understand the problem of ChatGPT in a different light, then you begin to see what the university is at heart: a money-making machine.
We all knew this from the start. The amount of students that go through the system is shocking to say the least.
How can quality education be given to a class of 700 students?
Some of my colleagues' classes are 700-2000 big. I have marked tests from student groups 1200 strong. Your eyes get numb. I was an early postgraduate student. I did not know anything. Yet I marked. Is this education? Where papers are marked by those who know nothing yet? But this is how we learn, this is how we gain experience. But at what cost?
The students I am currently marking cannot write to save their lives. Are they products of the broken system? Am I that loose nut that troubles the well-oiled system? I am at a moral standstill in which the system will probably end up killing me.
Oh well.
Sorry for the depressing tone. I hope you enjoyed it if you read it. It felt good writing it. Maybe this was basically a therapy session for myself after the many papers that drained my creativity.
The musings are my own. The photographs are also my own. Keep well. Stay safe.